Last Christmas

So it's one of those years.

I really, really wanted a solid Christmas album for this year's recommendation, so much so that I even  attempted to listen to Sia's latest offering. (I made it halfway through the first song on the album. My commitment knows no bounds, people.) Finding no reason for joy, I eagerly awaited Bullseye's holiday special, but they just rebroadcast last year's show. Jane Lynch's A Swingin' Little Christmas is still marvelous, but the presbyterian blogger union won't let me repeat a recommendation. (Nobody wants to get ratted out to the shop steward, man.)

So no Christmas album recommendation this year, but thankfully I can give you a new Christmas song. Noisetrade's holiday mixtape for 2017 includes the Dollyrots' cover of Wham's Last Christmas. I graduated high school in the '80s, but only now have learned to love this song.

Sorry, the late George Michael.

Underground Airlines

When Mrs. Curmudgeon's maternal grandfather died, I inherited a sizable chunk of his theological library, at which time I ceased from the incessant accumulation of books which is an endemic hazard to those in my line of work. Given that I now owned more than enough volumes I would never read, it seemed doubly ridiculous to buy more that I will never read. I still acquire books for my professional library, of course, but they have to meet the (strict-only-to-people-who-already-have-a-severe-bibliomania-problem) standard of being something I actually have plans to read. At least most of the time.

But then Mrs. Curmudgeon gifted me my first Kindle e-reader a few years ago, and I discovered Amazon's Kindle Daily Deals, where books often go for only a couple dollars. As these volumes have the additional benefit of taking up literally no shelf space whatsoever, my borderline bibliokleptomania became resurgent, and now I've lost count of the digital books I own. (Nonetheless, I am sure that I will eventually read every last electronic page of that unabridged copy of Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples.) One recent acquisition I actually did read is Ben H. Winter's Underground Airlines.

In Winters's alternative timeline, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated en route to his inauguration, the Crittenden Compromise was amended to the Constitution, and these United States remain a house divided into the twenty-first century. The main character is an escaped slave who has been turned by the U.S. Marshals Service into a fugitive slave catcher himself. Winters is an able hand at both character and plot: he had me so hooked that as soon as I finished Underground Airlines, I took up his The Last Policeman (that one I checked out from the library), which won an Edgar Award.

The plot, and the true significance of the macguffin which drives it, get at the dehumanization at the heart of American chattel slavery and interestingly explores the ways in which we still are working through its consequences in our own (real?) timeline. More important to me, however, the book drips with anger from every page. Outrage is the only proper and human response to America's peculiar institution and its racist legacy today.

Perhaps institutional racism continues not because we fail to love strongly enough, but because we aren't angry enough. Underground Airlines will help stoke your fury.

Because I can't look away

Pajamagrams are the cure to anxiety over "The Democratic Republic" of Korea's nuclear ballistic missile program. Now I look forward to the dystopian nightmare.

Revelation, text & redemptive event

Francesca Aran Murphy has been writing a biweekly blog for First Things on religion. In "Everything Is Outside the Text," she makes this provocative assertion:

If, as Brague says, “the relationship of secondarity toward a preceding religion is found between Christianity and Judaism and between these two alone,” what links Christianity and Judaism is that neither of them is actually a “religion of the Book”—neither of them has sacred scripture at its very heart and core. Both Judaism and Christianity are “commentarial,” midrashic traditions because both regard scripture as a secondary witness to something infinitely greater, namely, the presence of God with his people.

In other words, we believe not in the Bible, per se, but in the redemption revealed in and by the Bible.

With that, we neatly dodge the facetious charge of "bibliolatry" flung by the cultured despisers of orthodox Christianity: we worship not the witness, but the one whose acts are witnessed.

Has man been abolished?

Our congregation's reading group recently finished discussing C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, a collection of three lectures he delivered in 1943. In the first ("Men without Chests"), he observes how a presupposition that all values are subjective was being propagated in the British schools of his day. (And now in the American public schools of our day, where children are taught to classify "the sky is blue" as "fact," and "God is good" as "opinion.") In the second ("The Way"), he refutes the theory that values are subjective, and labels as the "Tao" the objectively real virtues which have been discovered, recognized, and taught by all cultures across time and space. In his third lecture (the titular "Abolition of Man"), Lewis explores the consequences for humanity should his society's elites succeed in their project to condition all people to believe values truly are subjective. (Spoiler alert: said consequences are not good.) While the book is a warning against a possible abolition of man, this last lecture strikes a fairly pessimistic note (at least to my ears).

The Abolition of Man is widely praised as a rigorous piece of moral philosophy, and justly so. I've always thought of it as the theoretical background for That Hideous Strength, which is hands-down my favorite of C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy novels. Still, I wondered whether, seventy-some years on, western anglophone culture continues to move in the direction projected by Lewis. If anything, culture seems to be much more atomized and individualistic as the control of elites (in politics, entertainment, education, etc.) has been eroded by the media explosion birthed by the webernet’s arrival. If elites no longer dictate the culture's direction, then they cannot condition our beliefs.

Hence, I am grateful to be reading together with other thoughtful Christians. One of our interlocutors asked whether the transhumanist movement, which seeks to transcend human limitations by genetic tinkering and such, represents a rejection of humanity itself. With that, a penny dropped in the vast and vacant recesses of my mind. 

Over the last few years, I've become accustomed to reading stories in Denver's journal of record which begin with something like "Dylan was assigned as a male at birth." Give heed to that verb, "assigned." One is assigned to a homeroom class at the beginning of high school, and to a cabin at the beginning of summer camp. No one in the history of the entire human race, or of any other mammalian species while we're at it, has ever been "assigned" a gender. Rather, the gender of every single human being has been DISCOVERED by a cursory visual inspection. While gender expression is a subject fraught with tension and subject to cultural variety, in human society gender is universally controlled by one's sex, full stop.

This editorial cartoon gets the matter exactly right. If a girl can be a Boy Scout, there is no meaningful relationship between the thing and the thing's descriptor. There is, then, no way to determine what a thing is; instead, the thing's essence is fluid, undetermined, and defined only by whim. Accordingly, there's no way to determine what a thing is because it has no essence. Instead of a square knot, we have only a tangled mess.

In logic, the argument from the lesser to greater holds that if a statement is true regarding the lesser thing, it is all the more true for the greater thing which encompasses the lesser. It seems to me that in the realm of objectively discovered fact, gender identity is far more obvious, and easily discoverable, than moral truth. If our culture is now at a point of rejecting the objective reality of gender identity, then that of moral truth was long ago abandoned.

As Westminster Shorter Catechism #10 helpfully reminds us, mankind images God precisely in his moral attributes of knowledge, righteousness, and holiness (Ephesians 4:24; Colossians 3:10). If morality has no fixed content, and our bodies have no fixed identities, then humanity is not in the image of the eternal and unchanging God.

In other words, there's no point in heeding Lewis's warning that the abolition of man is coming. Man has already been abolished.

Après cela, le déluge

This brief notice from WORLD magazine signals what could very well be the beginning of the end of the way of life assumed by countless evangelical congregations across these United States. The vast majority of Churches are small (under 100 members) and entirely self-supporting; even those which are part of denominations rarely receive regular budget support from broader ecclesial bodies. The clergy housing allowance tax exemption is a little-appreciated mechanism by which they're able to stretch their dollars a little bit further.

The housing tax exemption evolved as a way to level the playing field between Churches which provide parsonages for their pastors, and ones which expect the pastor to provide for his own housing. In the first case, the Church owns the pastor's house, and so the government does not tax it. In the second case, the monies paid to the pastor to enable him to pay rent or a mortgage (and the costs of maintaining a domicile) are not taxed. If this ruling in Wisconsin is upheld on appeal, Protestant clergy could lose their right to the housing tax exemption and congregations would have to have to pay them that much more to compensate for the additional tax burden. Yes, that would be only a few thousand dollars more a year. However, given the extremely thin margins of most Church budgets, that additional tax burden could easily put a full-time pastor out of the reach of many small congregations.

I've written at length on the implications of such a development for the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in my "Manifesto for the OPC." This court case may be the chink in the conservative Churches' dam against the rising flood of legal hostility to the cause of Christ. Remember: Noah built the ark before the rains began.

Some belated aggregating

I've had some webpages bookmarked for a while now to share with my vast worldwide audience, so it's well past time for me to clear out the backlog. If these articles share a theme, it's that they each introduced me to new arguments which made me think more deeply on a topic than I had before.

While the Presbyterian Church in America lacks a denominational magazine, they have a close substitute in the byFaith website. "Prisoners in the Pew" documents how some congregations are working to uncover and remediate domestic abuse of all sorts. It provides food for thought for sessions of all presbyterian traditions.

"Prejudice and the Blaine Amendments" was published a few weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court released its decision in Trinity Lutheran of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer. (This is the playground resurfacing case.) Philip Hamburger does admirable historiographical work to demonstrate that amendments to state constitutions which now appear to have been intended to require government neutrality in religious matters were in fact designed to institutionalize the then-dominant forms of liberal cultural Christianity. In our day, that has effectively morphed into the institutionalization of an anti-ecclesial bias.

In a two-part review of the book Executing Grace, James R. Rogers carefully examines Christian arguments against the death penalty and sets forth a Biblical argument for its judicious use. From a redemptive-historical framework, he shows that death is an appropriate sanction for the attempt to extinguish God's image by killing an image-bearer.

These aren't short essays, but they're well worth your time if you'd like to think more carefully about these issues.

It's the little things

Last night I enjoyed my first pumpkin beer of 2017 because the only people who drink pumpkin beer outside the Oct. 1 to the-day-after-Thanksgiving window also wear white trousers before Memorial Day (in other words, satanists).

This morning I awoke to learn that the Denver Post has dropped Fred Basset from its comics section.

As Ice Cube might say, it's a good day.

What happens when you decorate for Halloween too early

'Decapitated man' Halloween display in Tennessee sparks 911 calls

Respect the seasons, people. It's not even the vernal equinox yet.

Authority, charisma & charism

As my presbytery has debated and discussed various pastoral matters (by which I mean issues which arise out of, or directly affect, local congregations) over the last eighteen years, I've suspected there's been an (although by no means the) underlying theme, but only recently have I been able to put a finger on it. What seems to come up, again and again, is a concern to maintain and enforce the authority of the pastor and/or session of the local congregation. I think I've had a hard time identifying this theme because it's simply not a concern I share. I've been mystified as to why some care so much about this issue, but I've come to suspect the difference may lie in an American perspective on the basis of personal authority.

In many areas of life, Americans tend to grant authority to individuals on the basis of personal charisma. Here, I'm using "charisma" to refer to the ineffable qualities which induce others to trust an individual. There's the charisma which draws us to prefer certain dining companions, and then there's the charisma which leads us to believe this person's views on Spiritual affairs should be respected. The pastor's charisma is not that of the actor's, but there's certainly a general gravitas we expect of ministers of Word and sacrament. It may be ineffable, but most think they've identified it when they tell a young man they think he should pursue the ministry.

Charisma is a powerful force, not to be underestimated, but its great weakness lies in its very ineffability. Tom Hanks is America's most beloved movie actor because we all believe him to be self-effacing and charming. Should a video surface of him kicking basset hound puppies for sport, no one would watch Sully ever again. We would all be angry that he had deceived us with his charisma. (I hasten to add that I, personally, am certain Tom Hanks is uniformly kind to children and small animals. CERTAIN.) Charisma is a double-edged sword: we want to be seduced by it, but then are angered by its seductive power.

So, too, with a pastoral authority based on charisma. If a pastor on some occasion acts, well, unpastoral, his charisma is called into question. If charisma is but a fleeting mirage, then the authority founded on it quickly evaporates. I remember well my fear as a new teacher (so, so many years ago) that my control of the classroom would disappear if even a single student successfully challenged my authority. That fear can motivate a reactionary posture in which all perceived opposition must be vigorously put down lest it spread like a contagion. Sadly, I think I've seen this in more than one pastor's or session's attitude toward the congregation.

To be clear, I'm not commenting on the legitimacy of the opposition. The person challenging the pastor's preaching may be entirely out of line and not a little bit crazy. (More than once, a person has accused me of saying something I did not say in a sermon, then refused to listen to the audio to double-check.) Even in those cases, the man of God must pursue gentleness: it's the only way to fight the good fight with those who are wayward and confused (2 Timothy 6:11-12). Frankly, those people are the bruised reeds our Lord would not break (Isaiah 42:3): they're done no good when they're punished for questioning the elders' authority.

Now, it's all well and good to suggest the pastor ought be like Jesus and not return reviling for reviling (1 Peter 2:23), but won't doing so undermine his authority in the eyes of the congregation? If authority rests in charisma, yes indeed. But his authority cannot be undermined if it rests on a charism.

"Charism" means "gift," and all presbyterian Church officers should remember they received one at ordination: "Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you" (1 Timothy 4:14). The Spiritual charism granted by ordination is an objective reality, and cannot be removed or undermined by challenges to authority or questioning of charisma. During our Lord's earthly ministry, his authority got challenged plenty, but (obviously!) he never lost it. Similarly, the authority granted to elders by ordination is a durable thing, easily able to survive any opposition. A challenge to my authority to preach would be like a challenge to the blueness of my eyes: silly, and not worth quarreling over.

Church officers do well to remember all Church power and authority is ministerial and declarative: it is exercised as delegated by and on behalf of our Lord Jesus, and can only set forth that which is set forth by the Word of God. So long as I exercise my charism of authority according to those very presbyterian principles, my charisma (or, frankly, lack thereof) is utterly beside the point. Authority  in the Church is lost only by those afraid of losing it.