Friday, February 17, 2006
Science and Education Redux
As usual, the Vatican agrees with me on intelligent design. The original story was in the 17 January edition of L'Osservatore Romano, but it's hard to read if you don't know Italian. So listen to the related story at NPR.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Science and Education
The Ohio Board of Education has rejected language that would have required science teachers to consider evidence that is not consistent with evolutionary theory when teaching biology.
Now, I'm already on record, in a number of posts from late last year, as opposing the teaching of creationism and intelligent design in biology classes. My view is, in a nutshell: creationism is not science, science is not religion, and intelligent design is an a priori metaphysical hypothesis that is not necessarily related to either science or religion.
Having said that, though, surely it is the case that any working scientist ought to know that one must always consider evidence that is not consistent with one's working hypothesis or with the presently dominant scientific theory. That is what it means for a theory to be a scientific one: it is testable in the sense that we can imagine conditions that would falsify it. Indeed, this is precisely why creationism is not science: it is not falsifiable. There is no empirical evidence that could possibly show that God did not create the kosmos in a special act of creation at some particular point of time in the past.
This is not to say that intelligent design is any more testable. It is not a testable hypothesis either, and so it cannot count as a scientific hypothesis. But it doesn't claim to be. It is a metaphysical hypothesis about structure and order as a first principle and an explanatory cause.
But if there were any empirical evidence that was inconsistent with evolutionary theory, of course it ought to be mentioned in any science class deserving the name. That is precisely what science is: the testing of hypotheses in the face of empirical evidence.
And the history of science shows quite clearly that the shelf-life of any given scientific hypothesis is finite.
Now, I'm already on record, in a number of posts from late last year, as opposing the teaching of creationism and intelligent design in biology classes. My view is, in a nutshell: creationism is not science, science is not religion, and intelligent design is an a priori metaphysical hypothesis that is not necessarily related to either science or religion.
Having said that, though, surely it is the case that any working scientist ought to know that one must always consider evidence that is not consistent with one's working hypothesis or with the presently dominant scientific theory. That is what it means for a theory to be a scientific one: it is testable in the sense that we can imagine conditions that would falsify it. Indeed, this is precisely why creationism is not science: it is not falsifiable. There is no empirical evidence that could possibly show that God did not create the kosmos in a special act of creation at some particular point of time in the past.
This is not to say that intelligent design is any more testable. It is not a testable hypothesis either, and so it cannot count as a scientific hypothesis. But it doesn't claim to be. It is a metaphysical hypothesis about structure and order as a first principle and an explanatory cause.
But if there were any empirical evidence that was inconsistent with evolutionary theory, of course it ought to be mentioned in any science class deserving the name. That is precisely what science is: the testing of hypotheses in the face of empirical evidence.
And the history of science shows quite clearly that the shelf-life of any given scientific hypothesis is finite.
Monday, February 13, 2006
Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!
The February 6 issue of The New Yorker has a rather strange essay by Timothy Ryback on Pope Benedict's visit, as Cardinal Ratzinger, to the cemetery at La Cambe in Normandy where, along with many other German soldiers, hundreds of S.S. are buried. The upshot of the essay, which runs from page 66 to page 73 with only one large photo and a few cartoons to break the pace, appears to be that Ratzinger/Benedict was morally amiss to say as little as he did about, not Nazi attrocities, but the guilt of the entire German people for allowing those Nazi attrocities.
Many are perhaps familiar with the arguments of Daniel Goldhagen, first in Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust and then in Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, to the effect that the German "race" as a whole bears full moral responsibility for the Nazi holocaust and the Roman Catholic Church, in particular, bears full moral responsibility--to the extent of owing reparations--for not merely standing by while it happened, but actively promoting its ends. Ryback's rant does not foam at the mouth as Goldhagen does, but it labors mighty hard to work up a lather over statements and actions that, upon reflection, seem perfectly harmless and, upon closer inspection still, are evidently benign.
Eventually one must wonder where all this animus against the German "race" comes from, if not from a noxious racism of the very sort deemed unacceptable in others, especially Germans. Another explanation is on offer, however, and I suppose it may even apply to Goldhagen. There is a tendency in some writers--more than a tendency in Ryback, as it turns out--to conflate individuals and institutions. It is ironic in a day and age in which Platonism is far from the minds of most of the self-styled "Brights" who criticism religion as an institution that moral responsibility should so often and so easily be transferred from the culpable individuals who commit great crimes to the institutions to which these individuals claim allegiance. This reification of institutional structures cannot be taken as a hopeful sign that Aristotelian essentialism is again on the rise: rather it is a sign of the incredibly sloppy moral reasoning to which we are subjected on an almost daily basis.
It would seem to be so obvious as to be a truism: individual persons engage in moral reasoning and make moral choices, therefore individual persons are the sole bearers of moral responsibility, the sole objects of praise and blame. Institutions become objects of praise or blame only indirectly, as blanket-terms covering a multitude of individuals. When John Paul the Great offered his "apology" for the actions of the Church, it is important to read the text of the apology very carefully, because it is quite clear that it is not the Church itself, qua Body of Christ, that has acted sinfully in the past, but only certain individuals claiming to act on behalf of the Church who have sinned. It should come as a surprise to no one that the Church contains sinners, but it apparently can still surprise some that the Church is not itself a sinner.
There are really two fallacies at work here. The first is the reification of something that cannot be a moral being; the second is to treat the "parts" of that reified whole as having all the same properties as the whole.
It really grates, though, when the responsible individuals are dead and gone and the rest of us are still pissed off about what they did. That's why it's so tempting to hold their tribe responsible for what they did. Hatred is always more tempting than forgiveness. For one thing, it's a lot easier. My son, who is twelve, is often irritated by his sister, who is four. She pesters him constantly to play with her, but he often refuses on the grounds that she has done this or that to him to make him angry. Last night, as I listened to yet another one of these squabbles, I decided to have a "teaching moment". I hauled out the Bible and made Michael read to me from Matthew 18.21-22: forgive your brother (or sister) seventy times seven times. As quickly as he finished reading it he was piping up: "But dad, I've already forgiven her more than seventy times seven times, and she keeps on doing the same things!" So after explaining to him about numbers in the Bible, I talked to him at some length about forgiveness, and how it is difficult to do, yet necessary, since those who do wrong are in need of something other than anger and hatred, ortherwise they would not be doing wrong. He actually caught on to this immediately: when I asked him why parents ought not to react in anger to children who do wrong he said "Because they're just stupid little kids--they don't know any better." But he understood that such children need some sort of discipline, otherwise they might wind up being seriously hurt. You do not beat up a sick person: you give him medicine. Forgiveness doesn't seem like medicine to us because we're too accustomed to desiring vengeance rather than rehabilitation. Hopefully, though, a parent who disciplines a child is not seeking the retributive suffering of that child, but his betterment.
For the Goldhagens, and perhpas the Rybacks, of the world, forgiveness as a principle is something one rolls ones eyes at:
Ryback clearly endorses this attitude towards forgiveness. He wants more retributive suffering, and he wants it from whomever he can extract it. The Germans as a "race", if that's all he can get, but ideally from the Catholic Church, which apparantly ought to have known better. Silly old Church--why can't you keep closer tabs on what your parts are doing? The Pope, of course, stands for the Church in ways that the rest of us can never hope to, but he is not identical to it, and Popes may err. When that happens--when a Pope sins--the Church itself remains sinless. The Pope is the vicar of Christ, and we do hold him to a higher standard because of that special role. But we ought not to act surprised when Popes do what Christ would have done: forgive even their bitterest enemies, even while hanging on the cross.
The title of Ryback's essay?
"Forgiveness"
Many are perhaps familiar with the arguments of Daniel Goldhagen, first in Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust and then in Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, to the effect that the German "race" as a whole bears full moral responsibility for the Nazi holocaust and the Roman Catholic Church, in particular, bears full moral responsibility--to the extent of owing reparations--for not merely standing by while it happened, but actively promoting its ends. Ryback's rant does not foam at the mouth as Goldhagen does, but it labors mighty hard to work up a lather over statements and actions that, upon reflection, seem perfectly harmless and, upon closer inspection still, are evidently benign.
Eventually one must wonder where all this animus against the German "race" comes from, if not from a noxious racism of the very sort deemed unacceptable in others, especially Germans. Another explanation is on offer, however, and I suppose it may even apply to Goldhagen. There is a tendency in some writers--more than a tendency in Ryback, as it turns out--to conflate individuals and institutions. It is ironic in a day and age in which Platonism is far from the minds of most of the self-styled "Brights" who criticism religion as an institution that moral responsibility should so often and so easily be transferred from the culpable individuals who commit great crimes to the institutions to which these individuals claim allegiance. This reification of institutional structures cannot be taken as a hopeful sign that Aristotelian essentialism is again on the rise: rather it is a sign of the incredibly sloppy moral reasoning to which we are subjected on an almost daily basis.
It would seem to be so obvious as to be a truism: individual persons engage in moral reasoning and make moral choices, therefore individual persons are the sole bearers of moral responsibility, the sole objects of praise and blame. Institutions become objects of praise or blame only indirectly, as blanket-terms covering a multitude of individuals. When John Paul the Great offered his "apology" for the actions of the Church, it is important to read the text of the apology very carefully, because it is quite clear that it is not the Church itself, qua Body of Christ, that has acted sinfully in the past, but only certain individuals claiming to act on behalf of the Church who have sinned. It should come as a surprise to no one that the Church contains sinners, but it apparently can still surprise some that the Church is not itself a sinner.
- Here is a box. It contains diamonds. Therefore the box is a diamond.
There are really two fallacies at work here. The first is the reification of something that cannot be a moral being; the second is to treat the "parts" of that reified whole as having all the same properties as the whole.
- Here is a BMW. The BMW costs thousands of dollars. Here is a bolt from the BMW. The bolt costs thousands of dollars.
- Here is a BMW. Here is a bolt from the BMW. The bolt is very cheap. Therefore the BMW is very cheap.
It really grates, though, when the responsible individuals are dead and gone and the rest of us are still pissed off about what they did. That's why it's so tempting to hold their tribe responsible for what they did. Hatred is always more tempting than forgiveness. For one thing, it's a lot easier. My son, who is twelve, is often irritated by his sister, who is four. She pesters him constantly to play with her, but he often refuses on the grounds that she has done this or that to him to make him angry. Last night, as I listened to yet another one of these squabbles, I decided to have a "teaching moment". I hauled out the Bible and made Michael read to me from Matthew 18.21-22: forgive your brother (or sister) seventy times seven times. As quickly as he finished reading it he was piping up: "But dad, I've already forgiven her more than seventy times seven times, and she keeps on doing the same things!" So after explaining to him about numbers in the Bible, I talked to him at some length about forgiveness, and how it is difficult to do, yet necessary, since those who do wrong are in need of something other than anger and hatred, ortherwise they would not be doing wrong. He actually caught on to this immediately: when I asked him why parents ought not to react in anger to children who do wrong he said "Because they're just stupid little kids--they don't know any better." But he understood that such children need some sort of discipline, otherwise they might wind up being seriously hurt. You do not beat up a sick person: you give him medicine. Forgiveness doesn't seem like medicine to us because we're too accustomed to desiring vengeance rather than rehabilitation. Hopefully, though, a parent who disciplines a child is not seeking the retributive suffering of that child, but his betterment.
For the Goldhagens, and perhpas the Rybacks, of the world, forgiveness as a principle is something one rolls ones eyes at:
John Pawlikowski, a professor of social ethics and the director of the Catholic-Jewish studies program at the Catholic Theological Union, in Chicago, took a somewhat different view [from that of Avery Cardinal Dulles, who explained that Christians ought to pray for their enemies and those who persecute them]. "I think there is a strong tendency, not only in the bone marrow of the average Christian but in the DNA of Christian ethicists and theologians, to emphasize forgiveness and reconciliation," he told me. He has worked with Holocause survivors and has spent years on the Holocaust Memorial Council, and these activities have tempered this instinct for forgiveness. Pawlikowski said that Ratzinger was right in leaving the fate of La Combe's war dead "in the hands of God," but he faulted him for not condemning that which should have been condemned: Catholic, if not German, culpability. "Many of the S.S. men were certainly raised as Catholics," Pawlikowski said. "They were part of this Church that we remain part of as well. They were catechized by that Church and may also have had the anti-Jewish attitudes that were so prevalent in the Church. We need to acknowledge that we catechized them in the wrong direction, and commit ourselves today to not repeating that sort of catechesis."It's a little scary to think that this Pawlikowski is a professor of any kind of ethics, in spite of the fact that he makes at least one true claim here--that we ought not to repeat any kind of shoddy catechesis that may have occurred. The glaring errors in his other claims, however, outweigh whatever truths he has hit upon accidentally. Consider the effortless slide he made, for example, from the claim that those S.S. men who were raised Catholic "were catechized by [the] Church" to the claim that "We need to acknowledge that we catechized them in the wrong direction." Who's "we", white man? Somebody catechized them in the wrong direction, that's for sure--but it was not "we" (I, for one, would have opposed it), and it wasn't the Church, either, since the Church explicitly condemns the very thing he's accusing it of teaching. Some particular idiotic individuals did the catechizing, and they are the morally culpable ones. We need to do what we can, again as individuals, to see to it that this sort of thing never happens again, but we won't be doing anybody any favors if we perpetuate moronic moral inferences of this sort.
Ryback clearly endorses this attitude towards forgiveness. He wants more retributive suffering, and he wants it from whomever he can extract it. The Germans as a "race", if that's all he can get, but ideally from the Catholic Church, which apparantly ought to have known better. Silly old Church--why can't you keep closer tabs on what your parts are doing? The Pope, of course, stands for the Church in ways that the rest of us can never hope to, but he is not identical to it, and Popes may err. When that happens--when a Pope sins--the Church itself remains sinless. The Pope is the vicar of Christ, and we do hold him to a higher standard because of that special role. But we ought not to act surprised when Popes do what Christ would have done: forgive even their bitterest enemies, even while hanging on the cross.
The title of Ryback's essay?
"Forgiveness"
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Twice the Fun
My lovely wife Lisa has joined me as a "team member" on this blog. Since she's always complaining about all the time I waste blogging it occurred to me that perhaps the best way to avoid her reproachful glances would be to turn the tables on her and make her my partner in crime. Misery loves company after all, and now I can be the one doling out the reproachful glances.
Lisa will be the political arm of our operation--although I love to talk politics I confess my interest is often more theoretical than is to most folks' tastes, so Lisa, whose eyes glaze over whenever I start talking philosophy, will be able to keep the political posts from becoming too boring.
Sadly, the other posts will be just as boring as ever, if not more so, now that the pressure to be less boring is off.
Lisa will be the political arm of our operation--although I love to talk politics I confess my interest is often more theoretical than is to most folks' tastes, so Lisa, whose eyes glaze over whenever I start talking philosophy, will be able to keep the political posts from becoming too boring.
Sadly, the other posts will be just as boring as ever, if not more so, now that the pressure to be less boring is off.
Saturday, February 11, 2006
Meme Me Up, Scottie
Mike Liccione memed me. I can't tell whether this is a good or a bad thing, but here goes.
4 jobs you have had in your life
I think I will pass over in silence the fact that the term "meme" was introduced by my good friend Richard Dawkins.
4 jobs you have had in your life
- Clerk in a Logos bookstore
- Computer programmer
- Professor of classics
- Professor of philosophy
- The Lord of the Rings
- Beetlejuice
- Jesus of Nazareth
- Pather Panchali
- Kent, Ohio
- Chapel Hill, North Carolina
- New Brunswick, New Jersey
- Athens, Ohio
- Seinfeld
- Law and Order
- Curb Your Enthusiasm
- Nature
- London, England
- Paris, France
- West Palm Beach, Florida
- Ann Arbor, Michigan
- Sacramentum Vitae
- On The Square
- Mark Steyn
- Best of the Web
- sushi
- Anything Thai
- QPC
- Maple syrup, straight up, with a twist
- Paris, France
- Anyplace warm
- Southern California
- Paris, France
I think I will pass over in silence the fact that the term "meme" was introduced by my good friend Richard Dawkins.
Olivia Day
It was four years ago today that Lisa and I drove to Columbus to pick up Olivia Grace, our newly adopted daughter. Her birthday is not until April, but we've made it a point to celebrate "Olivia Day" every year. Soon she will turn five, and already it's getting hard to believe how quickly she's growing up.
The picture says it all--she's cast her spell over the whole family.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
The Plateau
According to a CNS report, Cormac Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, of Westminster, England, sees ecumenism achieving a plateau with the threatened (if that is the right word) consecration of a woman as a bishop in the Anglican Communion. For those of us who have longed for a greater union with the Anglican Communion but for whom the traditional teaching of the Magisterium is the final arbiter with respect to what is Good, Just, and True, the plateau has, perhaps, already been crossed with the consecration of a bishop who rejects the traditional teaching on the Sacrament of Matrimony and the willfull ignoring of another bishop who rejects the teachings on the Real Presence and the Resurrection. For us, we are already more than half-way down the other side of the mountain.
I'm not altogether sure why the plateau wasn't reached when the first women were ordained to the priesthood. The Cardinal notes that "a bishop is in a particular way a figure of unity," but he also admits that once you've admitted women to the priesthood "it's probably inevitable that in due course there will be the ordination of women as bishops." In any case, the teaching has to do with the admission of women to Holy Orders simpliciter, not the admission of women to any particular grade of Holy Orders. But his point is taken: if things were bad before, they are beyond worse now, what with traditional morality under attack and the last vestiges of doctrinal slowly dissolving in the acid of contemporary secular values.
A possible complication to this mess, however, of particular interest to folks like me, is the question it raises about the status of folks in the more traditional dioceses in this country who now style themselves as the Anglican Communion Network (see, for example, the website for the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh). Most of them, so far as I know, have no objection to the ordination of women to the priesthood--their decision to mark themselves off somehow from the rest of the Episcopal Church was grounded not in the ordination of women, but rather in the consecration of Gene Robinson. One way to view that consecration, one might have thought, is as a camel-back breaking straw, but apparently it was something rather different. After all, if there is nothing wrong with the admission of women to Holy Orders, then the only reasons for excluding them from the episcopacy are purely prudential rather than moral, and it would be a matter of considerable injustice to prevent them from holding that position. No: if they may not be bishops, the only reason that is morally permissible is that they may not be admitted Holy Orders at all. But most members of the Anglican Communion Network appear to accept the legitimacy of admitting women to Holy Orders, so presumably they will have no objection to the consecration of women as bishops.
These things are mysterious for now, however, since I, for one, haven't seen any statements from members of the ACN on this particular question. In the end, one must trust in God and pray that His will be done.
I'm not altogether sure why the plateau wasn't reached when the first women were ordained to the priesthood. The Cardinal notes that "a bishop is in a particular way a figure of unity," but he also admits that once you've admitted women to the priesthood "it's probably inevitable that in due course there will be the ordination of women as bishops." In any case, the teaching has to do with the admission of women to Holy Orders simpliciter, not the admission of women to any particular grade of Holy Orders. But his point is taken: if things were bad before, they are beyond worse now, what with traditional morality under attack and the last vestiges of doctrinal slowly dissolving in the acid of contemporary secular values.
A possible complication to this mess, however, of particular interest to folks like me, is the question it raises about the status of folks in the more traditional dioceses in this country who now style themselves as the Anglican Communion Network (see, for example, the website for the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh). Most of them, so far as I know, have no objection to the ordination of women to the priesthood--their decision to mark themselves off somehow from the rest of the Episcopal Church was grounded not in the ordination of women, but rather in the consecration of Gene Robinson. One way to view that consecration, one might have thought, is as a camel-back breaking straw, but apparently it was something rather different. After all, if there is nothing wrong with the admission of women to Holy Orders, then the only reasons for excluding them from the episcopacy are purely prudential rather than moral, and it would be a matter of considerable injustice to prevent them from holding that position. No: if they may not be bishops, the only reason that is morally permissible is that they may not be admitted Holy Orders at all. But most members of the Anglican Communion Network appear to accept the legitimacy of admitting women to Holy Orders, so presumably they will have no objection to the consecration of women as bishops.
These things are mysterious for now, however, since I, for one, haven't seen any statements from members of the ACN on this particular question. In the end, one must trust in God and pray that His will be done.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Multiculturalism vs Liberalism
In an interesting post Sunday about the Present Prophetic Cartoon Kerfuffle columnist Mark Steyn notes that
I think it's important to remember that for every weirdo throwing a Molotov cocktail there are many thousands of devout Muslims who would never dream of acting violently towards even the worst of sinners. Islam, like Christianity, worships the God of Mercy and Compassion. The violent folks are not acting qua Muslim when they act violently. There are Christians who sometimes act that way too, though you don't hear about them very often, and they are not acting qua Christian when they act that way, either. These people are not religious fanatics, they are simply fanatics.
For people like that, democracy is actually a Bad Thing, since it tolerates dissident views. In this sense these fanatics are no different from the Communists or the Fascists, for whom the elimination of opposing views by whatever means necessary is licit if done in service to The Cause. When I was in college there used to be these student groups who set up tables in the Student Union to display their literature, and I used to like to go to the Young Spartacus League table, because those guys were off the scale in terms of political wackiness. They were always willing to argue with people stopping by, however, so I often took the liberty. I asked one of them once why he advocated revolution and violence to bring about his Workers' Paradise--why not use democratic methods instead. His answer, given in all sincerity, was quite simple: probably the majority of folks wouldn't approve of the programs they would put in place, so you have to force it on them. Shouldn't the majority rule, I asked. No, only the workers should have any say. But a lot of workers--at least in this country--don't support communism either, I said. That doesn't matter, he said, they will once we've re-educated them to support it.
Well, it's a point of view. I hope you will forgive my sense of Schadenfreude when I report that this conversation took place in 1976--not long before a very different Revolution took place that my Young Spartacan could not have felt very happy about, the Reagan Revolution, followed by the fall of European Communism. I hope he's been re-educated sufficiently to appreciate how much better off he is now than he would have been after his own revolution.
Folks who insist that everything be their way or the highway (to hell) are not thoughtful people. This is true not only of pseudo-Muslim fanatics throwing bombs at people but also of the intolerant Left in our own political culture. One reason why a joke like "Cruci-fixin's" is acceptable in (some parts of) our culture is because Christianity itself is growing ever less acceptable to the folks on the left for whom Christianity represents sexual repression and anti-materialist zealotry. A TV show that makes a blasphemous joke about an innocent person's cruel, tortured death throes is quite different from a riot, of course, but both are about as inappropriate as you can get. I imagine that some of the same people responsible for making jokes about the unimagineably cruel death by crucifixion, which usually involved six or seven hours of horrendous pain and agony, are also very much opposed to the death penalty in our country, which usually takes all of 10 minutes--but consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, I suppose.
I am not a Muslim, and there are aspects of Muslim culture that do not appeal to me. I might be tempted to write about those aspects someday, but I would never make derogatory remarks about the Prophet himself, simply out of deference to the idea that intelligent people can differ about the nature of the True and the Good. It is precisely this deference that makes genuine dialogue possible, and it is dialogue that makes Liberalism--the only kind of multiculturalism that matters--possible. This is a fact that is lost on the likes of the writers for "Will and Grace", as it is lost on many of the self-styled "Brights" who ridicule Christianity and its contributions to Western civilization. For such people, the elimination of religion is not too much to hope for, even if it means re-educating the millions of persons for whom religion is our only contact with what Plato called "the really real." For these fanatics, it's their way or the highway. They are the intellectual fascists of our time.
Very few societies are genuinely multicultural. Most are bicultural: On the one hand, there are folks who are black, white, gay, straight, pre-op transsexual, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, worshippers of global-warming doom-mongers, and they rub along as best they can. And on the other hand are folks who do not accept the give-and-take, the rough-and-tumble of a "diverse" "tolerant" society, and, when one gently raises the matter of their intolerance, they threaten to kill you, which makes the question somewhat moot.This is a very important point. Personally, I would never dream of portraying the Prophet in a cartoon--not because I'm afraid my house would be fire bombed but simply as a matter of respect for my Muslim brethren to whom such a depiction would be blasphemous. I am always heartened when I hear of Muslims who are indignant about negative depictions of Jesus, and I am happy to return them the favor when it comes to their own religion. Like many, I was outraged by the "Cruci-fixin's" that was to have been one of the main anti-Christian jokes on an upcoming episode of "Will and Grace" (since pulled by the network), so I think I can understand how faithful Muslims feel about the way their Prophet is sometimes used for political or social purposes. But there is obviously a difference between feeling outraged or, perhaps more consistently, saddened by such things and going down to the nearest Consulate and throwing stones at people.
I think it's important to remember that for every weirdo throwing a Molotov cocktail there are many thousands of devout Muslims who would never dream of acting violently towards even the worst of sinners. Islam, like Christianity, worships the God of Mercy and Compassion. The violent folks are not acting qua Muslim when they act violently. There are Christians who sometimes act that way too, though you don't hear about them very often, and they are not acting qua Christian when they act that way, either. These people are not religious fanatics, they are simply fanatics.
For people like that, democracy is actually a Bad Thing, since it tolerates dissident views. In this sense these fanatics are no different from the Communists or the Fascists, for whom the elimination of opposing views by whatever means necessary is licit if done in service to The Cause. When I was in college there used to be these student groups who set up tables in the Student Union to display their literature, and I used to like to go to the Young Spartacus League table, because those guys were off the scale in terms of political wackiness. They were always willing to argue with people stopping by, however, so I often took the liberty. I asked one of them once why he advocated revolution and violence to bring about his Workers' Paradise--why not use democratic methods instead. His answer, given in all sincerity, was quite simple: probably the majority of folks wouldn't approve of the programs they would put in place, so you have to force it on them. Shouldn't the majority rule, I asked. No, only the workers should have any say. But a lot of workers--at least in this country--don't support communism either, I said. That doesn't matter, he said, they will once we've re-educated them to support it.
Well, it's a point of view. I hope you will forgive my sense of Schadenfreude when I report that this conversation took place in 1976--not long before a very different Revolution took place that my Young Spartacan could not have felt very happy about, the Reagan Revolution, followed by the fall of European Communism. I hope he's been re-educated sufficiently to appreciate how much better off he is now than he would have been after his own revolution.
Folks who insist that everything be their way or the highway (to hell) are not thoughtful people. This is true not only of pseudo-Muslim fanatics throwing bombs at people but also of the intolerant Left in our own political culture. One reason why a joke like "Cruci-fixin's" is acceptable in (some parts of) our culture is because Christianity itself is growing ever less acceptable to the folks on the left for whom Christianity represents sexual repression and anti-materialist zealotry. A TV show that makes a blasphemous joke about an innocent person's cruel, tortured death throes is quite different from a riot, of course, but both are about as inappropriate as you can get. I imagine that some of the same people responsible for making jokes about the unimagineably cruel death by crucifixion, which usually involved six or seven hours of horrendous pain and agony, are also very much opposed to the death penalty in our country, which usually takes all of 10 minutes--but consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, I suppose.
I am not a Muslim, and there are aspects of Muslim culture that do not appeal to me. I might be tempted to write about those aspects someday, but I would never make derogatory remarks about the Prophet himself, simply out of deference to the idea that intelligent people can differ about the nature of the True and the Good. It is precisely this deference that makes genuine dialogue possible, and it is dialogue that makes Liberalism--the only kind of multiculturalism that matters--possible. This is a fact that is lost on the likes of the writers for "Will and Grace", as it is lost on many of the self-styled "Brights" who ridicule Christianity and its contributions to Western civilization. For such people, the elimination of religion is not too much to hope for, even if it means re-educating the millions of persons for whom religion is our only contact with what Plato called "the really real." For these fanatics, it's their way or the highway. They are the intellectual fascists of our time.
Saturday, February 04, 2006
I'm Shocked--Shocked!--to Find Love Being Praised Here!
I've just been perusing Chris Blosser's survey of the conventional wisdom regarding Deus Caritas Est, here and here. As usual, Chris is to be congratulated for doing us all the service of bringing this material together and commenting on it with such perspicacity. What struck me about the various voices heard from in the excerpts was not so much how little these people appear to understand Benedict XVI, but how very badly they understand Roman Catholicism. Take, for example, this Bright Light (Ruth Gledhill, writing in the Times of London):
Also of interest to me was the fact that Stephen Crittenden, religion correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, quoted from DCE the passage where the Holy Father refers to Nietzsche's infamous claim that Christianity had poisoned eros, causing it to degenerate into a vice, in order to support his approving claim that "this document dialogues with everybody." This is interesting for two reasons. First, and most importantly, it is quite clear to anybody who reads the encyclical with even minimal care that Benedict XVI is not quoting Nietzsche with anything like approval. In the section immediately following the quotation Benedict compares the role of eros in the pre-Christian world with the treatment it got from the Church, and then draws the conclusion that, as far as Christian teachings go:
As I ponder the encyclical I am struck, over and over again, by the consistency of its message with John Paul's Theology of the Body and, indeed, with the whole of the Church's Tradition. I'll never cease to be amused by the hopeless pundits of the left, those dinosaurs who continue to play football as though Knute Rockne had never existed, running and running their pointless, old fashioned arguments about this or that changing while the rest of us are watching the spectacular passes by means of which the Church moves forward in Her own way, with logical consistency and historical continuity.
Thanks again to Chris Blosser for all of his hard work.
I started reading Deus Caritas Est expecting to be disappointed, chastised and generally laid low. An encyclical on love from a right-wing pope could only contain more damning condemnations of our materialistic, westernised society, more evocations of the “intrinsic evil” of contraception, married priests, homosexuality. It would surely continue the Church’s grand tradition of contempt for the erotic, a tradition that ensures a guilty hangover in any Roman Catholic who dares to indulge in lovemaking for any reason other than the primary one of reproduction. How wonderful it is to be proven wrong.Quite. I expect she's used to it by now, though. Here is a woman who appears to know absolutely nothing about the Church's moral theory or theology informing us that she's surprised to find that the Church does not teach what she, in her ignorance, assumed that it did teach. When she finds out that it never did teach what she assumed that it did, I expect she will find it even more wonderful, because the surprise will be greater.
Also of interest to me was the fact that Stephen Crittenden, religion correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, quoted from DCE the passage where the Holy Father refers to Nietzsche's infamous claim that Christianity had poisoned eros, causing it to degenerate into a vice, in order to support his approving claim that "this document dialogues with everybody." This is interesting for two reasons. First, and most importantly, it is quite clear to anybody who reads the encyclical with even minimal care that Benedict XVI is not quoting Nietzsche with anything like approval. In the section immediately following the quotation Benedict compares the role of eros in the pre-Christian world with the treatment it got from the Church, and then draws the conclusion that, as far as Christian teachings go:
Far from rejecting or "poisoning" eros, they heal it and restore its true grandeur.That's the kind of dialoguing with error that I like, but it shouldn't come as such a shock to the likes of Stephen Crittenden that one should quote one's opponent before shredding him. Or maybe it should--he is just a journalist, after all.
As I ponder the encyclical I am struck, over and over again, by the consistency of its message with John Paul's Theology of the Body and, indeed, with the whole of the Church's Tradition. I'll never cease to be amused by the hopeless pundits of the left, those dinosaurs who continue to play football as though Knute Rockne had never existed, running and running their pointless, old fashioned arguments about this or that changing while the rest of us are watching the spectacular passes by means of which the Church moves forward in Her own way, with logical consistency and historical continuity.
Thanks again to Chris Blosser for all of his hard work.
Friday, February 03, 2006
The Word in Words
I was somewhat startled not too long ago (29 December, to be exact) to read Richard John Neuhaus' comments in the First Things blog On the Square regarding the remarks made at Hirhurim Musings about reading the Old Testament in Hebrew, rather than some English translation, however literary. The poster there had written:
Looking back over the original post at Hirhurim, however, I came to agree (as I usually do) with Fr. Neuhaus--there did seem to be something, well, rather pompous, at least in the tone, floating around in there, and I got to thinking about this problem a little more carefully.
I can't read Hebrew very well--I'm working on it but I'm certainly not at the point yet where I can pick up the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and just start breezing through it, the way I can with the Greek New Testament or the Septuagint or the Vulgate. So I have absolutely no grounds for disputing the claim that Hebrew poetry is better read in Hebrew than in translation. But after years and years of reading things like the New Testament, ancient Greek philosophy, medieval Latin philosophy and theology, and other similar texts in the original languages, I can honestly say that, whether anything gets lost in the translation depends almost entirely on what you hope to get out of your reading experience.
Clearly, if what you want to engage in is a scholarly exegesis of the meaning of the text, you absolutely must read it in its original form--that's a principle that I subscribe to not only with Biblical exegesis but with the exegesis of any text, whether Plato or Aristotle or Virgil or Dante or Beowulf or Shakespeare. But not everyone--indeed, arguably only a very few--read either the Old Testament or the New for that purpose. There are, I think, a lot of folks who believe that is what they are doing on certain occasions but I don't think it actually happens as often as some people think. It is really the domain of the specialist, the scholar, and few folks who think they are engaging in Biblical exegesis are really "Scripture scholars" of the sort that Neuhaus mentions.
Most of us, I think, read the Scriptures primarily as a means of encountering God as he has manifested himself to his Church, and for that purpose I don't really see why reading the Scriptures in translation has any necessarily deleterious effect on our experience. The main reason for seeing it this way is my belief that the interpretation of God's revelation of himself to us is always properly the domain of the Church rather than the individual, hence if the translation is recognized by the Church as accurate in a doctrinal sense then there is usually no grave harm involved in relying on it.
If you have doubts about this, you might ask yourself how feel, then, about the restrictions that were imposed, in certain places at certain times, on reading the Bible in the vernacular. The thinking of some was that precisely because the interpretation of these texts was extremely difficult, and something easily manipulated by the educated for the purpose of swaying the uneducated, such texts should be carefully regulated. In particular, the thinking went, translations of the texts--which are always, by their very nature, acts of interpretation--ought to be very closely monitored by the Church. Since the people were supposedly being instructed on the genuine meaning of the texts at the liturgies, it was thought, what need for uneducated folks to read the things themselves?
Then there were the restrictions imposed during the 16th century on reading the New Testament in Greek. Now that was a bizarre move, but not one that I find to be per se wrong, since what the New Testament teaches was still being made available by the Church in her ministry. It was certainly wrong from a utilitarian point of view, since it had rather unfortunate consequences, but there is nothing wrong, in principle, with the Church reserving the right to explain Christ's teaching to His people in Her own way. This is, after all, the way things were perforce during the first century, when the New Testament did not even exist but there was Good News to be preached nevertheless. That News was preached by the Church through the efforts of her ministers, and there was no question of letting folks sit around and examine the sayings of the Apostles, who were summarizing the teachings of Our Lord, with a view towards finding out what those sayings really meant. If there had been any question, they could ask the ministers themselves, who could then explain the meaning more fully, after which it would have been absurd to say "Oh no, that's not what you meant at all--I heard you say XYZ and XYZ doesn't mean what you just told me you meant by it." Things were no different, really, under the restrictions of the 16th century.
Since most folks are not Scripture scholars, then, most folks will read the Scriptures in translation. In fact, even pedantic weirdoes like me read them in translation from time to time. My own tastes in translation have varied over the years. When I first became a Christian in the spring of 1979 I was still living an aesthetic principle that had its origins in the 1970s, and so I found the New International Version somewhat appealing in its folksy, cozy way. But that appeal was quickly lost when I discovered the anal-retentive accuracy of the New American Standard Bible. Remember, I was a young grad student in classics at the time, and the NASB is a godsend to anyone trying to work through the original texts because the translation is so literal as to be almost unreadable. But that was precisely what I liked about it--I guess I thought it was the next best thing to being able to read Hebrew. Even if you know Greek, it's kind of nice to have a trot sitting nearby to give you a sense of security in case things go badly wrong ("Gee, I've never seen that form before! Does Koine have some kind of hemidemisemiquavery apodictic aorist optative?") Remember, too, that I was a young Episcopalian. So of course the pedestrian prose of the NASB quickly wore thin with me and I needed to move on. My friend in the Episcopal church (about whom I have blogged before and who, if you will believe it, has entered the Roman Catholic Church, Deo maximas gratias) introduced me to the Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha, which quickly became my favorite.
It is the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition that Fr. Richard Neuhaus favors, and that edition is not all that different from the RSV with Apocrypha, though the differences that do exist are not to be ignored. But clearly I was on the right track by this time. Where Fr. Neuhaus and I have begun to diverge, though, is in this very strange phenomenon: I have begun to favor--the Authorized Version!!! Yes, that's right folks, the very version that was "authorized" for use in the liturgies of the Church of England by King James I and, hence, also known as the "King James Version". Editions with the Apocrypha do exist, so it is just possible to use this version without losing too much in the way of Inspired Scriptures. But the Inquiring Mind wants to know: what is the appeal in this version? The English is antiquated, the texts have been superseded, and gee whiz it was subsidized by schismatics!
I suppose that, in the end, what has drawn me to it after all this time is a combination of (a) coming to peace within myself about my own Episcopalian past (=I don't care any more that they were schismatic), (b) an appreciation for the prose style employed, and (c) a desire to stay as far away as possible from the contemporary political considerations that seem to me to be driving most of the revisions upon revisions that come out, sometimes yearly, of already overly-revised translations whose initial value as "keepers" was already somewhat suspect. Let me address the three points from the last paragraph in order.
It is true that the language of the AV is somewhat antiquated, but certainly no more so than Shakespeare and surely no one would argue that it's not worth taking a little trouble to read Shakespeare, and it would be ridiculous to suggest that you should only read Shakespeare in some contemporary "translation", though such things do exist. For texts produced just a century earlier than Shakespeare (the letters of Saint Thomas More, for example) a translation is sometimes necessary, but there's no reason why an educated person these days ought to have trouble with the English being written at the start of the 17th century. Moreover, as I read more and more about Shakespeare and his times, the period comes to be ever more alive for me, and if only on a personal level I find it something of a satisfaction to read this version as an artifact from a time and a place with which I feel a humanistic connection. It is remarkably beautiful prose even in its directness and simplicity, and it was clearly produced by people who were both scholars and artists--a rare combination these days.
More worrisome is the fact that in the New Testament the AV is a translation of the so-called textus receptus, the Greek text as established by Humanists such as Elzevir, Beza, Erasmus, and Stephanus and deriving ultimately from Byzantine manuscripts. This was the scholarly text up until the end of the 19th century but it has long since been superseded by very much improved editions. (The very best edition of the Greek New Testament in an affordable format, for those who are interested, is the 27th edition of Nestle and Aland, available from the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, ISBN 3-438-05101-7; there is an editio maior but it consists of multiple very-expensive volumes.) Those who would refuse to read the AV for this reason are, I suppose, the same folks who see themselves as engaging in textual exegesis when they read the Scriptures. These are the folks who should be learning Koine, not going around comparing translations to each other without having any independent grounds for distinguishing among them. Church doctrine managed to survive for 19 centuries under the texts that comprise the TR, and I very much doubt that any radical changes are about to be introduced on the basis of new papyrus findings. Some folks try to make too much of what is possible with textual criticism anyway. In 1945, when the Nag Hamadi findings were in the news, folks were all a-twitter with talk of the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, etc. etc., and we find similar controversies today, from the totally silly kind (The Da Vinci Code) to the (slightly) more serious (Elaine Pagels, Elizabeth Clark). For a thorough debunking of these controversies and others, check out Philip Jenkins, Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. The long and the short of it, as far as I'm concerned, is that few textual shortcomings in the AV are going to lead me into heresy--it's substantially the text used by the church for the vast majority of its history, and I don't rely on the authority of texts anyway for my doctrine, I rely on the teaching authority of the Church, which produces the very texts themselves and gives them their authority.
It's true that the AV was produced by some folks who had it in for the Papists, and that is probably more troubling to some than to others. The online version of the Catholic Encyclopedia (produced in the early years of the 20th century) articulated only one explicit complaint about partisanship in the AV:
Given the great beauty, ancestry, and overall maiestas of the AV I am happy with my current preference. I can't pretend to be a real "Scripture scholar" in Neuhaus' sense, but when I want to be I'll read the Greek anyway, and try to figure out the Hebrew. Failing that, I'll rejoice in a text that has delighted generation upon generation of English speaking Christians, and I'll give thanks that I find myself a part of that great Company that still gives praise to God after a fashion that is worthy of Him.
Thankfully, not being personally burdened by a long (in Neuhaus’ case, very long) ritual and scholarly bond with an English translation, I’m not invested in any particular English translation. I actually rarely use one. To me, the original Hebrew text is for the sophisticated reader and any English translation is directed to the unlearned and, therefore, should use the ‘vulgar,’ common language. Those who want poetry should go to the original.This seemed all very well and good to me, not having yet read Neuhaus' essay in the print version of First Things on English versions of the Bible. So I was taken aback to read Neuhaus' comment:
A word to the unlearned: We’re Scripture scholars and you’re not. Get used to it.Ouch! That's going to leave a mark! Maybe they should change the name of the blog from On the Square to No Squares Allowed.
Looking back over the original post at Hirhurim, however, I came to agree (as I usually do) with Fr. Neuhaus--there did seem to be something, well, rather pompous, at least in the tone, floating around in there, and I got to thinking about this problem a little more carefully.
I can't read Hebrew very well--I'm working on it but I'm certainly not at the point yet where I can pick up the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and just start breezing through it, the way I can with the Greek New Testament or the Septuagint or the Vulgate. So I have absolutely no grounds for disputing the claim that Hebrew poetry is better read in Hebrew than in translation. But after years and years of reading things like the New Testament, ancient Greek philosophy, medieval Latin philosophy and theology, and other similar texts in the original languages, I can honestly say that, whether anything gets lost in the translation depends almost entirely on what you hope to get out of your reading experience.
Clearly, if what you want to engage in is a scholarly exegesis of the meaning of the text, you absolutely must read it in its original form--that's a principle that I subscribe to not only with Biblical exegesis but with the exegesis of any text, whether Plato or Aristotle or Virgil or Dante or Beowulf or Shakespeare. But not everyone--indeed, arguably only a very few--read either the Old Testament or the New for that purpose. There are, I think, a lot of folks who believe that is what they are doing on certain occasions but I don't think it actually happens as often as some people think. It is really the domain of the specialist, the scholar, and few folks who think they are engaging in Biblical exegesis are really "Scripture scholars" of the sort that Neuhaus mentions.
Most of us, I think, read the Scriptures primarily as a means of encountering God as he has manifested himself to his Church, and for that purpose I don't really see why reading the Scriptures in translation has any necessarily deleterious effect on our experience. The main reason for seeing it this way is my belief that the interpretation of God's revelation of himself to us is always properly the domain of the Church rather than the individual, hence if the translation is recognized by the Church as accurate in a doctrinal sense then there is usually no grave harm involved in relying on it.
If you have doubts about this, you might ask yourself how feel, then, about the restrictions that were imposed, in certain places at certain times, on reading the Bible in the vernacular. The thinking of some was that precisely because the interpretation of these texts was extremely difficult, and something easily manipulated by the educated for the purpose of swaying the uneducated, such texts should be carefully regulated. In particular, the thinking went, translations of the texts--which are always, by their very nature, acts of interpretation--ought to be very closely monitored by the Church. Since the people were supposedly being instructed on the genuine meaning of the texts at the liturgies, it was thought, what need for uneducated folks to read the things themselves?
Then there were the restrictions imposed during the 16th century on reading the New Testament in Greek. Now that was a bizarre move, but not one that I find to be per se wrong, since what the New Testament teaches was still being made available by the Church in her ministry. It was certainly wrong from a utilitarian point of view, since it had rather unfortunate consequences, but there is nothing wrong, in principle, with the Church reserving the right to explain Christ's teaching to His people in Her own way. This is, after all, the way things were perforce during the first century, when the New Testament did not even exist but there was Good News to be preached nevertheless. That News was preached by the Church through the efforts of her ministers, and there was no question of letting folks sit around and examine the sayings of the Apostles, who were summarizing the teachings of Our Lord, with a view towards finding out what those sayings really meant. If there had been any question, they could ask the ministers themselves, who could then explain the meaning more fully, after which it would have been absurd to say "Oh no, that's not what you meant at all--I heard you say XYZ and XYZ doesn't mean what you just told me you meant by it." Things were no different, really, under the restrictions of the 16th century.
Since most folks are not Scripture scholars, then, most folks will read the Scriptures in translation. In fact, even pedantic weirdoes like me read them in translation from time to time. My own tastes in translation have varied over the years. When I first became a Christian in the spring of 1979 I was still living an aesthetic principle that had its origins in the 1970s, and so I found the New International Version somewhat appealing in its folksy, cozy way. But that appeal was quickly lost when I discovered the anal-retentive accuracy of the New American Standard Bible. Remember, I was a young grad student in classics at the time, and the NASB is a godsend to anyone trying to work through the original texts because the translation is so literal as to be almost unreadable. But that was precisely what I liked about it--I guess I thought it was the next best thing to being able to read Hebrew. Even if you know Greek, it's kind of nice to have a trot sitting nearby to give you a sense of security in case things go badly wrong ("Gee, I've never seen that form before! Does Koine have some kind of hemidemisemiquavery apodictic aorist optative?") Remember, too, that I was a young Episcopalian. So of course the pedestrian prose of the NASB quickly wore thin with me and I needed to move on. My friend in the Episcopal church (about whom I have blogged before and who, if you will believe it, has entered the Roman Catholic Church, Deo maximas gratias) introduced me to the Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha, which quickly became my favorite.
It is the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition that Fr. Richard Neuhaus favors, and that edition is not all that different from the RSV with Apocrypha, though the differences that do exist are not to be ignored. But clearly I was on the right track by this time. Where Fr. Neuhaus and I have begun to diverge, though, is in this very strange phenomenon: I have begun to favor--the Authorized Version!!! Yes, that's right folks, the very version that was "authorized" for use in the liturgies of the Church of England by King James I and, hence, also known as the "King James Version". Editions with the Apocrypha do exist, so it is just possible to use this version without losing too much in the way of Inspired Scriptures. But the Inquiring Mind wants to know: what is the appeal in this version? The English is antiquated, the texts have been superseded, and gee whiz it was subsidized by schismatics!
I suppose that, in the end, what has drawn me to it after all this time is a combination of (a) coming to peace within myself about my own Episcopalian past (=I don't care any more that they were schismatic), (b) an appreciation for the prose style employed, and (c) a desire to stay as far away as possible from the contemporary political considerations that seem to me to be driving most of the revisions upon revisions that come out, sometimes yearly, of already overly-revised translations whose initial value as "keepers" was already somewhat suspect. Let me address the three points from the last paragraph in order.
It is true that the language of the AV is somewhat antiquated, but certainly no more so than Shakespeare and surely no one would argue that it's not worth taking a little trouble to read Shakespeare, and it would be ridiculous to suggest that you should only read Shakespeare in some contemporary "translation", though such things do exist. For texts produced just a century earlier than Shakespeare (the letters of Saint Thomas More, for example) a translation is sometimes necessary, but there's no reason why an educated person these days ought to have trouble with the English being written at the start of the 17th century. Moreover, as I read more and more about Shakespeare and his times, the period comes to be ever more alive for me, and if only on a personal level I find it something of a satisfaction to read this version as an artifact from a time and a place with which I feel a humanistic connection. It is remarkably beautiful prose even in its directness and simplicity, and it was clearly produced by people who were both scholars and artists--a rare combination these days.
More worrisome is the fact that in the New Testament the AV is a translation of the so-called textus receptus, the Greek text as established by Humanists such as Elzevir, Beza, Erasmus, and Stephanus and deriving ultimately from Byzantine manuscripts. This was the scholarly text up until the end of the 19th century but it has long since been superseded by very much improved editions. (The very best edition of the Greek New Testament in an affordable format, for those who are interested, is the 27th edition of Nestle and Aland, available from the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, ISBN 3-438-05101-7; there is an editio maior but it consists of multiple very-expensive volumes.) Those who would refuse to read the AV for this reason are, I suppose, the same folks who see themselves as engaging in textual exegesis when they read the Scriptures. These are the folks who should be learning Koine, not going around comparing translations to each other without having any independent grounds for distinguishing among them. Church doctrine managed to survive for 19 centuries under the texts that comprise the TR, and I very much doubt that any radical changes are about to be introduced on the basis of new papyrus findings. Some folks try to make too much of what is possible with textual criticism anyway. In 1945, when the Nag Hamadi findings were in the news, folks were all a-twitter with talk of the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, etc. etc., and we find similar controversies today, from the totally silly kind (The Da Vinci Code) to the (slightly) more serious (Elaine Pagels, Elizabeth Clark). For a thorough debunking of these controversies and others, check out Philip Jenkins, Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. The long and the short of it, as far as I'm concerned, is that few textual shortcomings in the AV are going to lead me into heresy--it's substantially the text used by the church for the vast majority of its history, and I don't rely on the authority of texts anyway for my doctrine, I rely on the teaching authority of the Church, which produces the very texts themselves and gives them their authority.
It's true that the AV was produced by some folks who had it in for the Papists, and that is probably more troubling to some than to others. The online version of the Catholic Encyclopedia (produced in the early years of the 20th century) articulated only one explicit complaint about partisanship in the AV:
Nevertheless, there remained in the Authorized Version here and there traces of controversial prejudice, as for example, in the angel's salutation to the Blessed Vergin mary, the words "highly favoured" being a very imperfect rendering of the original.That doesn't strike me as a particularly volatile issue, but I suppose at the back of it is a whole shipload of Marian baggage that pushed a lot of buttons back in the day. The Greek text in question, from Luke 1.28, reads
khaire, kekharitômenê, ho kurios meta sou.Probably the best translation of this is something along the lines of "Greetings, highly favored one, the lord is with you." The verb kharitoô, as it is used in the NT, refers to the great favor God bestows by his divine grace, and the form we find in our passage is the perfect passive participle, so it's hard to see why "highly favoured" is "a very imperfect rendering of the original." The Douay-Rheims Bible renders the passage as "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee." Is there a huge difference between "highly favoured" and "full of grace"? Not if you know what "highly favoured" means in this context--it means "favored by the bestowal of God's grace". If this is the best that the First Edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia can come up with I'm not going to worry too much--I'm certainly not going to be too concerned about passages that may try to persuade me to be a Royalist, if there really are any, as has sometimes been alleged.
Given the great beauty, ancestry, and overall maiestas of the AV I am happy with my current preference. I can't pretend to be a real "Scripture scholar" in Neuhaus' sense, but when I want to be I'll read the Greek anyway, and try to figure out the Hebrew. Failing that, I'll rejoice in a text that has delighted generation upon generation of English speaking Christians, and I'll give thanks that I find myself a part of that great Company that still gives praise to God after a fashion that is worthy of Him.
A Straussian Waltz
Let me tell you a little secret. It's actually a very, very little secret, so don't get all excited. My secret is this: I don't like Straussianism, in spite of those aspects of it that strike me as rather congenial. The main reason I don't like it is because of some of the claims the Straussians make about Plato and his philosophy. I think some of them--Seth Benardete, for example--understand Plato fairly well, but by and large I find it very difficult to sail very far with them. So I was rather delighted by the essay at The Weekly Standard by Robert Kagan called "I am Not a Straussian." Kagan is often accused of being one, and his explanation of why he can't be one is worth a read.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)