Logically Speaking

For everyone's benefit, let us avoid romanticizing the days when "everyone" studied some form of logic. Familiarity with the discipline has never implied its consistent or appropriate use. However, now that logic is rarely studied at all, appeals to it are for the most part either amusingly or annoyingly meaningless. Does that seem too harsh? Consider that a speaker appeals to logic; it is unlikely that he himself is familiar with the discipline in any form, and even less likely that a majority of his hearers are. Which makes his appeal to logic about as substantive as an appeal to nano-computation.

But the funny thing about logic is, as much as it is spurned in study, it still retains powerful emotional ties to the popular mind. This emotional tug of logic on the nous of the populace is explicable by a lingering affection for reason; it is ironic, though, since rigorous rationality is the last thing the poster [post-everything] mind desires. Logic is the bomb-shell ex that you sometimes remember fondly but can't stand in person.

More ironic than the poster's incantation of logic in an affectionate though meaningless manner is what he means when he says "logic" or "logical." Even a brief examination of a popular address in which some form of the noun "logic" occurs will reveal that the speaker most likely intends something along the lines of "this makes sense to me." Thus, "This is the only logical way of looking at x" becomes intelligible as "This is the only way of looking at x that makes sense to me." The poster mind has even succeeded in vaporizing logic via the narcissistic ego.

Of course, logic is not yet as arcane a discipline as, say, Latin. The academy still occasionally seeks to implement it--usually in philosophical or theological papers. However, outside scholarly writing, the appeal to logic is usually just a "red herring" on the way to another non sequitur.

Joe Ratzinger Needs to Grow a Pair

American Philistine is highly disappointed with Joe Ratzinger's flip-flopping on the "evil and inhuman" Mohammed quotation. Since when does the Pope apologize to anybody, let alone to a bunch of Mahometans who somehow manage to get in a tizzy over a serene and erudite speech?

And where are the angry Protestants in all of this? Joe R. did not directly criticize Mahometans, in fact his speech had little to do with them at all (see the link below), but he did single out Protestants for criticism. Where is Rick Warren demanding that Joe R. find a better purpose in Germany than taking pot-shots at Protestants?

Pope’s Regrets Over Statement Fail to Quiet a Storm of Protests - New York Times

Ernst Troeltsch

Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Western Theology: Ernst Troeltsch

Joe Ratzinger Pisses Off Ragheads

Nobody would mistake me for being pro-Catholic. Protestantism is in my blood and my brain, to the extent that my main interest in Ireland, where I will be going next year for my anniversary, is meeting the Orangemen. That said, Joe Ratzinger did a helluva job on this speech, and I believe that, with typically Protestant reservations, he ought to be commended and defended against the suicide-bombing peoples of the world.

The speech:
Meeting with the representatives of science at the University of Regensburg

Annie Dillard on Seeing

I'm re-reading Annie Dillard's remarkable Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. The following is an excerpt:

"I was sitting on the sycamore log bridge with the sunset at my back, watching the shiners the size of minnows who were feeding over the muddy sand in skittery schools. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split second across the current and flash! the sun shot out from its silver side. I couldn't watch for it. It was always just happening somewhere else, and it drew my vision just as it disappeared: flash, like a sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade, a sparking over a dun and olive ground at chance intervals from every direction. Then I noticed white specks, some sort of pale petals, small, floating from under my feet on the creek's surface, very slow and steady. So I blurred my eyes and gazed towards the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the world's turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down the a rolling scroll of time. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone.

When I see this way I see truly. As Thoreau says, I return to my senses. I am the man who watches the baseball game in silence in an empty stadium. I see the game purely; I'm abstracted and dazed. When it's all over and the white-suited players lope off the green field to their shadowed dugouts, I leap to my feet; I cheer and cheer.

But I can't go out and try to see this way. I'll fail, I'll go mad. All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort is really a discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West, under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod. The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and and gazing beyond it into the the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance. 'Launch into the deep,' say Jacques Ellul, 'and you shall see.'

The secret of seeing, then, is the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the kildeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return from the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth Ailinon, alleluia! I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff."

Newly Discovered Fragment of Heraclitus

"Good prose is better than sex."

Why We Watch Movies

This post is a draft of a presentation to be given on opening night at the Long Island Movie Night event.

Why, as Reformed Christians, do we watch movies? What justification, if any, can we give for spending a couple of hours at a time sitting passively in front of a screen? Beyond that, how can we rationalize inundating ourselves with the words, images, and actions of films which so often militate against our faith and the commandments of our God?

Film has been called "the art form of the twentieth (and, by extension, of the early twenty-first) century." Motion pictures have taken over the place formerly held by other public art forms in previous centuries. Whereas once painting, drama, literature, and music were important forms of public art, forms that had a nearly universal appeal and a massive popular and communal significance, we find that, to a large extent, film is left to us now as the one incarnation of art which we all enjoy together.

And that is not neccesarily a bad thing. Film has a remarkable capacity to incorporate the salient features of other art forms. Film unifies in its single format components of drama, literature, music, visual arts, and so on, and provides them with a nearly limitless platform for expression.

So far I have explained why Joe Pagan might justifiably be interested in watching movies. But what about our case as Christians?

Consider Augustine's comment on Exodus 12, where the Israelites are recorded as taking the riches of Egypt with them when they left:

“Whatever has been rightly said by the heathen, we must appropriate to

our uses.... For, as the Egyptians had...vessels and ornaments of gold and

silver, and garments, ...in the same way all branches of heathen learning ...

contain also...instruction which is...adapted to the use of truth, and

some most excellent precepts of morality; and some truths in regard even

to the worship of the one God are found among them. Now these are, so to

speak, their gold and silver, which they did not create themselves, but dug

out of the mines of God’s providence ... . These, therefore, the Christian ...

ought to take away from them, and to devote to their proper use in preaching

the gospel. Their garments, also--that is, human institutions such as are

adapted to that intercourse with men which is indispensable in this life--

we must take and turn to a Christian use.”

On Christian Doctrine, Book II, Ch. 40

This concept, known as "plundering the Egyptians," is related to the Creation Mandate in which God commanded Man to subdue the earth and rule over it in obedience to Him. It also ties in to the Great Commission, where Christ ordered his servants to disciple the nations. This is part of what we ask for when we pray, "Thy Kingdom come." We see this approach to pagan culture in Paul's actions on Mars Hill; we catch a glimpse of it in John's Apocalyptic vision of the "wealth of the nations" being brought into the New Jerusalem.

As Christians we are to privileged to discerningly appreciate the legitimate cultural productions of the world's societies, and to seek to appropriate what is good in them for the expansion of the Kingdom of God. By examining such productions in the light of God's revelation, we separate the wheat from the chaff, praising what is excellent and condemning what is wicked. For, as Augustine, Calvin, and Kuyper have taught us, whatever is excellent among the heathen is the work of the Spirit of God.

Churchy Church

I still remember the cute young couple that arrived at our small, thriving church in Southern Illinois. I couldn't have been older than 12 at the time, but my mother's comment to me has managed to survive the intervening years: "They're not used to it here. They come from a churchy church."

Odd, now that I think about it, that she should say that. Her statement was somewhat cryptic, of course, unless you knew her. As a refugee from superficial evangelicalism, she had developed a reflexive fear of a program-heavy Protestantism that emphasized appearances and lingo at the expense of community and day-to-day obedience. She had found safety in our local PCA congregation, where young families embraced the Reformed faith with enthusiasm and sincerely struggled to consistently live out its ramifications. The vitality of this congregation was obvious, in spite of, or perhaps because of, its lack of a youth group, ladies' Bible study, cell groups, outreach committee, etc. Put another way, our church was vital because it was an organism, not an artifice.

I'm too familiar with the anarchy attendant upon the "home-church" movement to naively think that a lack of organization generates an organic community. But I have had opportunity in the last few years to discover that the temptation to create a "churchy church," where programs, committees, and general busyness crowd out that sense of "bodyness" that one finds so rarely, is a very real one, even in the most ardently Reformed communions. Maybe Aristotle's "golden mean" is not a myth, but a secular statement of the sacred imperative to "turn not to the right hand, nor to the left."