Intellectual Jurisdiction

I was leading a group of men through a study of a particular passage in the Bible a few years back, and I made a tangential point about the U.S. Constitution. The particular passage we were in affirmed human depravity especially at a geopolitical level, and I thought the U.S. Constitution was a decent rubric to prove that the Founders assumed this same human depravity the Bible did. In my mind, without referencing this in the study, I was thinking of Federalist Paper #52 (written by James Madison, Framer par excellence) where Publius affirms that checks and balances are needed in the three branches of government because "ambition checks ambition." Because men were prone to power, I assumed, men were prone to depravity. If the Constitution recognized this fundamental flaw of humanity, and created a system to where no one's individual ambition could rule the day, I imagined this a good way to deal with the depravity of humankind at a governmental level.

This comment was not received well. Not well at all. The flow of the entire study was interrupted and a gentleman in the bible study said that the Constitution said nothing about depravity, and I was wrong to superimpose my religious beliefs into the world's oldest still-standing body of law. He clearly didn't connect the dots that I did.

Ultimately, our disagreement came down to his misunderstanding of what I meant by depravity (and indeed the Calvinist understanding of total depravity, which is distinct from utter depravity- that humans are as bad as we can be). Our disagreement also came down to his misunderstanding of what I claimed the Constitution actually says. Notice, I said, the Constitution assumes depravity. I did not say it claims human depravity as a theological disposition. Nay, it merely presupposes that human depravity is a reality to navigate in order for effective government to occur.

In our disagreement, he tried to correct me. He even told me he respected me as a theologian but that I knew little of history and therefore wasn't qualified to comment on it (this despite the fact that I studied history intensely in undergraduate school, and continue to read widely in history).

The issue crystallized a larger issue though: what can a pastor credibly comment on? What can any of us credibly comment on? Do I need a degree or an advanced degree to opine upon any matter of liberal arts? Can I comment on anything at all if it doesn't have to do with the Bible?

These are difficult questions for someone who's favorite writer- or one of- is G.K. Chesterton, who commented on nearly every matter of human existence during the time he graced planet earth.

These are also difficult questions for someone who admires humility, even epistemic humility. It is indeed a matter of great care when someone acknowledges what or how much they do not, in fact, know. What to do?

Academicians often call this the question of intellectual jurisdiction: what can an academician credibly comment on without going outside their bounds of personal knowledge and authority?

For instance, I grow mad when Bart Ehrman attempts to discredit the historicity of Jesus when his arguments have been disproven for decades in the fields of archaeology and biblical history (Holy Week alert: some major media outlet will utilize Ehrman this week, I'd gamble). Ehrman, despite posing as an authority, steps beyond the bounds of his intellectual jurisdiction. But does the misuse of knowledge outlaw the entire venture for unified knowledge completely? I don't think so.

In our narrowing intellectual climate- where dissertations in biology are written about some random strain of a strain of a virus (okay, I have zero intellectual jurisdiction in biology)- true knowledge grows ever more fragmented. Dissertations in New Testament are written about some esoteric piece of theology that won't matter for anyone except the one who gets awarded the Ph.D.

Furthermore, we live in an era characterized by philosophical postmodernism, which is skeptical of every meta-narrative claim (ie "all of life is about _____"). Fragmented knowledge is already our mileau, and further fragmented knowledge is where we are headed.

I'm left wondering, even in our epistemic humility, if the project for related, inter-related, and expansive knowledge is still worth it? I think it is. Despite the hazards it causes me in the occasional bible study, I will pursue knowledge and truth. All forms of it. Though I'm finite, I won't allow someone to outwit or discredit me simply because he or she is an "authority." I will simply learn on my own, even without the credential.

Intellectual jurisdiction is important, but overrated.

Peyton Manning, Myself, and Worship

It's a common cliche that being a fan comes from the root word fanatic. Color me fanatic then.

I blame my parents, really. I grew up mostly in Knoxville, Tennessee, home of the University of Tennessee, also my alma mater. My mom graduated from there. Both my sisters graduated from there. So I'll pass some of that blame to my sisters too. On top of that, my dad was always a huge sports fan. Ever since I can remember, I was wearing orange and rooting for the Vols.

Some things just always seemed constant: the Vols had a great quarterback, we always beat Kentucky, and I always told every other elementary school kid that Tennessee was better than their school (especially when I lived in Ohio for a while).

My journey with Peyton (for he only needs one name to be known in my parts) began when I was in fifth grade. Already being fanatical about the men in Orange and White, I was at the very first college football game that Peyton ever started, against Washington State in 1994. I remind you, fifth grade.

I suppose it's rare that someone's boyhood sports hero grows all the way into adulthood with you. I mean, I'm a father now, and Peyton is still playing football. And I'm still fanatical. I went to the Broncos-Colts game 2 seasons ago with a close friend. Did I wear a Broncos shirt? Yes. Yes I did. Under my #16 Peyton Manning jersey from the University of Tennessee. Some loves seem to only grow with the sweet passage of time.

And now my boyhood hero "follows" me to Denver to play his remaining days of professional football. Truly, I love the Broncos. They were the first and easiest team to rally behind once I moved here. Loving this city meant loving it's teams. But some loves have a ceiling when the one you really want is so far away. But no longer. Now I really love the Broncos.

I'm not sure if I can get to the place in my sports-fan experience to truly comprehend the day when Peyton Manning will no longer play football. It's an emotional place I'm probably not prepared for. So, I'll enjoy these waning days like there is no end. I'll just be naive about the deeper things.

The deeper things: what an odd phenomenon sports and sports heroes are.

I used to never understand the concept of idolatry. All over the Old Testament people find wooden poles or golden things and they worship them. Always seemed bizarre to me. A wooden pole isn't that exciting, after all.

So when I read the passage in Exodus about Moses and his people, I'm confused. Moses is hanging out on the top of a mountain with God. It's quite the thunderous experience as Moses receives the law with which to give his people from his God- the exclusive, the God. God tells Moses to go down though, because the people are practicing wickedness. They collected everyone's gold and decided it'd be a good idea to melt it and make a golden calf and talk about how awesome it is.

Over 400 years of slavery, and the golden calf they just made gets all the credit for the miraculous events they've witnessed. That story used to make no sense to me. That is, until I understood sports in my life. Until I came up close and personal with my emotions and with my boyhood idol.

When my beloved Volunteers won or when Manning won, my heart was filled with glee. When they won. Oh, when they won. Joy. Inexpressible joy. But, when my beloved Volunteers used to lose or when Manning lost, I'd be sad. I'd be angry. There wouldn't be words. I wouldn't want to talk to anybody about it. But since when did the outcome of a game have to affect my whole sense of contentment? How did that happen?

Consider Aaron. He responds to Moses about the whole calf deal:

"Do not be angry, my lord...You know how prone these people are to evil. They said to me, 'Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him.' So I told them, 'Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.' Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!"

I'm not sure if my sense of contentedness, as it's so connected to Manning, is so different from people throwing some gold into a fire.

We humans will worship anything. We all worship. My temptation is to not make Peyton Manning god, but just let him be a guy that throws an oblong ball to other people, and to enjoy it as mildly as possible. That's so hard for me.

There are other gods afoot, most of them of my own creation, you see.

The Two Men of Bullying

Bullying isn't what you think it is; it's not quite the movement we've been led to believe in popular media.

John Cloud of Time, in a feature article, demonstrates the myths of the bullying epoch we seem to live in:

Other numbers suggest that many students are both victims and victimizers. In a survey of 43,000 high school students completed in 2010, the Josephson Institute's Center for Youth Ethics found that 47% had "been bullied, teased or taunted" at school but " that 50% had been bullies themselves. This suggest a lot of overlap between the two groups, meaning that the world isn't cleanly divided into bullies and victims.

Cloud goes on to describe this truth in particulars.

Lowe, who has been a principal in middle schools for 25 years, has found that bullying incidents are rarely simple cases of cool kids attacking outcasts. Once she starts poking around, she says, "I can guarantee you that no one is innocent on any of this. Something has come before."

We are both victims and victimizers. Both innocent and guilty.

In similar reading on Bensonian, I'm glad sociologists and principals are picking up on what Dickens so long again did.

Reviewing Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s book Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, Michiko Kakutani writes:

In a remarkable account of a meeting [Dostoevsky] had with Charles Dickens in 1862, Dostoyevsky recalled that the British novelist told him: “All the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity toward those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. ‘Only two people?’ I asked.”

Truly, our sociologists and novelists are only confirming what Saint Paul understood years ago, and even saints before him. That we are both created in the image of God and subject to the Fall. Saint Paul says it a little better than I do.

So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

-Romans 7:21-2

When we realize that evil cuts straight through the heart of even ourselves, we will seek a savior.

Laudator Temporis Acti

All things are wearisome,
   more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
   nor the ear its fill of hearing.
What has been will be again,
   what has been done will be done again;
   there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say,
   “Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
   it was here before our time. 

Ecclesiastes 1:8-10

When I graduated from graduate school, I told myself that for a year I wasn't going to read anything written in the last 50 years. That put my cut off point around C.S. Lewis, whom I allowed to nourish my soul still. That's because in seminary I always had to read the newest research, the newest books on ministry innovations, and the newest commentaries. One would think after graduating seminary I would have actually read Luther or Barth. But I didn't. I read new authors who talked about Luther and Barth, but I was never required to read them. So, for a year, I read Luther (though not Barth) and Chesterton and Calvin and Agatha Christie (one of these things is not like the other one).

And even still, after several years, I grow weary of re-invention and innovation and the clamor for newness. The great American myth of newness has even infiltrated the church. For instance, music must always be newer. Music texts must always be newer. Sermons must be fresh and meaningful and entertaining. As one who works in the church, believe me when I say it's hard to compete with YouTube and television for a congregation's entertainment.

In light of my rumination of the shadow of things which are past, I found some amusing reading this past week. I'm reading Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a book put together after his death, and of which only recent history has given us a thorough and authoratitive version of it. The irony is that Bonhoeffer speaks to his friend of his relationship to his fiancee:

Unfortunately, I am not yet of one mind with Maria in the area of literature...Most likely our age difference also shows in these literary matters as well. Maria's...generation has unfortunately grown up with very bad contemporary literature, and it is much more difficult for them to connect to older literature than for us...Do you know of one book from the best literature of the last fifteen years that you think will endure? I don't. It's partly wishy-washy, partly striking various poses, partly self-pitying sentiment- but no discernment, no thought, no clarity, no substance, and almost always a base, unfree use of language. On this point I am quite consciously a laudator temporis acti.

This last phrase in Latin means "one who praises the ancient time." He might as well have been writing about our contemporary literature.

The reason for such judgment is that time itself is the ultimate judge. The hymnbook has mostly good hymns because time has weeded out all the bad hymns written centuries ago. The reason classic literature is so good is that no other literature has really endured from it's milieu. Time has judged that which is bad. There is a lot of bad music and books being written today, just like in any age, but we haven't had the patience to let time do it's work.

We should therefore care more about older things than various fads. It's the love of the things of the past that help us determine what in our own time is ephemeral and kitsch versus what is lasting and significant. The Arab Spring mattered. The Grammys do not. Usually what's trending on Twitter does not. After all, isn't what's trending only a matter of minutes usually?

With all this clamor for newness, like the writer of Ecclesiastes, I join the chorus of "Vanity!"

Down-Syndrome and the Moral Mess

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.

Isaiah 5:20

Time Magazine has a feature article this week on the improving technology for detecting Down-Syndrome in the womb. The news isn't good.

Because of this improved technology, abortions are expected to rise, and the article already puts Down-Syndrome "pregnancy terminations" at about the 90% range. Somehow, this earlier-detection technology relieves a little more moral weight. If we can kill a child at week 7, then that's better than week 15 or 20. What a sad state of affairs. If viability makes someone a human, then I visit a lot of non-humans in hospitals these days. Woe to those who call evil good.

One doesn't have to be a hermit to understand other implications of detecting Down-Syndrome in the womb either. You have seen it in the media-as well, I have friends- that when Down-Syndrome is detected that people are considered moral monsters for having the child. "The child will suffer," they say. I've had friends who have Down-Syndrome; they aren't suffering. Our own sense of freedom might decrease, but that doesn't change the fundamental humanness of someone with Down-Syndrome. Woe to those who call good evil.

Perhaps a different moral example will clear matters up. In India and China, when gender is discovered in the womb, little girls inside their moms are routinely aborted. The quintessential question becomes, what is the fundamental difference between this and children with Down-Syndrome? What is fundamentally distinct? People could make the same argument for women in patriarchal cultures: "they will suffer." But nothing is fundamentally distinct. Reminds me of a Reagan quote something to the tune of "I can't help but notice that all those in favor of abortion have been born."

Sadly, though the Time article acknowledges the moral muddle of the technology (and we should add, it's benefits: it is helpful for parents keeping the child to walk through the emotions and plan before the child is born), the interviews conducted in the article leave the ambiguity on a morally clear situation. Even some of the parents in the article who did have the child honestly weighed "pros" and "cons" to having the child. Woe to those who call evil ambiguity.

Perhaps the moral root of this quandary will never leave us. We are selfish and we hate suffering, so if someone else will make us suffer let's end them before we have to lay eyes on them. But perhaps, just maybe, those who come after us will view this issue like American slavery is now viewed from 150 years of distance. We'll end an enormous moral problem.

Join me in this cause. It's the small issues, like Down-Syndrome early detection and resulting termination, where hearts and minds need to begin to be changed. If it can't be changed in our laws, let's begin to change it in the people around us lovingly and with respect.