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.

My philosophy of ministry

[I, Paul,] now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the church: whereof I am made a minister, according to the dispensation of God which is given to me for you, to fulfill the word of God. (Colossians 1:24-25)

While every Christian is called to share in the sufferings of Christ (Luke 9:22- 26), over the years I have learned, experientially and exegetically, that this call is given particularly to ministers of the Gospel. This fact is modeled for us in the pastoral work of the Apostle Paul, which was for him a ministry of suffering. If his admonition “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ,” (1 Cor 11:1) is to all believers with regard to their use of earthly things, it is much more so with regard to pastors in the discharge of their office. The Scriptures, which teach the man of God all he needs (2 Tim 3:15ff), were so inspired by the Spirit to give us the Apostle to the Gentiles as our most comprehensive model for the Christian ministry, and so it is to his example that we should look. 

Paul’s pastoral suffering is summarized perhaps most poignantly in 2 Corinthians 3:2-3: “You are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by all men; being revealed that you are a letter of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tablets of stone, but in tablets that are hearts of flesh.” The Corinthians’ Christian conviction was a testimony to the successful labors amongst them of Paul, who was held in low regard by many in that congregation, as both 1 and 2 Corinthians amply demonstrate; in other words, he was rejected by those he had blessed. When Paul speaks of his sufferings for the Gospel (2 Tim 1:8), he no doubt includes the many beatings and persecutions he endured. Still, it seems to me the greater pain of the pastor is to be rejected by one’s own friends and disciples (2 Tim 1:15), just as our Savior wept most bitterly over Jerusalem (Lk 19:41-44). 

Note that both Paul and Jesus were faithful in their ministries; they suffered and were rejected not because of personal fault, but because men were through them rejecting God himself (Lk 10:16). Pastors must not desire the reward of being well-thought of by their congregations, though our Lord is kind in allowing many this experience. In helping their people become conformed to the image of Christ, they must be willing to endure patiently anger and bitterness, much of it entirely misdirected. They must accept disrespect and ingratitude, the aggravation of one’s wise proposals being ignored or derailed by one’s session. They must even accept blame for the pastoral malpractice of others and be extraordinarily slow to defend their Ninth Commandment rights to a good name. They must patiently and silently suffer injustice so they may be free to do the one thing on which they can in no way compromise: proclaim the grace of God through the Cross of Christ. 

This suffering is itself a proclamation of God’s grace because it testifies that the pastor only needs the Lord’s good testimony of him, and his confidence of that is not based on his accomplishments or recognition received. He can tell his people to rely solely on the Cross for all things without fear of being accused of hypocrisy. Over time, his people will learn to think less well of themselves as they think more highly of God’s grace, which in turn may reduce their tendency to attack their pastor when their self-esteem seems threatened. However, that result comes about only as the fruit of much patient labor, usually over some period of time and through the endurance of several trials. For these reasons, pastoral ministry is only for those prepared to rejoice when they are called to complete what is lacking in Christ’s sufferings for the sake of his Church.

Insert dope joke here

A couple months ago I participated in a discussion of the impact of marijuana's legalization on Colorado and the Churches here. An edited transcript is the cover story in the most recent Reformed Presbyterian Witness.

I should also note that the RP Witness's editor sent me a copy of The Book of Psalms for Worship as a thank-you gift, so I totally recommend participating in any discussion to which you're invited by your Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America pastor friends.

Nakedness & Saul

Then Saul’s anger was aroused against Jonathan, and he said to him, “You son of a perverse, rebellious woman! Do I not know that you have chosen the son of Jesse to your own shame and to the shame of your mother’s nakedness? For as long as the son of Jesse lives on the earth, you shall not be established, nor your kingdom. Now therefore, send and bring him to me, for he shall surely die.” 

There's an awful lot packed into Saul's insults in 1 Samuel 20:30-31. Initially, it may seem odd that when he is angry with his son Jonathan, he attacks the character of Mrs. Saul. Actually, he's making a subtle, although highly offensive, dig at Jonathan. By making a covenant with David, now Saul's enemy, Jonathan is faithless toward Saul, as though Saul were not in fact his father. Saul alleges that Jonathan's choice suggests he is the product of adultery, which would make Mrs. Saul a perverse and rebellious woman. The only way Jonathan can restore his mother's reputation (in Saul's opinion) is to break his covenant with David and turn him over to Saul.

That reference to "your mother's nakedness" puts me in mind of the Law's various commands that "the nakedness of your [insert category of family relation here] you shall not uncover," the vast majority of which are found in Leviticus 18. Since these are all variations on adultery and already clearly prohibited by the 7th Commandment, one might wonder why they need to be enumerated in such exhausting detail.

The context of Leviticus 18 provides illumination. It prohibits all consanguineous adultery, child sacrifice, and homosexual and bestial sex acts. These were the grave abominations of the Canaanites who the Lord rejected from the land, and can be grouped together as fertility cult practices. Leviticus 18, then, is a specific warning to Israelites to not break covenant with the Lord by adopting the fertility cult religion of the Canaanites.

Fertility cults are attractive because they make the propagation and welfare of the family of central importance, which seems intuitive to most people. And by "most people," I mean "especially men" because the  head of the family, the patriarch, becomes a virtual object of worship. After all, it's his name and reputation that are being preserved and propagated. The recent resurgence of  polygamy in scripted and reality television provides many examples of how the man is the center of his vast family's universe.

Ironically, although his insult against Jonathan is remarkably witty, it's Saul who violates the intention of Leviticus 18. As the patriarch, he considers his will to be inviolable and binding on his son. In commanding Jonathan to break a lawful covenant with David and conspire in his murder, Saul demands he be obeyed rather than the Lord of Israel. He is just another in a long line of fathers who insist their families serve them rather than the Lord's Anointed.

The anti-Macbeth

In his Interpretation commentary on 1 & 2 Samuel, Walter Bruggemann observes of David's rise to the throne that he "takes no initiatives. He does not assert himself or express any ambition. He only receives what is given." David is almost passive as he comes to power, never taking direct action against King Saul or his family. Having been anointed as Israel's next king in 1 Samuel 16, David waits patiently for the moment his position will be recognized by all Israel.

David stands in striking contrast to William Shakespeare's Macbeth. Whereas David is anointed by a prophet long before he can take the throne, Macbeth is told his destiny to rule by three prophetic witches. Macbeth is a tragedy because a great and noble warrior determines to bring about his destiny through "murder most foul" (Hamlet, Act 1, scene 5) and makes himself cruel and corrupt. The witches, as the three Fates of Greek mythology, induce Macbeth to self-condemnation and destruction rather than glory.

In 1 & 2 Samuel, that royal tendency to hubris is expressed by King Saul. He knew he had lost the throne because of his sins of disobedience (1 Samuel 13 & 15), but refused to submit to the sentence pronounced by Samuel. Saul plotted to undo prophecy, and in so doing simply sealed his doom. Unlike Macbeth, Saul did not play out a fate written for him in a cauldron, but instead chose rebellion over repentance.

Saul : David :: Laban : Jacob

In 1 Samuel 18:17-30, King Saul offers first one daughter, then another, as wife to David in order to ensnare him in dangerous combat against the Philistines and, Saul hopes, death on the battlefield. This echoes Laban, who in Genesis 30 uses marriage to his two daughters to ensnare Jacob in indentured servitude and hopes to exploit the latter's labor for the rest of life.

If Saul plays the part of Laban, then David is Jacob, who was renamed Israel by the Lord (Genesis 32) and fathered the sons whose progeny would become the twelve tribes of Israel. This, in turn, suggests that, as king, David will become a new father to a finally united twelve tribes of Israel.

Sometimes a commentary needs a commentary

In his commentary on 1 & 2 Samuel, David G. Firth titles 1 Samuel 18:17-30 as "Saul's attempts to kill David through marriage."

I can't be the first to wonder about this author's relationship with his in-laws.

At last! A white man comments on race & gender relations

I've been listening to Pass the Mic (I believe on the recommendation of Mrs. Curmudgeon), the podcast of the Reformed African-American Network for a couple years now. It was thus that I heard the now-infamous "Gender Apartheid" episode, a crossover with the Truth's Table podcast. I won't bother recounting the sturm und drang which ensued; if you're blissfully unaware, the Google will tell you more than you need to know.

The kerfuffle gave me another occasion to reflect (as it seems I have had many occasions of late) on white people and what is wrong with them, especially the male ones who hold positions of influence and power in confessionally reformed circles. Anyone who knows me will freely tell you I have no idea what it would be like to hold a position of influence or power (despite the fact that every once in a while dozens [literally, dozens] of people read one of my blog posts), but I imagine that were I in one I would feel secure and self-confident. Instead, many of these men act like snowflakes (to coin a term) when they hear someone using terms which make them uncomfortable and describing reality in a manner to which they are unaccustomed.

Take, for example, R. Scott Clark, a professor at Westminster Seminary California, who recently commented on the original podcast at his Heidelblog in a two-part analysis. For the sakes of space and propriety, I will put aside the utter offensiveness and insanity of a late-middle-aged white Nebraskan taking umbrage at black women a decade or so younger than he using the term "apartheid" and presuming to lecture them on its historical context. (I am not making this up.) Instead, I will note that the first segment of his analysis focuses entirely on the terms "gender apartheid" and "toxic masculinity" without any engagement whatsoever with how the hostesses of Truth's Table defined those terms in their discussion. Notable also is a failure to interact with the problems they describe as occurring in confessionally reformed circles. Here's the closest Clark gets:

The question remains: Is there systematic oppression of females in NAPARC churches? Again, definitions are essential. In our late-modern subjectivist culture, recognition of sexual differences and of a creational pattern is regarded as “systematic oppression” but Christians may not simply adopt cultural categories and use them to leverage Scripture and nature. Christians recognize that there is such a category as nature, that there are such things as “givens.” There are laws of nature and there is a God who made nature. Properly defined, we should conclude that no, there is not a systematic oppression of females. Are there quarters within the NAPARC world in which females are told, in effect, to “sit down and shut up”? Yes. This is part of the problem. In reaction to the various iterations of feminism, some congregations do not allow females to vote in congregational meetings on the grounds that voting is an exercise of authority and therefore a violation of 1 Timothy 2:12. This strikes me as an unlikely inference and application of this passage.

I read this paragraph (and its broader context) several times, and am still confused. On the one hand there is no systematic oppression of females, apparently because on Clark's definitions there cannot be. On the other hand, there are "quarters within the NAPARC world in which females" are oppressed. Eh?

In the second section of his analysis, Clark presents an unobjectionable view of sexual relationships within the Creation order, but doesn't actually touch on anything in the podcast except in one paragraph. There, he states "When the podcasters spoke about qualifications for special office (e.g., elder) in the church they mocked the idea that only men are permitted to hold special office by reducing the qualifications to male anatomy." Actually, they said no such thing. Instead, they noted that opportunities for non-ordained persons to participate in a Church's ministries are often restricted to non-ordained persons who are "ordainable," which in practice often means nothing more than "male." (I will note that this is a complex issue worthy of much discussion by itself, and so I will not comment here.) At least in this regard, it appears Clark failed to listen carefully to that which he presumed to critique before presuming to critique it.

Sadly, Clark's response exemplifies most of the reformed white male responses to the "Gender Apartheid" podcast which I've encountered. (For the record, I am not a reformed white male, but a presbyterian white man.) To me, they read something like, "I am terribly offended by your recasting the discussions in terms which the people like me have not previously authorized, and will therefore excuse myself from paying any heed to the actual arguments you are making." The bitter irony, of course, is that many (although probably not all) of these middle- to late-middle-aged reformed white males have criticized today's young people for being overly delicate snowflakes.

Honestly, I listened to the original podcast and found nothing objectionable about it. The comments, particularly from the ladies, are trenchant, but that's what makes for entertaining listening. They were having an open and honest conversation, not attempting to educate me or reformed white males comfortable in their privilege: something which they have every right, before God and man in these United States, to do. Why would I bother to take offense?

And now I have given you just what everyone has been waiting for: a white man's opinions on race and gender relations. At long last.

The younger supplants the elder (again)

In 1 Samuel 18:2, King Saul brings David, until now the son of Jesse, into his royal household. The very next thing the narrative records is a covenant Jonathan, Saul's son and the crown prince, makes with David. Although the terms of the covenant aren't revealed, it is sealed by Jonathan giving David his robe, "and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt;" i.e. all the princely garb which signifies Jonathan's royal office. In other words, Jonathan recognizes and affirms that David, now his younger brother, is to take his place as Saul's successor.

This episode reflects the older/younger brother theme in Genesis, in which the younger brother supplants the elder as heir and in significance (ex. Jacob and Esau). That theme, in turn, teaches the reader to look away from Adam, the first man in Genesis, and forward to Adam's "younger brother," Jesus Christ. As the Second Adam, Jesus not only supplants Adam, but reverses the devastation wrought by Adam in the Fall and replaces it with life and glory (Romans 5:12-21). In his relationship with Jonathan, then, we find one more example of David as a type (figure) of Christ.

I admire boysenberry more than any ordinary syrup

As the legions of faithful readers of this blog will readily imagine, the list of reasons for me to go on is not only passingly brief, but growing briefer by the day. Over the years, pancakes have almost entirely dropped out of our Sunday-morning-breakfast rotation because the sugar-and-carb overload not only leaves one in a mild state of self-loathing, but even worse fails to fend off hunger pangs through the morning worship service.

Nonetheless, I cheerfully concede that the International House of Pancakes makes a quite excellent buttermilk pancake, and I get the occasional craving for a short stack covered in boysenberry syrup. I was accordingly driven to the depths of existential despair when told this morning that the blessed blackberry is no longer available at IHOP. O tempora, o mores!

Thankfully for you young people, the cause for boysenberry syrup's return has been taken up on the Facebook. It may be too late for my generation, but think of the children.

Another reason I will never leave Colorado

After last week's Bible camp in the bucolic Black Hills of South Dakota, I'm done with all the out-of-state travels planned for this summer, and apparently just in the nick of time. According to this survey, Colorado's are amongst the most polite in these United States. From this, I can only conclude that the rest of the nation has been overtaken by war boys on motorcycles festively bedazzled with human skulls, riding in convoy with mutants playing flame-throwing electric guitars across the apocalyptic landscape in search of potable water and oil refineries.

On the upside, there probably aren't any highways left onto which fellow drivers won't let you merge.

An open letter to my adopted daughter

You're too young to read this right now, and by the time you're old enough to understand what I'm writing, it's possible I'll have changed my mind. Over the years, I've learned not to judge the younger me for disagreeing with the older me, and I hope you'll learn the same. Our younger selves had their reasons, and even if they didn't get everything right, those reasons and the views they supported deserve to be taken seriously.

Amongst adoptees, there's a growing movement to protest the common practice of issuing children new birth certificates upon their adoptions, ones on which the birth parents' names are replaced with the adoptive parents'. One major reason for this is that sometimes the adopted child has no connection at all with her birth parents, and even their names are a mystery. Of course, we know very well who your birth parents are, and in the miraculous age of the interwebs it would likely take little effort to track them down. Practically speaking, for families like ours, the birth certificate is purely an identity signifier.

I get how personal identity is an enigma to each person, and how the adoptee cannot help but feel her identity contains elements unshared by the rest of her family. She is doubly unique: a unique individual, as is every person, but also unique within her family. The birth certificate is a marker of her identity, and one with her adoptive parents' names can seem a counterfeit, a denial of her obvious uniqueness.

But identity goes both ways. I understand that you have to work out what it means that two sets of parents can legitimately claim you as their daughter. At the same time, you need to understand what it means for me to claim you as my daughter when the world is poised to reject that claim. It's not just that our skins and hair are so obviously different: it's that your mother and I were told, for over three years, that we weren't your real parents and had to defer to the whims of two people whose immaturity deeply wounded you.

I didn't just fight for you, although God knows I did. I didn't just fight to be your father. I also fought to be recognized as your father, and I deeply suspect the world around us refuses me that identity. I fear being thought of as the counterfeit.

This will be hard for you to read, and it's difficult for me to write because the solipsism is so obvious, but your birth certificate is not only about your identity. I don't know how to describe what it felt like to open up that envelope from the county and read your name, your real name at last, with your mother and me listed as your parents. Everything suddenly slotted into place. Here, after over three years, was proof, proof the world must recognize and acknowledge, proof of what I had known since we carried you out of the hospital that Good Friday: I am your father.

Your sense of identity matters to you, and it matters to me. As far as you and I are concerned, though, your identity is inextricably tied up in mine. You are my daughter, I am your father, and your birth certificate testifies to the truth.

Why attendance is low on Good Friday

Thanks, Wumo.

News I can use

My father died of a massive heart attack at the age of 78, and my paternal grandfather of heart disease in his mid-60s. In order to beat my dismal odds, and in line with my policy of following medical advice I like, I will be sure to maintain my daily dose of chocolate, per the counsel of the latest most absolutely reliable medical study.

Also, since I always make sure to eat the red and blue peanut M&Ms for their antioxidants, I will never get cancer.

1 Samuel 16:1-13

In 1 Samuel 16, Samuel the prophet represents the reader's point of view, having to guess at the Lord's intent as best he can until David is revealed in verse 13. Saul also represents Israel's perspective on qualifications for rule (1 Samuel 9:2 & 10:23-24), as both Saul and David are outwardly qualified but only David has the right heart.

Interestingly, David's anointing as king by Samuel parallels Saul's earlier anointing by Samuel. Both occurred in a private setting (1 Samuel 16:13 & 9:27-10:1) and in the context of a sacrifice (1 Samuel 16:2-5 & 9:11-13, 19-24).

For the Vos completist

Ordained Servant, an online journal for Church officers produced by the OPC's Committee on Christian Education, has been serializing a new biography of Geerhardus Vos by Danny Olinger. Vos is to date the most prominent, and perhaps the most accomplished, Biblical theologian working within the confessional tradition of Protestant orthodoxy. Olinger's biography helpfully situates Vos' work within the contexts of his life and history. Recommended.

[The latest installment can be found here, along with links to previous issues of Ordained Servant.]

Batman vs. Emma Stone

I've been hearing the movie musical is making a comeback, especially after the recent success of La La Land. I suppose it's possible, but I have my doubts.

Stage theatre and film are both constructed on "the suspension of disbelief," the convention whereby the audience pretends it doesn't know the people they are watching are pretending to be people who don't know they're being watched. Said suspension is more easily done at the movies, where the projected image necessarily alienates the viewer from the persons viewed. It's a tad more complicated at the theatre, where the physical, embodied presence of actual persons makes the "play" part of play-acting all the more obvious.

Over the last century, this epistemological fact has resulted in popular spectacle, once a staple of the stage, moving over almost entirely into the cinema. Because we nearly automatically surrender our disbelief in front of the screen, we are willing to believe almost anything, up to and including spectacle the like of which simply cannot exist in real life. Take, for example, the truly wondrous moment in Captain America: Civil War when the Winter Soldier grabs hold of a moving motorcycle, reverses its direction in midair, mounts it and speeds back in the direction whence he came. Now, I haven't take a physics class since high school, but I'm pretty sure that scene violates all three of Newton's laws of motion. Nonetheless, I stood up and cheered because it was SPECTACULAR.

A generation ago, the spectacle of choice was the movie musical. No, ordinary people in mid-twentieth century America were no more likely to break into song and dance than those of our day, but that's not the point. The emotional experiences of film characters were such that singing and dancing were the only available means by which to express themselves. This seemed so commonsensical that every major Hollywood actor had to appear in a movie musical. (Exhibit A: Marlon Brando as Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls. Oh, the humanity.)

Times have changed, and not for the better. Instead of a street crowd breaking out into a synchronized dance number, we think it far more plausible that cars chase each other through crowded Los Angeles streets and freeways at dizzying speeds while their drivers make accurate shots, one-handed, with PISTOLS. Talk about suspension of disbelief. This genre has evolved, thanks largely to Marvel Studios, into the superhero picture. Now genuinely respectable Marlon Brando-caliber actors (looking at you, Robert Downey Jr. and Anthony Hopkins) are all flying into the air and doing battle with villainy and nefarious conspirators who have secretly riddled the state's security apparatus.

In other words, the niche once occupied by the movie musical now belongs to the superhero/action film. Emma Stone and Damien Chazelle don't have to win over skeptical audiences. They have to take on Batman.

The sun & the moon & the stars

And beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.

There's something about Deuteronomy 4:19; I just can't get it out of my head. It puts me in mind of what Paul said at the Areopagus in Acts 17:26-28.

And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for

‘In him we live and move and have our being;'
as even some of your own poets have said,
 ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’

Israel's particularity as God's chosen people (one of the major points of Deuteronomy 4, by the way) is sometimes taken as a sign of God's rejection of all other peoples. However, the Lord of Israel is simultaneously the Lord of Creation, and he has written signs in his creation, signs which we are unaccustomed to reading as such. We think time is a malleable social construct (Exhibit A: Daylight Savings Time) and national borders are arbitrary political constructs. But Paul, in his Acts 17 meditation on the aftermath of the Babel debacle (Genesis 11), argues that time and borders were made by God in order to channel our social relationships back into a search for him.

The sun and the moon and the stars, Genesis 1:14-19 tells us, tell us the days and hours and years are passing in ordered succession, and so the moment is arriving when we must reckon with their Creator. But instead of feeling our way toward him and finding him, the nations are drawn away and bow down to them. They turn these governors into idols, failing to recognize that theirs is merely a designated authority.

We who are now God's chosen people in the new Israel, his Church, are as prone as our ancient fathers to bow down to idols. Rather than worshiping the evident power of the sun and the moon and the stars to govern our lives, however, we, along with the nations of today, think we can claim and manipulate that power to our own ends. We are lords of time and space, displacing the Creator of space and time alike.

The particularity of God's chosen people isn't a sign he has rejected all other peoples. In his mercy, he has left us all allotted periods and boundaries so that we should seek him. In our sin, we are too readily and quickly satisfied instead with the sun and the moon and the stars, and, too often, with our infantile conviction we cannot be governed even by them. Because we cannot and will not find God, then, he came to be not far from each one of us.

For in him we live and move and have our being.

The Flintstones

I didn't see it coming, but apparently no one else did, either, if the interwebs are a reliable indicator for this sort of thing. It was recommended during a segment on the Slate's Political Gabfest podcast. I found it on the Hoopla digital library site (thanks, Aurora Public Library!), and figured I had nothing to lose by checking it out. Boy, howdy, am I ever glad I did.

I speak, of course, of DC Comics' reboot of The Flintstones.

It's more than a little shocking, especially for those of us with no particular fondness or animus toward the original Hanna-Barbera cartoon. Steve Pugh's artwork is in the classic modern "realistic" comic-book style, and he does a competent job of rendering the visual complexity of the town of Bedrock. However, the real genius behind the project is writer Mark Russell, who uses this page right out of history to examine our moment in history. I've been trying to remember when last I came across a biting social satire of this caliber with such an intensely human heart, and the closest I can come is somewhere between the British and American versions of The Office.

A bit of dialogue from Slate's Quarry, as a new Cro-Magnon employee queries Fred Flintstone.

"Can I ask you a question?"

"Sure."

"How come you wear a tie?"

"I read an article once that said you should dress for the job you want, not the job you have."

"So how long have you been wearing that tie?"

"Fifteen years."

Everything in our culture gets skewered, but I can forgive all the jabs at religion since Unitarianism ends up taking the hardest hits. So, so good.

Twins

At the end of John 10, Jesus flees from a homicidal mob to Bethany across the Jordan (John 10:40-42 & 1:28). At the beginning of John 11, he is summoned by Mary and Martha to Bethany near Jerusalem. In John 11:16, the Evangelist identifies Thomas as "called the Twin."

In John 10-11, we have twin mentions of twins: the villages Bethany and Thomas the disciple. I have no idea what this means.

Very reasonable packaging

Yup. This was all for a few pairs of girly socks. 

The Devil and Hilary Mantel

First Things

35 East 21st Street

Sixth Floor

New York  NY  10010

Friday, March 3, 2017

To the Editor: 

As I expect thoughtful engagement from First Things, I was surprised and confused to read what Patricia Snow herself called “psychoanalytic criticism” (perhaps the least thoughtful style of literary analysis) in “The Devil and Hilary Mantel” (February 2017). Surprised, that is, until I read Snow’s description of William Tyndale’s protestant doctrines, all of which have found a home in historic presbyterianism’s Westminster Confession of Faith: “Rarely has blasphemy or heresy been so gently proclaimed.”

Protestant readers of First Things expect and accept uncritical endorsement of Roman Catholic conciliar doctrine as the price of admission. I will be gravely disappointed if that price is increased to include shallow insults of protestant conciliar doctrine (especially when packaged in psychoanalytic criticism).

grace and peace,

The Presbyterian Curmudgeon

I Am Not Your Negro

Mrs. Curmudgeon and I took in an early matinee showing of I Am Not Your Negro this morning, filmmaker Raoul Peck's presentation of the thought of James Baldwin. 

Content aside, it's a masterpiece the intensity of which drew me in, as a viewer, in a way which I don't remember experiencing since the much and well-deservedly praised Whiplash. For me, however, the nearest point of cinematic comparison is 2003's American Splendor. Neither film can be neatly categorized, and both, while not entirely new in style, present a model which we can only hope other filmmakers will imitate. American Splendor used actors and the real people they portrayed, along with elements of cartooning, to present something (entirely moving) between a biography and an autobiography of Harvey Pekar. I Am Not Your Negro is only nominally a documentary; in fact, it's an essay in film form.

That it comes off as a unified and incisive essay on race relations in these United States is Raoul Peck's personal triumph, since he edited it together from a number of Baldwin's published works, notes towards a never-completed book, and footage of James Baldwin in debate, lectures, and even an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. That last, in particular, made me wonder how anyone could not fall in love with Baldwin's mind. Completely off the cuff, in rejoinder to a white academic, he improvises a speech marked by symmetry and repetition of key phrases, and which crescendoes to a shattering climax. It's a feat of rhetorical jazz which I've rarely had the privilege to encounter.

James Baldwin wanted to use Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. to tell the story of the Negro in America (and I wish I could figure out a way to mention his brilliant analysis of the role of Sidney Poitier in 1960s American cinema), but his true central thesis emerges most clearly in the film's final moments. To Baldwin, the Negro is a concept constructed by whites who sought to deny the reality that America is not composed of black and white people, but of one people with a literally shared and commingled blood. He posited that the challenge for whites, and implicitly for blacks as well, is to recognize that truth, that we are not other to one another, but rather are one. As Baldwin says, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed if it is not faced."

A word to the historically ignorant

Perhaps you, like I, have heard it asserted that yesterday was the first time ever a Vice-President broke a tie vote in the U.S. Senate to confirm a Cabinet nominee.

To which I can only say, balderdash and folderol! First time ever, my foot!

That is precisely the determinative plot point in Advise and Consent! (The film version, at least. I think the book had somewhat different conclusion.) What are they teaching in high school civics classes these days?

Oh, wait. There are no high school civics classes these days.

Memorials

My essay "Memorials," on the sacraments, is currently featured at The Daily Genevan.

Minor Miracle by Marilyn Nelson

This is the second time this poem appeared in my feed since subscribing to The Poetry Foundation's Poem of the Day podcast. As a poem, it's not much, not even as blank verse. But as a testimony we all need to hear, especially in these dark days, it's something else.