Autonomous vehicles, my eye

We got stuck behind a school bus driving out of our neighborhood on its ice-covered streets when something odd under the chassis caught my eye. It was, of course, automatic snow chains in action, which you can also view here and here.

Automatic snow chains! These are the days of miracles and wonders! Why have I never heard about these? Why are the media going on and on about self-driving vehicles when we have already achieved the winter-roads-condition eschaton?!?

We are living in the golden age of transportation, people.

When the English Fall

When the English Fall by David Williams. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2017.

Whilst a university student, I sojourned amongst the Anabaptists (mostly Mennonites, but definitely not universally Mennonite) of Virginia's northern Shenandoah Valley. I think it was my junior year that my best friend and I attended a Church whose only apparent Mennonite distinctive was that a few of the older women wore the token doily on their heads; I don't think there were even any black bumpers in the parking lot. No buggies, either, although getting stuck behind a horse and buggy on Rockingham County's winding roads was just the price of leaving Harrisonburg. I never did become an Anabaptist, but I got a sense of what they're all about.

As a presbyterian, there are few commonalities between my tradition and Anabaptism, at least with regard to surface features. Beneath that, however, both our traditions agree that discipleship is a serious matter which one ought to expect to have serious consequences for the way one lives. That belief is at the heart of When the English Fall and its fictional narrator, Jacob, a member of an Amish district in Pennsylvania. The Amish have pretty well worked out their path of discipleship, but their patterns of life are challenged and tested when civilization collapses.

In Williams's version, the dystopian tipping point comes when some freak atmospheric event acts as a massive electromagnetic pulse, effectively putting an end to all electricity and machinery. The plain folk, of course, are perfectly capable of getting by without those things which make modern civilization possible. For Jacob and his community, physical survival is never in question. Instead, their central concern is whether their culture and path of discipleship can survive in a world in which, like it or not, they are irretrievably entangled.

It's refreshing to read a novel in which prayer is a central feature. It's challenging to ask how committed one is, in practice, to following Jesus.

Between the Times

Between the Times: the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Transition, 1945-1990 by D.G. Hart. Willow Grove: The Committee for the Historian of the OPC, 2011, xii + 340 pages, cloth.

D.G. Hart concludes his history of the OPC's middle years (i.e. the time between the operatic intensity of our denomination's founding and the solipsistically fascinating contemporary period) this way:

The history and identity of the OPC are bound up with each other; they cannot be separated. The OPC's history looks different from that of other Presbyterian churches because of its understanding of Reformed Christianity. At the same time, Orthodox Presbyterianism arose from specific struggles and traditions within Presbyterianism in the United States. When the OPC has been most aware of its history she has been most keen to preserve her Reformed heritage, and when she has been most zealous for what Machen called the grandeur of the Reformed faith she has been most attentive to her history. If the OPC is going to maintain her strengths as a Reformed communion, or if her officers and members decide to refashion or modify her identity, they will need first to consider the church's past. Without that history Orthodox Presbyterianism makes no sense.

That's an admirable defense of his book, and the very reason for which I read it. Indeed, as an immigrant into the OPC by virtue of my ordination to the ministry of Word and sacrament, I've long believed that familiarity with our communion's peculiar history is the only thing which might enable one to begin comprehending what matters to us and why.

In practice, that may mean that Between the Times is only for a select audience consisting of OPC historiphiles and anthropologists such as myself. The production of the Trinity Hymnal and Sunday School curricula does not, sadly, make for a riveting read. On the other hand, Hart demonstrates the close connection between home and foreign missions in the OPC's early decades, along with the reality that many pastors were, in practice, as much Church planters as anything else. This helps expand the portrait of parish life which one might otherwise assume to be fairly constricted.

The relationship between the denomination and Westminster Theological Seminary evolved and was strained to the breaking point during this period. I would have preferred an even more in-depth exploration of the Shepherd controversy. About fifteen years ago, its sequel erupted over the doctrine of justification. Sadly (in my opinion), the General Assembly report which was to settle the matter dealt only with doctrinal matters and ignored the history and the personalities involved. The intensity of the debate is explicable only when sociological and historical, over doctrinal, matters are considered. We really need George Marsden to write a history of the entire affair comparable to his "Perspective on the Division of 1937" (found in Pressing Toward the Mark).

Between the Times may not be a popular history, but is indispensable reading for anyone who would serve in ordained office in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, particularly at the presbytery or General Assembly levels.

The Last Policeman

Ben H. Winters can write a compelling novel. The Last Policeman (title of both a trilogy and the first volume thereof) begins in March 2012 and concludes, along with the world, on October 3, 2012 when a giant asteroid collides with the Earth. In each volume, Detective Hank Palace works to unravel a particular mystery, but the real puzzle at the heart of the trilogy is what Albert Camus proposed as the only truly serious philosophical problem: suicide. That is, given the sobering reality that every person is born to die, what gives any person's life a meaning sufficient to make delaying that death worthwhile? 

Winters is clearly aware he is following in the footsteps of Camus's existentialist novels and philosophy, having described The Last Policeman as "existential detective novel." By condemning the entire world to destruction, Winters forces each of his characters to determine the reason that she or he will keep going. Those reasons are highly individualistic and, unsurprisingly, infrastructure rapidly unravels as hyperinflation gives way to something like martial law which in turn collapses into simple anarchy, as even members of police forces and the military cannot be compelled to uphold a system which very soon will no longer exist.

The Christian response to the existential question, of course, is found in Ecclesiastes 12:13: "Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man." However, I recognize that those outside the Church don't recognize this wisdom, and am personally interested in how the existential question is worked through in the narrative arts. Last Night and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World are riveting cinematic examples of the genre, at least to me. I appreciate the clarity which the End of Days brings to each character's every choice.

The existential dilemma forms the background. Hank Palace and others wrestle openly with it, but what makes this trilogy a page-turner is Winters' ability to construct an opaque but plausible mystery and engaging characters. I read it as fast as I could; I suggest you do the same.