Historical Taxonomy via Email: The Scotch Helped

This is a follow-up via email on a conversation topic at a friend's house.

Svenski,

I've been thinking about our conversation re "What are we now if we're post-everything?" I was mulling over the common designations of Western History A.D., and it occurred to me that labeling something as "after" another defining moment is standard: e.g. the Middle/Dark Ages. Standard divisions were devised by those in the Renaissance & Enlightenment who saw the period between the Classical World and the Humanist World as regressive downtime. So the "after something really important" motif isn't new. However, what if we tried to rethink the classifications along Christian lines? We would start the History of the West at the Incarnation, of course, but then we could possibly continue along the lines of the following:

I. The First Age: The Age of Faith. This would begin with Christ and the Apostles and continue to, say, Anselm and the beginning of Scholasticism (a watershed change in my mind). We could call these people Patristics or Primitive Christians.

II. The Second Age: The Age of Faith and Reason. This would catch what was going on in Scholasticism, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. We could call them Medievals, to avoid confusion.

III. The Third Age: The Age of Reason. This would be the period normally called Modern, and we could call these people Moderns, simply because we don't like them.

IV. The Fourth Age: The Age of the Absurd. I would start this in the mid-Twentieth century sometime, probably with Sartre and Camus. The designation of this Age as "Absurd" accounts both for the Existentialism that it spawned and popularized (e.g. Camus in particular refers to the Absurd), but it would also refer to the Death of Reason, i.e. the inherent absurdity and insecurity and arbitrariness of reasoning in a post-everything world. I think that "absurd" accurately characterizes a lot of contemporary phenomena: multi-culturalism, the supremacy of the welfare-state, the end of the nuclear family, infinite genders, depth psychology, etc. We could call the people in this Age....Absurds? We can't call them Absurdists, as that's already taken, and Absurdites sounds like a sect of Coptic Christians. T said Absurdians, but somehow that reminds me of Abelard and retributive castration.

Anyway, I know that this is a pretty rough sketch, but let me know what you think.

Your friend,

Hoss

St. Ann, Save Us!

Ann Coulter, whether you find her charming or revolting, is one of the cleverest opinionators in Punditworld. This is a remarkable piece on indicting the New York Times' editorial board for treason.

Link:
HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE - When Will NYT Reveal One of al Qaeda's Secret Programs? by Ann Coulter

St. Paul Goes to Berkeley, Part 2: Promotor Fidei Asks, "Whence the Gauntlet?"

Dear Advocatus Diaboli,

I shudder to think what Faust would say if he knew to what his hospitality has given rise. But let us press forward boldly.

Being the learned sort, and notwithstanding your rather dim view of things historical, you will no doubt recall the scholastic method known as disputatio. In its Thomistic form, the method entailed a statement of one’s opponent’s view on an issue, followed by a systematic presentation of one’s own view, followed by a reply to opposing arguments. In the opening salvo of our exchange, I hope you will not mind my drawing selectively from this method.

Following your lead, I postpone questions of biblical authenticity, canonicity, and theological oppression, and concentrate presently on what you perceive to be a/the central problem of “my” orthodoxy, viz., the problem of the author. As you define the problem, an author’s “situatedness in his own cultural, historical, linguistic, and personal milieu implies that you cannot access what he meant, what he intended to communicate; you can only access what you yourself at this moment experience as a result of reading his words.”

If I may be so bold, the problem is in fact much more acute than you have stated. A reader/hearer of a text is confronted not only with the problem of how to fuse the “two horizons” of his/her situation and that of the text (author); but also with such philosophical problems as (a) whether the text “contains” or corresponds to any metaphysical reality, (b) if so, whether that reality is independent of the reader/hearer or “constructed” by the reader/hearer, (c) if the latter, whether any metaphysical reality (within or without a text) exists independent of the human mind, (d) whether the human mind and/or its “situation” is/are sufficiently stable to admit of analysis or interpretation (is the “human mind” itself a construct of some sort?), and (d) what, if any, ethical issues are implicated in how one “interprets” or “constructs” meaning/reality. (My debt to Vanhoozer at this point will be obvious.)

To express part of this another way, the problem of the author as it arises in connection with text is one manifestation of a much larger problem: that of reality itself. Does reality exist “out there,” independent of the knower? If so, is there any correlation between that reality and the knowing faculties of the knower? Or if not, is all reality simply a projection of a knower’s own consciousness? The literary problem is, mirabile dictu, a philosophical one. I might add, a very old philosophical one. Dating even from the Enlightenment. Berkeley comes to mind.

What, then, saith orthodoxy? Two things. First, by way of counterstroke, it is profoundly ironic that you will raise such “problems” yet certifiably fail to carry them through while reading this text. You will read my words as if they have meaning, however much you may think him a Luddite who wrote them. And, I doubt not, you would quickly protest if I treated your post as having no meaning whatsoever beyond what I impose upon it.

(Parenthetically, I realize your original question had to do with texts, attributed to St. Paul, which are centuries old. However, the problem of the author does not become a problem simply when the author lived in the first century; it is basic to verbal communication between any two people, even those quite similarly “situated.”)

Let me press the point. You assume the existence of meaning in order to speak about it. If meaning is purely a reader-construct, your “speech” simply floats out into a universe of sounds, which must then be strung together into something definite by whomever happens to find those sounds interesting. You have not “spoken” any more than the person who burps after dinner. You vanish the moment your words are emitted, and they lie like an amorphous blob of sound, waiting to be resurrected and shaped by another. This is the death of communication; it is the reduction of language to sound, and nobody with a brain could take it seriously. Which is no offense to you, because, as I said, you don’t take it seriously. You assume meaning exists. Our correspondence is proof positive of that.

Second, by way of further counterstroke, I wonder how you justify this assumption. George Steiner said in Real Presences, “Any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs . . . any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence.” That is precisely the assumption of orthodoxy; but as it is one you don’t share, I wonder how you defend your belief in (a) your own metaphysical existence, (b) my metaphysical existence, (c) the meaningfulness of language, and (d) a correlation between us that makes communication possible, one that goes beyond shared language to a shared metaphysical and/or epistemological structure. You may, of course, deny that you hold these beliefs, but to do so is to render this whole exercise between us nonsensical in the extreme; and I remind you who wrote first.

To sum up, thus spake orthodoxy: “Great question! Now defend it.”

Sincerely,

Promotor Fidei

Old Lady Clothes

There they are, those clothes you would only let your teenage daughter wear if you happened to be pimping her out on the side, and they're on a 65 year-old woman. Ahh, summertime in Brooklyn. And in a sudden epiphany, you realize why delis always give you your food in paper bags.

Even for a youth- and sex-obsessed society, isn't this a bit much? How is the image of a retirement-aged woman in a tight, scooped-neck tee supposed to be appealing? You start wondering if there's there's a club for wealthy octogenerian bachelors nearby.

I suppose that we deserve this. Our culture has been saying for a long time now that virile, copulating bodies are only approached in importance by consumer goods, so much so that the "greatest good" now sounds like a bad pun if you say it in Latin. So, we got what we asked for, I guess. Maybe we should have asked for propriety instead.

Why Egalitarian Democracy Sucks

Pullitzer Prize winner or not, I'm not a big fan of Michiko Kakutani's book reviews. They're predictable, limp, and forgettable. So I wasn't going to read her "nod to Independence Day" review, but I read the blurb and was rendered helpless. It's an interesting article, one that I'm surprised to find in the Times (she even suggests that feminist revisionism might not be the end-all in historical analysis-gasp!).

Of course, Gordon Wood's suggestion (as recorded by Ms. Kakutani-I have not read the book), that egalitarian democracy stifles individual greatness, is nothing new. I suppose if you haven't read Plato's Republic or Nietzche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra you may not be aware of the criticism, but, seriously, how many people can there be in the Information Age who aren't familiar with Plato and Nietzche? Or at least Moses?

Cynicism aside, Wood does make an interesting argument. That the Founders, in creating a democratic Republic dependent on the common man, destroyed the possibility for future leaders of their own stature seems likely. Great men need a hierarchical society in which to grow, and democracy is the government of the midget, by the midget, and for the midget. Or haven't you read Atlas Shrugged recently?

A conclusion that would not likely be published by Mr. Wood or suggested by Ms. Kakutani is that the dwarfing impulses of democracy are such that it should itself be banished. But maybe our loss of great men should cause us to entertain that conclusion as a possibility. The medieval Scholastics are frequently mocked for arguing that feudalism had its basis in the nature of things; maybe they were not so far off the mark after all.

Link:
'Revolutionary Characters,' by Gordon S. Wood - New York Times

Gooey Crap Profusions

Okay, so maybe the "GCP" on the back of the church bulletin stands for "Great Commission Publications," but it sure seems to me that those people generally produce gooey crap. The bulletin backs, which I studiously avoid reading because I don't want my hands sticky with syrup while I'm sitting in church, are usually better ignored than read. Somehow I can never help noticing the titles, though, and I occasionally deign to read the articles if I'm particualarly curious to see what flavor Aunt Jemima is offering this week.

Today Auntie sported a piece on "National Greatness," presumably in preparation for the Independence Day weekend ahead. I couldn't help myself, so I read it. The remarks weren't quite as bad as I had anticipated. Not quite. But then I found this curiosity: "Righteousness is the hallmark of greatness. True greatness is to be subject to God, who made us for himself. Conformity to his will is the true measure of a great individual, and hence of a great nation." So far, so good. After a nod to George Washington, the article continues: "We don't necessarily need a formal statement of allegiance to Christianity..." Whyever not? Does this strike anyone else as a glaring non sequitur? Are we to understand that righteousness, understood as subjection to God (a poor definition, by the way), does not involve a formal profession of Christianity? Try that one on your local session.

In context, maybe the author was trying to communicate that we should work for reformation "from the bottom up." I don't have a problem with an emphasis on bottom-up reform, except that historically (both within and without the canon) reform usually happens in a top-down fashion. Okay, so bottom-up reformation it is. And our ultimate goal, while we're "preaching...the gospel...leading to transformed lives and...a transformed culture," is not to get that transformed culture to obey the First Commandment. I'm sticking with Gooey Crap Profusions.

Behold Your Mother

I heard an excellent sermon today. My good friend Ben Miller preached on "Mother City: A Window on Zion," a message which focused on the question, "Do you love the Church?" Ben chose Psalm 87 as his text, and demonstrated that this cryptic poem is not only a love song for the special dwelling place of God among men, which in the New Covenant is the Church Universal, but is also a promise of the triumph of the Gospel throughout the world.

I was greatly edified by Ben's reflections. I found his message timely, as it really is all too easy to despise the Church, or take it for granted, especially when you've been in it all your life. The reason that Ben urged, that God loves the Church, so we should also, is highly motivating. And the reminder that the Church's current state of "disrepair," as Ben put it, is not a rationale for affective estrangement, is also helpful.

I would add to Ben's insightful remarks that we should not only love the Church, but identify ourselves with it. Of course this concept was implicit throughout his message, but it seems to me that the point bears emphasizing, since we live in an age of "personality crisis," as The New York Dolls put it. Much has been said concerning the tribalization of the postmodern person, whose identity involves loyalty to one or more sub-cultures. The Church tends to be, in the minds of its members, one more sub-set in the stratified loyalties that make up who they envision themselves to be. That is, the Church is one more tribe among many. The challenge in this age is to catapult the Church to the level of the uber-tribe, the uniting clan of which all other allegiances are merely septs, a state of mind in which "I'm a Christian" will be the most fundamental identification of its members.

This sort of uber-tribe allegiance can, I think, help to refurbish the disrepair of the Church: by identifying oneself primarily with the Church, the Israel of God, one resurrects the Church Militant, because reality is instantly bifurcated into an "Us vs. Them" conflict. There is suddenly a sweeping category for those who are not members of the New Israel, the New Humanity: they are Gentiles. And they are inimical to the mother tribe. This mindset can help to call us once again out of Bablylon, because there is suddenly a Babylon to be called out of.

Who said postmodern tribalism was a bad thing?

Link to Ben Miller's sermons:
SermonAudio.com - Orthodox Presbyterian Church Franklin Sq

St. Paul Goes to Berkeley, Part 1: Advocatus Diaboli Throws Down the Gauntlet

Dear Promotor Fidei,

I was delighted to meet you at Faust's soiree last Tuesday. I find it fascinating that endearing anachronisms such as yourself still exist (only in the dear old U.S. of A., of course, do you still survive-but how charming!). As we agreed during our conversation, I am beginning a correspondence delineating post-Enlightenment objections to your personal version of Christianity; not that I think your faith has ever answered the Enlightenment, but the illumined sectors of today's society have progressed beyond it (what hateful concepts it promoted!), and so I will not pester you with the critiques of pure reason, which are so horribly dated. Rather, I will produce the critiques of impure reason, the infinite play of the Protean mind. Can you confine the unceasing, ever-altering human game within your Pauline, Augustinian, Calvinistic orthodoxy?

Your Presbyterian Christianity, for all its perpetual splintering, is quite typically Protestant in its reliance on the Bible. Objections of authenticity and canonicity aside (I left my can-opener at home today), you have the problem of the author to deal with. To make myself clear, I shall choose St. Paul as an example, since you Calvinists don't really concern yourselves with the rest of the Biblical crew anyway. In your infatuation with St. Paul, you orthodox Presbyterians assume that you can lift concepts from his purported epistles and pawn them off as enduring truths. Unfortunately, though you are a "people of the Book," you never study literary methods, a fact which I have always found most peculiar. If you had kept up with the Steins in the last few decades, you would have found that we've lost the author. As in, she has disappeared and we don't know where to find her. Rather like Poe, except we haven't found the rabid corpse in a ditch yet. We're looking in the 19th century, though; we think that Rousseau's noble savages may have eaten her. All this to say that Paul was a first-century Jew, and you are not. St. Paul's situatedness in his own cultural, historical, linguistic, and personal milieu implies that you cannot access what he meant, what he intended to communicate; you can only access what you yourself at this moment experience as a result of reading his words. Paul the author has disappeared from the scene of the crime, leaving no trace; you are only yourself, looking at the corpse through your own utterly disparate mental matrix.

This, of course, implies that you are literally unable to develop a "Pauline" theology; it also makes preaching from Paul's texts an exercise in infelicitous absurdity, as long as you are professing to preach a "Pauline" sermon. Any attempt to expatiate on "what Paul said concerning x" is an unbridled exercise in the theological oppression of your hearers, not an unpacking of the euangelion. [Maybe next time we can discuss the power-games inherent in having the laity sit passively while you stand above them, forcing the words of the sermon upon them.]

I hope that my comments do not appear derogatory, and that I have not crossed whatever reified bounds of propriety you may have found fit to establish. I write in the spirit of one who warmly embraces endless diversity, and who looks forward to your response with anticipation.

Sincerely,

Advocatus Diaboli

A Post-Feminist Opinion Worth Noting?

Manohla Dargis is a cranky old woman whose film reviews are dependable only for their snottiness, but her piece on Adam Sandler's new movie "Click" is a marvelous specimen of biting film criticism.

Link:
Click - Review - Movies - New York Times

Pastoral Blogging

Link:
Reformed Thoughts and Gary’s Desk

My wife and I visited her parents in California last weekend. As we were sitting in church waiting for the service to start, I noticed that my father-in-law, the pastor, had noted his blog in the church bulletin. I had not seen this done before; my home church has been pushing its website recently, with some success, but I hadn't seen a Presbyterian pastor recommending his blog to his congregation.

As I began to consider this novelty, it seemed an exceptionally wise way of using currently popular technology for pastoral ends. Even in a small congregation, such as my father-in-law's, it is very difficult for the minister to both hear and say everything that needs to be heard and said. Maintaining a specifically pastoral blog would appear to be one way to facilitate communication with the congregation on topics that one is not able to address in sermons, lectures, and conversations (vocal or electronic). One can easily link articles, audio files, and websites that one considers possibly helpful to the congregation. Also, a blog provides a convenient format for transmitting prayer requests and updates on church members, as well as publishing insights and admonitions.

There are obvious difficulties with a specifically pastoral blog, one being that blog posts are susceptible to all the ambiguities of tone and intention that email has become famous for. Another is that one could endorse a particular article by a particular author and thereby be construed as endorsing other things of which one does not approve, or does not wish one's session or congregation to be perceived as approving, such as other opinions of the author, the idiosyncracies of the host website, etc. Of course, the format of a personal blog brings with it the danger that one will foist one's own preferences and opinions on the congregation in a way that exceeds the legitimate boundaries of pastoral office, whether intentionally or not. To me, the most serious difficulty appears to be that the local session (or presbytery) is not likely to review such a blog, so that the pastoral blog is likely to be free from the automatic examination that accompanies, say, a Sunday School lecture.

In spite of these misgivings, the pastoral blog seems to be a promising tool for ministerial work in the first decade of the 21st century. Maybe it can partially compensate for the fragmentation of the local parish by uniting electronically those congregants who are separated by geography and schedules. Maybe it can partially fill the gap left when pastors stopped making regular house calls. With this hope, I'll keep checking bulletins to find what electronic means pastors are using to shepherd the flock of God.

Alan Jacobs Bashes Blogs

Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.

(To continue reading, click below.)
Goodbye, Blog - Books & Culture

Creative Conformity

Ever wonder why most current poetry is written in free verse, instead of embracing traditional schemes of rhyme, meter, and structure? It certainly cannot have anything to do with the greater difficulty of writing poetry in standardized forms, and the inexorability of progress most definitely implies that the arts are more aesthetically advanced now than they were a few centuries ago. Anyway, sonnets are archaic, and who wants to bother with end rhyme or trochaic feet? Art is about self-expression, not artificial limitations on creativity.

Right. And the life of individuals is also about free expression, about "being yourself," "becoming who you are." (Speaking of progress, does it ever occur to anyone that popularized existentialism is so 1950s?) "Follow your dreams." These flippancies, which never really meant much of anything, have so completely entered the American public consciousness that it is nearly impossible to evade them. Even in the church, where one would hope that the very grouping together of worshipers would give everyone a clue that it's not primarily about exploring individual fulfillment, we're just a gathering of disparate persons trying to see "what we can get out of it" as individuals. Group-think, far from being the national danger which the New York Times' Op-Ed page seems to consider it, is something which Americans haven't been able to do for generations.

If Christians are to reject pop-existentialist individualism, what model can replace the current one of individual fulfillment? My recommendation is a model of "creative conformity," and I would proffer the Elizabethan sonnet as my analogue.

A sonnet is a verse form consisting of 14 lines, which are arranged within a fixed rhyme scheme. An Elizabethan (or Shakespearean) sonnet is made up of three quatrains (stanzas of four lines each) and a couplet (two concluding lines). The rhyme pattern is abab cdcd efef gg, and the feet are iambic (da DA) in pentameter (five-foot lines). While I am sorely tempted to allegorize each aspect of the Elizabethan sonnet for our mutual edification, I will leave that to the Middle Ages and evangelical preachers. Instead, I would like to suggest that the sonnet, with its rigid form but limitless possiblilities for structured creativity, can show us how to be individual, corporate, original, pious, and orthodox, all at the same time.

Okay, well maybe that's a bit ambitious, but it does seem to me that this verse form demonstrates that antecedent structure does not inhibit creativity, but rather enhances it. Multitudes of sonnets were written between the 13th century and the 18th, and they continue to be written today-except that now everyone ignores the poets who write them. Some of the greatest poetry in the English language is written in sonnet form, Shakespeare's sonnets being Exhibit A. Translate Shakespeare's sonnets into free verse, and they lose much of their beauty: the form complements the content.

Analogously, the Siamese twins of orthodoxy and orthopraxy paint clearly drawn lines for the Christian's thinking and acting. Far from inhibiting his personal expression, though, these parameters deepen the significance of his individual creativity. They do this by the obvious characteristic of providing context for his life and thoughts. An authoritative tradition spins a web of meaning which provides a referent for the individual; without this web, the individual becomes one of Democritus' atoms, falling through the void. The boundaries of the web also provide a standard for evaluating the quality of a person's life and activity: a bad sonnet might include anapestic and dactylic feet that disrupt the poem and distract from its meaning, but a prose poem can include whatever feet may seem felicitous at the moment. Finally, the rigid rules of the sonnet make it quite apparent when one has been faithful to the form, while leaving room for occasional excellence within the same form.

The orthodox life is not a prose poem, but neither is it a tax form. Creative conformity, like the sonnet, can allow real, coherent significance while highlighting individual contributions as well. But here's my favorite part: the immutability of the sonnet's structure extends a ladder into the abyss of the individual's isolation, uniting the subject and the Other without destroying the distinction between them.

Egalitarianism Is for Dorks

Blanket egalitarianism is an impossible dream, not to mention a cultural nightmare. The fiction of across-the-board equality must be one of the silliest and most improbable projects launched by the Enlightenment-and that's saying something. Were it not for this notion's embededness in the contemporary West, were it not for its unceasing popularity with the ostensibly underprivileged, it would have died from sheer mockery long ago. But it persists, and its purported ramifications are continually thrust upon us. What content would there be to the current amnesty debates if it were not for this concept?

The utopian dream of moral, material, political, and gender egalitarianism appears to me to be an extraordinary extrapolation and misapplication of the imago dei of the Christian centuries. Back when Christendom was still Christian, all men were considered equal by virtue of creation in the image of God, and so of equal worth as men qua men before God, so there was an accepted ontological egalitarianism. This is the driving force behind works such as Lex Rex and De Jure Regni apud Scotos. Presbyterian theorists battled for the equality of all men before the law, for a legal egalitarianism based upon ontological egalitarianism. It was supposed to stop there, though, because the Creator had not only placed his image on all his human creatures, but had created hierarchies of authority, in institutions such as the family and the state, that were also the common inheritance of all men. There was an economic order in human society, analogical to the economic order of the Trinity, which placed boundaries on human equality, thus securing it and keeping it sane. Not only this, but there was a recognized hierarchy of talent and achievement, usually called "gifts and graces," which differentiated between the excellent and the rest. Fast forward four centuries: now egalitarian thinking has been extended to pretty much anything it could conceivably encompass, and then some.

However, it seems to me that the nature of things militates against the idea that all persons must be equal in everything. God's universe is not an equal opportunity employer, and neither is any other organization, despite frequent claims to the contrary. A hierarchy of worth seems to me to be implicit not only in the Scriptures, but also in the natural order. And you can insert here the best arguments for meritocracy and neo-feudalism that you can find; I won't bother to reiterate. What concerns me is the inability of Americans, Christian or otherwise, to get it through their heads that one person might be more worthy, by reason of gifts or graces, than the next. Particularly we cannot wrap our minds around the concept that person x might be more worthy than moi.

Perhaps it is because I was both home-schooled by my Chilean mother and raised in the Presbyterian church, but I find this failure to accept the greater worthiness of another remarkable. I also find it particularly harmful to the church, which is the last refuge of hierarchy in the Biblical sense. How is the house of God to be ruled if all Christians are created, and remain, equal? How are families to function when respect for hierarchy and worth are such foreign concepts? Conservative Christians pay lip service to these notions, but try telling someone at church that you think Bob Smith is more worthy than you yourself are, by both grace and nature. Your conversation partner is likely to nod smilingly, thinking that you are simply paying Bob a compliment. If you insist that you are attempting to express your opinion that Bob is literally more worthy than you are, because of both his talents and his achievements, your conversation partner will probably do a double-take and start looking for his kids.

Human society cannot function felicitously without hierarchy, whether of authority, achievement, or worth. Blanket egalitarianism will by definition stunt all that is best, in whatever sphere it may be found. The endemic nature of blanket egalitarianism is leeching the vitality not of our civilization, but of our very humanity. So go find someone that's a better man than you are, and tell him so.

Argumentum ad Misericordiam

"Theodicy in the post-war era is excessively difficult, if not impossible." How many times have we heard this sort of sentiment pronounced, usually with the utmost gravity? And this is the opinion of persons who are friendly toward Christianity, not just that of its enemies. Generally, I think this statement is meant to express that the mass killing of Jews in Europe implies the death of theodicy; certainly the current irreligiosity of the non-Muslim population of Europe is blamed in large part on the experience of the war.

Why is this objection considered valid? It is as if large segments of Christendom decided in the middle of the 20th century that God, after failing to live up to corporate expectations for quite a while, was finally fired-without severance pay. The objection seems to me to be just one more manifestation of what C.S. Lewis described as placing "God in the dock." I also believe that this objection exhibits, in a general way, the argumentum ad misericordiam, also known as the informal fallacy of the "appeal to pity."

No doubt the events of the World Wars were mind-numbing in their demonstration of the human capacity for evil, but traditionally Christianity had told us that this is precisely what we should expect from fallen man. The Enlightenment faulted Christianity for a pessimistic view of human nature, and then its heirs blamed God when humanity turned out to live down to revealed expectations. "Frailty, thy name is Christendom."

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the West felt obligated not only to give God a pink slip, but also to attempt in some way to make reparations to the Jews; the rejection of Christ's atonement meant that sin had to be expiated in some other way. Now, I don't have the slightest inclination to mitigate the horror of what was perpetrated on the Jewish people; however, it seems to me that the general contours of the above-mentioned fallacious argument have, as a result of this desire to assuage collective residual guilt, insinuated themselves into biblical and theological scholarship. Whatever was rightly owed to the Jews after the war, skewing our scholarly perspectives was not part of the reparations package. Residual feelings of guilt, while they might be well-founded, do not serve well as foundational sentiments for biblical or theological studies.

This criticism occurred to me while reading N.T. Wright's Jesus and the Victory of God. Wright, an English Episcopalian, in one passage attacks Bultmann's reading of the New Testament simply because Bultmann concurred with the 19th-century Continental sentiment that the New Testament is not particularly Jewish. Not that I desire to defend Bultmann; I simply object to seeing him attacked on these grounds. Wright goes on to provide an influential account of the New Testament that steeps the primitive Christian church in first-century Judaism, an account which rides in part on the post-war popularity of re-Judaizing the New Testament-which popularity Wright cites favorably.

On the local front here in Brooklyn, Steve Schlissel, a Jewish Christian, has urged an understanding of the Reformed faith that is thoroughly informed by Hebraic and rabbinic theory and praxis. Again, not that I object to Hebraic revisions of the Enlightenment project; I simply object to the persistent emotionalism of Schlissel's appeal. Schlissel rarely states why a particular Jewish practice or perspective is preferable; he presents these proposals as simply preferable because of their Jewishness.

It is this emotionalism, whether in a scholar such as Wright or a popular preacher such as Schlissel, which I object to. The appeal in part resorts to a "the more Jewish it is, the better it is" dynamic. And this dynamic is fueled, at least in part, by the residual guilt of the post-war West. This particular appeal to pity has been effective in the cases of both these men; that does not mitigate the fallaciousness of its structure.

The Inalienable Rights of God

During the Tribeca Film Festival, I experienced what is sometimes termed a "brain fart." On May Day 2006, on my way to an utterly inhibition-free Czech film, which I regret having watched, I emerged from the subway in the middle of the New York City illegal immigrant rally. There were a lot of people there. Probably not as many as the Times said there were, but there were a lot. What with the crowd and the police barricades, I nearly didn't make it to see Jan Svankmajer's "Lunacy."

But I did hear something that was at least as bizarre as watching amputated body parts wriggle in and out of sculptures and cow skulls. While I was struggling through the crowd, I heard part of a speech that was being given in support of the rally. "We demand the basic rights that make us human! We demand the right to health care, the right to housing, and the right to education for our kids!" Granted, the pronouncements of a hysterical woman who is rapidly alternating between two languages at a large rally should not be taken at face value. To justify my dismay, though, the speaker made essentially the same point in both Spanish and English.

We demand the basic rights that make us human. If we do decide to give these people amnesty, maybe we should insert basic ontology into the citizenship curriculum. But, more seriously, the rampant rights-talk that pervades our conversation really has degenerated to this point. Rover has rights, and government benefits make Jose human. Does this strike anyone else as nonsense?

Rights-talk was always a doomed enterprise. Although I must admit that I find Locke's trinity of "life, liberty, and property" appealing, it didn't take too long before those damn Yankees turned "property" into "the pursuit of happiness." Ms. Hysteria was at least specific in her tabulation.

I am going to exercise my right to free speech to opine that "human rights" is currently among the most meaningless of concepts-along with "freedom." But, since rights-talk still seems to resonate, I would like to plead for the inalienable rights of God. God's rights, like the black man's, were not high on the priority list at the time of the Founding. God, in the First Amendment, did get the right to be left alone-which was a lot more than the French were willing to give him.

It seems to me that this arrangement is exactly backwards. From the viewpoint of Original Presbyterianism, God gets the inalienable rights, like the right to innovation-free worship, the right to respectful use of his name, the right to explicit political acknowledgement of him and explicit political support of his church and its confession. Humans get the privilege-the true privelege-of obedience. And it is that obedience alone that can make them happy (to which happiness they are not entitled).

I grant that it is monstrously unlikely that anyone will make a compelling political theory out of this any time soon, but there it is. Maybe John Rawls could have made it work-he was fairly good at revitalizing discredited political theories. Maybe if he had established the inalienable rights of God, I would agree that he was a genius.