Fencing Bear at Prayer

"If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were uneducated.  But, as it is, a cultural life will not exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not.  To be ignorant and simple now --not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground-- would be to throw down our weapons, and then betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen.   Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.  The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether. " Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past .  Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is...

AHA Session 267 Sunday, January 6, 2013, 11:00AM-1:00PM Roosevelt Ballroom II (Roosevelt New Orleans) Today is the feast of the Epiphany, the manifestation or appearance of God.  Today Christians celebrate the revelation of the Son of the Most High in the person of Jesus Christ.  Traditionally, in the West, the day was marked by the story of the visit of the Magi; in the East, it is marked as the day on which Jesus was baptized in the Jordan by his cousin John.  Both were instances of revelation, of God's becoming present to the world, not mystically or spiritually, but actually, in the body of a baby born of a woman, in the body of a man anointed by the Holy Spirit and acknowledged by a voice from heaven as God's Son. So what?  What does this feast have to do with us, sitting here in this hotel conference room rather than in the pews of a church?  Is it appropriate to call our attention to the fact that in the Christian calendar, today is one of the holie...

"In the eighth chapter of the Proverbs, Wisdom says of Itself, that It was present in the Creation, ordering all things conjointly with the Almighty (Prov. 8, 30).  And I said above that this Wisdom is the incarnate Word, who with his most holy Mother was present, in spirit, when God resolved upon the creation of the whole world ; for in that instant the Son was not only coexistent in divine essence with the Father and the Holy Spirit, but also the human nature, which He was to assume, was foreseen and conceived as the prototype of all works in the divine mind of the Father.  Conjointly with Him was also foreseen as present the human nature of his most holy Mother, who was to conceive Him in her most pure womb.  In these two Persons were foreseen all his works , so that on account of Them (speaking in a human way) He overlooked all that could offend Him in the conduct of the men and angels that were to fall; for the conduct of the latter was an inducement rather to desist...

Because truth is always (and I do mean always) stranger than fiction ... The Apocrypha about the assumption is omitted for the sake of brevity Art teaches us to summarize in an order opposite to the treatises of the prophets: thus my pen narrates great things briefly: when Christ ascended with a company of cloud, he alone was the virgin lover and guardian of the Virgin. When it pleased the bridegroom to assume the bride from the world, as I believe, he raised his temple to the stars: the temple of purity, the bedchamber of divinity, the court of honor he enriches with the honor of the celestial home. While it is foolish to define rashly and pious to believe, that she reigns intact I however believe: Enoch and Elijah were taken from Earth into the joys of Paradise and the delights of God; because heavy sin did not weigh them down, as it pleased the author himself, holy life is lifted up into the air. Who would deny therefore that the wholly pure mother and bride of Go...

"Just as the Nazi attack on Christianity was part of a larger war on the idea of universal truth, whole postmodern cosmologies have been created to prove that traditional religious morality is a scam, that there are no fixed truths or 'natural' categories, and that all knowledge is socially constructed.  Or as the line goes in The Da Vinci Code , 'So Dark, the Con of Man.' "The 'con' in question is, in effect, a conspiracy by the Catholic Church to deceive the world about Jesus' true nature and his marriage to Mary Magdalene.  The book has sold some sixty million copies worldwide.  The novel, and movie, have generated debates, documentaries, companion books, and the like.  But few have called attention to the ominous roots and parallels with Nazi thought. "Dan Brown should have dedicated his book to 'Madame' Helena Blavatsky, the theosophist guru who is widely considered the 'mother' of New Age spirituality as well as a to...

I have another theory. Here it is: God is God because He is our Creator, not just because He is "divine" (read, more powerful than we are). Even more important, we are called to worship Him because He loves us; indeed, loves us so much that He became one of us and died out of love because it was so painful for Him that we, His creatures, not love Him. God made this. Okay, I know. It is not perhaps the most original observation--it is in the Creed, after all--but it is one of those things that suddenly strikes you afresh and then changes everything about how you see the world. Think about it. Why should we worship God? Because He is all-powerful? Because He knows everything? Because He could crush us like bugs? No, although it sometimes seems that this is why some would say we should. But this is to worship God as a bully, not as a Maker Who Loves Us. God is not a bully, however much some would like to feel that He is (and so either idolize or reject Him). God love...

"This may seem the greatest paradox of all.  The most liberating act of free, unconditional grace demands that the recipient give up control of his or her life.  Is that a contradiction?  No, not if you remember the points of Chapters 3 and 9.  We are not in control of our lives.  We are all living for something and we are controlled by that, the true lord of our lives.  If it is not God, it will endlessly oppress us.  It is only grace that frees us from the slavery of self that lurks even in the middle of morality and religion .  Grace is only a threat to the illusion that we are free, autonomous selves, living life as we choose. "The gospel makes it possible to have such a radically different life.  Christians, however, often fail to make use of the resources of the gospel to lives the lives they are capable of in Christ.  It is critical for anyone reading this book to recognize this fundamental difference between the gospel ["salv...

You all know the parable ( Matthew 25:14-30 ).  There's this man, see, who was going on a journey, but before he left, he called three of his servants to him and entrusted them with his goods.  "And to one he gave five talents, and to another two, and to another one, to every one according to his proper ability: and immediately he took his journey."  While he was away, the servant to whom he gave five talents used the money in trade and raised five more talents; and the servant to whom he gave two talents did likewise, raising two.  But the third took his one talent and buried it in the earth.  Guess who gets the kudos when the master returns?  Not the one who buried his talent to keep it safe, oh, no!  Rather, the other two who took the lord's money and made more of it.  And so the master took the one talent from the servant who buried it and gave it to the servant who had doubled his five, so that the one who had had five talents now had eleven,...

This is what I would have said back in January if I had had the time to finish the book then.  We're having a discussion about it here on campus this week , if you want to know more.   This is what I'll be saying, more or less. Comment on Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012). This is an intimidating book.  It is also a book that is very difficult to summarize.  Not only does it take on the whole of European history from the high Middle Ages to the present; it also critiques the very historiography upon which our narrative of European (and, by the by, American and, indeed, world) history has tended to depend.  Name something—anything—that you know about the development of the modern world and Prof. Gregory’s book will have something to say about it—and then it will show you how everything that you have ever believed about it is wrong.  The triump...

" We are able to represent the mystery of divine providence as intelligible to us in any way at all only insofar as we can represent it in the form of a narrative --for history is, as it were, the narratival refraction of the divine eternity, as a single source of light might be refracted in the multiplicity of fragments of glass.  Time is eternity shattered into fragments that we can piece together again only one after another in sequence as best we may.  What is one in itself, a single willing of love emerging from the divine simplicity, can be perceived by us only in the time-bound fragmentations of historical succession in some way linked into a narrative.  Moreover, this narrative is not one we can be told or tell as if from a position outside it, for we are internal to the story we tell, we are being told by it as we attempt to tell it.  Perforce, the eternal knowledge and love that made all things out of love--the Trinity--is for us a narrative : and the near...

I don't believe it.  I saw him die three days ago .  Nobody comes back from the dead, not after three days.  I won't believe it unless I see him again, alive, in body, and can put my fingers in his hands and feet and side . It's easier for me to believe that he was God incarnate than it is that he died, really truly died, and then came back to life.  And it is easier for me to believe that he died and came back to life than that this means I will. Give me a break.  We all die, every one of us, and that's that.  Sure, there are all those stories about people coming back from the dead, but those were just little excursions of the soul, not true death.  Not the kind of death that has maggots eating away at your entrails.  Not the kind of death you die after the medical examiner finishes her autopsy.  Or after a soldier puts a sword through your side. They did something with his body, that's the only explanation I can think of.  But wh...

God is dead, and we have killed Him, but with our virtue more so than our vice. We have killed Him with our efficiency. We have killed Him with our dedication to our jobs. We have killed Him with our responsibilities. We have killed Him with our perpetual busyness. We have killed Him every time we refused to stop to talk because we were late for an appointment. We have killed Him every time we promised to be in touch soon. We have killed Him because we were trying to stay on schedule. We have killed Him with our calendars. We have killed Him by always planning for tomorrow. We have killed Him because there simply wasn't time.

"My people, what have I done to you? or how have I afflicted you? Answer me! "Because I led you from the land of Egypt, you have prepared a cross for your Savior. "Because I led you through the desert for forty years, fed you with manna, and led you into a land exceedingly good, you have prepared a cross for your Savior. "What more should I have done for you that I have not done?  For I planted you, my most precious vineyard, and you have become exceedingly bitter to me; for in my thirst you gave me vinegar to drink, and with a lance you have pierced the side of your Savior. "I gave you a beautiful planet on which to live, filled with animals and plants to feed you and help you, and you have imprisoned them, tortured them, forced them to live in cages and to reproduce as if they were machines, murdered them without compassion or thanks, and turned them into things to be bought and sold. "I gave you beautiful bodies in which to live and reason wit...

I can't.  I'm too tired.  I have nothing to say.  No, as usual, that's not quite true.  Thanks to the reading I've been doing these past four or so weeks , I have much, too much to say.  If only I knew where to start.  If only. I am tired.  Truly.  It's the second week of term, and I'm teaching a wholly new course on education in the Middle Ages.  I know, I know, it was the Dark Ages, they didn't have any education.  Which, of course, isn't true.  They had loads.  Only--and here's the embarrassing thing--even we medievalists don't spend enough time thinking about what medieval people (i.e. school children) learned in school.  In particular, we don't spend enough time thinking about grammar.  And logic.  And rhetoric.  A.k.a. the trivium . I know I don't.  I'm embarrassed that my Latin isn't stronger than it is.  Even after almost a full year of working on my translation of John of Garland ....

"It should be uncontroversial (though, given the mood of the times, it probably is not) to say that if the teachings of Christianity were genuinely to take root in human hearts--if indeed we all believed that God is love and that we ought to love our neighbors as ourselves--we should have no desire for war, should hate injustice worse than death, and should find indifference to the sufferings of others impossible.  But, in fact, human beings will continue to make war, and to slay the innocent and the defenseless with cheerful abandon; they will continue to distract themselves from themselves, and from their mortality, and from morbid boredom by killing and dying on a magnificent scale, and by exulting in their power to destroy one another.  And human society will continue, in various times and places, to degenerate into a murderous horde, even if it remains so civilized as to depute the legal, political, and military machineries of the state to do its murdering for it.  ...

"The turn to experience [in mainline and evangelical Protestantism] is a failure because it's based on a misunderstanding of how experience actually works.  Focusing on your experience waters down your experience, because experience feeds on what it experiences, just as love feeds on news of the Beloved.  We can use the same picture to illustrate this point as in chapter 9.  In Christian faith, your experience is like the arrow on side A of the picture.  It's the verb in a sentence like 'I believe in Christ.'  The arrow is aimed at Christ, just as the verb is 'aimed' at its grammatical object, which is Christ.  Very significantly, it is not aimed at itself, which is why on side B, what the person on side A is experiencing, the arrow, disappears.  That is to say, the experience of faith is not about faith or experience but about Christ.   We don't believe in our experience, we believe in him.  So Christian faith and the experience that comes ...

"By way of conclusion, it will be well to draw the reader's attention to the inherent limitations of the philosophical principle of order in theology.  Philosophy is reckoned as quite a high card in theology: let us call it the jack, the fourth-highest card the pack possesses.  This card can be trumped by three other cards.  First, it can be trumped by the king, which is divine revelation itself.  Obviously, if a philosophical principle of order is tending in some way to distort revelation or leads to our leaving out of count things that are manifestly important to the faith of the Church, then the king will trump the jack.  But in between the king and the jack is the queen.  Between divine revelation and the philosophical principle of order in theology there is always some theological principle of order.  As I mentioned in the course of roughing out a definition of theology, no one theology can ever present divine revelation in its totality.   It...