Christian Carnival CCV

Thanks to an invitation I received from Jeremy Pierce of Parablemania, it’s my privilege to introduce a few posts from the last week by avowedly Christian bloggers. I enjoy connecting dots and seeing an unusual and unexpected shape emerge. So let’s see where the dots take us. Are you ready for a wild ride? Here we go.

Martin LaBar has a riff entitled "Beginning: simple and profound," musing on the apparent contradictions between Genesis 1 and 2 (without resolving them -- sorry about that!).People get excited when debating things like creation and evolution and intelligent design. If you look through Martin’s archive and the comment threads he’s hosted, you’ll make the acquaintance of a mild-mannered, well-informed gentleman with a lively faith. One might compare a Chris Heard post or two. The same issues receive a lot of attention in orthodox Jewish circles: here’s a relevant post by Iyov.

Nick Cross presents a post entitled “10 Essentials of a Highly Healthy Marriage.” Whenever this subject comes up, an old piece by Martin Marty entitled "Fundies in their Undies" comes to mind (not available online, sorry). Marty’s piece is good for a laugh. Nick’s piece contains solid advice. The advice does not depend on a return to patriarchy, nor on an embrace of matriarchy lite, a widespread arrangement if you ask me (“if mamma’s not happy, nobody’s happy”).

Paul Kuritz submitted a thoughtful review of a recent movie entitled “I am Legend.” I guess “I am Legend” doesn’t fall within the purview of Matt Page’s Bible Films Blog. But many recent films are best understood by someone at home in biblical literature and its appropriation in contemporary culture. “I am Legend” is no exception. For a rave review of “I am Legend” by Jeremy Bouma, go here.

Steve Bishop reviews the latest reprint of Francis Schaeffer's Escape from Reason. He finds reading Schaeffer a “bittersweet experience.” Schaeffer’s villain in Escape is Aquinas. For a sympathetic introduction to Thomas, one might start with one of Peter Kreeft’s works.

Annette talks about control issues, as in how to parent a child who has a mind of his own. I’m old school myself: it’s important to pass on a concept of authority, whereby you do something because you are asked to do it, not because you know why the particular thing asked should be done. All kinds of questions are then askable in the right frame of mind. A challenging Socratic method becomes possible in a context of obedience.

Joseph Celucien blogs on the importance of geography in marking turning points in the gospels. Go here. I really like Joseph’s blog. Anyone who is able to write appreciatively of people as diverse as James Cone, Origen, and E.P. Sanders is my kind of guy.

Henry Neufeld presents Preachers: Respecting without Idolizing. What an excellent topic. Jody Neufeld presents Friday Morning Devotion (Satisfy!). A joy-filled post, her point of departure is the fabulous Psalm 145.

Rodney Olsen closes the book on 2007 with some excellent reading suggestions. A great deal of positive searching is going on in the evangelical world. Rodney’s blog is deservedly popular and emblematic of a questing missional spirit.

Richard Anderson, whom I know as an excellent Bible blogger, has written a whimsical piece entitled Leaving the Grid. In his Bible blogging, Richard touches on important topics I wish were more widely discussed. Take this post, for example.

JR Madill takes us into the mad world of the Creation Museum in a post entitled Creating a universe of certainty: or if you remove reason, you remove doubt. Lots of pics! I’d love to go there myself, with Duane Smith as guide, and watch my teenage children try to make sense of it all.

Tom Gilson submitted How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions to the carnival, but I’m not sure he gets very far with the topic. The comment thread is more interesting than the post. On the other hand, I like Tom’s critical review of the recent Viola-Barna book. Really, he doesn’t go far enough. The book is way off in my estimation and deserves a thorough smackdown.

Diane R strikes a nerve with a post on the fear of the Lord and why the concept is misunderstood in today’s world. There is a great fear of fear in our society, unless, of course, one is in a movie theater. Fear, anger, authority: the positive use of all three would be telltale signs of a healthy culture. It’s possible, of course, to leave all three to the crazies, but if left to them, we almost guarantee them a large following.

Jeremy Pierce explains why socially conservative Christians need not wring their hands at the prospect of life lasting 160 years on average rather than 80. Jeremy, that was too easy. Why not pick more challenging topics? The quality of public debate on issues like legal and illegal immigration is abysmal: why not raise the bar? Is it possible to be a Christian environmentalist? Why not take on the huge amount of nonsense associated with environmentalism – and anti-environmentalism?

John of Brain Cramps for God is working through the principles of historical criticism relative to the Bible and resurrection. This is his latest. I think some of the hard questions are being left to one side, which is not like this blogger. Look at his posts on things like racism and homosexuality. He’s not afraid to go where angels fear to tread.

Mark Olson’s submitted post has a whopper of a title: Tron, Takeshi Kovacs, Ontology, and Abortion. According to Mark, one’s attitude about abortion depends on one’s definition of life, whether it begins at conception or not. That’s what lawyers and doctors argue about, so in some sense Mark is right. But I don’t think he’s hit on the nub of the question. I remember vividly an occasion in which a colleague of mine, a Catholic priest, impregnated a teenager who was a member of a parish he served. An abortion was arranged through church channels. There are also cases in which nuns have been raped and the church has supplied them with abortion-inducing pills. In these cases, abortion was permitted in the interest of preserving a greater good (the possibility of a priest or a nun to carry on with their vocation). Those who justify abortion often reason along similar lines, except that the vocation that is being preserved is not defined by canon law. How often is this kind of reasoning of a self-serving kind? We all know the answer. But in that case, the nub of the question is not about when life begins.

Jennifer in Oregon blogs about a Mom getting thrown off public transit because she was reading the Bible out loud to her kids. I have fond memories of taking public transit as a kid, when it cost a dime to go across town, but I’m not sure I would want to take the system Jennifer refers to.

That was fun. Fellow bloggers are invited to take a look round this blog. There is an index a distance down on the left sidebar. Perhaps a post or two will catch your eye.

Comments

[Rodney Olsen]

Thank you for all the work you've put into this week's carnival and thanks for the very kind words.

[Martin LaBar]

Thanks for doing this. You have displayed some thoughtful attention to detail in this post.

[Stephen (aka Q)]

• There are also cases in which nuns have been raped and the church has supplied them with abortion-inducing pills. In these cases, abortion was permitted in the interest of preserving a greater good (the possibility of a priest or a nun to carry on with their vocation). Those who justify abortion often reason along similar lines, except that the vocation that is being preserved is not defined by canon law.

I'm not Roman Catholic, but I believe the Catholic Church regards abortion as intrinsically evil. Consequently, it is not possible to justify abortion on the grounds that it leads to a greater good. See the papal encyclical Veritatis splendor:

"Intrinsic evil: it is not licit to do evil that good may come of it (cf. Rom 3:8)." (heading preceding paragraph 79)

The people in the instances you cite appear to have acted contrary to canon law.

By the way, the Catholic Church uses the same logic with respect to torture: the end never justifies the means. Abortion and torture are both identified as intrinsically evil in paragraph 80 of the encyclical.

[JohnFH]

Hi Stephen,

well, that's not always how it works in practice. I saw it with my own eyes. Here's a brief article which, if you read between the lines a bit, will give you a sense of how things play:

Raped nuns in Bosnia raise abortion issue
Peter Hebblethwaite

OXFORD, England -- Catholic religious women in Bosnia have shared the fate of their Muslim sisters and been raped as a deliberate act of policy. The issue of what happens if they become pregnant has been raised by a Franciscan priest from Reggio Emilia, Father Aldo Bergameschi.

"How can one reconcile," he asked, "Pope John Paul's exhortation to Bosnian women not to have abortions, with the fact that in the recent past the church allowed abortions in the case of nuns who have been raped?"

Bergameschi was thinking of the precedent of the Simba revolt in the Belgian Congo in the 1960s. But perhaps he has confused abortion after rape with the right to go on the pill in anticipation of rape. This was defended at the time in the name of the principle that everyone "has the right to repel an unjust -- and unwanted -- aggressor."

A former consulter of the Holy Office, who asked not to be named, has confirmed that "those who are not faced by a genuine conjugal act, which of its nature should be open to the transmission of life, may use the pill in advance or may get rid of the semen in the hours immediately after the act of violence." That is the "liberal" view among moralists.

It was rejected by Monsignor Pietro Pennachini, the new deputy director of the Vatican press office, who observed that "there are no official Vatican documents on this question."

"Maybe not," said Father Efrem Tresoldi, editor of the missionary magazine Nigrizia, "yet there are cases of sisters who were advised to take the pill. I don't know how many there were, but it is no mystery that it happened."

In ex-Yugoslavia is one documented case of two novices being raped by Serbian irregulars in the Banja Luka diocese in Bosnia. The Vatican advice was that they could leave the convent and have their children, or hand them over for adoption.

COPYRIGHT 1993 National Catholic Reporter

[jchfleetguy]

Thank you for the kind words - and all the work. The tying of the posts to other outside resources was very nice.

I am not sure whether I didn't ask the hard questions - or didn't know them :-). Herrick's piece was nice because rather than bash the historical critical method - which is normal in conservative circles - he tried to make a useful tool out of it by stripping away it's some of the antisupernatural bias of some of its practitioners.

I always hope to "raise up the ire" of some folks on the various sides so they will raise, and answer, the hard questions. [scholars take note]

It's how I massage those cramps.

[Jeremy Pierce]

The point isn't whether Catholicism has within it cases of abortion. (It does seem to.) It also isn't whether that conflicts with canon law. (I think it clearly does.) The issue is that the justification being given (even if thoroughly inadequate) doesn't involve pretending the fetus doesn't have moral status. It involves treating some other issue as morally more important. Many cases of abortion are like that, and you don't have to look within Roman Catholicism to see that. There are lots of people who think there's a strong moral presumption against having an abortion but that sometimes other considerations win out. Most pro-lifers think so if they think abortion is ok to save the life of the mother. It's just that pro-choicers add in lots of other kinds of cases too.

[Duane]

John,

Thanks for the honorable mention. Or was it dishonorable mention?

Duane

[Jennifer in OR]

Thank you for hosting! I'll browse about a bit. You have a very interesting site...

[JohnFH]

Jeremy,

Ditto everything you said. Ethical thinking and the choices that follow are like that: absolute either/or's are unusual. A "strong" and even "very strong" moral presumption against doing something, abortion, torture, war, and divorce, for example, is not the same thing as saying "never ever."

[JohnFH]

Duane,

that was an honorable mention. I grew up on Stephen Jay Gould and have never had an anti-evolutionist bone in my body - that doesn't mean, of course, that the theory is free from the need of revision in the light of current or as yet uncovered evidence.

[Jeremy Pierce]

Right, but even so it may be that in these cases the judgment of some other concern as morally more important happens to be a false judgment. That certainly happens even if sometimes other considerations might win out.

[michael]

When I was in college in the stone age early 80's the chaplain of my fraternity tried to reach out to me, a secular humanist at the time, by scratching my intellectual itches. I had asked him how "born-again christians" justified their pro-war,xenophobic, homophobic,mysoginistic points of view "in the name of God" (remember, I was not convinced that God existed at that time). He said that some of their ignorance was not even their own fault. He told me that in ancient languages like Hebrew, often verbs or adjectives could be interchanged for a more or less formal usage in context. He told me that the proverb "Respect of the Lord is wise" does not ring the same to an ignorant American as much as the more visceral "Fear of the Lord is wise", but in the original language, the terms respect and fear were pretty much equal. This didn't sink in totally until I saw the movie version of John Grisham's "A Time To Kill" when one of the local ne'er-do-wells began talking about the need for some "good, God-fearing klan" to solve a racially charged murder trial. Is this possible? Could this subtle variance of a descriptive word really have led to so much hatred and heartache over the centuries? I'd really like to learn more about this. BTW, today I am a very liberal Catholic(not many of them left)trying to instill intellectual curiosity into my beautiful 7 yr old son every time he hears a new phrase. Any comment, direction to a learning resource or just good old open discussion would be quite welcome.

[JohnFH]

Michael,

I think that part of the problem is that very liberal Christians have painted themselves into a corner.

Note that Obama, a convert to Christianity, a bona fide liberal, is nevertheless pro-war and homophobic in the eyes of vocal very liberal people. This despite the fact that Obama is a typical product in the best sense of the word, of a liberal American subculture.

It might be the case that *non* very liberal people have reasons for not thinking that the key issues of the day revolve around an end to the projection of US force around the world, the right of GLBT people to marry, affirmative action, and things like that.

Many of us who are not "very liberal" but not "very conservative" either, think that there are a great number of dimensions of human life very liberal and very conservative people seem hardly to notice. The balance of the Jewish and Christian traditions in this sense is appealing to us.

Down through the ages believers (in Eric Hoffer's sense) have shown themselves capable of accomplishing both great humanity and great inhumanity in the name of their beliefs. Every Christian, for example, will gain insight into Christianity's typical failures from the chapter in Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky entitled "The Grand Inquisitor."

I think it is very important to keep these things in mind. On the other hand, political ideologies which proclaim their independence from Judaism and Christianity, fascism, communism, social democracy, capitalism, have been responsible for far greater inhumanities in the couple of centuries in which they have stalked the earth than traditional religions were able to do when they dominated. This too is food for thought.