Forgive a slight detour from Catholic legal theory. I'm almost always glad to be Catholic . . . except when I'm singing Catholic worship songs, at which time I get the unmistakable sensation that I'm at a very sleepy campfire sing-along. This does not mean that I want to bring back the Gregorian chant. Traditional Protestant hymns have long provided an inspirational, rousing, and accessible worship form that I have yet to experience in a Catholic parish. Apparently, I need to read Christopher Brown's new book, Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation, in which he focuses on the role of hymns in the life of a 16th century German town, Joachimsthal.
We live in a world where technique, allied to advertising, is determinative in all areas of our life, not just in the technical ones. Because we read the past in our image, a study like Brown's tempts us to view 16th-century Lutheran hymn singing as a skillful technique, a means to get people to buy into Lutheranism. We then jump to the conclusion that if we could only find a comparable technique, we could get people to buy into our version of Christianity. Sometimes this perspective is even considered evangelical and missional. But it widely misses the mark, partly because the freedom of the Christian message itself breaks the tyranny of such manipulative intent, and also because it misconstrues the Christian community in Joachimsthal and the Lutheran understanding of the faith.
The Christians in Joachimsthal did not believe in a technique. They believed in the God who "calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies" the church, as it says in Luther's Small Catechism. Proclamation then was not about technique. It was about the centrality of God's gracious action and the comfort the recipients experienced. Hymns were not gimmicks. They were part of the fiber of life together under God.
The reviewer also makes the broader observation that many of the differences in sacred music stemmed from theological differences in understanding the role of music:
Lutherans tied their music to proclamation, Roman Catholics used it as intercession for the purpose of satisfying a debt, and Calvinists saw it as congregational prayer.
I'll be the first to admit that, in the past, Protestants occasionally became a bit exuberant in their whole hymn-as-proclamation theme (see, e.g., this classic), and that the "seeker-sensitive" movement has reduced a lot of today's Protestant worship music to technique. But what is the role of today's Catholic liturgical music? If Gregorian chants served to erase the debts of the faithful, what mountain of eternal debt are we accumulating every time we sing "On Eagle's Wings" or "Morning Has Broken?"
A conference on religious conversion organized by the Vatican and the World Council of Churches has issued a report (HT: Religion Clause) concluding that:
We affirm that while everyone has a right to invite others to an understanding of their faith, it should not be exercised by violating other’s rights and religious sensibilities. At the same time, all should heal themselves from the obsession of converting others.
I'm no fan of many tactics used for conversion. That said, I'm not sure what "religious sensibilities" are, or what constitutes a violation of them. I'm also a bit sketchy as to when a call to implement the Great Commission crosses the line into an "obsession" for which healing is appropriate. Was St. Paul obsessed with converting others?
While it's not difficult to garner popular support (at least in Georgia) for teaching the Bible in school, it gets a bit trickier when the time comes to choose a text.
Human rights groups are raising alarms over a new law passed by the Iranian parliament that would require the country's Jews and Christians to wear coloured badges to identify them and other religious minorities as non-Muslims.
Between mandatory badges and cartoon-driven violence, the naked public square can seem fairly inviting.
The bishop of Vermont has placed local parishes in charitable trusts, apparently in order to protect them from sex abuse settlements. I lack the expertise to know if this is a prudent -- or even a novel -- maneuver; Voice of the Faithful called it "fraudulent, deceitful, and irresponsible."
A new study has found that the scandal over sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church has not caused American Catholics to leave the church, or to stop attending Mass and donating to their parishes.
Notwithstanding his (unnecessary) apology, Michael's response to my earlier post is a good reminder for me not to so casually cast criticisms at my former church, so let me be more specific. I'm not claiming that there no non-lefty grounds for favoring same-sex marriage or abortion rights, only that the broad panoply of social positions staked out by the New York diocese of the Episcopal Church is largely indistinguishable, in my view, from the pre-Clinton/DLC policies of the Democratic Party. In other words, the church's political identity is wide open to the criticism that it is no more than a product of its surrounding culture (New York City). A more serious problem is the diocese's apparent lack of humility in staking out some of these positions. (E.g., the diocese refused to support a friend of mine as a candidate for the seminary -- much less hire him as a priest -- on the ground that he would not state his willingness to bless same-sex relationships.) While I favor some of the diocese's positions (including supporting some sort of legal recognition for same-sex relationships), I wish there was greater space made for reasonable disagreement on the thorny task of translating the Gospel into workable and humane policies for society. (Perhaps the Catholic Church is open to the same criticism on certain issues, but that's another story.)
I thought Wheaton College looked bad for firing a professor who became Catholic. Now Patrick Henry College has fired a professor for writing an article stating that:
"A common misconception among American evangelicals, and one that cannot be supported by the Scriptures themselves, is that the Bible is the only source of truth," the article began. "We argue that this misconception amounts to a blasphemous denial of Christ's words in Matthew 5 that 'he sends rain on the just and the unjust.'"
The 900-word article argued that "a Christian must refuse to view special and general revelation as hostile to one another. Nor should he hesitate to learn from a pagan. There is much wisdom to be gained from Parmenides and Plato, as well Machiavelli and Marx."
The school claimed that the article "diminishes the import of Scripture." Apparently when the school's namesake made his famous quote about liberty, he was referring only to the non-academic kind.
An essay in the new Christian Century asks Christians to rethink homosexuality by looking to Isaiah for an example of a radical reimagining of divine grace as a supplement to scriptural exegesis. And Commonweal has a reflection by an Episcopalian on the uneasy state of the Anglican communion in light of the ordination of Gene Robinson:
To my mind, the question of whether an openly and sexually actively gay person can serve as a bishop is not a matter of essential Christian faith, nor is the identity or faithfulness of Episcopalians threatened by such service. I respect those who feel differently, but I think they are confusing the essential with the inessential. I believe the identity and faithfulness of the church are threatened far more by those who think the Gnostic Gospels or The Da Vinci Code has more to teach us than the Nicene Creed or the central texts of the Bible. I wish the ECUSA had waited a bit longer to take the step to ordain a sexually active homosexual person as bishop, and I wish the opponents of that step were more willing to consider whether God may be doing something new in our own time. But I continue to be an Episcopalian because the arguments, the disagreements, and even the threats of schism are all part of a messy and all-too-human way of struggling together to glimpse the nature and actions of an ultimately unknowable and infinitely loving God.
As a former Episcopalian, I appreciate a certain dose of theological humility; I just wish there would have been a similar reticence in proclaiming what could only be considered a strangely perfect convergence between Christianity and lefty secular social policy. (At least in our New York diocese, that is: see, e.g., here, here, and here.)
Over at Balkinization, Brian Tamanaha highlights an issue that should get more attention, especially at Catholic law schools:
One has to wonder . . . how long [these skyrocketing tuition rates] can continue, as we collectively sprint past $30,000 per year (not counting expenses) and beyond. The economic value of a law degree for graduates from elite law schools, and for top students from non-elite law schools, would seem to handily justify the price. . . . But what about the overwhelming majority of law graduates (all those not in the favored categories above) for whom a law degree offers a far lower earning potential? . . .
This brings me to the fairness issue. A peculiar system has developed in many non-elite institutions, in which the students most likely to make the least money end up subsidizing the legal education of the students most likely to make the most money. The way "merit" scholarships work, students with high LSAT scores--which law schools covet in the effort to shape their profile for the purposes of U.S. News rankings--get large discounts (with some paying no tuition at all). It is not the case, of course, that high LSAT students always rank at the top of the first year class, or that the lower LSAT students end up at the bottom half of the class. But when it does happen (often enough), the result is that the lowest ranked students pay full price, while the highest ranked students pay much less. And the lowest ranked students get the worst paying jobs (and sometimes no job), while the highest ranked students get the best paying jobs.
This system is understandable--and one can come up with an argument that the lower students benefit from the system as well because maximizing the LSAT profile of the law school enhances the value of their degree (though that does not mean they will make any more money)--but it is also, well, perverse.
