Two houses (being the second part)

 The United Stated Congress is made up of two houses: the Senate and the House of Representatives. The number of Senators is set by the United States Constitution: at two per state, there are 100. The number of Representatives was set by statute in the early 20th century, when it was realized things were getting out of hand and was accordingly capped far too late at an entirely unwieldy 435 (441 if you include non-voting delegates). 

This vast numerical disparity has led to very different styles of operation. The Senate, due to its relatively small size, gives each member opportunities to speak, debate and serve on important committees even while new to the institution. (In theory, this also allows senators to pursue regional agendas as avidly as ideological ones, but this feature has been waning as the type of candidate elected has tended to be increasingly partisan over the last couple decades.) In the House, seniority is everything and parties strive to maintain strict control over their members. There are just too many Congresspersons running around to let everyone have an equal voice in the chamber's operations.

Each house and its manner of doing business has its own strengths and weaknesses, most of which are dictated by necessity. The particular genius of the bicameral legislature is to ensure that those weaknesses never prove fatal because both houses must agree in order for legislation to pass. This system therefore allows us to benefit from each house's strengths without (necessarily) falling victim to its weaknesses.

This is all fairly elementary stuff that should have been covered in your high school civics class, if American high schools still taught civics. I bring it up not because I think you ignorant (after all, you're a reader of this blog, demonstrating thereby rare taste, refinement, education and, almost certainly, above-average height and physical attractiveness) but because it offers insight into the general assemblies of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church in America.

The OPC's General Assembly is strictly capped at 155: its debate (supposedly) mirrors that of the U.S. Senate with lengthy speeches and much freedom for individual commissioners to pursue idiosyncratic agendas. Not so the PCA's General Assembly, which may include all teaching elders and two ruling elders from each congregation. (The "may" is emphasized because each commissioner must pay his own way and so it's never been the case that everyone who is eligible to serve at the PCA GA has actually registered to do so.) Given this rule, along with the fact that the PCA is over twelve times the size of the OPC, the PCA's GA is much larger than the OPC's and so tends to mirror many of the operational tendencies of the U.S. House of Representatives: commissioners voting according to group affiliation (however defined), less allowance given to debate, low tolerance for idiosyncratic agendas.

As with the two Houses of the United States Congress, each assembly's approach to its membership, and the concomitant operational style of each, has its own strengths and weaknesses. However, while we hope (often against hope, bitter experience and reason itself) that the weaknesses of each House of Congress will be negated by the strengths of the other, no such hope exists for the two General Assemblies. Because each is the highest court of its respective denomination, the rulings of the one cannot impact the other, and so each General Assembly, and the denomination it serves, may eventually fall victim to its own weaknesses. 

I offer this analysis for two reasons: first, I've not seen anyone else draw this comparison; and second, I have thoughts, to be offered at another time.

Two houses (being the first part)

 In one sense, all history is revisionist history in the sense that every new piece of historiography seeks to revise our understanding of that which we previously knew. There would be no point in writing a new biography of Abraham Lincoln, for instance, if one had absolutely no original insights to offer (other than as a cynical ploy to gain tenure at a university, but we will not speak of such things).

In that manner, and as one long exhausted by my homeland's willful ignorance of the felt experience of racism on our shores, I was intrigued by The 1619 Project's stated goal of reframing American history through the lens of the black experience. I found much of its contribution to the American historical project rewarding, but sadly, some of its least helpful arguments seem to have gained the most traction. The one which most irks me is the contention that the creation of a Senate alongside a House of Representatives was primarily a scheme to permanently  invest political power in slave-holding interests.

Really? A bicameral legislature because racism? Not because every European nation, including and especially Great Britain, which just happens to have been the nation of which the original 13 States were a part, has a bicameral legislature? (Not to mention Virginia, whose form of government was basically copied wholesale by the 1787 Constitution, which I am obliged to mention because I graduated from a Virginian public high school and university.) At this point, The 1619 Project goes from completely reasonable lower-case-r revisionism to 1984 memory hole upper-case-R Revisionism which is plausible only to those operating with utter ignorance of the foundations of our form of government. Which is to say, Americans who have attended elite private universities.

I am particularly irked because this narrative seems to have gained a great deal of traction with a class of Americans (i.e., Americans who live in overpopulated cities on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts) who are dismayed that states with remarkably few residents (looking at you, Wyoming) get just as many Senators as do California and New York. While my listening habits may be unusual, I'm hearing an increasing number of complaints that this arrangement is not only suspect (because racism), it is anti-democratic.

To which I can only say: That's the point.

The peculiar genius of the American experiment in self-government is not a bicameral legislature: everybody has one of those (except for Nebraska, about which the less said the better). Instead, it is in composing its upper legislative house not from a political/social class (as in Great Britain, about which the less said the better), but from a conscious recognition that political decisions are driven as much by lived experience as by ideology. Westerners understand the value of water in a way that easterners never can. (Having recently relocated from Colorado to Ohio, I am constantly appalled by how much water the locals here waste. It's as though they think it falls from the sky.) The House of Representatives gives full weight to our nation's massed populations, but the Senate exists to ensure that the majority cannot unilaterally impose its will on States in which they do not live.

That might frustrate those with majoritarian instincts, but as a citizen who remains sympathetic to my friends in the West, I think it a good thing. Along with the separation of powers, it not only makes us a republic, but the greatest Republic which this sad world has yet seen. 

And that is a very good thing.

His tithes & our offerings

I am not the first to note that the recent pandemic did a number on Churches and their worship services. Much attention has been paid to the problem of getting people back into sanctuaries and rebuilding relationships which became attenuated over months of social isolation. Equally of interest, in my opinion, is how concern about the 'rona impacted liturgical practices themselves. Ushers and greeters stopped shaking hands and passing out bulletins. Bulletins got bulked up with photocopies of songs because hymnals were put away to eliminate a point of contact. In many cases, celebration of the Lord's Supper was either suspended or traditional elements were replaced with itsy-bitsy factory-sealed personal-size portions of saliva-dissolvable styrofoam and purple-dyed sugar water. Passing the offering plate was replaced with exhortations to give online or drop one's tithe in a basket in the back of the auditorium.

Presbyterians understand that the sacraments are a primary means of grace (Shorter Catechism #88 uses "Word, sacrament and prayer" as shorthand for all the means of grace) and so communion has made a comeback right along with the return of "in-person worship" (a redundancy I never thought I'd utter with a straight face). However, passing the plate or bag or upturned baseball cap has not yet returned in many places. I think this is a mistake: the public and corporate offering of gifts is also an important means of grace, and we miss an element of worship when it is absent.

The Orthodox Presbyterian Church had a different iteration of our Directory for Public Worship when I was ordained as a pastor late in the last century; although the wording was different, the point was similar to the current "The bringing of offerings in the public assembly of God’s people on the Lord’s Day is a solemn act of worship to almighty God. The people of God are to set aside to him the firstfruits of their labors; in so doing, they should present themselves with thanksgiving as a living sacrifice to God" (OPC DPW II.B.4.a). When I was reading through the Directory in my early days of my pastorate, I realized that the giving of tithes and offerings fulfills a specific role in the liturgy's structure: it is the congregation's especial opportunity to give thanks. Since that realization, I usually inserted the offering after the confession of sin and declaration of pardon, as thanksgiving to God for Jesus Christ and his gifts is most appropriate at that point in the service. I now feel that a service without an offering lacks this note of thanksgiving.

Yes, one can have a thankful heart even if the liturgy does not include an offering. But by the same token, we always enjoy some sort of fellowship with God in Christ: that does not render unnecessary the Lord's Supper. It's time for sessions to bring back the offering so that we may all, as part of the worship service and with thankful hearts, present to God his tithes and our offerings.

Travel narrows the mind

 An oft-unmentioned benefit of travel and living in a variety of regions and climes is the opportunity to have one's prejudices and biases reinforced with new anecdotal and statistical evidence. Of course, one must first have worked oneself into an appropriately curmudgeonly state of recalcitrant grouchiness, which, thankfully, I have. Indeed, when I ask "How are you?" and the reply is "Can't complain," I usually respond "I bet you could if you tried."

Shortly after moving to the Greater Cincinnati Metropolitan Area, Thing 2 and I noticed something wrong with the sunrise: namely, it came much later in the morning than we expected. Studying a map, I eliminated being further north as a cause because Cincinnati and Denver are at roughly the same latitude. However, I suddenly realized that Cincinnati is relatively closer to the western edge of the Eastern Time Zone than is Denver to the western edge of the Mountain Time Zone. (Reread that last sentence until it makes sense; I promise it does.) Therefore, the sun rises and sets later in the day in Cincinnati than it does in Denver. A series of interviews with the native population of Ohio confirmed my hypothesis (because in this house, we believe in science).

This means, of course, that the Birthplace of Aviation most definitely does not need "more daylight at the end of the day," the oft-cited justification for Daylight Saving Time. Indeed, the pitiful schoolchildren attempting to cross busy streets every morning are in need of sunlight lest they lay down their lives for public education, but it has again been denied to them by the bolshevik scheme to mess with the nature of reality itself through mandating that all clocks "spring ahead" (even though it's still winter). If any of these United States should do away with this annual insanity, it's Ohio.

Stop the madness, save the children, and never again. Ohioans unite! You have nothing to lose except showing up an hour late to worship services once a year.

The danger facing the OPC today

 Because teaching the humanities at a juvenile detention facility is not nearly as lucrative as one might hope, I continue to look for other employment, particularly as a presbyterian pastor. Search committees frequently ask some version of "What are the greatest theological dangers facing the (insert name of confessional presbyterian denomination here)?" This is one of my responses.

I believe the greatest theological problem facing the Orthodox Presbyterian Church today is the failure on the part of too many Church officers, especially ministers of Word and sacrament, to fully inhabit the Westminster Standards as their personal confession of faith, the main instrument by which to organize instruction of Church members, and the form by which unity within the OPC and with brethren in Churches of like faith and practice may be maintained. Several inextricably linked problems emerge from this failure.

Absent a confessional mooring, pastors seek out tools and frameworks with which to organize their preaching and teaching. This can exacerbate the temptation to follow one’s most charismatic seminary professor or the current fashions of the blogosphere, whether or not these conform closely to presbyterian doctrine and tradition. In fact, the man who looks to these as his guides may well fall into the hole of online controversy and mistake a momentary fashion for a question critical to the Church’s very existence.

A teaching and preaching ministry preoccupied with transient controversy will have little time to dedicate to the fundamental doctrines of the faith, summarized in the Westminster Standards. Consequently, Church members may become more acquainted with recent trends in seminaries than with the Catechisms.

Perhaps worst of all, neglect of historic presbyterian doctrine almost necessarily leads to indifference toward presbyterian polity and discipline. Over the years, I have become ever more dismayed by how many Church officers seem entirely unaware of the presbyterian doctrine of Church power (ex.
OPC Form of Government III). Such Church officers tend to think their prerogatives are vast and they do not need to make sure they never infringe on members’ liberty of conscience (Westminster Confession of Faith chapter 20). Church power is abused, which is to say members are spiritually abused. (In the Church, spiritual abuse always precedes any other kind of abuse or misuse of power by Church officers.) As confessional presbyterians, our theology is sound. Many of the dangers we face come from the failure of many Church officers to humbly submit to this truth.

The sense of sickness

I suggest that, for us, the sense of sickness has replaced the sense of sin, to which it was always near allied, and that while we are acutely aware of the difficulties surrounding notions of good and evil, we ignore, though they are manifest, the equally great difficulties surrounding notions of sickness and health, especially as these judgments are applied to behavior. Antebellum doctors described an illness typical of enslaved people sold away from their families, which anyone can recognize as rage and grief. By medicalizing their condition, the culutre was able to refuse the meaning of their suffering. I am afraid we also are forgetting that emotions signify, that they interpret the world to us and us to other people. Perhaps the reality we have made fills certain of us, and of our children, with rage and grief – the tedium and meagerness of it, the stain of fearfulness it leaves everywhere. It may be necessary to offer ourselves palliatives, but it is drastically wrong to offer or to accept a palliative as if it were a cure.

–Marilynne Robinson, "Facing Reality," in The Death of Adam 

The problem with comedies

 

 I did a close reading of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure in college when I was assigned a scene from it for an acting class, and decided that it really shouldn't be a comedy. Like most Americans, I like my comedies to be funny: I've never really accepted the classic definition of a comedy as a story with a happy ending (preferably a wedding or two). In the case of Measure for Measure, I thought the story so grim (a major plot point has a young woman pressured to have sex with Vienna's ruler to save her brother's life) that its happy ending seemed forced and inappropriate. A more consistently written Measure, I thought, would have turned out tragically, perhaps with a Hamlet- or Macbeth-style bloodbath.

When we know everything will turn out all right, it's hard to credit the emotional struggles through which characters must journey on their way to that happy ending. That's clearly the case with the Hebrew midwives whom Pharaoh told to kill all baby boys (Exodus 1:15-16). In just a few verses, they deceive Pharaoh by turning his own deceitful premise against him and so are rewarded by God (Exodus 1:17-21). I'm tempted to think of them as plucky, clever and indefatigable, but upon reflection I'm not sure why. Their bravery is remarkable, but is made remarkable because they didn't know they were living in a comedy: for all they knew, Pharaoh would kill them when he discovered they hadn't killed any babies.

In some sense, of course, this wasn't a comedy because Pharaoh simply takes his genocidal impulses public in Exodus 1:22: "Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, 'Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.'" I can't imagine anything about the episode seemed comic to Shiphrah and Puah. From the beginning, they must have been terrified that Pharaoh would see through their paper-thin deception. Then they had to live with even greater fear of what he might do to them once he had made his murderous intentions known to the world. Yes, God had given them families, but how long would they keep their own heads?

Perhaps that's the root of all anxiety: we don't realize we're living in a comedy. Jesus tells us anxiety is the sin of unbelief in Matthew 6:25-34, and it's one of the sins from which repentance is particularly difficult and signally uncommon. That may be because our time horizon is too short. We worry about tomorrow and the day after, forgetting that the deus ex machina which literally saved many a Greek hero and figuratively rescued the cast of Measure for Measure is an overly literal foreshadowing to the comedic end to this cosmic drama which we are all acting out.

Maybe we need more unfunny comedies. Life in a fallen world is rife with dread and struggle, and all too often we think that means it must therefore end badly. American Christians are particularly loathe to acknowledge the immense suffering of living in a fallen world because they fear that portends a tragic end. This is wrong, of course: I can say that God is good and my life is bad without any tension or contradiction. The Bible does have a few funny bits, but overall it's extremely unamusing. Nonetheless, its account of history is entirely comic.

Read this way, we can understand the experience of all believers from Shiphrah and Puah to our fellow congregants to ourselves, and how to survive that experience. We can get through the horrors of this life not on a reserve of innate cheerfulness, but on the basis of a Christian hope in the truths of comedy.

Iconoclasm is a virtue

 I suppose I'm thankful R.R. Reno's essay "Shared Loves and Strong Loyalties" is on the First Things
website. He helpfully clarifies just how I think both he and First Things, under his editorship, have drifted away from waters in which a Protestant can swim. 

Reno argues that the liberal political tradition has enervated our society and we need instead love, and in particular shared loves. Those shared and efficacious loves are inspired by and directed toward the strong gods of justice, nation, family and blood. He concedes that the strong gods are dangerous gods who may become idols, but

Misjudging lesser goods as the highest good (the essence of idolatry) always remains a danger. But the unstated premise behind Return of the Strong Gods [the book to which this essay is a preface] is that life without love is a greater evil than life in which finite loves are made absolute.

To this claim, the Christian might well respond that if both are evil, better to avoid both rather than merely the greater. Apparently anticipating this response, Reno goes on,

Let me issue my own theological warning: Beware iconoclasm. It is a heresy born of the fantasy that we can eliminate the possibility of idolatry by destroying every object of love other than the highest, which is God. 

This, in my view, the natural endpoint both of Reno's way of thinking and of the Roman Catholicism to which he converted some years ago: an obviously Biblical virtue is called a heresy. For what is iconoclasm but the smashing of idols, and what is the smashing of idols but sanctified obedience to the Second Commandment? 

Iconoclasm swept Europe as it entered its Christian Era, and the boldest fathers of presbyterianism, Ulrich Zwingli and John Knox, were iconoclasts in word and deed. As I have argued repeatedly in my own dialogues with Roman Catholics, iconoclasm is necessary to Protestantism. On the other hand, iconolatry and idolatry have overwhelmed Roman Catholicism as, for example, disordered love for glorified saints such as the mother of our Lord has crowded out all-consuming love for her son.

Life without love is evil, and life consumed by disordered love is evil. For love to be rightly ordered, it must be directed toward Jesus Christ. Europe entered its Christian era when the princes became Christian and the Church supplanted empire as the continent's great unifying power. Our culture indeed needs strong love: a love which hates false gods, strong or otherwise, and is monomaniacally preoccupied with the only truly worthy object of all love, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Carl Trueman gets weird

 If the Gospel Coalition's website is a reliable indicator, Carl Trueman's recent "The Failure of Evangelical Elites" in First Things has garnered thoughtful attention. I'm not sure why.

Trueman's thesis appears in the essay's second paragraph: "accommodation appeals to those who seek a seat at the table among ­society’s elite." "Those" are the university-educated elites of evangelicalism who, as he puts it later on, "[talk] in an outraged voice about racism within the boundaries set by the woke culture." From these statements and from the rest of the essay, Trueman clearly suspects their motives. Is he being fair or reasonable?

Trueman begins his discussion with Friedrich Schleiermacher, who made a great show of challenging liberal protestantism while conceding, upholding and endorsing all its tenets. While "On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers" is a truly awesome polemical title, the actual content was the exact opposite. From Schleiermacher, Trueman moves on to Mark Noll and George Marsden, who in the 1990s made a compelling argument for the recovery of Christian intellectualism in these United States. On the one hand, Trueman affirms the legitimacy and orthodoxy of that project ("And unlike ­Schleiermacher’s, I find their arguments convincing."), but with the other he denies it ("Nevertheless, a sociological comparison of their project with Schleiermacher’s is legitimate.") With this move, evangelical intellectuals "committed to a thoroughgoing supernatural Christian orthodoxy" are nonetheless associated with protestant liberalism, a counterfeit of the Christian faith.

This is guilt by association. Not only is it not nice, it's a logical fallacy.

Trueman makes a valid point when he considers the example of Francis Collins, the evangelical scientist who is head of the National Institutes of Health. Indeed, one might reasonably hope an agency headed by a faithful Christian would not so enthusiastically sponsor the use of genetic material taken from aborted babies in research and development. However, the pointedness drifts when he begins writing about "evangelical elites" and "Christian leaders." He may have specific persons in mind, but by not naming names, one is unable to check whether certain persons are actually the mealy-mouthed compromisers he implies they are.

Rhetorically, we call this a "glittering generality," which also happens to be a logical fallacy.

Trueman seems very annoyed by evangelicals who call for repentance from America's original sin of racism without simultaneously denouncing abortion and gender dysphoria affirmation. The money line in this piece comes toward the close.

Let me put it bluntly: Talking in an outraged voice about racism within the boundaries set by the woke culture is an excellent way of not talking about the pressing moral issues on which ­Christianity and the culture are opposed to each other: LGBTQ+ rights and abortion.

That sounds really good, until one remembers that Carl Trueman is a confessional presbyterian writing for a journal which toes the most Tridentine Roman Catholic line possible without drifting into outright Lefebvrism. To illustrate, I suggest a rewrite.

Let me put it bluntly: Talking in an outraged voice about evangelicals who oppose racism within the boundaries set by an apostate Anglican conservative Roman Catholic editor is an excellent way of not talking about the pressing theological issues on which ­Protestantism and Romanism are opposed to each other: justification by faith alone and the sole authority of Scripture.

In other words, Carl Trueman finds working with papists a rewarding and helpful way to promote ideas near and dear to him; he doesn't need to prosecute the material causes of the Protestant Reformation (i.e. the doctrines on which the faith stands or falls) at every turn. Good for him! Is it not possible that some of his coreligionists find working with secularists a rewarding and helpful way to promote ideas near and dear to them?

If I may point out the obvious, Mr. Trueman's lived experience in these United States is in the suburban outposts of Pennsylvania's two largest cities. His concerns about these United States, gathered from that lived experience, are entirely valid. At the same time, so are the concerns of those of us who have lived in parts of the United States which are not Pennsylvania. In fact, I tend to agree with many "evangelical elites" who think it is possible, and even necessary, to make inroads against systemic racism even if one is not directly addressing abortion on demand.

In sum, Carl Trueman's argument is just plain odd: anti-Trump evangelicals are posers petitioning for worldly acceptance because they argue against racism without, in the exact same breath, denouncing abortion on demand and LGBTQ+ rights. To put it mildly, I am not persuaded.

While I am a natural-born U.S. citizen under color of law, I was not born on American soil and so try to believe that other late-comers to our shores may understand our great country and her citizens, Christian or otherwise. At the present moment, Carl Trueman is not making that easy.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

It's been a week, and I've pretty much decided that Charles Yu never meant for How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe to be taken at face value as a time travel novel. It is, instead, a novel on memory and loss in which the tropes of science fictional time travel, and especially world-building, are referenced but never truly centered. Yu's ultimate theme is the son's longing for his father, which he evokes elegiacally and unashamedly.

Science fiction fans may be disappointed because Yu has written an allegory which exploits science fiction conventions, not a science fiction novel. Those steeped in said conventions who are open to explorations of the chasms between parent and child will be rewarded.