The Little Friar

Some years ago, as I was reading through Augustine's sermons, I came across this wonderful imagery.  First, the Latin: Exsultavit diabolus quando mortuus est Christus, et ipsa morte Christi est diabolus victus, tanquam in muscipula escam accepit. Gaudebat ad mortem, quasi praepositus mortis. Ad quod gaudebat, inde illi tensum est.  Muscipula diaboli, crux Domini:  esca qua caperetur, mors Domini. Then my translation: The devil rejoiced when Christ died, but by this very death of Christ the devil was defeated and vanquished, as if he had swallowed the bait in a mousetrap.  He rejoiced in Christ's death, like a bailiff (of the prison) of death.  What he rejoiced in was his own undoing.  The cross of the Lord was the devil's mousetrap:  The bait by which he was caught, the Lord's death. Let that imagery sink in for a minute. "The cross is the devil's mousetrap." It sounds so foreign to modern ears.  But it's a beautiful way to think of...

There are doubtless other ways of understanding our Lord's words, Why ask me about the good?  No one is good but the one God (Matt 19:17).  Provided however they do not favor belief that the Son's substance, by which he is the Word through whom all things were made (John 1:3), is of a lesser goodness than the Father's, and are not otherwise at odds with sound doctrine, we may cheerfully use not merely one interpretation but as many as can be found.   For the more ways we open up of avoiding the traps of heretics, the more effectively can they be convinced of their errors. -- Augustine, De Trinitate I.31

I realize the trend is to ask, "What would Jesus do?" And expect a clear answer.  But I'm not so sure, in our case at least, that Jesus would even vote.  So I'm skeptical of claims that tell me what Jesus would vote for.   Instead, I want to subvert that question by asking a question my favorite t-shirt asks: What would Nietzsche do? Consider this aphorism from Human, All Too Human :  " Leave to speak.  All political parties today have in common a demagogic character and the intention of influencing the masses; because of this intention, all of them are obliged to transform their principles into great frescoes of stupidity, and paint them that way on the wall.  Nothing more can be changed about this -- indeed, it is superfluous even to lift a finger against it [. . . .] Now that this has happened, one must adapt to the new conditions, as one adapts when an earthquake has moved the old limits and outlines of the land, and changed the value of property". ...

It's no secret that I'm not a fan of "natural theology".  My mentor, Stan Hauerwas, said it best in his 2000 Gifford Lectures, With the Grain of the Universe :  Natural theology, far from giving us causal explanations ("god") for the universe, merely results in a theologia gloriae , leaving no room for the cross.   But here's my new idea:  What if, instead of the usual "first cause" arguments that we get with natural theology, it instead offers us a unification  of lots of different explanations?  In other words, what if all the various (strange) phenomena in science could be brought together in a wholistic way theologically, under the rubric of natural theology ? What if nature bears transcendence, but not in a "natural" way?  Not out of its own essence, since there's  no mere  uninterpreted nature, but only different constructed "readings" of nature (think Young's Double-Slit Experiment from your general physics da...

As a little boy there was a song I loved to sing.  I learned it from my great-grandmother.  She taught it to me and I sang it, and all my life it has replayed inside my mind. Into my heart, into my heart, Come into my heart, Lord Jesus; Come in today, come in to stay, Come into my heart, Lord Jesus. It was (or so I thought in those days) a song about conversion, about getting saved, being born again.  A kind of children's version of the Sinner's Prayer.  At church (especially Vacation Bible School) they were warning us to make sure we'd invited Jesus into our hearts.  This song only reinforced that message.  It  seemed a pretty grand thing, to have Jesus living in your heart.  And we always felt sorry for the poor non-Christians, those people who went about like walking ghost towns, their interior houses empty and abandoned.  Our most fervent wish was that they too might one day invite Jesus into their hearts.   It's a good thing, I supp...

Nearly everyone who's anyone in theological circles loves to claim St Augustine as a theologian extraordinaire. We quote him often, finding within him a church father to ground any number of our ideas.  Since that's true, my fundamentalist brothers and sisters often find it odd that I quote Augustine to illustrate the absurdities of a strict biblical literalism.   Now to be honest, I think there's a place for a literal reading -- if by "literal" one means that the biblical text is restrained in its meanings by what the original audiences would have heard and read.  That kind of historically-grounded reading is at the heart of how I read the text.  That said, this historically-informed "literalism" often leads in directions that make me, my liberal friends, and  my conservative friends anxious.  Because it means approaching the Bible with a humble, listening ear, one that is grounded in the breadth and depth of truth that we find in history, science, econ...

I'm not a supporter of Barack Obama for any number of reasons.  Not least of which is his support of Reinhold Niebuhr .  I'm a Christian pacifist, and I think being a pacifist is made possible only because I'm a follower of Jesus Christ.  Being a follower of Jesus Christ, I think, is the only cure for the realism that pervades our culture's thinking about violence and war. Realism is a political theory that views politics as a realm shorn of all moral and ethical constraints. Sometimes called "power politics", a realist politics is not motivated by concerns for the common good or virtue, but rather by self-interest, necessity, and most of all, maximization of power.   According to realism, politics is seen as limited only by power constraints, not by ethical constraints about what may or may not be just.  Realism can be summed up as "they that have odds of power exact as much as they can, and the weak yield to such conditions as they can get...

That I'm a Christian pacifist isn't too much a surprise.  Thing is, most folks assume that pacifism is tantamount to being a doormat.  That it's impractical in the real world.  Even some of my sisters and brothers misunderstand what that means. Many otherwise devout Christians simply dismiss Jesus' teachings about nonviolence out of hand as impractical idealism.  And with good reason. "Turn the other cheek" has come to imply a passive, doormat-like quality that has made the Christian way seem cowardly and complicit in the face of injustice.  "Resist not evil" seems to break the back of all opposition to evil and to counsel submission.  "Going the second mile" has become a platitude meaning nothing more than "extend yourself" and appears to encourage collaboration with the oppressor.  Jesus' teaching, viewed this way, is impractical, masochistic and even suicidal -- an invitation to bullies and spouse-batterers to wi...