It Turns Out Glenn Beck is a Mormon

Which explains a lot.

According to CNN.com:

Beck's emerging role as a national leader for Christian conservatives is surprising not only because he has until recently stressed a libertarian ideology that is sometimes at odds with so-called family values conservatism, but also because Beck is a Mormon.

Many of the evangelicals who Beck is speaking to and organizing, including [Rev. Richard] Land [of the Southern Baptist Convention], don't believe he is a Christian. Mormons, who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, call themselves Christian.

"There's a long history of tensions between Mormons and evangelicals and some of that is flat-out theology," says John C. Green, an expert on religion and politics at the University of Akron. "Mormons have additional sacred texts (to the Bible) and a different conception of God."

"It's also competitive," Green said, "because evangelicals and Mormons are both proselytizing in the U.S. and around the world."

Don't miss the complete story, here, for which you will not need 3-d glasses.

Barely 3.2% of ELCA Congregations Vote to Separate Over Gay Clergy

Roughly 335 out of over 10,000 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America congregations are prepared to leave the denomination over the church's decision to allow practicing homosexuals to serve as pastors, according to this story.

Which tells you that the largest Lutheran body in America today doesn't really believe in one of its signature issues: sola scriptura.

Cold comfort to those who have rightly maintained that this Lutheran church left them long ago.

Rome Still Pink As The Day Is Long

The UK Daily Mail reports here on yet another embarrassment for the Roman Catholic Church right in its own backyard:

Catholic sex scandal as undercover reporter 'films priests at gay clubs and having casual flings'

By Nick Pisa

23rd July 2010

A gay priest sex scandal has rocked the Catholic Church in Italy today after a weekly news magazine released details of a shock investigation it had carried out.

Using hidden cameras, a journalist from Panorama magazine - owned by Italian Prime Minister and media baron Silvio Berlusconi - filmed three priests as they attended gay nightspots and had casual sex.

Today there was no immediate comment from the Italian Bishops Conference and the Vatican - which has been rocked by a series of sex scandals involving paedophile priests since the start of the year.

A preview of the Panorama article sent out by email last night added that video footage from the investigation would be made available.

The article describes how the reporter was assisted by a gay 'accomplice' as they 'gate-crashed the wild nights of a number of priests in Rome who live a surprising double-life.'

In its preview, Panorama added: 'By day they are regular priests, complete with dog collar, but, at night it's off with the cassock as they take their place as perfectly integrated members of the Italian capital's gay scene.'

Panorama described its investigation as 'deeply disturbing' as it detailed how three priests - two Italians and a Frenchman - happily took part in gay events and had casual sex.

The Catholic Church forbids priests to have sex and homosexuality is also seen as a 'sin' .

In 2008 the Vatican issued guidelines which said that any would be trainees should not join if they had 'deep-seated homosexual tendencies'.

In one part of the investigation Panorama said that one priest, named as Carlo, willingly put on his cassock to have sex with the reporter's gay accomplice, adding 'all of which was filmed by the hidden camera'.

The magazine also described how they had attended a Mass which was celebrated by Carlo.

In its preview Panorama insisted that it had carried out through checks and established that all three priests were bona fide but would not reveal their real names or any other details.

Panorama editor Giorgio Mule said: 'This was a two week investigation and was not aimed at creating a scandal but showing that a certain section of the clergy behaves very differently.'

HATRED AS SELF-ESTEEM

Shelby Steele cuts to the heart of the failure of nerve which now animates the post-Christian West, the cultural self-doubt which first spelled the end for our society when our parents could no longer bring themselves to say No to their children:

[T]he entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now. Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist. Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past—racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on.

Read the rest here.

ON "NECESSITY"

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

BY ROBERT FROST

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1923.

BAGHEERA DIDN'T FIT ON THE NAME TAG . . .

. . . and so I called her Mowgli.

This was her favorite spot, from which she could keep an eye on me in the kitchen, in the hope that I was working on a plate of food for her, and bask in the sun at the same time!

Mowgli was the runt of a litter, born under a backyard deck in Illinois in the spring of 1993. When we bought the house next door to it in the summer and the lady of the house discovered the existence of the kittens, it didn't take long for a trail of food left from the neighbors' deck to ours to produce a fast friendship between us and Mowgli and her remaining sister, Cal. They spent their first winter outside, spooning by night in a little Dogloo I retrofitted with a 100 watt light bulb and some cedar bedding.

Cal was quite inquisitive, a beautiful tortoise shell in greens and blacks and browns. But her curiosity got the better of her in May of 1994, and she didn't make it back across a road one fateful weekend. Mowgli, on the other hand, was a natural survivor. She always hung back, watching, evaluating. And when she was sure of us, it was only natural that she joined the family, even though Little Sheila wasn't too happy about it. They never did get along all that well. But that was ok, because Sheila, a classic cream and tan Turkish Angora, printed on the lady of the house, who is blonde. So Mowgli sort of became mine, and she and I spent many a happy evening together, usually in front of a fire.

When Sheila couldn't go on any longer almost two years ago, Mowgli became the undisputed queen of this castle, once and for all, and took to the role instantly. It was going so well I had forgotten how old she was getting. In truth I didn't want to think about it. It was 17+ years. We, like others, had lost so much in so small a space.

 

I tried to tell myself Mowgli had lots of time left, but she didn't.  

 

"There is no pleasure, no shape of good fortune, no form of glory in which death has not hid himself, and waited silently for his prey."  -- Alexander Smith, 1888

 

And so she is gone, buried next to Little Sheila on Saturday, the 29th of May.

I open the kitchen cupboard and am startled when I reach up to see so many plates stacked so high in the corner, the little ones from which she used to eat every evening, unused. From her spot Mowgli could observe this motion, repeated thousands of times, and be roused instantly from her leisure with every certainty that something good was about to happen. But now it is for me to consider how in this motion, so oft repeated, I . . .

 

"have passed weeks, months, and years which are now no longer in [my] power; that an end must in time be put to every thing great as to every thing little; that to life must come its last hour, and to this system of being its last day, the hour at which probation ceases, and repentance will be vain; the day in which every work of the hand, and imagination of the heart shall be brought to judgment, and an everlasting futurity shall be determined by the past." 

 

-- Samuel Johnson, 5 April, 1760

  

THE RELENTLESS MARCH OF HOMOSEXUALITY

In 1993, when President Clinton sought to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the U. S. military, there was an enormous upheaval in the country, a veritable firestorm of outrage which became an integral part of the reaction leading to the Republican takeover of the Congress in the elections of 1994.

Fast forward to today, the day after the U. S. House voted to repeal the Don't Ask, Don't Tell compromise of those years, and you'd hardly even know the measure is on its way to the Senate for a vote. There was nothing on the websites of Bill Bennett, Laura Ingraham or Rush Limbaugh to indicate any reaction to the vote, which represents nothing short of a repudiation of the agreement reached with conservatives on the issue at the time. CNBC.com had the story from about 01:04 AM EDT on its website until the mid-morning, when it disappeared altogether. The House passed the bill in the dead of night, just before the Memorial Day weekend. It seems as if no one, except for the far left, wants to talk about the historic vote.

In less than twenty years, the social conservatives have completely lost the war for traditional morality in America, whether it comes to the Hyde Amendment prohibiting the expenditure of federal funds for abortion or the acceptance of homosexual behavior. The reason for this is clear: a relentless effort by the left to insinuate homosexuality in every venue possible, from prime time television to public school sex education. Inured to the topic and themselves less religiously oriented over the period, the public can hardly muster the will to discuss the matter anymore, save for values interest groups like the Traditional Values Coalition. The Roman Catholic Church, whose seminaries are as pink as the day is long, is utterly incapable of standing against a tide which its own doctrine recognizes as the creation of God. You'd hardly believe it that not that long ago homosexuals discovered on U. S. Navy vessels at sea often didn't set foot on land again.

The Book of Kings informs us that good King Asa did that which was right in the eyes of the Lord and drove out of the land of Israel all the male cult prostitutes. The only group left in the world with a similar moral mission, it seems, is radical Islam. And they say politics makes strange bedfellows.

Time Out

Not for him was there ever any waiting for that wisest of all counselors. The old gray head was always a fool, and could never wait for anything.

Not for him at the end of days will grief do its work now, and bring its gift.

Not for him will loss mean standing alone for once, in command of himself. Only now, after all these years, is it plain that he is not a man in full.

It teaches all things as it grows old, but not to this old goat. He changes women like a pair of too tight pants, like a bull answering the rut before the ashes have even grown cold. Like an ever rolling stream, it has born her away. She flies, forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.

Some of him is passed on because of you, because you were the same way once, and made the same mistakes. You may yet learn from yours, but he will never really know he made any.

It is said that the truth is the kindest thing we can give another in the end, but it is a pearl as surely trampled on by a certain sort as it is by others redeemed, and treasured, in time.

Babies Know The Difference Between Good And Evil

So says the headline to the story, here.

An astonishing series of experiments is challenging the views of many psychologists and social scientists that human beings are born as 'blank slates'--and that our morality is shaped by our parents and experiences. . . . [T]hey suggest that the difference between good and bad may be hardwired into the brain at birth, 

says the article for the UK Daily Mail by David Derbyshire.

Neither conclusion is inconsistent with the Bible's understanding of the human predicament, however, that notwithstanding our first ancestors' willingly made affirmative answer to the invitation of evil (Genesis 3:5), evil has been ever after "biologically" transmitted to their progeny:

Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.

 -- Psalm 51:5

The Bible holds these antonyms together in tension. Those who cut one or the other loose inevitably veer off into utopianism of one kind or another or into assorted determinisms as the case may be. In its way, the Bible is a pragmatic, realistic, dare we say conservative, reflection on human experience which people with much of it continue to find compelling for these reasons.

Three Cheers for Tom Watson

This has needed saying for a very long time, quite apart from Tiger Woods' more recent shortcomings:

The 60-year-old Watson, one of golf's elder statesmen, also criticized Woods — a 14-time major winner — for bad language and other on-course behavior.

"I feel that he has not carried the same stature that other great players that have come along like Jack (Nicklaus), Arnold (Palmer), Byron Nelson, the Hogans, in the sense that there was language and club throwing on the golf course," Watson said. "You can grant that of a young person that has not been out here for a while. But I think he needs to clean up his act and show the respect for the game that other people before him have shown."

For more, go here.

To Be or Not To Be

On Fox News Sunday, January 3, 2010, Brit Hume made the following remarks about the Buddhism of Tiger Woods, remarks which have been the subject of much controversy for days:

Tiger Woods will recover as a golfer. Whether he can recover as a person, I think is a very open question, and it’s a tragic situation with him. He’s lost his family, it’s not clear to me whether he’ll be able to have a relationship with his children, but the Tiger Woods that emerges once the news value dies out of this scandal, the extent to which he can recover, it seems to me, depends on his faith. He’s said to be a Buddhist, I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith, so my message to Tiger would be 'Tiger, turn to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.'

Since Hume is a self-professed Christian, is it reasonable to expect that Tiger's present record of misbehavior wouldn't call into question for such a person the character of Tiger's own religion? Indeed, Tiger's egregious misbehavior suggests that some awfully bad karma from a past life has been manifesting itself in this one just as much as his pre-eminence as an athlete suggests the opposite. What extremes these are. What was he in a past life that he should be what he is in this one?

Christianity explains reality very differently, in terms of tragedy, where human excellence derived from a divine spark becomes co-mingled with total depravity because of a choice taken to disobey, made freely. To the Buddhist, all of this is an illusion, both the good and the evil, along with the idea of personality, whether human or divine. Escaping from the great chain of being represents a rather different religious goal than forgiveness, redemption and eternal life. But Tiger's penchant for the procreative act seems like a strange, deep and willful entanglement in it.

The thing which jumps out at me about this spectacle is how incidental religion has seemed to the careers of the principals involved, and how avocational. Hume should feel as free to speak his mind as I feel to say that his chosen venue was unwise, if he sincerely had Tiger's eternal welfare foremost in his mind.

Advent: The Season of Eschatological Denial

For the First Sunday of Advent, Nov. 29, the text for the sermon in the Presbyterian Church came from 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13, the last verse of which speaks of "the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all his saints."

Nary a mention was made of the meaning of this text, even though the preacher carved it up into three's and expounded upon it at great length. He simply assumed that it was appropriate to the season of advent, of "coming," when we celebrate the coming of Jesus into the world. But the text, of course, does not refer to the birth of Jesus at all. It refers, instead, to the fervent expectation of the return of Jesus, that he would "be beside" us again soon, an expectation shared by Paul with most, if not all, Christians of the first century.

The underlying Greek word, parousia, in the Latin vulgate is adventu, which of course means "coming," but not the one we celebrate at Christmas. It is, rather, the final coming of the Lord to end history as we know it and commence the final judgment. It would be no babe, meek and mild, spreading peace on earth to men of good will, but a victorious king separating the wheat from the chaff, purifying the former and consuming the latter with the fire of divine justice.

The failure of Jesus to return "soon" caused a crisis for Christianity, the effects of which are detectable as much in the development of its practices and theology as they are in the development of the gospel texts themselves. It should not surprise us, however, that Christianity's devotees would fall back on more familiar conceptions and, for example, eventually co-opt the term advent for other purposes. In doing so they acquiesced to a very old idea of a seasonal round, in which the celebrating of the coming of Jesus into the world and his going out again was loosely made to coincide with the times of harvest and planting in the autumn and the spring. It was a concession to the rhythm of life going back millennia, and to the impulse of human beings to attach religious significance to these facts of existence. A paganus, a pagan, after all, was just a country boy, nothing more than a farmer who, like all his fellows, marked the times and the seasons with rites and rituals meant to enlist the blessing and deflect the displeasure of the gods on his efforts in the fields.

And so it is today. The typical Christian is a pagan with no more sense of urgency about the imminent return of Jesus than an audiophile has of the return of vinyl. Whether he celebrates a liturgical calendar or not, his life revolves around seasons just the same, more often than not "the kids are back in school," "spring break," and "summer vacation." He goes to church seeking God's blessings on his life all the same, so that he may excel at his career, place his children in good schools, take a nice trip somewhere in June, save for their college and his own retirement, and generally enjoy life, within limits if he is wise. There is no such thing today as a disciple, who leaves all and follows Jesus (Luke 14:33).

Some of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies and listened to Christian balladeers like Larry Norman or read The Late, Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey acquired a veneer of the expectation only to lose it again because we finally realized that almost every century since the first has seen such expectation frustrated, or we came to grips with the fact that just because the expectation was preserved on papyri doesn't necessarily make it true, or translatable to now.

If Christianity is to remain relevant to such-minded people, it must do better than yet one more celebration of the Savior's birth. Saved from what? And for what? More of the same, day after day, year upon year, only to "fly forgotten as a dream, dies at the opening day?"

Thanksgiving For Protestantism

The Protestant work ethic, that industry and frugality eventually lead to riches, was not by any means fully formed in the minds of the grateful at the first Thanksgiving. It took the struggles and failures of communalism and the specter of want in the years immediately following to cause a reassessment and reformulation of the Pilgrim economy.

The following article originally appeared here.

November 25, 2009

The Mayflower's Pilgrim Capitalists

By Steven Malanga

Reading Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower, an account of the voyage of the Pilgrims and the settling of Plymouth Colony, what strikes me most is not simply the extraordinary suffering of those who made the crossing, or how close to failure the entire venture teetered for years, or even the author's recounting of the first celebration we've since dubbed Thanksgiving.

What leaps out from the pages of the history, probably because it's so little a part of the common narrative of the Pilgrims, is a crucial decision by the colony's governor, William Bradford, to change the fundamental organization of Plymouth's economy, a move which secured the colony's future. As Philbrick describes it, after three years in America the Pilgrims "stumbled on the power of capitalism" and in the process ensured the colony's survival.

Of course, for many people, the particulars of an economic system hardly seem like the stuff out of which national myths are made. Instead, the popular retelling of the Pilgrims' tale this time of year typically focuses on their role as separatists who fled England seeking religious freedom, came to thrive in the Dutch city of Leiden but worried that their children would lose their English identity and language, and so determined instead to found a colony in America where they could practice their religion but otherwise govern themselves as Englishmen and women.

The Pilgrims got more than they bargained for in the journey. After a brutal 66-day voyage, the Mayflower reached Cape Cod in mid-November of 1620, too late to build a suitable settlement before the winter set in. Living largely aboard the ship while they built the first structures, the settlers were ravaged by disease that winter, and by early spring, only half of the original voyagers remained alive.

Through the spring and the summer the Pilgrims nursed each other back to health, built their settlement, made friends with local Indians, and planted both native English crops and American seeds provided them by the local natives. That fall, as Plymouth Harbor attracted hordes of migratory birds, the Pilgrims went hunting, accumulating enough meat for a big celebration. When a hundred or so Pokanokets Indians showed up with freshly killed deer to add to the plenty, what started as a traditional European harvest festival became a feast of mythic significance, especially after Bradford and Edward Winslow ended their account of the Pilgrim's first year at Plymouth with the story of that Thanksgiving..

But mythic celebrations aside, the Pilgrims would struggle at Plymouth for two more years, never quite securing their freedom from worry and want until Bradford reorganized their tiny economy. For three years Plymouth had operated like other English colonies such as Jamestown, on a communal system where everyone worked the land and shared the fruits of labor. Now instead, in 1623, Bradford decided that each family should have its own plot of land to cultivate and would get to keep what it produced. By rights, this shouldn't have mattered much to the God-fearing Pilgrims. After all, they were engaged in a heroic endeavor to create a new life for themselves in America and all of them were presumably working as hard as possible to achieve that.

Still, as Philbrick writes, under Bradford's new regime, "the change in attitude was stunning." While previously men had tended the fields while women cared for the children, Bradford wrote that now women and children took to the fields, too, and the colony's output increased sharply. "The inhabitants never again starved," Philbrick relates, and eventually Winslow described Plymouth as a place where "religion and profit jump together."

Despite their devout nature, the Pilgrims weren't abhorred by such comparisons because the nature of religion was changing, too. The Protestant reformer John Calvin had placed work and the pursuit of one's occupation in a new religious context. Whereas under the Catholic Church for more than a thousand years work was something one did to subsist, Calvin argued that work was what God willed the faithful to do, and the worldly success that one achieved through hard work was a sign that one was, perhaps, a member of the elect. So thoroughly did many Protestant sects adapt this ethic that more than 100 years after the founding of Plymouth the minister John Wesley, architect of Methodism in England, would observe that "religion cannot but produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches."

The Pilgrims were followed to New England by waves of Puritans who believed as the Pilgrims did that a man's occupation was his calling in life and that success in one's calling was not to be renounced. It was a very different view of work and prosperity which became, not surprisingly, the ethic that defined the new country where, as Alexis de Tocqueville would later observe, all "honest callings are honorable" and where "the notion of labor is therefore presented to the mind on every side as the necessary, natural, and honest condition of human existence."

Not your typical Thanksgiving sentiment, but words nonetheless to contemplate this time of year.

Steven Malanga is an editor for RealClearMarkets and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute

Different Strokes for Different Folks

It is common among the Lutherans to insist on letting Scripture interpret Scripture. This is all well and good until you find out this means that Paul gets to interpret Mark, for example, despite the fact that it is easily argued that Paul had no knowledge of the teaching of Jesus as found in the Gospels.

The principle doesn't mean that a text should be allowed to speak for itself. Instead, the principle presupposes the notion of the unity of the Bible, which simply insulates its books within a cocoon of canonicity, impenetrable by anything from without and the individual books within incapable of disagreeing with each other, the latter being what troubled Luther about James.

Sunday's sermon in a Lutheran church was based on the story from Mark 10 about the godly rich man who asked Jesus what he yet needed to do to inherit eternal life. It pointedly illustrated the special pleading so characteristic of the Lutheran manner of interpreting the Bible. The preacher actually wanted us to believe that Jesus did not give the rich man a straight answer at all, even though Jesus said in all candor that the rich man needed to "sell whatsoever thou hast and give to the poor . . . and come, take up the cross (a theological embellishment absent from Matthew and Luke), and follow me." No, a deeper theological (!) point was being made by Jesus, we were told, to the effect that we cannot save ourselves by our own actions. Only God can save. So Jesus demanded an "impossible" thing of the man to underscore that point.

In other words, Mark is not allowed to speak for himself. Ephesians must be imported to interpret the text: "for by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." Indeed, almost every line of Scripture must be brought under the sway of Paulinism as understood by Lutherans.

The problem with this line of thinking is that the text of Mark shows that the disciples themselves had successfully obeyed the difficult call to discipleship given to them and "said goodbye to everything that they owned" (Luke 14:33). The Synoptic accounts are all in agreement on this, and indicate that Jesus recognized their obedience and promised them rewards "in this present time, and in the world to come life everlasting" as a consequence. That is the simple meaning of the text, however much one would rather it sounded like St. Paul.

It is true that the disciples were surprised by the severity of the demands Jesus placed on the rich man. No doubt they compared their experiences and concluded "no one could be saved" if such extreme conditions were required as the cost of discipleship, conditions with which they themselves had not yet had to comply. Obviously we are confronted here with varying costs of discipleship, the simple meaning of the text. The disciples had not sold everything and given away the proceeds to the poor. They obviously had nothing to sell. All they had were menial jobs to walk away from, and wives and children, and the humble dwellings where their poor families remained behind. The rich man doubtless had all these things as well, but much more in great abundance, and money in the bank.

So how can two levels of cost be justified? How can that be fair? Have not all "sinned and fallen short of the glory of God?" Is it not the case that "there is none righteous, no not one?"

The Synoptics are unanimous in reporting the sycophantic ruse of Jesus' opponents who came to him saying "we know that thou art true, and carest for no man: for thou regardest not the person of men" (Mark 12:44; Matthew 22:16). Indeed, they must have heard that Jesus was as likely to criticize the upstanding figures of the day as a "brood of vipers" as he was his own followers as "ye of little faith." If Jesus' invectives against scribes, pharisees, the rich and the powerful, and hypocrites in general cause one to think he simply favored the poor, the meek, the downtrodden and such like, that is a mistake. He addresses his willing hearers as "you who are evil." He is routinely found employing the language of reversal and rebuke: the first shall be last and the last first, the truly great must be the servant of all, Satan is as quickly personified in the person of Peter as the voice of the heavenly Father, etc. No, Jesus is at pains to level the playing field, as it were.

If we were to let Mark and the other Gospels speak for themselves, a different answer comes to hand for the question of the cost of discipleship: "Every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required." Because human beings are not equal in their earthly condition, they must become so when they answer the call to discipleship. All people, rich and poor alike, must unite in the abolition of the antonyms which divide them. They must repent and see themselves as God sees them, as the mere ants we appear to be from thirty thousand feet. The spirit at work in Jesus is the same spirit at work in Isaiah, who called Jacob, the Israel of God, a "worm."

From the richest ruler with great possessions to the poorest widow with only two mites, all must say goodbye to the old world with its old distinctions, honors, achievements and rewards, and yes its shames, calumnies, failures and injustices, and follow as equals into the kingdom of God. Those who have little to leave behind must leave it as surely as the rich must leave behind plenty. It is only from the human point of view that the one leaves little and the other more. From God's perspective, it is the renunciation of whatever one is which shows the true repentance. "Whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it."

There can be no question of renouncing someone else's life, someone else's experience, only of what falls within one's own sphere. Wealth is a snare, however, more likely to weigh down the would be follower, too cumbersome for the demands of the narrow way that leads to life. It is not surprising that a preacher in a wealthy American town in 2009 should do whatever he can to explain away the severity of Jesus' demands on the rich.

 

But it is still sad.

You Got a Friend?

It will probably come as a surprise to many readers that the late-1946 film "It's a Wonderful Life" wasn't terribly successful in its debut. The movie placed 26th in revenues for 1947. One reviewer called attention to its unreality and "sentimentality," which is underscored in the closing when the angel Clarence, who finally gets his wings, tells George that "no man is a failure who has friends." Audiences fresh off the horrors of war weren't exactly overwhelmed. It took a generation to garner its critical acclaim and to reach its popularity as a Christmas staple, which its creator Frank Capra said in 1984 was sort of like seeing your kid grow up to be president. Obviously something had changed in America. The baby boomers had to take over before the film could really succeed.

In the intervening period the trend has continued in different forms with the buddy movie, a wildly successful television comedy called "Friends," and the meteoric rise of a friends craze on social networks such as Facebook, among others. The thirst for that sentimental something is strong among the boomers, but it gets harder to get a buzz on no matter how much they drink, and the morning after remains lonely, and is getting lonelier. Consider the conclusion of a 2004 study that the average number of confidants per citizen had dropped in America from three to two since 1985, and fully a quarter of the population reported having no friends to confide in at all.

There has been a similar trend toward the sentimental within the church of the boomers, where theology has taken on a distinctly more familiar tone, emphasizing a personal relationship with God and drinking deeply from the well of ideas found in the Gospel of John. There one meets such notions as being "born again" and "knowing" God, and its Jesus talks about friendship in ideal terms: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." These Christians appropriate these ideas and think God is deeply, passionately interested in everything about them and has an individual plan for each and every life, as if Salvation History culminating in the Incarnation was kind of beside the point. What matters in their minds is finding your own divinely appointed purpose in life. It is narcissism writ large.

These developments help explain the penetration of pentecostalism into mainstream Christianity in the 1970's, and the subsequent exodus from mainline Protestantism into conservative "evangelicalism" after that. But the novelty has definitely worn off. Maybe the boomers are finally ready to grow up. While the country today is still overwhelmingly Protestant, self-identification with it has now dropped below 50% and the numbers of the unaffiliated and the sectarian are on the rise. For growing numbers of people it would not be wrong to say that familiarity has bred contempt. More and more books are appearing which recount the de-conversion experiences of people from Bart Ehrman at Princeton University to William Lobdell, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America-And Found Unexpected Peace.

In the same way the World War II generation was so different temperamentally from its children, it is interesting how the Synoptic tradition, which contains little if any positive teaching on friendship, differs dramatically in substance and in tone from the Fourth Gospel. For example, the Gospel of Matthew warns that "A man's foes shall be they of his own household." Its command to "love your enemies" practically makes friendship irrelevant by annihilating the category itself, which, as we have said before, is characteristic of the religious impulse. For the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels, this abolition of the antonyms occurs at the eschaton, which for him has already dawned: "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand." Wherever this thorough-going eschatological message of Jesus predominates in the record, conventional social constructions are overthrown. "For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother," in contrast to his actual family which was in the street looking for him in the house where he was teaching. "In the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven."

Cultivating strong friendships is about the last thing on Jesus' mind in part because there simply won't be time for them. The end of all things approaches so fast that one must abandon all traditional roles immediately and follow Jesus. The normal niceties of interaction no longer apply. At one point we see how even his closest associate is rebuked for a misplaced intention to protect him. Jesus may indeed call many to follow him, but few are actually chosen. And even those whom we would call his mates were always kept at a certain distance despite various purported confidences shared, and the record shows that these followers consistently misunderstood him, failed him, and at length even betrayed him. If with Cicero a friend should be as a second self, Jesus didn't just die alone, he lived that way.

Which makes the emergence of the ideal of divine friendship in the Fourth Gospel quite startling: "Henceforth I call you not servants . . . but I have called you friends." Here we meet with a response of interpretation to the failure of the imminent end of the world to materialize. But instead of adopting the later development which we see already at work in the apocalyptic narratives in the Synoptic Gospels where hope of terrestrial transformation is postponed to an indeterminate time in the future, the Fourth Gospel eschews talk of the "second coming." Instead it conceives of the promised kingdom in a new way, located in a celestial venue where Jesus has gone "to prepare a place for you." His kingdom will not come with the Son of Man appearing with the clouds of heaven, but rather "My kingdom is not of this world." This is how the original ideology is neatly transferred by the Fourth Gospel to the unseen world, where it can cause little offence.

The Fourth Gospel's response to the Synoptic tradition also is on display in the way it co-opts the eschaton. One way it does this is through its notion of the coming of the Spirit: "the Father shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth." Another is through the love teaching of Jesus, which no longer emphasizes love of enemies but rather brotherly love within the Christian community: "Love one another, as I have loved you. If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him." Christians will continue to co-exist with other human beings who are still going to hate them and be their enemies. But Christians are to look at it this way: "In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world."

It is interesting how for the Christian community imagined by the Fourth Gospel it is not the Lord's Supper but the washing of one another's feet which Jesus establishes for its social cohesion. "I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you," he says of this custom, instead of "This do in remembrance of me" which he says of the Lord's Supper in the Gospel of Luke. The reason for this is precisely because the Lord's Supper is still understood by the author to be potently invested with the original eschatological significance, which is why there can be no place for an account of its institution in his gospel. It is an issue best left unaddressed, and better yet replaced, in view of the changed circumstances.

When it comes to choosing between variant readings in the manuscripts it is often the case that we choose the more difficult reading because its existence is harder to explain. The same holds true of interpretation. The Fourth Gospel in the main is comparatively more easily explained as derivative of the contents of the Synoptic Tradition. The latter puts us closer to the Jesus of history, but he is a sterner, more urgent, and less friendly figure.

The Ethics of the End of the World

Sunday upon Sunday can stack up after a while into something which amounts to not much of a muchness, and one must try to put all that out of one's mind for a moment, lay everything aside and re-read an entire Gospel at a sitting to regain one's sense of interpretive proportion. Usually when I do this I end up shaking my head over the stark contrast a Gospel represents just in its urgent tone of voice compared with the satisfied demeanor evident in the denizens of any given church. Whatever may be said of our religion of forty years ago, let alone twenty centuries, its moral tone was more distinct, its own sense of urgency more palpable. Was it because we were not as rich then? And did not live as long? Or was our connection to the sources of Jesus' inspiration somehow more substantial? Did we actually preach Law and Gospel in those days, instead of about Law and Gospel?

The conviction of the imminence of the end of the world has its basis in Jesus' moral vision of God's coming judgment. A studious peasant on the periphery of society, he brings to bear the powers of a gifted critic whose observations are steeped in the language of the Law and the Prophets but whose experience is that of the outsider looking in. His contemporaries are repeatedly said to be astonished at this mere carpenter's son who suddenly appears on the scene filled with an urgency to tell all who will listen to repent and follow him. Jesus is at pains to urge radical change in attitudes and behavior, to invest life with a moral sense it has come to lack, because he is convinced God is about to intervene decisively and justly in human history, in contrast to contemporaries who were content to acquiesce in the status quo, or who more widely thought we should enjoy it while it lasts because human life simply represented a fleeting point in time. For Jesus "Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die" must give place to "take up your cross and follow me" because God surely is coming. Apart from this constellation of presuppositions, the character and force of the teaching of Jesus itself becomes distorted and misunderstood.

The earthly Son of Man of this early tradition, who has no place to lay his head, looks besieged by hangers-on though supremely in command in comparison with the ascended Jesus of the later tradition, who sits at the right hand of God's power in heaven, from where he seems oddly unable to find the kind of competent help he is looking for, even among The Twelve. The latter he had commanded "Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not." Suddenly all that is changed, and he at length hits upon a young fanatic, one Saul of Tarsus, to whom he complains from heaven of being persecuted and whom he subsequently directs in his travels, first here and not there, to spread the message beyond the Jewish confines where it had produced what must be considered an anticlimactic result. But after a good beginning even this Paul disappears for upwards of a decade before he reappears and produces the history with which we are now familiar from the New Testament.

Since God's decisive judgment of men had failed to materialize in the conclusion of Jesus' earthly career, it is not surprising that the re-interpretation of it should find new expression in such formulations as "it is appointed unto men once to die, and then comes judgment," which amounts to an attenuation of the original eschatological expectation of Jesus. And unlike Jesus' missionaries of Matthew 10 (The Twelve) who went out provisionless with the promise and expectation that they "shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come," Paul takes no support from anyone but funds his own missionary activity by practicing his trade, going among the Gentiles, planting churches and visiting them, retracing some of his steps multiple times, being closer to the end of all things only by a day, each and every day that passes.

Under the pressures of such developments, it is still somewhat surprising that the memory of the early tradition survived. At this long remove it is easy to fail to imagine the impact that it must have made. Much of it must have seemed as unintelligible as it was offensive.

We are informed that the individuals Jesus called who became The Twelve left everything behind, including co-workers and jobs, wives and family, and, depending on the chronology you accept, wandered around following their teacher for about three years, turning most of them into what today we should call beggars and dead-beat dads, socially irresponsible men of the meanest sort. While it may be argued that some of these had nothing to lose by doing so except long hot days in the boat, at least one may have abandoned a more lucrative skimming operation collecting taxes.

But most were far more reluctant to come along. The command to cut off hands and feet or pluck out eyes if they cause one to sin can't have helped. The rich young ruler sorrowfully declined because he couldn't bear to part with his many possessions, which Jesus told him to liquidate for the benefit of the poor as the final one thing lacking. Others protested their need to bury their dead before they answered the call to follow, for which social obligation Jesus had no patience whatsoever. The man at the plow must keep looking to the future and not look back or he will plow a crooked line and miss the kingdom's sudden appearance ahead of him.

The rich in particular have difficulty inheriting the kingdom of God because wealth's many cares distract them from the impending catastrophe and the narrow way of escape. The foolish rich man is more concerned with building new barns to store his gains than with the prospect of a final reckoning overtaking him as a thief in his nightly leisure. Riches represent a wide load on their backs which makes passage through the narrow doorway to the kingdom impossible. "Narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life, and few there be who find it."

Ostentatious dumping of wealth at the last second to get in won't do either, and would represent as conspicuous a sin as the lifelong propensity to accumulate wealth and ignore the needs of the poor. The improper divestiture of wealth at once exposes the insincerity of the would be follower of Jesus. It is noteworthy how often this is overlooked by our contemporaries both in the church and out of it who want to be recognized for their charitable giving. "Take heed," begins Matthew 6, "that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly."

A person who has less to give away more easily escapes detection than one who has much, and faces a task therefore much less onerous. But still he must do it, and God will see it. This is the meaning of Jesus' statement that the widow he saw from the street, who almost escaped notice when she put into the treasury two small coins, "cast more in than all they . . . even her whole life," because it was all that she had, in contrast to the Pharisees who openly and grandly deposited great sums out of their abundance. In what Jesus had observed in the woman, God had observed as one of the truest of followers.

What is remarkable about the Gospels is how they preserve the memory of this world renouncing ethic in the face of the imminent eschaton despite the trend already at work within them, especially in the little apocalypses in Matthew 24 and Mark 13, to re-interpret the urgent expectation of the end in the light of the crucifixion. Consider, for example, Luke's account of the trial of Jesus. There Jesus no longer predicts his imminent coming as the Son of Man with the clouds as in Mark, but only that he will in future sit at the right hand of the power of God (23:69). Yet in 14:33 Luke uniquely preserves in the sternest possible terms the conditions of discipleship: "So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple." The latter shows against the hyperbolists that Jesus expected all his followers, not just the rich, to turn their backs on everything they owned. To the hardness of which even members of the Twelve had protested their compliance, wondering to what end.

To what end, indeed. Despite the sacred halo painted over the early community in Jerusalem in Luke's Acts of the Apostles, it was Paul who intervened to rescue them from the economic difficulties they got themselves into, and who made of The Way the Weltreligion that it became. It was his expansive missionary ambition which brought Jesus' moral vision of reality in a new form to new soils which did not have the benefit of the Law and the Prophets. Without Paul the civilization of the West is almost unimaginable, the way forward, full of danger. If ours is a post-Christian age, if we no longer know what to make of this inheritance, if we no longer care, perhaps the swine are ready to turn, trample and rend.