Monthly Archives: September 2008

Green(-washed) Kid Lit

The other night, I read Lil’ H a title we picked up from the library this past weekend: Dora Saves Mermaid Kingdom.

***Warning: Spoilers Ahead!***

Well, as much as there can be surprises and spoilers in a Dora book… :-D

In this particular work, our intrepid bilingual heroine assists mermaids whose kingdom is imperiled by a mean octopus who dumps trash in the ocean. The mermaid princess tries to get a magic wishing crown to set things to right but is captured by the mean octopus. Dora finds the crown, transforms into a mermaid, and uses the magic wish power in an attempt to clean up the kingdom. The wish is not entirely successful, so she gathers her mermaid friends to clean things up. She then saves the mermaid princess and the octopus is left covered in his own filth.

There were two things here I liked:

  1. The environment was an issue to be placed before children, and
  2. wishing alone doesn’t solve the problem; it takes collective and personal action to clean things up.

Overall, however, the book left me a bit annoyed… The offense? green-washing. The perpetrators? The entertainment industry with the collusion of the latte liberal set.

The take-away message for little children is not a bad one: trash doesn’t belong in our oceans; we need to clean up trash when we see it even if we didn’t put it there.

The take-away for parents and anyone old enough to see through the paper-thin allegory is what bothers me: we are righteous when we raise children’s consciousness about environmental issues; we are righteous in our disdain for greedy corporate interests (obviously played in this case by the trash-dumping octopus).

This message and this way of framing the debate and the moral meaning is a common one from the left-leaning entertainment industry. The theme of righteous good guy taking on illegal and unprincipled corporate trash dumpers is a staple of both action films (I’m thinking, for example, of an unfortunate Steven Segal movie here among others) and children’s material (I believe this was the central conflict in the cute penguin movie “Happy Feet” from a few years back). It’s one favored by latte liberals, but I find it fundamentally flawed. Yes, our kids need to hear environmental messages but this one misses a much more important and much deeper issue.

In a lull in the conversation about Lil’ G’s school day last night at dinner, I brought up the book. We talked for a little bit about two simple questions:

  1. Where did the mean octopus get his nasty trash from?
  2. After Dora and her mermaid friends cleaned up–where did they put the trash that they collected?

An obvious answer here is: the same place.

Who’s the real villain in this story? Is it the octopus (yes, certainly), or is it also the people who consume “disposable” items that are in turn thrown away for the octopus and his ilk to dump willy-nilly?

Latte liberals and the entertainment industry like the idea that trash shouldn’t be dumped in the environment. Not in the oceans, not in our forests–not even in our landfills. And there’s much to commend this. But they pass in silence over the deeper and more fundamental issue: We are the ones who generate the trash that gets dumped. The key isn’t bashing an easy and obvious target–those greedy corporate interests (thankfully the lattes were paid for by bartering hand-woven organically-grown hemp items; God forbid our latte-sippin’ superiors actually work for corporate employers…)–rather the key is raising awareness about what we do and how our unthinking acts of consumption and disposal cause the problem in the first place.

So I asked Lil’ G what Dora and her friends could do to reduce their trash. She told me (quite earnestly) that they need to do more recycling and composting. M then explained that this why we pack her lunch in her lunch box in washable containers rather than “disposable” bags and juice-boxes. (Yes, I’m indulging in some smug self-righteousness here…) That’s the message that I’d like to see the entertainment industry take up–but, hey, they too are an industry that depends on consumption and disposable content for their survival.

One of our new family rituals here is morning composting time. Before G gets on the bus for kindergarten, we take take our accumulated food scraps out to the compost pile, bury them, water the pile if needed, and check in on our small contingent of herbs. (I’ve got bugs in my basil and yellowing on my lavender; too, our compost pile has acquired a small swarm of fruit-flies—something’s not right in our method….)

So, last night for bedtime after reading about Princess Jasmine we read a nice children’s book (with great watercolors) on composting, Compost! Growing Gardens from your Garbage by Linda Glaser. My favorite part was the way Lil’ H kept interrupting me as I read: “Hey! I do dat! I compost!”

On Theologies and Worldviews

I noted today’s Daily Episcopalian shortly after perusing the great comments on Third Millennium Catholic’s call for a new Lux Mundi. What struck me (and makes in appearance in the comment I left at the Cafe) is that this Anglican conflict of ours is so often presented by the talking heads as an either/or: either Liberal Christianity or conservative Reformed evangelicalism. But there are so many more options out there.

The main problem with the present options is what Third Mill Catholic brings up in the comments: There is not to my knowledge a sound version of orthodox theology that adequately and systemically engages current science. Most Liberal Protestantism deals with it by retreating from it; most conservative evangelicalism deals with it by ignoring it. And yet—nature, creation, incarnate reality are bound up with the heart of the Christian proclamation.

I don’t know the answer, but in thinking through the options—and in the interest of presenting options, I thought I’d resurrect an old post from three years ago that addresses some of these issues:

—–

So, in an
earlier post I discussed some of the historical and exegetical issues
surrounding the formation of the creeds. However, stating the origins
of a thing and discussing its current applications are two different
things. To summarize briefly, the creeds were developed to serve as a
meta-narrative that located the key parts of the Faith by securing a
literal meaning to select portions of biblical narrative, specifically
parts in question by heretical groups. Fast-forward 2,000 years and
here we are today… [One quick procedural point: When I think of the
creeds my first thought is of the Apostles’ Creed rather than the
Nicene. Thus, it’s the one I work off of instinctively.]

The creeds were formed in a different age with radically different
philosophical conceptions and scientific notions. They are based in a
foreign way of understanding literary documents and of conceptualizing
religious communities. They functioned in certain ways then, how do we
use them now? Have these categories changed too much for them to be
useful?

Intellectually, the biggest problem that I can see with using the
creeds in the modern church is a disconnect in worldviews, especially
the understanding of the physical world. The modern American worldview
is heavily conditioned by Western science and preeminently Newtonian
physics. (As cool as quantum physics may be, it hasn’t penetrated to
the daily assumptions of normal people yet and probably never will.)
The two most important point of this belief system in relation to the
creeds are these: 1) scientific theories are verified by observation of
reproducible data and 2) reliable science is predictive, which follows
logically from 1. That is to say, if I throw a quarter up in the air
one hundred times, I can be confident that it will come back down.
Furthermore, if I have a steady hand and a good eye, I can consistently
throw it in such a way that I can more or less describe its arc by
means of a mathematical equation. These assumptions form the bedrock of
our understanding of reality.

What does this have to do with the creeds? Just this: the majority
of the beliefs in the creed, especially those concerning the first two
persons of the Trinity, deal specifically with completely
non-reproducible, unpredictable events many of which contradict what we
know from our quotidian experience of reproducible data. Once again,
that’s to say, I know how babies are made and I know how dead bodies
act. The creeds fly in the face of that knowledge. Or, to push a
different edge, I don’t know how the world was created and will never
have the opportunity to observe the whole process again. And I don’t
know scientifically what it means to have a God-Man and how his body
would or would not share the same biochemical structures as the rest of
us. In other words, these events are not repeatable and we have no data
to prove or disprove the creedal statements except by analogy to
repeatable phenomena. We cannot directly access either the moment or
acts of creation or the resurrection. At least with creation we can
study what remains but even that can not answer questions of causes—it
will only demonstrate mechanisms.

The problem, then, is a conflict of worldviews. A literal
understanding of the creeds as they were originally intended to be
understood is in conflict with a modern scientific worldview. Now we
must ask what to do with this conflict.

In order to resolve the conflict and to achieve consistency of
thought, one worldview must win and supplant the other. Thus on one
hand we have those who pick the biblical/creedal worldview over the
scientific worldview. Young Earth Creationism, Intelligent Design, a
general suspicion that physical scientists are part of an atheistic
conspiracy against God and the Family seem to be the fruits of this
side. On the other hand are those who pick the scientific worldview
over the biblical/creedal worldview. And yes, this view has a long and
distinguished history in Western intellectual circles from the Deists
on forward to the likes of Bishop Spong and clergy who say the creeds
but confess to believing very little of them or taking them only in an
allegorical sense. Many if not most of the people in the seminaries
that I have attended or been around have been quite congenial to this
second view. But are these really our only options?

One of my favorite conceits in the Science Fiction movies of yore
was the preferred manner for the unarmed Space Hero to destroy the
Killer Robot hard on his heels. It’s easy enough to do—just yell out
some sort of conundrum (what rhymes with “orange”?)—and the Killer
Robot would lurch to a halt, smoke pouring out of convenient orifices.
Ever seen anyone try that when being pursued with a guy with a gun?
Didn’t think so. He might think about it for a second, shrug, and start
shooting…

My point is this: human beings live in a messy, contingent,
incarnational world. Things are always more complicated than they seem.
Humans are fully capable of working simultaneously within multiple and
conflicting worldviews. This came home to me most strongly when I first
read Bultmann’s classic Jesus Christ and Mythology as an undergrad; the same thought is expressed in his essay from this book. He writes:

Man’s knowledge and mastery of the world have advanced
to such an extent through science and technology that it is no longer
possible for anyone seriously to hold the New Testament view of the
world-in fact, there is no one who does. What meaning, for instance,
can we attach to such phrases in the creed as “descended into hell” or
“ascended into heaven”? We no longer believe in the three-storied
universe which the creeds take for granted. The only honest way of
reciting the creeds is to strip the mythological framework from the
truth they enshrine-that is, assuming that they contain any truth at
all, which is just the question that theology has to ask. No one who is
old enough to think for himself supposes that God lives in a local
heaven. There is no longer any heaven in the traditional sense of the
word. The same applies to hell in the sense of a mythical underworld
beneath our feet. And if this is so, the story of Christ’s descent into
hell and of his Ascension into heaven is done with. We can no longer
look for the return of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven or hope
that the faithful will meet him in the air (I Thess. 4:15ff.). …

It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless
and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and
at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and
miracles.

My response on first reading the last line was to say…but we do. We
do and can believe in contradictory things at the same time. Smoke
doesn’t belch from anywhere—we may get confused in extreme cases of
overlap, but we can live quite comfortably using insights from a
pre-scientific Christian world view to those from a contradictory
Newtonian physics perspective mingled with those from a contradictory
quantum physics perspective to those of a Platonic universe.
Specifically speaking as an American Pragmatist, I go with the
worldview that works. When I’m in “installing computer components”
mode, I’m all Newtonian physics. When I’m in “playing cards” mode, I’m
all about quantum physics and probability mechanics [which with my
pop-scientific knowledge may explain why I don’t play cards for money
;-D]. When I wonder about my salvation, I go pre-scientific all the
way.

How does this make me neither schizophrenic nor intellectually
inconsistent? Because I’m not hegemonic about any of my worldviews. I
think that they are all models that serve to describe certain
aspects of reality from certain perspectives. If I was wondering where
a quarter would go if I threw it with a certain velocity at a certain
trajectory, I feel confident that Newtonian physics could describe the
arc for me and, furthermore, that chaos theory could give me the
probability that the Newtonian equation would prove incorrect. These
equations are not reality, though; they map it and offer a way to
understand it especially when I approach it with certain questions. I
don’t think that any of these worldviews offer all of the answers to
any apprehension of reality and that gives me the freedom to switch
between them when I need to.

So—where does that get me with the creeds? I believe the creeds
literally. Scientifically, I can’t tell you how they work. I have no
idea how to model the Ascension mathematically—which is the part that
ties my logical brain into the worst knot. It also doesn’t bother me
that much. As the only humanities guy in a family of hard scientists I
take the sciences seriously. I also know their down-side when they are
taken as a philosophical system; they offer only an empirical
materialism of cause and effect. It’s the epicureans redivivus.
I find them lacking in power. And maybe power is the point. In living
between worldviews I have found a certain amount of power in a
scientific worldview, the kind of power that confirms its truth. I can
calculate events and have the events turn out a certain way. I have
found the beauty of equations replicated in microscopic corners of the
world. But the same is also true of the religious, pre-scientific
worldview; I have experienced the power of the resurrection in my life,
of the communion of the saints, and God as creator in ways that verify
their truth. While the scientific worldview has power in its realm it
cannot touch the spiritual side of my life the way that the creedal
truths do. (And the same holds true the other way–science offers far
more compelling arguments in the realm of things material.)

As a result when in the field of personal belief I experience a
conflict between the creedal worldview and the scientific worldview, I
go with the creeds. I cannot explain them scientifically, I cannot
explain the mechanics of the Trinity but I believe it and I believe
that it matters for how I live and move in the world. One of the
reasons that I allow the creeds to trump science too is because of
hope. I hope that there is more to life and existence than empirical
materialism. Faith in the creeds allows a belief in the mundus plenior,
a world where reality cannot be bounded only by what can be weighed and
measured. There are wonders in the world that our science does not
explain. Maybe some day it will but even if it does it will not
diminish my belief in something beyond the purely physical.

In short, I’m proposing an active cognitive dissonance. Not an
unthinking one that does not recognize the conflict between worldviews,
but one that both notes it and appreciates that all of our worldviews
are reductionistic models of a reality that we can never completely
quantify or wrap our heads around. Call it a creative contradiction.
So, what do you think? Does it work?

Sed contra

And now, a response to the Scotist’s latest writing on the proper regard for the Ever-blessed Virgin Mary…

Once again, the issue at hand is whether awarding the BVM the title of “co-redemptrix” should be held dogmatically by Anglicans. He is arguing for; I am arguing against. In this latest post he starts to address my previous rebuttal in numbered sections; I shall start with him, and add section numbers as it seems appropriate.

I.
I had suggested that the notion of Mary as “co-redemptrix” might be a novelty and asked for citations from the Church Fathers (typically defined as Westerns up through Bede or Easterners up through John of Damascus, though an alternate Anglican definition is the Fathers of the first 5 centuries [yes, Bonaventure is right out…]). In reply, the Scotist provides a handful of quotes. My overall impression of them is that they tell us that great reverence was afforded the Mother of God and that she played an indispensable role in salvation history. I do not find in them, however, the notion of “co-redemptrix”. Let’s look at a few…

His first two are perhaps his best and strongest; they’re both from Irenaeus. Irenaeus was a great champion of and a well-spoken advocate for the notion of recapitulation which was a central understanding of God’s actions in salvation from the time of St Paul.

Let me break this down as best I can: Romans 5 is a key text here. In the latter half of this chapter, Paul speaks of Adam and Jesus as type and antitype. That is, Adam was the one man who sinned through disobedience. His sin of disobedience brought death to all humanity. All humanity was therefore guilty of sin and deserving of death. Jesus the Christ, the sinless, the obedient, freely gave his own life up for death—but this went against the “rules”. He did not deserve death but the gift of his death, as it were, “broke the machine” subsequently freeing humanity from the curse and condemnation of their disobedience; this is accessed through baptism which is a joining into the death and resurrection of Christ by becoming joined into his mystical body (Rom 6).

Paul thus gives us an elegant chiastic sort of structure: one pivotal man (Adam) through his action (disobedience) produces a result for all humanity (death). By embracing that result (death) out of turn, another pivotal man–yet very God–(Jesus) through his action (obedience) produces a result for all humanity (life). It’s compelling in an intellectual kind of way. (I’m open to the notion that it’s less compelling through other forms of knowledge.)

This is also seen in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul’s resurrection chapter, where he gives us the wondrous passage that we use liturgically in Eastertide as the last part of the Pascha Nostrum:

Christ is risen from the dead, *
and become the first fruits of them that slept.
For since by man came death, *
by man came also the resurrection of the dead.
For as in Adam all die, *
even so in Christ shall all be made alive. Alleluia.

Irenaeus takes up this theme which he calls “recapitulation” and makes it explicit. Another key place where the Fathers found it was in the Temptation narrative in the Gospels. As his very first public act (in the Synoptics…) Jesus is tempted by Satan in the desert–just as Adam was in the garden… John Cassian and all those after him (especially Gregory the Great who popularized it) understood the three core temptations of gluttony, pride, and avarice to be the same as before; Adam was bested by these in garden, Jesus triumphed over them in the wilderness. [I’ll have to see if they all get this from Irenaeus…] The devil’s hold suffered a fatal set-back even then—the rest of Christ’s ministry accelerated the unfolding result achieving its great climax in the crucifixion and resurrection.

So—what does all this have to do with Mary? Because as Paul sees Christ as the New Adam, Irenaeus explores the notion of Mary as the New Eve.

As Eve sinned through disobedience, refusing and ignoring the command of God, this primal disobedience in the garden was reversed by Mary in the Annunciation. In Mary’s acceptance, in her obedience to God, Eve’s initial curse was undone. As Jesus “rolls-back” Adam’s disobedience, so does Mary “roll-back” Eve’s. Thus, to the degree that both Adam and Eve were participants in humanity’s primordial sin, so both Jesus and Mary factor into its overcoming.

This notion of recapitulation, therefore, is—as I see it—the single best case for arguing the Immaculate Conception and therefore Mary as “co-redemptrix”. That having been said, I’m still not convinced that this overcoming of original sin requires an immaculate conception or necessarily makes Mary a true “co-redemptrix”. Yes, true obedience to God is an act directly contrary to original sin, but—as we believe and as the Fathers testify—God’s grace strengthens us to overcome this sin; original sin itself is cleansed in Baptism and as we cleave to the Spirit received in Baptism and open ourselves to its work in our wills and ways it nerves us to reject sin and to love, fear, and trust God as we ought.

The central question for me, then, is origin and volition: was the choice of obedience at the annunciation Mary’s free, “unaided” will, or was it her choice assisted and inspired by the Spirit already at work in her life? I can’t see it any other way than the second. To my way of thinking, even Mary’s “yes” was at God’s initiative through grace. It was surely not a coerced “yes”, but the prime mover for the action, its true origin, was in God and not Mary herself.

Moving right along…

The Jerome quote—part of a defense of virginity—is more of the same.

I believe the other two are as well, but I profess and plead my ignorance of the Later Greek Fathers.

Augustine—that one looks intriguing; I’ll have to hunt it down…

Origen—wow, this one would be a clincher—if Origen said what the Scotist said he said… He got tripped up on grammar here. The referent of the sentence is John, the beloved disciple, the one who leaned his head on the breast of Jesus and who [at the foot of the cross] received Mary as his mother from Jesus. The point that Origen is making is that this John is the one most qualified to write the deepest and most penetrating of the gospels because he was the most intimate with Jesus—not because he received the ability to understand Jesus through his mother.

So, this showing has promise particularly in the case of recapitulation but, as the Scotist admits, nothing here seals the deal.

[As a sidenote, you keep referring to the “fifth Marian dogma”. I’m assuming you are using this to refer to the “co-redemptix” notion. Where does this numbering come from—and what are the other four?]

II.
I brought up earlier the conjunction of topics found in Vatcian II’s Lumen Gentium, where it produced a statement on both the Church/ecclesial bodies and the BVM and I suggested that elevating Marian doctrines to the point of dogma without understanding the wider implications was a dangerous business. This point the Scotist concedes. I do want to say a little more about it, though…

Theologically, I’m fairly conservative. One of the reasons that I am conservative is because I fear the consequences of hasty change to any part of the Church’s central proclamation because none of it is truly independent. It’s an interconnected web, a seamless garment. This always proved to be one of the eye-opening moments for the students in my Church Year class—and we generally hit it when we got to what I affectionately refer to as the Goth Triduum—Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls. These days—and the problem of the Protestant co-opting of All Saints as All Souls—can’t be understood without understanding the Church’s theology of death, of the communion of the saints, of Baptism. For many of them, that discussion was their first glimpse of the web of theological connections that is orthodox Christian thought; playing with one part affects everything around it and linked to it by thousands of years of speculation, meditation, and life experience of the reality of the Living God.

III.
Moving along, the Scotist addresses my distinction between doctrine and dogma. This, as far as I’m concerned, is why this is worth fighting over. Doctrine is what may be held; dogma is what must be held. To put it another way, it’s possible to have a doctrinally minimalist Christianity and to still have it recognizable as orthodox Christianity. For example, it’s possible to lop off many of the doctrines and practices relating to the saints and the sacraments and still be “Christian” as described by the Scriptures and the Creeds.
I think it’s a lot more fulfilling and a lot more fun to have these, but I’ll recognize Reformed and Baptist folk as fellow members of the mystical Body even if they don’t sing the right antiphons on the Benedictus for the feast of St Ethelreda. But “dogma” means that it must be held in order for it to be a valid Christianity. A “dogma” is the kind of thing that if you went, in the Spirit, to an orthodox mother and father who died before its establishment and asked, “Hey, do you believe X”, they’d respond, “Well, of course—but that’s so obvious we’ve never had to say it…”

Would the great Baptist, would the great Reformed, forebearers respond this way in regard to the BVM as “co-redemptrix”—and are you prepared to cut them off from the Body of Christ if they answer in the negative on that account?

While the Scotist says: “There is no reason, as an Anglican and an Episcopalian, I have to convert him and others to belief in the fifth dogma as dogmatic, however desirable conversion would be” he is, in fact, mistaken: that’s exactly what dogma means. If he wants to talk about “co-redemptrix” as a doctrine, then he’d be absolutely correct and I’d have no problem with his decision.

Dogma is the fighting word here.

He closes by borrowing a notion from Rahner, the anonymous Christian, and suggests that there may be anonymous Marians. I hate to say it, but this completely rubs me the wrong way. If a roshi told me that I was an anonymous Buddhist, or if I were told by an imam that I was an anonymous Muslim, I’d thank them nicely for their complement of my character but feel a bit annoyed at their condescension. To be told that I am acceptable to the degree to which I participate in their system of belief while not knowing it strikes me as a bit patronizing.

In conclusion, then, I thank the Scotist for his latest effort. I receive with gladness his nice package of patristic quotes and commend the doctrine of recapitulation to you for your consideration. However, I find nothing here that persuades me that the BVM as “co-redemptrix” belongs at the level of dogma. Rather I am persuaded by his use of the term, that the Scotist is improperly using the term, equating doctrine with dogma, when historically and theologically dogma is not equivalent but refers to a mandatory rather than optional doctrine.