Notes from a Byzantine-Rite Calvinist

Obama and religious freedom

2012-02-02T14:13:00.013-05:00

I have thus far largely refrained from criticizing President Obama on this blog, even as I was put off by the messianic expectations he encouraged during his first presidential campaign four years ago and have been uneasy about his performance since then. But his attack on the religious freedom of overtly confessional institutions requires comment, which Michael Gerson ably provides here: Obama plays his Catholic allies for fools.

The implications of Obama’s power grab go further than contraception and will provoke opposition beyond Catholicism. Christian colleges and universities of various denominations will resist providing insurance coverage for abortifacients. And the astounding ambition of this federal precedent will soon be apparent to every religious institution. Obama is claiming the executive authority to determine which missions of believers are religious and which are not — and then to aggressively regulate institutions the government declares to be secular. It is a view of religious liberty so narrow and privatized that it barely covers the space between a believer’s ears.

Obama’s decision also reflects a certain view of liberalism. Classical liberalism was concerned with the freedom to hold and practice beliefs at odds with a public consensus. Modern liberalism uses the power of the state to impose liberal values on institutions it regards as backward. It is the difference between pluralism and anti-clericalism.

I am not an enthusiast for the betrayal of liberalism thesis to which Gerson appeals, because I believe the contempt for nonvoluntary institutions is implicit in liberalism's logic from the outset. Nevertheless, Gerson persuasively points to the link between liberalism's claim to defend liberty and its narrowly individualistic interpretation of that liberty. Let us hope and pray that the policy will be changed before it is implemented.

Religious liberty and civil society

2012-02-01T09:27:00.006-05:00

Controversy continues south of the border: Religious Liberty and Civil Society. Yuval Levin plausibly explains the origin of the current confusion over the definition of religious freedom in English-speaking democracies:

The English common law tradition of religious toleration, which we inherited, has always had a problem with religious institutions that are not houses of worship—i.e. that are geared to ends other than the practice of religion itself. To (vastly) oversimplify for a moment, that tradition began (in the 16th century, and in some respects even earlier) with the aim of protecting Protestant dissenters and Jews but (very intentionally) not protecting Catholics. And the way it took shape over the centuries in an effort to sustain that distinction was by drawing a line between individual religious practice (in which the government could not interfere) and an institutional religious presence (which was given far less protection).

Because Catholicism is a uniquely institutional religion—with large numbers of massive institutions for providing social services, educating children and adults, and the like, all of which are more or less parts of a single hierarchy—this meant Catholics were simply not granted the same protection as others. Obviously the intent to treat Catholics differently has for the most part fallen away since then, but the evolved legal tradition is very much with us, and it is not a coincidence that it always seems to be the Catholic Church that gets caught up in these situations when the government overreaches. . . .

Does civil society consist of a set of institutions that help the government achieve its purposes as it defines them when their doing so might be more efficient or convenient than the state’s doing so itself, or does civil society consist of an assortment of efforts by citizens to band together in pursuit of mutual aims and goods as they understand them? Is it an extension of the state or of the community?

Douthat on government and its rivals

2012-01-30T12:05:00.005-05:00

Writing for The New York Times, Ross Douthat's mention of "liberal communitarians" sounds a little odd to my ears, but he is dead on in his analysis of the current situation south of the border: Government and its Rivals. An excerpt:

Liberals know that it takes a village; conservatives pretend that all it takes is John Wayne.

In this worldview, the government is just the natural expression of our national community, and the place where we all join hands to pursue the common good. Or to borrow a line attributed to Representative Barney Frank, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”

Many conservatives would go this far with Frank: Government is one way we choose to work together, and there are certain things we need to do collectively that only government can do.

But there are trade-offs as well, which liberal communitarians don’t always like to acknowledge. When government expands, it’s often at the expense of alternative expressions of community, alternative groups that seek to serve the common good. Unlike most communal organizations, the government has coercive power — the power to regulate, to mandate and to tax. These advantages make it all too easy for the state to gradually crowd out its rivals. The more things we “do together” as a government, in many cases, the fewer things we’re allowed to do together in other spheres.

Sometimes this crowding out happens gradually, subtly, indirectly. Every tax dollar the government takes is a dollar that can’t go to charities and churches. Every program the government runs, from education to health care to the welfare office, can easily become a kind of taxpayer-backed monopoly.

But sometimes the state goes further. Not content with crowding out alternative forms of common effort, it presents its rivals an impossible choice: Play by our rules, even if it means violating the moral ideals that inspired your efforts in the first place, or get out of the community-building business entirely.

Facebook politics

2012-01-13T14:03:00.006-05:00

The following appears as the latest instalment of my monthly column, "Principality & Powers," in Christian Courier, dated 9 January 2012. Please subscribe today.

Facebook has been around for almost eight years, having been started by a group of enterprising Harvard students. Although it was intended initially for the Harvard student body alone, it was soon expanded to include other Ivy League universities and eventually the entire globe. In a short time it has remade the way we communicate with each other. Speaking for myself, I am now in constant touch, not only with immediate family and former students, but also with elementary and secondary school friends, my grade 5 teacher, and geographically distant relatives in Cyprus and elsewhere. Every week or so, I receive a friend request from someone who has read my book or shares my interest in sung psalmody.

It is not surprising that Facebook would begin to reshape political life as well. Candidates for public office now have Facebook pages, which supporters are encouraged to “Like” and thereby spread the word to their own expanding list of “friends.” Although the internet has been around for a decade and a half, and candidates have been posting websites for some years now, Facebook has developed into a distinct medium of communication in its own right. It has radically democratized the communication process by allowing users to reveal as much as they like about themselves in addition to following the activities of well-known personages. Facebook has made all of us potentially famous – to someone at least.

In the past year we have learnt how protesters in Egypt, Iran and Russia have used Facebook to communicate with each other and to co-ordinate their activities. Later in the year, the Occupy Movement spread to cities around the globe, facilitated, not by a common ideology or set of goals, which it largely lacked, but by Blackberries and iPhones, along with the social networking sites which they accessed.

As of last month I had 777 Facebook “friends.” (I use inverted commas because, although many are indeed personal friends, others are mere acquaintances or people who follow my writings.) A number of these regularly use Facebook to air their political views to their own “friends.” Their views range from aficionados of Ron Paul and Sarah Palin to champions of Barak Obama and the late Jack Layton. (Twenty of my friends like Palin, while 42 like Obama.) Most of these are utterly predictable in the sorts of articles they link to. Those of a conservative bent will link to the likes of National Review Online while those with progressive leanings tend to link to the Huffington Post and similar publications.

Perhaps I should not be surprised at this, but it has become increasingly evident that Facebook does little to facilitate genuine dialogue or even healthy debate on the major political issues of the day. People simply put their views out there, as if they were obviously gospel truth with which all people of good will must surely agree. It is the rare person who will call attention to an article in, say, the Globe and Mail and ask her “friends” for their input on the matter in the interest of expanding her own store of wisdom. Facebook encourages us, not to exchange ideas with each other, but to put ourselves on display for the world to see. We therefore post our profile photos, the schools we attended, our current employment information, and our numerous likes and proclivities, to which our religious and political convictions are implicitly reduced.

There is some irony in the fact that a social networking site intended to facilitate communication has effectively impaired the communicative process on those matters of greatest significance. We may now be in constant touch with people we knew forty or fifty years ago and haven’t seen in nearly as long, but the quality of our communications with each other has not notably improved. In fact, it may have exacerbated the current tendency for people to shout their political propensities at each other rather than to listen, learn and – perish the thought – even change their opinions.

Perestroika. . . again?

2012-01-13T12:13:00.003-05:00

From The New York Times: New Days to Shake the World. An excerpt suggesting that official attempts to control information are singularly ineffective in the 21st century:

Mr. Putin devised a new model of media management, keeping tight control of national television and most newspapers while allowing free rein to a few Moscow outlets (the newspaper Novaya Gazeta and the radio station Ekho Moskvy), providing a steam valve to the intelligentsia and a display of tolerance to foreign critics. But the growth of the Internet, which now reaches more than 60 million of Russia’s 140 million people, has begun to undermine the scheme.

Are we seeing the beginning of yet another Russian revolution?

ByzantineCalvinst youtube channel

2011-12-27T13:37:00.005-05:00

A few weeks ago I set up a ByzantineCalvinist youtube channel. Among the items posted are my own guitar arrangements of Away in a Manger and Genevan Psalm 13. I hope at some point to access a venue with better acoustics for recording purposes. But for now this will have to do.

In þe bigynnyng was þe word

2011-12-24T15:55:00.000-05:00

In þe bigynnyng was þe word, and þe word was at God, and God was þe word.
Þis was in þe bigynnyng at God.
Alle þingis weren maad bi hym, and wiþouten hym was maad no þing, þat þing þat was maad.
In hym was lijf, and þe lijf was þe liyt of men; and þe liyt schyneþ in derknessis,
and derknessis comprehendiden not it.

John 1:1-5 (Wycliffe translation)

A favourite Ravel piece

2011-12-21T19:25:00.019-05:00

One of my all-time favourite musical pieces is Maurice Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, a highly imaginative work that nevertheless follows traditional classical forms. In its original piano version, written between 1914 and 1917, Ravel composed six movements: the Prélude, Fugue, Forlane, Rigaudon, Menuet and Toccata. Each was dedicated to the memory of a friend who had died during the Great War. Despite these personal losses, and despite the title's allusion to the tomb of baroque composer François Couperin, it is not at all a morose piece — except possibly for the Forlane — as can be heard from the Prélude below:

In the months after the end of the war, Ravel scored four of the movements for orchestra: the Prélude, Forlane, Menuet and Rigaudon, changing their order so as to conclude with a moderately fast movement. Although Ravel was a master orchestrator (his version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is more frequently performed than the Russian composer's original piano version), he chose not to score the Fugue and Toccata, possibly because the latter would have required a larger number of instruments than he had envisioned for the piece. The orchestral version thus has a somewhat different feel from the piano version. The complete orchestrated version can be heard below:

Many have wondered what the piece would have sounded like if Ravel had scored all six movements. Jack Jarrett has tried his hand at orchestrating the two missing movements below:

The results are intriguing, although I believe that Hungarian conductor Zoltán Kocsis has better captured the spirit of the piece and approximated Ravel's own orchestral timbre in the following performance of the spectacular Toccata:

Whether the following is Kocsis' arrangement of the Fugue I cannot say, but the Chicago Reed Quartet's performance seems very much along the lines of what Ravel would have done, that is, using a small wind group and giving the oboe a prominent place.

What I would love to hear is a performance of the full six movements of Le Tombeau de Couperin, in their original order and with Ravel's and Kocsis' orchestrations. That would be one thrilling concert.

Question authority. . . unless it's mine

2011-12-07T08:42:00.005-05:00

In putting the finishing touches on my manuscript on authority, office and the image of God, I came across this wonderful passage in Thomas Molnar, Authority and Its Enemies (p. 112):

There have always been people like Dr. Ronald Fletcher, who writes: "Never accept authority; whether that of a jealous god, priest, prime minister, president, dictator, unless in your own seriously considered view, there are good grounds for it. . . . Rationalists in the modern world reject the authoritarian heritage of Moses and substitute a set of non-commandments, i.e., principles on which the individual must work out his own conduct when faced by particular problems." One wonders what authority issues (or doesn't issue?) the non-commandments which tell individuals how they must work out their problems, and one is reassured again that the enemies of authority do not allow authority to fade away. If not Moses, then Dr. Ronald Fletcher is in authority.

Religion and soft drink labels

2011-12-06T14:02:00.001-05:00

Many of us are persuaded that religion is not merely one element among many in life but is central to one's entire being. Social and political scientists have explored the implications of this for partisan loyalties, among other things. But could one's ecclesial commitments influence the more mundane side of life? For example, take a look at this map:

. . . and then look at this map:

I won't pretend to isolate the causal connection, but it certainly appears that what Southern Baptists call coke, Lutherans and Methodists call pop and Catholics call soda. I offer this puzzling phenomenon to the graduate student in the social sciences casting about for a dissertation topic.

US party reform needed

2011-12-02T21:41:00.028-05:00

David Frum, former speech writer for George W. Bush, wonders aloud: When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality? The German weekly Der Spiegel carries this article in its English-language edition: A Club of Liars, Demagogues and Ignoramuses. Even if this is rhetorical overkill, the Republican Party's range of would-be presidential nominees is rather less than impressive. Those who were sceptical of Obama's deliberate cultivation of messianic expectations in 2008 hoped he would face a credible opponent in 2012. But thus far the GOP has yet to deliver and shows no signs of doing so any time soon.

It is long past time to repeal the internal party reforms of the early 1970s. It used to be said that any boy could become president. Even if we update the gender reference, we should not be happy with such a possibility. Do we really want just anyone to be the CEO of earth's remaining superpower? I sure don't. When I was a child, delegates to a party's convention actually chose its candidate for president. Party leaders in state, federal and local politics did their best to put forward a candidate they believed was qualified for the position and had a good chance to beat his opponent. Yes, there were smoke-filled rooms. Yes, there was wheeling and dealing. Yes, the occasional Warren G. Harding would somehow make it past the filtering process. Nevertheless, obvious incompetents were generally weeded out before they got too far.

That all changed four decades ago when Democrats and Republicans sought to more thoroughly democratize their candidate-selection process through a series of binding primary elections and state caucuses. Now by convention time everyone knows who the party's candidate will be. No genuine choices have to be made. If the voters have chosen a weak candidate, the party convention is nevertheless obligated to give him or her its backing. Not to do so would be perceived as undemocratic.

Philosopher Yves R. Simon observed that a democratic constitution needs nondemocratic elements if it is to survive and flourish. There is truth in the ancient Greek and Roman preference for the classical mixed constitution, combining the best elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy into a stable and enduring form of government. That the current crop of Republican candidates is being taken seriously as presidential contenders is a sign that things have got out of hand. It may be time to make the candidate-selection process within the parties a little less democratic for the sake of preserving the competitive character of electoral politics in the United States. It may be too late for 2012, but let's shoot for 2016.

In crisis: Canada's first peoples

2011-12-02T09:38:00.014-05:00

Canada's native reserves are in crisis and have been for a very long time. Stephen Harper's government is under fire for its handling of an emergency housing crisis on the Attawapiskat reserve. Ottawa has ploughed $90 million dollars into the reserve with little positive to show for it. Whose fault is it? Brian Dijkema suggests that responsbility lies with "a complex cauldron of abuse, mismanagement, moral waffling, lies, and other foul ingredients put into the pot by a variety of cooks, including the federal government."

Gary Moore, an immigrant from South Africa to Canada, finds that this country's reserve system bears more than a passing resemblance to his homeland's odious racial policies of the past: Apartheid laws rule Canada’s First Nations reserves.

Change was once in the air in Canada. In 1969 the then Indian-affairs minister Jean Chrétien issued a policy white paper which proposed repeal of the Indian Act, the winding-up of the Indian-affairs department and transfer of its functions to other government departments, equal treatment for aboriginals, interim funds for native economic development, rejection of land claims, and new measures to allow indigenous people to control and own the land. Chiefs and others objected. Mr. Chrétien’s proposals were dropped.

Mr. Chrétien’s 1969 white paper still rings true. It says that to be an indigenous person is to be someone apart in law and provision of government services and to lack power, and that special treatment has made aboriginals disadvantaged.

I am far from an expert in aboriginal affairs, but I do wonder whether our reserve system has not worsened life for our first peoples. Would they be better off under a different régime — one in which they enjoyed equality under the law with their nonaboriginal fellow citizens, and no longer suffered under special treatment? Such a change should obviously not be imposed on our first peoples without their consent, yet something just as obviously needs to be done to facilitate their taking responsibility for their own communities' welfare and to free them from their crippling dependency on Ottawa.

What the cultural mandate is not

2011-11-30T12:52:00.042-05:00

Reformed Christians often refer to Genesis 1:28 as the Cultural Mandate:

And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

There is nothing especially earth-shaking in this; it is simply affirming that, as God's image-bearers, we shape the world around us and adapt it to a diversity of uses. In recent years a number of books have been published by Christians on precisely this topic. One of the best is Andy Crouch's Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling.

However, there is a persistent tendency amongst some to misidentify the Cultural Mandate as a command to redeem the larger culture from the distorting effects of sin. Chuck Colson's recent Breakpoint commentary is typical in this respect: Dual Commissions. Colson properly understands that the Cultural Mandate — or Commission — and the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20) are not antithetical but, properly conceived, are complementary. Nevertheless, his understanding of the former is not entirely spot-on:

If Christians do not seize the moment and act on the cultural commission, there soon won’t be any culture left to save. But when we do our duty, we can change the world. Look at Christians like William Wilberforce, who spent most of his life fighting — and winning — the war against slavery in Britain, and bringing about a great cultural renewal in that country.

I will not deny that there are battles to be fought over significant issues, but that's not really what the Cultural Mandate is about. As Crouch puts it, "Culture is, first of all, the name for our relentless, restless human effort to take the world as it's given to us and make something else" (p. 23). We have a God-given propensity "to make something more than we were given." This is fairly basic stuff. We fashion "paintings (whether finger paintings or the Sistine Chapel), omelets, chairs, snow angels." Those who believe the cultural mandate was superseded by the Great Commission have only to look around: we human beings make culture willy nilly, and we always will, because God created us to do so. You don't have to be a culture warrior to recognize this reality of life.

Of course, one cannot escape the fact that our culture-making activities are affected by our sinful natures. This is the implication of Genesis 4:19-22. To be sure, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with fashioning culture. Yet neither can we escape the taint of sin in all our undertakings. Moreover, a distinction must be made between obedient culture-making and disobedient culture-making, which corresponds to St. Augustine's distinction between the City of God and the City of this World. Rightly-oriented culture-making obeys the norms God has given us for life in his world: social, economic, aesthetic, ethical, political and other norms.

A good portion of what Colson calls the "Cultural Commission" must rather be understood to be the last part of the "Great Commission": "teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you." Evangelization requires that we proclaim, not only God's saving grace, but the norms by which he intends those who are in Christ to live. In no way do mere human beings redeem culture by engaging in creative activity. This is presumptuous. Only God in Christ redeems his fallen creation. We are at most agents of his kingdom, manifesting his saving grace in everything we do — including the shaping of culture.

'And with your spirit'

2011-11-28T06:45:00.014-05:00

Yesterday, the first sunday in Advent, our English-speaking Roman Catholic brethren began using a newly revised liturgy that is closer to the Latin texts than the previous 1973 version in use for nearly four decades. Liturgy Training Publications has posted a comparison of the two texts for those wishing to see the differences side by side. Perhaps the most immediately noticeable change comes with the greeting at the beginning of the eucharistic prayer, which runs as follows in the old version:

"The Lord be with you"
"And also with you."

This now reads:

"The Lord be with you."
"And with your spirit."

This brings the English liturgy into closer conformity, not only with the Latin of the Novus Ordo mass, but with its translation into other languages as well, for example, French and Spanish. This month's issue of First Things carries Anthony Esolen's fascinating discussion of the new English texts: Restoring the Words.

Many other church bodies followed the Roman example during the 1970s, adopting the texts of the ordinary of the mass for their own use in, for example, the Episcopal Church's 1979 Book of Common Prayer, the Anglican Church of Canada's Book of Alternative Services and the Lutheran Book of Worship. Our own congregation yesterday celebrated the Lord's Supper with the now familiar greeting: "The Lord be with you." To which we responded: "And also with you." This new disparity in our liturgies prompts me to wonder whether other denominations will eventually follow the Roman lead once again and bring their own liturgies into closer conformity with the new, more accurate, texts.

At this point I am reluctant to speculate on this question. Official ecumenism has fallen on hard times in recent decades, as various denominations have gone their own way on a variety of divisive issues, seemingly unconcerned with the impact on their sister churches, and sometimes even on their own communions. A more practical consideration is that composers have used the 1973 texts for their own mass settings, which are in use in countless congregations throughout the English-speaking world. Without a Vatican-style authority to impose a different translation on them, force of habit will likely incline them to stick with what they have. In the meantime, as of yesterday we are all just a little further apart, liturgically speaking.

Whither the GOP?

2011-11-22T09:14:00.005-05:00

David Frum is a conservative commentator south of the border who appears to have been anathematized by other American conservatives enthralled with the Tea Party. He poses a question: When Did the GOP [i.e., Republican Party] Lose Touch With Reality?

I’ve been a Republican all my adult life. I have worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, at Forbes magazine, at the Manhattan and American Enterprise Institutes, as a speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration. I believe in free markets, low taxes, reasonable regulation, and limited government. I voted for John McCain in 2008, and I have strongly criticized the major policy decisions of the Obama administration. But as I contemplate my party and my movement in 2011, I see things I simply cannot support.

America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. And yet: This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong.

Will the Republican Party listen to Frum, or will it sideline itself in next year's election and hand another presidential victory to the opposition? Stay tuned.

Choice in education?

2011-11-17T13:22:00.005-05:00

An educational policy for the 21st century? Might be worth a try here as well.

PR and the courts

2011-11-16T11:03:00.012-05:00

The leader of Canada's Green Party is seeking a laudable goal with dubious means: Elizabeth May backs Supreme Court challenge against first-past-the-post elections. From the National Post:

May noted that more than 80% of people vote in Scandinavian countries and some other European nations, but she said the lowest voter turnouts in the world occur in countries with first-past-the-post systems, such as Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, where governments can be elected with majorities despite having received less than 50% of the ballots cast in elections.

The Association for the Advancement of Democratic Rights has failed in a previous legal challenge of Quebec’s first-past-the-post system. Now it’s hoping an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada will be heard and could eventually overturn the previous court ruling, changing elections across the country.

I would be somewhat surprised if the Supreme Court decided to hear this case. Yes, I agree with May: our single-member-plurality electoral system wastes votes, unfairly handicaps smaller principled parties, produces artificial majorities, and depresses voter turnout. But I am most reluctant to see the courts take the matter out of the hands of Parliament, even if the latter is, in effect, stacked against what many of us are convinced is a long overdue reform. If a court imposes electoral reform, even in the interest of enhancing democracy, it will be difficult for Canadians to take ownership of it. Questions concerning its legitimacy will continue to haunt our political life thereafter. Let's not go that route, please.

Parental authority and children's rights

2011-11-15T13:33:00.035-05:00

In 1989 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which was subsequently signed by representatives of 140 countries and ratified or accepted by 193, with the notable exceptions of Somalia and the United States. This was not the first time that obligations towards children had been expressed in terms of rights; an earlier Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child had been adopted by the League of Nations in 1924, although in its five brief points it never once used the word “rights,” speaking instead the language of duty: the child “must be fed,” “must be sheltered and succored,” “must be protected against every form of exploitation,” &c. The 1959 UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child is similarly spare in using the language of rights, mentioning them twice under Principle 1 and not at all in Principles 2 through 10. By contrast, the CRC consists of 54 articles in which “rights” are referred to 26 times and the obligations of “States Parties” mentioned 110 times.

These differences between the CRC and the two earlier documents are significant in that they represent an historic shift which Michael Ignatieff has described as the Rights Revolution, Francis Fukuyama as the Great Disruption, and what I have elsewhere referred to as the dawn of the choice-enhancement state.

It is worth noting that, especially in the US, the CRC is controversial because it would seem to bring the state too deeply into the legitimate sphere of family intimacy. Such reservations have thus far successfully prevented the US from ratifying the Convention. Even among the signatories, several states, including the Vatican, have explicitly qualified their acceptance for various reasons. Indeed it is not altogether clear that recasting parental or societal obligations towards children as rights represents genuine progress in ensuring the latter's well-being, especially if we do not curtail the tendency to view all rights as policed by the courts.

In one sense, of course, no one can doubt that children have the right to be loved and cared for by their parents. Yet the primary agents for fulfilling this responsibility are the parents themselves, and not the “states parties” which have signed the document, though the latter certainly have an obligation towards both parents and their children under their general mandate to do public justice. It is worth noting that the word authority appears only three times in the text of the 1989 Convention and each time refers to legal or judicial authority. When used in the plural form, authorities always denotes political authorities. Noticeably absent from all three documents is a recognition of the primacy of parental authority in nurturing the child towards maturity.

I have just completed the first draft of a manuscript on the subject of authority, office and the image of God. In the course of researching and writing this, I have become convinced that we need to reconfigure the ongoing conversation surrounding authority so as to recognize that it resides in an office – or, better, offices – given us by the God who has created us in his image. Accordingly we would be better served, in speaking of parental obligations towards their children, to focus on the authoritative offices borne by each, namely, father, mother, son and daughter.

What will a shift to the language of authority gain for us? I believe it will enable us better to account for the full complexity of the relationship between parents and minor children – necessarily an ever-changing relationship as the children grow to maturity. It will also help us to distinguish between the legitimate authoritative offices of parents and government, recognizing that, while both presumably intend the child's best interest, the secondary authority of government is necessarily limited by the primary authority of parents. It is thus not a matter of opposing freedom, say, of parents to the authority of the state but of recognizing that different agents possess authoritative offices whose demands are different yet, properly understood, mutually supportive and equally worthy of respect.

Convivium

2011-11-10T09:54:00.017-05:00

Canada now has a counterpart to First Things, the 21-year-old journal founded by the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. It's called Convivium, is edited by Peter Stockland and Fr. Raymond J. de Souza, and is published by the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal. The name comes from the homily Fr. de Souza preached at Fr. Neuhaus's funeral.

In each issue Fr. de Souza offers Small Talk, "an eclectic and ecumenical roundup of incidents, events and oddities that catch our editor's eye." Here's a sample:

What's the difference between Orthodox and Roman Catholics anyway? Not much, apparently. "The differences are slight," we are told by the Toronto Star. "They use the same liturgies, though Orthodox Christians don't consider the Pope a divine figure." So writes Murray Whyte. No one expects Whyte to know anything more about religion than anyone else at the Star, so it is sad but not surprising that he doesn't know that Catholics don't consider the Pope divine. But does he really consider a dispute about whether a man is or is not divine to be "slight"? Imagine if the Star had been covering the court of Constantine back in the fourth century. Breaking news from Nicaea: Arius and Athanasius quibble over slight differences.

The October 2011 preview issue is now out and subscriptions can be had here. Please subscribe today.

End of month notes

2011-10-31T13:51:00.015-04:00

It's almost certainly past time for this: Commonwealth agrees first-born girls can be queen. Two observations: First, eliminating gender discrimination is the easy part; ending birth-order discrimination would be more complicated. Then again we are talking about hereditary monarchy, no? Second, the United Kingdom can change the succession to the Crown more easily than Canada. In the UK an act of parliament is sufficient; here we would need a constitutional amendment requiring unanimous provincial approval. It seems unlikely that a single province would stand in the way, but stranger things have happened in our history.

We Canadians are not as wedded to our national symbols as are Americans to theirs, so changing them is not unthinkable: Should a polar bear replace the beaver as Canada’s national emblem?

Some months ago a friend, knowing my American birth, made me feel sheepish for not knowing that the oak tree is the United States' national tree. However, I subsequently discovered that the choice of a national tree was made only in 2004, long after I left the country. It seems my memory isn't as bad as I had feared. Um, now what were we talking about again?

The global protests are becoming more specific:

How many deadlines have passed for the indefatigable Harold Camping's doomsday predictions? Apparently a week ago last friday was the last straw, even for Camping: Family Radio Founder Harold Camping Repents, Apologizes for False Teachings. Last I heard, Family Radio was still airing on shortwave, but for how long?

Andrew Coyne is dead-on here: If our leaders were corrupt, would we know it?

In other countries executive power is subject to various checks and balances. Who or what prevents a prime minister of Canada from doing as he pleases? The governor general? But he is his appointee. The Senate? He appoints all the senators. The courts? He appoints every member of the Supreme Court, and all the federal court judges, too. The bureaucracy? He appoints the clerk of the privy council, every deputy minister, the heads of all the major Crown corporations, even the ambassadors. The police? He appoints the chief of the RCMP. And so on, hundreds and hundreds of posts, great and small, and nearly all without any independent oversight.

Reform is long overdue. I think modifying our first-past-the-post electoral system towards some form of proportional representation would be a step in the right direction, but it's not the only one.

This is from my Genevan Psalter blog, but it is worth posting here as well. The Psalm Project will be performing at Redeemer University College during its North American tour in January.

I hope their efforts will lead to a recovery of psalm-singing in North American churches, but one thing puzzles me: why would anyone tour North America in January?

Soprano recital

2011-10-23T21:11:00.002-04:00

I may be prejudiced, but I think this is worth sharing with the world:

October snippets

2011-10-19T20:12:00.026-04:00

Jason Hood has posted something on The Death of Christianity in the Middle East, for which the United States and its allies may bear some culpability. The statistics are sobering:

Here’s the big picture, from the Jersualem Post: “…at the time of Lebanese independence from France in 1946 the majority of Lebanese were Christians. Today less than 30% of Lebanese are Christians. In Turkey, the Christian population has dwindled from 2 million at the end of World War I to less than 100,000 today. In Syria, at the time of independence Christians made up nearly half of the population. Today 4% of Syrians are Christian. In Jordan half a century ago 18% of the population was Christian. Today 2% of Jordanians are Christian.”

Please continue to pray for our brothers and sisters in that troubled part of the world.

Many of us baby boomers grew to maturity in the suburbs that sprang up around the major North American metropolitan areas in the wake of the Second World War. Is it possible, however, that the settlement patterns characteristic of these communities are unsustainable over the long term? Robert Johnson and Kevin Lincoln have given us A Complete Guide To The Ponzi Scheme That Is Suburban America. An excerpt: "The suburbs do not create wealth, they destroy it. The American style of building our places is simply not productive enough to continue." It's something to think about.

The protesters on Wall Street and elsewhere have also given us something to think about. In the meantime Henry Blodget gives us Four Charts That Explain What The Protesters Are Angry About...

1. Unemployment is at the highest level since the Great Depression (with the exception of a brief blip in the early 1980s).

2. At the same time, corporate profits are at an all-time high, both in absolute dollars and as a share of the economy.

3. Wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low. In other words, corporate profits are at an all-time high, in part, because corporations are paying less of their revenue to employees than they ever have. . . .

4. Income and wealth inequality in the US economy is near an all-time high: The owners of the country's assets (capital) are winning, everyone else (labor) is losing.

Whose fault is this? That's where the disagreements come in.

Jean Bethke Elshtain is one of my favourite living political philosophers. We were privileged to host her at Redeemer University College back in 1998. Now we read that she is heading to Baylor University as Visiting Distinguished Professor of Religion and Public Life. Should the biblical proscription of coveting keep us from envying Baylor?

Canada may finally be getting its own counterpart to First Things in the form of Convivium, the brainchild of Peter Stockland and Fr. Raymond de Souza. The new journal was launched last evening in Ottawa. The National Post carries an inaptly-titled report: New magazine reunites church and state. Thus far there appears to be no online presence, but that will likely come in time.

Two decades ago we learned that a Class A minor league baseball team would be coming to Geneva, Illinois, a picturesque community on the Fox River not far from where I grew up. I had my own ideas concerning a name for the team, which they saw fit to christen the Kane County Cougars instead of my own preference: the Geneva Psalms.

Later: Convivium is indeed online. Check here.

Liberalism . . . and liberalism

2011-10-04T11:06:00.001-04:00

Miroslav Volf, author of the new book, Public Faith, speaks about the need to save liberalism as a way of securing an open public square where all faiths can meet and work for the common good.

I am increasingly persuaded that the contemporary debate over liberalism has been hampered by the failure of most of the participants to distinguish between two different, albeit related, meanings of the word.

On the one hand, there are those who critique liberalism, noting that its individualism is incapable of doing justice to community or accounting for our responsibilities to each other in a variety of settings. On the other, those defending liberalism, even if their defence is as moderate as Volf's, tend to emphasize that it provides a framework within which diverse citizens can work out their differences for the sake of the common good. This is the approach taken by the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and many of the writers in First Things.

I would suggest that the two sides are talking past each other and are referring to different phenomena. The first group is critiquing what is essentially a spiritually-based ideology which tends to reduce all communities to mere voluntary associations, thereby levelling the distinctions among church, state, family, marriage, business enterprises, labour unions, &c. Under such an approach, it is virtually impossible to speak of intrinsic differences among these. That marriage has been increasingly reduced to a private contract between self-interested parties should not surprise us, given the predominance of liberal ideology in the English-speaking countries. This is the kind of liberalism I take on in chapter 2 of my Political Visions and Illusions, as well as here.

When the second group hears that some people, including Christians, are criticizing liberalism, they hear a critique of political institutions that facilitate deliberation as a means of resolving potentially intractable differences. Such people as David VanDrunen and my friend and colleague Janet Ajzenstat fall into this category. They think that the first group is dismissing representative democracy, democratic elections, parliamentary debate and constitutional limits and is pining for a restored monarchy or a socialist commonwealth. There may be a few critics seeking these goals, but, as far as I can tell, the majority of such critics, myself included, value highly what some call liberal democracy but which I prefer to call constitutional democracy.

To be sure, our contemporary democratic institutions do owe something to the ideology of liberalism, with its contractarian account of the origins of civil government, but the smooth functioning of a democratic constitution is not dependent on this account. In fact, as the late Sir Bernard Crick pointed out half a century ago, democracy itself, if liberated from constitutional constraints, can become antipolitical in the sense that it hinders the chief political task of peacefully conciliating diversity.

My proposal is that, before the debate over liberalism continues, the two sides clarify what they mean by liberalism so as to avoid the misunderstandings that have beset the conversation up to now.

A Conservative dynasty?

2011-09-13T21:44:00.008-04:00

This is my latest column in Christian Courier, published under the general title of "Principalities & Powers." Please take out a subscription today.

Five years ago I was invited by columnist Lorne Gunter to speak at the annual meeting of the Civitas Society in Ottawa. This was after he read an article I had written for the Cardus publication, Comment. Although the organization touts itself as “a strictly non-partisan ‘society where ideas meet’,” it soon became clear to me that this gathering of journalists, academics, prominent politicians and political aides was only too pleased to celebrate the recent victory of Stephen Harper’s minority Conservative government at the polls. Tasting the first fruits of political power, Stephen Harper himself made an unscheduled appearance with his entourage on that first evening of the event.

The most revealing session of this meeting was an in-house talk by Frank Luntz, the American pollster and consultant – or spin-doctor, in current parlance – whose work for the Republican Party had contributed to two electoral victories for President George W. Bush. Somewhat to my surprise, Luntz told the gathering that, if Harper’s party were to listen to his advice, he could help them create a Conservative dynasty that would last for twenty years. At the time this seemed somewhat implausible. After all, the Liberals had ruled virtually unopposed for more than a decade and could still claim in some fashion to be Canada’s “natural governing party.” The newly elected Conservatives had only a minority in the House of Commons, and the Bloc québécois had a stranglehold on La Belle Province, apparently preventing any other party from achieving majority status.

I was reminded of Luntz’s promise after the Canadian people gave the Conservatives their coveted majority in May, demoted the Liberals to third place, virtually eliminated the Bloc as a political force, and elevated the New Democrats to official opposition. Now the notion of a lengthy Conservative dynasty does not seem nearly as far-fetched as it did in 2006. The NDP has just lost Jack Layton and is being led for the time being by a neophyte. Michael Ignatieff has become only the second federal Liberal leader, after Stéphane Dion, not to become prime minister. Finding a suitable replacement will not be easy for the deeply-divided party.

Even those otherwise sympathetic with the federal Conservatives’ policies should be uneasy with the current state of affairs. One senses that Harper and company have smelled blood and are going in for the kill. Yet a healthy democratic polity requires more than one robust political party. These parties must be fairly evenly matched to preserve the genuinely competitive character of elections. A ruling party must function under a realistic threat of being defeated in the next election; otherwise it will become complacent and take its popular mandate for granted. Where one party is repeatedly favoured to win, corruption and injustice are likely to creep into its activities.

If Stephen Harper wishes to leave behind a positive legacy for Canada, he should do what he can to support the New Democrats’ choice of an able leader who will keep the Conservatives on their toes and hold them to account for their policies. A weakened opposition unable to perform this vital task will tempt the government to pursue policies of short-term benefit to itself but detrimental to the public interest just because they can get away with it.

One of the things that brought down the Liberals in 2006 was public indignation over the Sponsorship Scandal, which saw their government disbursing funds by questionable means to advertising firms for unclear purposes. It did so during a period when its position in the House of Commons was virtually unassailable, facing as it did a divided opposition. During Luntz’s address to Civitas, he emphasized the “disgusting” waste of tax dollars by the Liberals – something intended to appeal to the participants’ sense of justice.

However, partisanship itself can be taken to unjust lengths. Partisans are more easily outraged by their opponents’ missteps than by their own. Reinhold Niebuhr once observed that those fancying themselves the “children of light” underestimate the power of self-interest in themselves even as they see it in their enemies. Yet if we understand clearly the teachings of Scripture, we must admit that everyone, and not just our opponents, has sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (Romans 3:23). This recognition will keep us from embracing a narrow partisanship that ignores the good in our adversaries and the evil in ourselves.

Up with Authority

2011-09-13T13:03:00.000-04:00

My review of Fr. Victor Lee Austin’s most recent book appears in last week’s edition of Comment: Why We Need Authority. Given that I am in the latter stages of writing a book on the subject, I have found Austin’s defence of authority refreshing and eloquent. I strongly recommend it.

Looking north

2011-09-08T09:25:00.007-04:00

Stratfor Global Intelligence has published a fascinating analysis of American global hegemony that argues, in effect, that geography is destiny: The Geopolitics of the United States. Here is a sample:

The American geography is an impressive one. The Greater Mississippi Basin together with the Intracoastal Waterway has more kilometers of navigable internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. The American Midwest is both overlaid by this waterway, and is the world’s largest contiguous piece of farmland. The U.S. Atlantic Coast possesses more major ports than the rest of the Western Hemisphere combined. Two vast oceans insulated the United States from Asian and European powers, deserts separate the United States from Mexico to the south, while lakes and forests separate the population centers in Canada from those in the United States. The United States has capital, food surpluses and physical insulation in excess of every other country in the world by an exceedingly large margin. So like the Turks, the Americans are not important because of who they are, but because of where they live.

On the other hand, all is not well economically in the "Land of the Free," and some Americans are queuing up at their northern border: Americans flee north to Canada for economic opportunity.

Canadian officials say the number of Americans applying for temporary work visas doubled between 2008 and 2010. Immigration lawyers in Toronto and the border city of Windsor, right across from job-starved Detroit, say they’re seeing a dramatic growth in clients seeking to come to Canada to work, or even as permanent residents. . . . Canada was one of the few to escape the 2008 financial meltdown relatively unscathed, a turn of events largely attributed to Ottawa’s long-standing refusal to deregulate the banking sector.

Canada is sometimes said to be cursed by its own geography, which tends to divide rather than unite Canadians. Yet we must be doing something right, even if we haven't the slightest chance of displacing America's global prominence.

August snippets

2011-08-31T16:06:00.022-04:00

The second half of the 20th century saw a dramatic proliferation of Bible translations, especially in English. It may not be much of an exaggeration to observe that one man fuelled this growth: Eugene Nida, Who Revolutionized Bible Translations, Dead at 96. The Good News Bible and its successors were obvious examples of his influence, but even the New International Version bore his imprint. I am of two minds concerning Nida's legacy. On the one hand, there is no doubt that easier-to-read Bible translations have brought to life God's word for the last two generations of Christians and seekers alike. At the same time, some translations have effectively obscured the peculiarities of the ancient cultures, discarding some metaphors (e.g., "to know" as a synonym for sexual relations) that perhaps ought to have been explained in footnotes rather than replaced by contemporary idioms in the text itself. I am somewhat sympathetic with the views expressed here by Raymond Van Leeuwen a decade ago: We Really Do Need Another Bible Translation.

Writing for The New York Times, Ross Douthat has poked holes in a recent New Yorker piece by Ryan Lizza connecting a well-known evangelist and "dominionism": The New Yorker and Francis Schaeffer. I am not one of those who was influenced by Schaeffer, but I personally know many people who were and who found direction for their lives through his ministry at the l'Abri communities. And not one of them, as far as I know, has tried to overthrow the US government.

This is from the National Geographic Society: 18th-Century Ship Found Under 9/11 Site. "Others have also suggested that the ship—which was likely deliberately sunk—may have done duty as a British troop carrier during the Revolutionary War." Contemporary New Yorkers may have forgotten that their city was a bastion of loyalty to the Crown during what is probably better called the war for American independence.

Over at my Genevan Psalter blog, I have now reached the halfway point in my thus far 25-year effort to set to verse the biblical Psalms, with fresh metrical versifications of Psalms 127 and 122. I also call attention to two compelling renditions of the Psalms by a group styling themselves Brother Down: Psalm 13 and Psalm 75. Yes, these are the Genevan tunes! Here is more from Douglas Wilson: Psalm Off Results. "Canon Press is now negotiating with the band Brother Down in Santa Cruz in hopes of releasing an album of Reformation-era psalms, all done in their distinctive style." It seems we have something to look forward to.

Who was H. Evan Runner? A Calvin College philosopher who had considerably more impact on the North American christian university scene than the relative paucity of his academic writings might otherwise indicate. Read about him here: The Importance of H. Evan Runner Although I did not know him well, Runner was nevertheless something of a spiritual and intellectual grandfather to me, as I was taught by a number of his students at a crucial stage in my own pilgrimage.

Holy smokes!

2011-08-24T17:17:00.000-04:00

Tobacco use has never been a temptation for me and I certainly would not advise anyone else to take up the habit. However, it seems there is a relationship between widespread availability of Bibles and cigarette use unknown to most of us. J. Mark Bertrand reports on the connection: Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em?

Mark O. Hatfield (1922-2011)

2011-08-09T23:02:00.001-04:00

As a young Christian trying to sort out the relationship between my faith in Jesus Christ and the political landscape, Senator Mark O. Hatfield was one of my heroes. I was privileged to hear him speak at a church in Minneapolis back in 1975, and I was favourably impressed. Here are two retrospectives on Hatfield's life and witness within the political realm, coming from opposite sides of the political aisle: Cal Thomas: A Conservative Remembers Mark Hatfield; and Wesley Granberg-Michaelson: A Tribute to Mark O. Hatfield. This is from my own Political Visions and Illusions (pp. 148-149):

U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon enjoyed a long political career extending over nearly half a century, although many of the positions he took on specific issues were quite controversial, especially his early opposition to American involvement in Vietnam. Hatfield explicitly claimed to vote in accordance with his convictions whether or not his constituents always agreed. Nevertheless, Oregon voters continually re-elected him, twice as state Governor and five times as Senator, not because he followed their wishes, but because he acted on principle and in so doing earned their continued respect. Refusing to bow the knee to the god of popular sovereignty is not necessarily a recipe for political failure. On the contrary, many citizens prefer to vote for someone willing to stand on principle.

May Senator Hatfield rest in peace until the resurrection and may the LORD see fit to raise up principled statesmen and stateswomen in his place.

Church decline across the pond

2011-08-05T11:30:00.001-04:00

Many North American Christians have been influenced by the remarkable political and social witness of the great Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands. I am pleased to count myself among them. Thus it saddens me to read the following BBC report: Dutch rethink Christianity for a doubtful world.

An imposing figure in black robes and white clerical collar, Mr Hendrikse presides over the Sunday service at the Exodus Church in Gorinchem, central Holland. It is part of the mainstream Dutch Protestant Church, and the service is conventional enough, with hymns, readings from the Bible, and the Lord's Prayer. But the message from Mr Hendrikse's sermon seems bleak - "Make the most of life on earth, because it will probably be the only one you get". "Personally I have no talent for believing in life after death," Mr Hendrikse says. "No, for me our life, our task, is before death."

Nor does Klaas Hendrikse believe that God exists at all as a supernatural thing. "When it happens, it happens down to earth, between you and me, between people, that's where it can happen. God is not a being at all... it's a word for experience, or human experience."

Mr Hendrikse describes the Bible's account of Jesus's life as a mythological story about a man who may never have existed, even if it is a valuable source of wisdom about how to lead a good life.

Much as a vibrant Puritanism had turned to unitarianism within a century of the settlement of New England, so has Kuyper's Gereformeerd community been largely assimilated into the Dutch mainline Protestantse Kerk, which, though pockets of vitality definitely exist within it, is far from being a confessional church.

However, the story is not over, and signs were already present four years ago that secularism in the Netherlands may be running its course. This Weekly Standard article is cause for hope: Holland's Post-Secular Future. Whenever we are tempted to despair over the apparent progress of secularism, we need only recall that ultimately it cannot satisfy. As St. Augustine put it so well, our hearts are restless until they find rest in the One who alone can provide it.

Pennings on Breivik

2011-07-28T10:49:00.002-04:00

My friend Ray Pennings has written an insightful op-ed piece in The Globe and Mail that is worth reading: Don’t blame religion for Anders Breivik. An excerpt:

The crimes of which Anders Breivik stands accused don’t show how religion can inspire evil. Quite the contrary: They are proof positive that a Christ-less Christianity is a cultural construct that can’t bring the depth of relationship required to prevent the horrors that evil inspires. It doesn’t show how faith makes us evil – it shows only why we so badly need to be inspired by the social virtues propagated by its institutions.

John R W Stott (1921-2011)

2011-07-28T10:40:00.000-04:00

Never mind the radio and television preachers we hear so much about. The two most influential figures on English-speaking evangelicalism in the 20th and 21st centuries were, not Baptist or Pentecostal, but members in good standing of the Church of England: C. S. Lewis and John R. W. Stott, the latter of whom we were privileged to host at Redeemer University College several years ago. He will be greatly missed.

July snippets

2011-07-25T15:05:00.042-04:00

When I was growing up in Wheaton, Illinois, it was definitely a dry town. Not any more. Here is incontrovertible evidence of how much things have changed in what has become just one more Chicago suburb: More than 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall at Wheaton Ale Fest.

The son of the last Habsburg emperor, Archduke Otto von Habsburg, has died at age 98. Although Habsburg represented a family with centuries-old imperial ambitions for a united Europe, he spent his later years working for federal unity within the context of the European Union, especially as a member of the European Parliament. Photos of the funeral in Vienna can be see here. A survey of Habsburg's life can be read here.

Three years after its publication, I have finally obtained a copy of The Orthodox Study Bible, the first complete Bible in English for Orthodox Christians. At some point I will post a fuller review of the volume. For now I will make some initial observations. The Old Testament is a fresh translation from the Greek Septuagint, while the New Testament, somewhat oddly, is the New King James Version, originally published in 1982. The "canonical order" of the Old Testament books differs from that familiar to most English-speaking Christians, having been "taken from The Old Testament According to the Seventy, published with the approval of the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece" (p. xi). At the beginning is an essay titled, "Introducing the Orthodox Church" (xxi-xxviii), whose appearance is somewhat surprising given that its target audience should already be acquainted with their own ecclesial communion. "Introducing the Bible" would seem more appropriate at that point. More to come.

Our prayers ascend to God for the people of Norway who have suffered an unspeakable tragedy in the deaths of so many at the weekend. In the coming days and weeks much will be written about mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik, whom much of the media were quick to label a fundamentalist Christian. As it turns out, one would have to stretch the definition rather a lot to make it fit: A Word About Anders Behring Breivik’s Christianity. One wonders why the press didn't jump instead on his anachronistic claim to be a Knight Templar, which, along with his nonreligious Christianity, is one element of a very weird mix.

I had certainly intended to comment before now on Canada's watershed federal election, which took place at the beginning of May. The 2011 election will go down in history along with such crucial elections as those of 1896, 1911 and 1993, each of which saw significant realignments in voter support for the parties. The 1993 election all but finished off the old Progressive Conservative Party, while the May election placed the Liberals — Canada's "natural governing party" — in third place for the first time ever — behind the socialist New Democrats, who now form the official opposition. Admittedly, I hadn't seen it coming. I had predicted a third Conservative minority government, assuming that the separatist Bloc québécois would continue to hold the balance of power in Parliament. Their unexpected collapse enabled the Conservatives to win a majority government for the first time in nearly two decades. I've been wrong before, and I'll probably be wrong again.

Long-time readers of this blog are aware that I dislike majority governments, especially when they do not have the support of a majority of voters. The Conservative Party of Canada has 166 out of 308 seats in the House of Commons, but received only 39.62 percent of the popular vote. Electoral reform would put an end to this anomalous situation, with the Commons better representing the views of Canadian voters. It would by no means solve all our problems, but it would force our political leaders to negotiate with each other and — perish the thought! — to compromise, rather than relying on an artificial majority to push what is in effect a minority agenda into law.

Responsibility claimed in Norway attacks

2011-07-24T08:43:00.000-04:00

Frank Schaeffer does it again: Christian Terror in Norway: I Predicted Terror from the Religious Right in My New Book “Sex, Mom and God.”

Murdoch's good news of the world

2011-07-22T21:30:00.000-04:00

A newsworthy item from the CNN Belief Blog:

It just so happens that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which is weathering a storm of criticism around newspaper ethics, also owns the rights to the world's best-selling English Bible, the New International Version.

Could this lead to an explosion in sales of the NRSV or ESV?

A family bible

2011-07-19T07:38:00.025-04:00

My great-grandmother, Lucy Jane Bentley Hyder, died several years before I was born, so I have no personal memories of her. However, I do have her family Bible, a hefty King James version printed in 1892 that has been passed down the generations and came into my possession not quite twenty years ago. I cannot say whether her family read from it regularly, but, like so many other bible owners, she recorded births and deaths in its pages – something giving it inestimable value to her descendants.

Lucy Jane and her husband Nelson were both born in 1875 and married in 1896. The first event she recorded was the birth of their eldest child, Mary E. Hyder, later that year. The most poignant record in her handwriting was the birth of twins Emmet and Emma in 1901, followed a day later by a record of their deaths. One suspects they were born — perhaps premature — at home before the days of hospital neonatal intensive care units. Apparently there was a page listing marriages as well, but at some point one of their sons seems to have torn it out to expunge evidence of an earlier matrimonial moment he preferred to forget.

Lucy Jane was a Virginian by birth, growing up and living in East Stone Gap, Virginia, until around 1914, when she and Nelson moved to a farm outside Adrian, Michigan. They were members of the local Friends Church, not because they were Quakers, but because it was nearest their home. A cousin assures me that Lucy Jane believed the world was flat until her dying day. My mother tells me she spoke with a distinctive southern accent, pronouncing the neuter third-person pronoun as hit, a holdover from Anglo-Saxon and Chaucer’s Middle English, with an obvious family resemblance to the Dutch het.

Though she had little formal education, Lucy Jane had the presence of mind to record two reminiscences of her own ancestry extending back to the end of the eighteenth century. One of these was dictated to my mother’s elder sister and is still found between the pages of the Bible in the book of Daniel. Armed with this information, I was easily able to find myriad connections with the so-called World Family Tree, containing the various European noble and royal figures from which virtually everyone we might chance to meet on the street is descended in some fashion. The results of my research I posted here nearly a decade ago: The Ancestry of Nelson Hyder and Lucy Jane Bentley Hyder, along with entries from the Bible itself.

There are no underscorings in the text of this Bible. Whether it was read in the course of daily family prayers I cannot say. I wish I had thought to ask her daughter, my grandmother, while she was still alive. Yet it was obviously an important part of the family’s life together, collecting over the years newspaper clippings, personal letters and pressed leaves. The binding is intact, although the front cover is loose and some of the cloth has clearly worn away near the spine. I hope that my own daughter will treasure this volume, as have more than a century of her ancestors.

Incidentally, during a recent visit with relatives, I rediscovered a family bible dating to 1841 belonging to the first settlers in a region of Michigan where my cousins were born and raised. I can no longer recall how it came into my possession some thirty years ago. But when I found it again and recognized what it was, I typed the original owners' names into the ubiquitous Google and quickly discovered that a descendant had posted their information on a popular genealogical website. I was able to contact her and return the volume to a family member who would value it more than I. This would not have been possible two or three decades ago.

My curiosity is piqued. In an age of mass printing and the easy availability of books, does anyone keep a family bible anymore? The people I know have scores of individually-owned bibles in their homes, but does any have the clear status of family bible? Responses are welcome.

Farewell to a prophet: Gerald Vandezande

2011-07-18T08:38:00.007-04:00

Adrian Helleman has posted a eulogy for Gerald Vandezande, who died this past saturday. I myself had known Vandezande for more than 30 years, mostly through associations with Citizens for Public Justice, on one of whose boards I served in the mid-1990s. He will definitely be missed. Here is Helleman:

He was born in the Netherlands and emigrated to Canada in 1951 at the age of 17. Although he had only a high school education, by dint of hard work he learned cost accounting at night school. His employer sent him to Sarnia, where he met his future wife and coworker, Wynne. He originally had a dream to become a minister in the Christian Reformed Church, but God had other plans for him: proclaiming the gospel through Christian action.

He did this first in the Christian Labour Association of Canada, where he became executive secretary. He was instrumental in winning certification for the CLAC. After that he worked for social justice through the Committee for Justice and Liberty, which became the CJL Foundation and later formed the nucleus for Citizens for Public Justice.

This brief sketch cannot begin to do justice to Jerry's many ventures. Later in life his efforts for social justice expanded to include the environment, abortion, pluralism, independent schools, and child poverty. No doubt, I have forgotten many other things that he did.

Jerry had a way of speaking to everyone in Canadian society, from factory workers to politicians. And he was fearless in addressing the issues of the day. Above all, he had a knack for uniting people from many faiths and working with them for a common cause.

He was an inspiration and mentor to many younger people in Canada, who learned from him how a Christian should be engaged in politics. Jerry's thought had been shaped by the Dutch Christian religious leader and politician, Abraham Kuyper, who asserted that all of creation belongs to Christ. That means politics as well.

On abortion, for example, Jerry supported proposed federal legislation that many anti-abortion Christians opposed and was thus defeated. This loss was a great disappointment to him.

For Jerry, justice meant more than "Just Us," which was the title of his book. In the name of justice, we must not support only our own individual or community projects, but we must prepared to build bridges to those of other political views or religious faiths. We must be prepared to compromise, if necessary, in order to achieve our common political objectives. That, after all, is the nature of politics.

The nation of Canada indicated its respect for Jerry by awarding him the Order of Canada [our counterpart to knighthood] in May 2001.

His death is a great loss to all Canadians who are passionate for social justice. Many people from diverse walks of life and widely differing faiths have lost a great friend. I count myself among them. My wife and I have enjoyed his friendship and encouragement for many decades.

Jerry was a prophet for our time, and Canada has lost one of its greatest prophetic voices. Our condolences go out to Wynne and their daughters, Janice and Karen, as well as the grandchildren.

Farewell to a faithful prophet. A good and faithful servant of God, Jerry has received the commendation of the master (Mt. 25:21).

Americans ahead of their time

2011-07-04T08:37:00.002-04:00

In 1931 the Statute of Westminster elevated the so-called Dominions within the British Empire to a status of equality with the United Kingdom itself. These included Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Newfoundland, the Union of South Africa and the Irish Free State. The Empire thus became the Commonwealth of Nations or, more popularly, the British Commonwealth. Each Dominion had its own Parliament and was functionally independent, sharing only a common monarch whose representative, the Governor General, was appointed by the King on the advice of his Dominion government.

Two centuries earlier, however, the American colonists believed that something like the Commonwealth of Nations already existed. This is what contributed to the outbreak of hostilities in 1775. Here is David Hackett Fischer:

These county oligarchies [in colonial Virginia] were not sovereign bodies. Above them sat the Assembly, Council and Royal Governor. The status of these institutions was in dispute until the American War of Independence. The Assembly was understood by Imperial officials as the colonial equivalent of a municipal council in England. They called it the House of Burgesses, a name which brought to mind the Burgesses of Bristol and other British towns. But Virginians had a different idea of their Assembly. In 1687, William Fitzhugh called it "our Parliament here," a representative body which knew no sovereign except the King himself (p. 407).

Tragically, this difference of opinion had to be settled on the battlefield, with Americans claiming full independence on this day 235 years ago.

Royal duty versus celebrity

2011-06-30T10:39:00.004-04:00

Father Raymond de Souza writes in advance of the visit of the new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to Canada: Lifestyles of the noto-rich-and-famous.

Queen Elizabeth II has visited New York City three times, which is the same number of trips she has made to Moose Jaw [Saskatchewan]. She has gone where her duty takes her. . . .

It is necessary that, on occasion, the Royals visit Hollywood and Fifth Avenue, but the occasions must be rare. The world of new money and fleeting celebrity is corrosive to the dignity and tradition that a monarchy sustains, and which sustains it in turn. The purpose of a Royal visit is not to chase after the people whom the world celebrates, but rather to bring the spotlight to those people and places which are not especially famous or powerful, but deserving all the same. Princes do not need wealth or fame, and it is unbecoming for them to lust after it.

Wise words indeed. I hope the future king and queen have read Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution and an early edition of Robert MacGregor Dawson's Government of Canada, which should definitely be part of their political education.

Chanting the psalms, daily prayer

2011-06-26T13:46:00.039-04:00

An acquaintance recently called to my attention two paragraphs from the Second Helvetic Confession, one of the confessional standards of the Swiss and Hungarian Reformed Churches, as well as of the Presbyterian Church (USA):

CHAPTER XXIII
Of the Prayers of the Church, of Singing, and of Canonical Hours

SINGING. Likewise moderation is to be exercised where singing is used in a meeting for worship. That song which they call the Gregorian Chant has many foolish things in it; hence it is rightly rejected by many of our churches. If there are churches which have a true and proper sermon but no singing, they ought not to be condemned. For all churches do not have the advantage of singing. And it is well known from testimonies of antiquity that the custom of singing is very old in the Eastern Churches whereas it was late when it was at length accepted in the West.

CANONICAL HOURS. Antiquity knew nothing of canonical hours, that is, prayers arranged for certain hours of the day, and sung or recited by the Papists, as can be proved from their breviaries and by many arguments. But they also have not a few absurdities, of which I say nothing else; accordingly they are rightly omitted by churches which substitute in their place things that are beneficial for the whole Church of God.

There are a number of things erroneously rejected by many of the Reformers, whose knowledge of antiquity was not always accurate, including the sursum corda in the Lord's Supper and the sign of the cross. In this case the authors of the Confession appear to have been unaware that chanting the Psalms in the course of daily prayer has ancient roots in the church, extending back into biblical times. See, for example, Psalm 119:164: "Seven times a day I praise you for your righteous ordinances." Also Daniel 6:10: "[Daniel] got down upon his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God. . . ." And Acts 10:9: "Peter went up on the housetop to pray, about the sixth hour." Following scripture, the Rule of St. Benedict prescribed (or, perhaps better, codified) seven daily prayer offices for use in the monasteries:

As the Prophet saith: "Seven times a day I have given praise to Thee" (Ps 118[119]:164), this sacred sevenfold number will be fulfilled by us in this wise if we perform the duties of our service at the time of Lauds, Prime, Tierce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Complin; because it was of these day hours that he hath said: "Seven times a day I have given praise to Thee" (Ps 118[119]:164). For the same Prophet saith of the night watches: "At midnight I arose to confess to Thee" (Ps 118[119]:62). At these times, therefore, let us offer praise to our Creator "for the judgments of His justice;" namely, at Lauds, Prime, Tierce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Complin; and let us rise at night to praise Him (cf Ps 118[119]:164, 62).

Although St. Benedict intended these daily prayer offices for monastic communities, it seems evident that they were much more widespread in the early church. The Muslim practice of praying five times daily, which many westerners regard as strange, obviously has roots in earlier Jewish and Christian usage.

The Reformers recovered so many ancient things lost to the mediaeval church, especially the doctrines of grace. Yet, given what we know now of the ancient church and its liturgical practices, it is difficult not to conclude that in some instances they were too quick to discard usages that ought to have been retained.

The Geneva Bible's influence

2011-06-02T11:07:00.004-04:00

This passage from Marilynne Robinson’s The Death of Adam makes me wonder whether we should have celebrated the 450th anniversary of the Geneva Bible last year in preference to observing the 400th of the King James Version this year:

“The Geneva Bible, first published in 1560, was a very great influence on political thought in England and America. It was the Bible of Shakespeare and Milton, the Bible one hears referred to sometimes as the ‘breeches’ Bible, because its Adam and Eve, unlike the Adam and Eve of the King James Bible, did not have the presence of mind to fashion their fig leaves into ‘aprons.’ The implication is that it was a crude or naive translation, but in fact it is largely identical with the King James Bible, which was published in 1611. . . . The great difference is that the copious interpretive notes that fill the margins of the Geneva Bible are gone from the King’s Authorized Version. . . . Printing of this Bible in England was forbidden, and it was gradually driven out of circulation in England and America by the King James Version, which basks in the legend that it is a masterpiece created by a committee, and enjoys the reputation of having been the great watershed of English-language literature” (The Death of Adam, p. 197).

Ascension Day

2011-06-02T07:06:00.000-04:00

Hell: temporary punishment?

2011-05-30T20:58:00.000-04:00

In the wake of the controversy over Love Wins, someone recently suggested to me that perhaps hell is not eternal after all and that those sent there might one day complete their sentences, much as a prisoner serves for a certain period and is then released. It’s an intriguing and hopeful thought, but it raises two difficulties, as I see it.

First, my understanding, following that of the historic church, is that Jesus Christ paid the penalty for sin for all those who are in Christ. Mere human beings could never pay the price for their own transgressions. To suggest that they could — by, in effect, serving time — would seem to imply that there is a second path to salvation other than through the only begotten Son of God. But, as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, “no mere creature can bear the weight of God’s eternal anger against sin” (Q&A, 14), and “Only those are saved who by true faith are grafted into Christ and accept all his blessings” (Q&A, 20).

Second, would not a non-eternal, temporary hell be tantamount to purgatory? Article XXII of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion definitively condemns belief in purgatory, but if one conceives of the possibility of completing one’s sentence in hell, then it seems to me that the distinction between purgatory and hell fades away.

Incidentally, the Rev. Wes Bredenhof has discovered something interesting about the author of the Belgic Confession: Guido De Bres and His Belief in Purgatory.

Why I am not a ‘red-letter Christian’

2011-05-27T22:24:00.000-04:00

Having come across the Red Letter Christians blog of Tony Campolo and others, I am reminded again of why I am not a red-letter Christian. There are two basic reasons:

1. It effectively and improperly privileges a canon within the biblical canon, implicitly elevating Jesus’ words above the rest of inspired scripture.

2. As I age my eyes have difficulty reading red letters against a white page. I prefer to read the Bible without straining my vision.

I suppose this makes me a black-letter Christian. So be it. Case closed.

A church in decline

2011-05-14T15:50:00.000-04:00

The fading of the mainline protestant churches over the past two generations has not been limited to the United States. North of the border, in the True North Strong and Free, a similar phenomenon has occurred. Canada’s National Post carries this article in its weekend edition: The split in the United Church. One of my Redeemer University colleagues, Dr. Kevin Flatt, is quoted here, as is Michael Van Pelt, head of the Hamilton, Ontario, think tank, Cardus, for whose publication, Comment, I write on occasion.

The United Church of Canada was formed in 1925 with the union of the former Congregationalist, Presbyterian and Methodist churches into a single national body. (A third of the Presbyterian churches, including our family’s congregation, remained out of the union, retaining the name, Presbyterian Church in Canada.) Since its high water mark in the mid-1960s, the United Church has gone into a precipitous decline in membership and attendance. However, the title of the article is not quite accurate: there has been no “split” as such, only a haemorrhage of members away from the United Church.

Incidentally, while we’re on the subject of Flatt, I would strongly recommend his Comment article, Cross-Border Evangelicals: Americans and Canadians, an astute analysis of the differences between evangelicals on each side of the 49th parallel.

Smith takes on 'new universalism'

2011-05-02T11:31:00.001-04:00

I have not thus far weighed in on the controversy surrounding the publication of Rob Bell's Love Wins. But I will call attention to an astute analysis of the "new universalism" by Calvin College's James K. A. Smith: Can hope be wrong? On the new universalism. I was especially struck by the following paragraph, addressed to those who persist in believing that "I-can't-imagine-a-God-who-[fill in the blank]" is a persuasive argument:

The "I-can't-imagine" strategy is fundamentally Feuerbachian: it is a hermeneutic of projection which begins from what I can conceive and then projects "upwards," as it were, to a conception of God. While this "imagining" might have absorbed some biblical themes of love and mercy, this absorption seems selective. More importantly, the "I-can't-imagine" argument seems inattentive to how much my imagination is shaped and limited by all kinds of cultural factors and sensibilities--including how I "imagine" the nature of love, etc. The "I-can't-imagine" argument makes man the measure of God, or at least seems to let the limits and constraints of "my" imagination trump the authority of Scripture and interpretation. I take it that discipleship means submitting even my imagination to the discipline of Scripture. (Indeed, could anything be more countercultural right now than Jonathan Edwards' radical theocentrism, with all its attendant scandals for our modern sensibilities?)

He is risen indeed!

2011-04-24T19:45:00.002-04:00

Χριστός ανέστη εκ νεκρών,
θανάτω θάνατον πατήσας,
και τοις εν τοις μνήμασι,
ζωὴν χαρισάμενος!

Christ is risen from the dead,
by death trampling down death,
and giving life to those within the grave!

Hearing the Word, seeking justice

2011-04-13T09:47:00.001-04:00

Notre Dame’s Calvinist philosopher Alvin Plantinga published an insightful essay more than a dozen years ago: Two (or More) Kinds of Scripture Scholarship, which found its way into his book, Warranted Christian Belief. Here Plantinga distinguishes between two ways of approaching the Bible: (1) Traditional Christian Biblical Commentary (TCBC) and (2) Historical Biblical Criticism (HBC). The former has the following three characteristics:

First, Scripture itself is taken to be a wholly authoritative and trustworthy guide to faith and morals; it is authoritative and trustworthy, because it is a revelation from God, a matter of God speaking to us. . . . Secondly, an assumption of the enterprise is that the principal author of the Bible — the entire Bible — is God himself. . . . Thirdly . . . the fact that the principal author of the Bible is God himself means that one cannot always determine the meaning of a given passage by discovering what the human author had in mind.

HBC differs from TCBC in that the former “is fundamentally an enlightenment project; it is an effort to try to determine from the standpoint of reason alone what the Scriptural teachings are and whether they are true. Thus HBC eschews the authority and guidance of tradition, magisterium, creed, or any kind of ecclesial or ‘external’ epistemic authority.” HBC requires, among other things, that “faith commitments should play no role” and that a hermeneutic of suspicion should govern our reading of the text. We cannot simply affirm that the biblical text is true but must apply empirical scientific methods to discover, if possible, whether, e.g., the picture of Jesus painted in the gospels is historically accurate. This approach is obviously at variance with TCBC, which comes to Scripture believing it is indeed the Word of God and thus a reliable witness to Jesus Christ.

Plantinga is not wholly dismissive of HBC, which he admits has broadened our knowledge of the Bible and especially of the historical contexts in which it was written. However, HBC tends to view the Bible, not as a canonical whole, but as a collection of disparate texts with different human authors and thus conflicting emphases and teachings. Harmonizing these teachings is not the business of the biblical scholar, according to HBC, but to the theologian who is more evidently tethered to the church’s confession. What this means is that the practitioner of HBC “tends to deal especially with questions of composition and authorship, these being the questions most easily addressed by the methods employed.” Furthermore, he at least tacitly excludes the very question of most interest to believing Christians coming to the text, viz., what God is trying to tell us in his Word. There is thus some tension within the academy between the practitioners of biblical scholarship and theology, with the former often believing the latter to be naïvely precritical and thus unscientific.

I myself am neither a biblical scholar nor a theologian. Nevertheless, as a political scientist reading and pondering Plantinga’s essay, I cannot help but observe a similar cleavage within the discipline of political science, viz., that between the empirical political scientist and the political theorist or philosopher. Having taught political science at the undergraduate level for a quarter of a century, I can testify that students take an interest in it when they are either captivated by a vision of justice or scandalized by the reality of injustice. This was my own experience as a student, when I changed my major from music to political science after the Watergate scandal and the Turkish invasion of my father’s native island of Cyprus. Because virtually all my paternal relatives became refugees overnight, I sought desperately to understand why injustice seems to be such a persistent feature of human life. This is what animated my passion for politics.

However, the empirical political scientist would tell us that such concerns as the nature of justice should play no role in political science. Political philosophy, with its ongoing, millennia-old quest to discover the meanings of justice, statesmanship, good citizenship and civic friendship, is a subdiscipline of philosophy, or perhaps even of religion, and not of political science, which must necessarily limit itself to exploring those questions amenable to empirical methods. Political science can treat only political behaviour and must refrain from making normative statements about the good political order or the virtues conducive to it. Processing and analyzing voting statistics is political science. Exploring the relationship between electoral and party systems is political science. Debating the justice of proposed public policies or of a particular approach to the state is definitely not political science.

I have no intrinsic quarrel with either HBC or empirical political science, properly understood. There is much indeed to be said both for studying the Synoptic Problem and for analyzing how, e.g., different sociological groups voted in the 2008 presidential election. Nevertheless I strongly disagree with those who believe that these types of empirical academic pursuits by themselves constitute the disciplines of biblical scholarship and political science respectively. There is little to be said for the assumption that reason functions apart from basic worldview convictions. The belief that Scripture is not much more than a collection of literary texts with no overall meaning or message is itself borne of a conviction that it — or rather, they — are not essentially different from any other texts. The notion that we should bracket our faith commitments in studying the Bible is rooted in a (nonfalsifiable) belief that it is possible for human beings to reason apart from these commitments and to obtain some form of religiously neutral objectivity.

Something similar could be said of empirical political science as well. The claim of those following the behavioural methods is that they are simply observing the facts of political behaviour. Nevertheless they fail to recognize that this very term presupposes general agreement on what is political and what is not. This general agreement implicitly presupposes a normative order in which the distinction between political and nonpolitical makes sense. What is it that makes setting a country’s foreign policy political while a mother reading to her child before bed is nonpolitical? I would suggest that it has something to do with the jural aspect of the former. By its very nature, the state is called to balance legitimate interests within its jurisdictional sphere. It is, of course, all too common for states in the real world to get this balance wrong, sometimes spectacularly so, as in the Soviet Union and Germany between 1933 and 1945. Yet this entails, not an absence of justice as such, but its distortion or miscarriage. Justice, in short, is central to the very definition of politics, which behavioural political scientists cannot adequately grasp with their methods, however useful they might otherwise be.

In the same way, the canonical status of Scripture and its authority are precisely what give this ancient collection of writings scriptural status. The existence of a Society of Biblical Literature already in some fashion presupposes recognition of at least their historical unity, even if not all its members acknowledge the authority of the whole.

If the very things that draw students to biblical scholarship and to the study of politics are excluded from the two disciplines, then something is seriously amiss in the way both are conceptualized by their mainstream practitioners. If so, then our christian universities may be in the best position to bridge the cleavages between biblical studies and theology, on the one hand, and empirical political science and normative political theory, on the other.

Nevertheless, this will come about only if faculty in the relevant departments take the time to become aware of the historical forces – along with their spiritual roots – that have artificially driven apart the two sides of these disciplines. This requires recognition that the academic enterprise, normatively understood, is not only about specializing in a particular field or subfield, but also about seeing clearly – and with great delight – the interconnections among the disciplines and their respective modest places within the coherent whole that is God’s multifaceted creation.

Cyprus and Greece

2011-04-10T07:49:00.006-04:00

Cyprus Updates poses an intriguing question to its readers: What would an Enosis referendum results be today [sic]? Those favouring enosis wanted to annex the island to Greece.

In December 1949, the Cypriot Orthodox Church challenged the British colonial government to put the Enosis question to a referendum. As was expected, the colonial government refused, and the Church proceeded to organize its own referendum which would take place in churches and be supervised by priests. The referendum took place on the two consecutive Sundays of January 15 and 22, 1950, with an overwhelming majority 95.7% of the people, including Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, voted in favor of extricating the island from the British Empire and annexing it to the Kingdom of Greece. It should be borne in mind that unlike modern elections and referendums which are decided by secret ballot, the 1950 referendum amounted to a public collection of signatures, not unlike a petition.

If Cyprus had been united with Greece, for ever after Cypriots would be complaining that they were being bled dry by the political élites in distant Athens for the latter's benefit. Cyprus is more prosperous than Greece, which is now on the verge of bankruptcy. Even dedicated enotists would be unhappy with Cyprus being no more than a far-away province of an economic basket case. Cyprus' independence has been a troubled one from the outset, but enosis would have been worse.

More trouble from Qaddafi?

2011-04-09T14:16:00.005-04:00

Canada's contrarian historian, Jack Granatstein, asks a troubling question: What happens if Gadhafi survives?

As for Gadhafi, if he survives as now seems likely, we can expect him to pay hard cash to import the arms he needs from countries such as Syria, Pakistan, and North Korea, to resume terrorist operations against western targets, and to kill every one of the rebels he can. (The rebels, a motley crew, will slaughter captured Gadhafi loyalists.) And if the world is distracted by a conflict elsewhere (another Israeli-Hamas-Hezbollah war, for example), Gadhafi will likely send his re-supplied and better trained troops against the pro-democracy enclaves in eastern Libya.

Muammar Qaddafi was a source of trouble for much of the world during the 1980s, as he exported terrorism from his home base of Libya. Over the past two decades, however, he had been conspicuously quiet, minding his own country's business and largely refraining from antagonizing the west. However, if the Libyan leader survives the current civil conflict, will he return to his old ways? If Granatstein is right, this is a definite possibility. However unsavoury a ruler Qaddafi is, the current international effort to oust him could end up backfiring on everyone.

The death of hypocrisy?

2011-04-06T21:01:00.000-04:00

Have you ever noticed that accusations of hypocrisy are almost always levelled by those desiring to loosen rather than to tighten standards of behaviour? If all standards were suddenly to evaporate, it would save accusers the trouble of identifying people as hypocrites because there would be no norms to hold them to. Of course it would also deprive them of the pleasure of assuming a position of moral superiority while likely changing many people’s behaviour for the worse. This suggests that, one way or another, too quickly charging others with being hypocrites carries a certain long-term risk for the accuser as well as for the larger society.

Libya and the Dilemmas of Overseas Intervention

2011-04-01T14:00:00.001-04:00

There is longstanding disagreement over when, where and whether the United States is justified in intervening in trouble spots overseas. Clearly we cannot police the whole globe, as that would ultimately exhaust our limited resources. Some would prefer that the US withdraw from any and all foreign ventures and focus instead on domestic matters. This policy was followed between the two world wars but failed due to the aggressive ambitions of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.

Read more here.

Joustra on Canada's defence

2011-04-01T13:38:00.008-04:00

Today's Globe and Mail carries an eloquent and cogently argued op-ed piece by a certain Mr. Robert Joustra: The F-35: Not whether to buy it, but why. Here's an excerpt:

Our debate over buying 65 F-35 fighter jets has stalled at hardware, taking a quintessentially Canadian turn in the worst sense: narcissistic, navel-gazing, insecure and bureaucratic. The national debate, both on and off the Hill, has obsessed over technical minutiae. Is the F-35 too slow? Is stealth necessary? Is it expensive or unreliable technology? Should the process have been open to competitive tender?

These are bureaucratic debates for a nation of soulless penny-pinchers, not a deep moral vision for Canada’s role in the world. Debates over tools don’t come before you set the project. Are we building a car or a barn? Then we’ll know whether we need hammers.

If you want to send a message to our country's leaders, by all means do it in Canada's national newspaper, on the off chance that somebody in Ottawa will be in the mood to hear some sensible advice during an election campaign.

Defending Constantine

2011-03-25T21:47:00.005-04:00

I first read John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus when I was 20 years old, and at the time I simply took it for granted that he was right that the Roman Emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity represented the corrupting alliance of the church with the state. Then Peter Leithart wrote Defending Constantine, which my friend and colleague Rob Joustra has reviewed for Comment: The Embarrassment of Power: Does Constantine Need Defending? Take a look and see what you think.

The Politics of the Psalms

2011-03-18T14:49:00.000-04:00

Perhaps it has something to do with my first name, but I have always been fascinated by the biblical book of the Psalms. I grew up singing from a hymn book in which the Psalms set to meter were given a prominent place. The liturgical practice of singing the Psalms has ancient roots going back to temple and synagogue worship, finding its way also into Christian churches. It is thus not surprising that, until the end of the 18^th century, the majority of Protestants sang from metrical psalters containing all 150 Psalms. Most Protestants since then have abandoned this practice, but many in the Reformed tradition have held to it, glorifying God, as it is often said, in his own words.

Read more here.

Food prices and global unrest: a vicious cycle

2011-03-05T10:37:00.012-05:00

This post in The Mail from Accra, Ghana, carries the following report: "The Global food prices rose for the eighth straight month in February, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported today, while also warning that unexpected spikes in oil prices could exacerbate an already precarious situation in food markets."

According to Chuck Colson's latest Breakpoint commentary:

If you ask the average American what lay behind the recent revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, you are likely to hear words like freedom, democracy, and even Facebook and Twitter. A word you probably won’t hear is food. But just as much as social media, what brought people onto the streets of Tunis and Cairo was food: too little of it at too high a price.

This apparently causal relationship between food prices and unrest works both ways. The uprisings in the middle east and north Africa are themselves driving up the price of oil. Gas here in Hamilton is up to $1.22 (CDN) a litre, with the Canadian dollar, which is a petro-dollar, worth slightly more than its US counterpart.

This rise in the price of oil will in turn lead to a further rise in food prices, as the cost of transporting food goes up. We wealthy westerners can generally afford to bear these prices by cutting back our discretionary household spending, but people elsewhere in the world cannot do this as easily. If food prices rise further, we could be in for more political turmoil around the globe.

Can we do anything about it? Colson believes we might transfer valuable agricultural land away from ethanol production to the production of foodstuffs. This could put more food on the market and lower costs for everyone. On the other hand, would a drop in ethanol production lead to more demand for oil, thereby driving up the cost of gasoline at the pump and further increasing transportation costs for food? Either scenario appears to have its downside. Our economists obviously have their work cut out for them.

On Wisconsin: Budget Battles and Adversarial Politics

2011-03-04T09:37:00.000-05:00

Just as historic popular uprisings have swept across the Middle East and North Africa, a similar, if less violent, wave of discontent has engulfed the state of Wisconsin, where Republican Governor Scott Walker has moved to rein in public spending by trimming public employee benefits and removing them from the collective bargaining process. Massive protests have been held in the state capital of Madison. The nearby state of Indiana looks set to experience similar turmoil.

Read more here.

Celebrating the Kimyal New Testament

2011-03-03T16:53:00.001-05:00

Those of us who have grown up knowing and loving God's word in its plethora of English translations cannot but be moved by the following video. Praise God that the Kimyal people of West Papua at last have the complete New Testament in their own language. We share in their joy.

Kimyal New Testament launch in Indonesia
from United Bible Societies on Vimeo.

Senate reform . . . again?

2011-03-02T09:34:00.011-05:00

Canadians have argued about our Parliament's upper chamber for nearly as long as it has existed. What place does an unelected Senate have in a constitutional democracy? New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton has made his own proposal: Layton proposes referendum on Senate. He wants to see it abolished. However, Lorne Gunter strongly disagrees: Disbanding the Senate would outrage the west. Canada is nearly unique amongst the world's federal systems in lacking an upper chamber effectively representing its component members, which makes our system rather unbalanced. By contrast, the United States Senate represents the individual states by giving each of them two members. The Australian Senate give each of the 6 states 12 members serving six-year terms.

However, if we were to abolish our Senate, our system would be even more unbalanced than it is at present. Over the decades our governments have attempted to compensate for this flaw by holding first ministers conferences, which are typically held annually but whose frequency has declined over the past ten years. Due to this lack of frequency and other factors, the first ministers conference has not adequately filled the gap in our constitutional framework. Rather than abolish the Senate, which would only exacerbate the historic tensions between central Canada and the rest of the country, we would do better to reform the Senate to make it more genuinely representative, especially of those living outside Ontario and Québec.

Setback in Pakistan for religious freedom

2011-03-02T09:15:00.008-05:00

This is a tragic development in a context already fraught with difficulties for believers in this troubled south Asian country: Pakistan's only Christian cabinet member assassinated. Last December our family met Shahbaz Bhatti's brother Peter and a colleague at a Presbyterian-sponsored breakfast here in Hamilton. They are leaders of a group called International Christian Voice, which "recognizes the suffering of Christians and other religious minorities of Pakistan and is dedicated to being the voice of the oppressed and work for their basic human rights which are suppressed." Please pray for our brothers and sisters in Pakistan and support the efforts of International Christian Voice to publicize their plight.

From Fort Lauderdale to the Isle of Lewis: Singing God’s praises

2011-03-01T22:12:00.000-05:00

There would seem to be no obvious connection between Missionary Baptists in Florida and Psalm-singers in the Western Isles of Scotland. But hear for yourselves the striking similarities between the way two communities of Christians worship God.

Israel and the new Middle East

2011-02-27T07:59:00.000-05:00

Writing for the National Post, veteran Canadian journalist Robert Fulford has noticed something interesting about the uprisings sweeping the Arab world: "In this widespread Arab movement, the most surprising role has been played by Israel, which has played no role at all. That’s the reverse of what the world media, the academics and the diplomats have taught us to anticipate." Time will tell whether this conspicuous lack of a role for the Jewish state is of broad significance for the region.

CAUT and the Christian University

2011-02-23T15:36:00.000-05:00

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has decided to put a stop to its investigations of the few Christian universities in this country, although it intends to maintain a list of those institutions governed by a faith statement on the presumption that they infringe on the academic freedom of faculty. In the meantime one Todd Pettigrew, a blogger for Macleans magazine, has penned this measured assessment of my employer's educational mission: Irredeemable, with this summary: "Redeemer University College, according to its published statements, promotes religion over knowledge." In a followup to this post, Pettigrew magnanimously offers this: "My point is not that Redeemer should be forced to close, only that, in my view, it should not be allowed to call itself a university, and that it not be allowed to award credentials called degrees."

The key to understanding Pettigrew's perspective can be found in book IV, chapter 8 of Rousseau's Social Contract, "On Civil Religion." What begins as a promise of tolerance quickly becomes perfectly intolerant of those who persist in believing in the tenets of their own religions.

In the meantime, I have written two letters to the editor, one in the local Hamilton Spectator and the other in the Canada-wide National Post, pointing out what should be obvious: that CAUT is in the grip of its own worldview from which it apparently brooks no dissent: CAUT imposes its own strict ideology on its members, and Caught up in CAUT's ideology.

To American readers, I call attention once more to the important work being done by Dr. Stanley Carlson-Thies with the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance, whose mission is to safeguard "the religious identity and faith-shaped standards and services of faith-based organizations, enabling them to make their distinctive and best contributions to the common good." In a context where freedom of religion is understood in narrowly individualistic terms, IRFA deserves all of our support. Perhaps it's time to extend its work north of the 49th parallel.

CAUT's 'investigations' questioned

2011-02-11T11:18:00.001-05:00

The Canadian Association of University Teachers and my own employer, Redeemer University College, are in the local and national news here in Canada and are the subject of two editorials, one in the local Hamilton Spectator: Academic witch hunt?; and another in the National Post: Stop the anti-Christian witchhunt on campus. Meanwhile the numbers of academics signing the Faculty Statement on CAUT is growing by the day. Remarkably, one of the signers is a "Former Secretary to the Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee of CAUT."

CAUT caught using bullying tactics

2011-02-08T11:24:00.009-05:00

Two months ago I wrote of the Canadian Association of University Teachers' efforts to "investigate" the supposed violation of academic freedom at overtly christian universities. Shortly thereafter CAUT approached my own employer, Redeemer University College, for the same reason. Today's National Post carries this report by Charles Lewis: Professors group accused of anti-religious bullying. Here is an excerpt:

A group of academics has launched a campaign defending Canadian Christian universities against what it terms anti-religious bullying by the country's leading university teachers' federation. "What we have here is an academic union ganging up on these smaller Christian universities, and I thought it was high time that people from the public universities take a stand," said Paul Allen, an associate professor of theology at Concordia University in Montreal.

The protest is a direct response to reports that the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) issued against Trinity Western University in British Columbia more than a year ago, Crandall University in New Brunswick in July and Winnipeg's Canadian Mennonite University in October.

"It bothered me that this is anti-religious ideology masked as supposedly an academic freedom issue," said Mr. Allen, who has started a petition to warn about CAUT's actions. "This was an opportunity in the current [secular climate] to go after religion."

The petition, which now has 140 signatures, said the investigations are unwarranted and invasive. Mr. Allen and many others who signed the petition are members of CAUT, which has 65,000 members. Academics at the schools that were investigated are not members.

All Canadian academics who value institutional religious freedom should take a moment to sign the Faculty Statement on CAUT.

Civility and the small-c constitution: lessons for Egypt’s future

2011-02-05T09:33:00.000-05:00

The following is this week’s instalment of my biweekly column, Deliberation, for Capital Commentary, published by the Center for Public Justice:

More than half a century ago the great American journalist Walter Lippmann, in grappling with the dilemmas of democracy, urged the recovery of a public philosophy rooted in traditions of civility. Last week in this space Michael Gerson gave readers Two Reasons for Civility, averring that its firmest foundation comes from a general belief that human beings are created in God’s image. This, he claimed, is the basis on which the founders crafted their balanced constitutional system.

However, the founders’ efforts would have come to naught if the American people themselves had not already cultivated traditions of civility in their thirteen political bodies in the run-up to the outbreak of the War for Independence. These in turn were inherited largely from the centuries-old English constitution with its roots extending back at least to Magna Carta in 1215 and embodied in the principles of the Common Law.

This underscores the huge importance of what political scientists call political culture and what the classic political philosophers called the constitution, with a small “c.” A constitution in this larger sense is more than just a scrap of paper. It embodies not only the existing political institutions but the attitudes carried in the hearts of the people towards such intangibles as respect for authority, the rule of law, styles of political leadership and tolerance of corruption. This unwritten constitution is more enduring than a document that might bear that title. It would not be inaccurate to conclude that the American small-c constitution is much older than the document titled the Constitution of the United States of America, the latter of which could not exist without the former.

The true genius of the American constitution lies, not with the founders, astute though they may have been, but with the people themselves. Had the traditions of civility not already been a part of this constitution, all the good intentions of the architects of the Constitution would have fallen flat. Examples of this are not difficult to find. After the outbreak of revolution in 1789 France underwent multiple régime changes. Its paper constitutions were so short-lived that one observer has called them “periodical literature.” Yet its small-c constitution, with its centuries-old tradition of strong unitary government capped by a powerful executive, has been more durable, eventually culminating in the institutions of the Fifth Republic, in effect since 1958.

At the moment we are facing what appears to be a revolution in Egypt that will have repercussions throughout North Africa and the Middle East. To champion democratic reforms in that country seems a sensible policy for the United States to pursue. Clearly the foreign policy “realists” who support a dictator simply because he is “our” dictator are asking for trouble over the long term as the people in the street take matters into their own hands.

Nevertheless, building democracy in the region is no simple matter, as institutions require the living traditions of civility rooted in a longstanding small-c constitution. The notion that we can simply transplant institutions that flourish in one environment into a less hospitable one stands in strong need of a reality check. Successfully channelling street protests into orderly public participation at the polls is by no means assured. Political cultures do not change that quickly.

This is not to say that we should give up hope. It is to say that finely-tuned institutions cannot by themselves create a political culture of civility. To do this requires hard work on the part of the people themselves, probably starting at the local level and working with the existing institutions of civil society. Change may come over many years—perhaps generations—but it will require more than a measure of patience on everyone’s part.

Tchividjian corrects defective theology

2011-02-02T14:57:00.001-05:00

The Rev. Tullian Tchividjian effectively skewers the popular “left behind” theology in this article in The Worldview Church: Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by Being Different.

Matthew 24:37-41 is a key passage some Christians use to justify an escapist theology, approaching this world with a “Why shine the brass on a sinking ship?” attitude. In this passage Jesus likens “the coming of the Son of Man” to the time of Noah, when people “were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away.” Then Jesus gives two brief pictures of the effect of his coming: “Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and one left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken and one left.”

These verses have been employed to support the idea that God will one day evacuate, or “rapture,” all the righteous people, leaving behind an evil world destined for annihilation. Therefore, the thinking goes, Christians should focus exclusively on seeking to rescue lost souls rather than waste time trying to fix things that are broken in this doomed world. This perspective is evidenced in a comment I read not long ago from a well-known Bible teacher: “Evangelism is the only reason God’s people are still on earth.”

But a closer look at the context reveals that in those pictures Jesus gave of men in the field and women at the mill, those “left behind” are the righteous rather than the unrighteous. Like the people in Noah’s day who were “swept away,” leaving behind Noah and his family to rebuild the world, so the unrighteous are “taken,” while the righteous are left behind. Why? Because this world belongs to God, and he’s in the process of gaining it all back, not giving it all up.

This is taken from Tchividjian’s new book, Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by Being Different. If this brief excerpt is any indication, the book as a whole should be worth reading.

Talking with Plato?

2011-01-26T21:04:00.010-05:00

This is the sort of thing I find utterly fascinating. Greek-speaking Muslims continue to live in the Turkish Pontos speaking a dialect of ρωμαίϊκα, a language with grammatical structures retained from classical Greek. Listen as well to the distinctive Pontic music in the background. Incidentally, ρωμαιϊκά means Roman, which harks back to the time when Orthodox Christians living in the Eastern Roman Empire called themselves Ρωμαίοι, or Romans.

Government's divine mandate

2011-01-24T14:27:00.003-05:00

I am not a fan of most politically-oriented sermons, especially when they undertake to pronounce on the specifics of public policy. However, a week ago our pastor, the Rev. Dr. W. J. Clyde Ervine, gave us all an excellent example of the right way to preach a political sermon. The title was King Solomon's Charge, based on I Kings 2. This is part of an ongoing lectio continua series on Solomon's reign. The Old Testament lesson recounted the circumstances that brought Solomon to the throne, including the execution of his father David's chief of staff, Joab, and his own half-brother Adonijah.

The episode raises a difficult issue: "is Solomon to be morally excused for killing the enemies who might have wanted to kill him?" Ervine admits that not everything scripture recounts does it necessarily approve. Yet he raises another possibility that ought not to be glossed over:

David is king and head of government, giving a charge not so much to a son, but to the incoming head of government. What he says is this: “Solomon, as king, you must deal with the State’s internal as well as external enemies. You may not want to, but you must confront those who mount treasonous attacks against the kingdom”. David mentions Joab as an example, while Solomon will later place Adonijah in the same category. Put like that, the issue isn’t whether or not Solomon was brutal, but whether the State may legitimately use force against its enemies. That’s the issue I Kings 2 poses; its answer is affirmative. I Kings 2 wants readers to conclude that Solomon was justified in hunting down State criminals, and further suggests that Solomon’s punishment of those criminals was endorsed by God. At verse 22, we’re told that as Solomon contemplates the punishment he believes Adonijah deserves, he says: “So may God do to me, and more also, for Adonijah has devised this scheme at the risk of his life! Now therefore as the Lord lives, who has established me and placed me on the throne...Adonijah shall be put to death”.The text presents Solomon’s blood-letting, not as the violence of a private thug but as the legal action of the head of state.

This, of course, raises the larger question of whether the state legitimately uses force, even to the extent of taking life. Although there is a long and honourable pacifist tradition within Christianity, we must nevertheless take seriously those biblical texts assigning the power of the sword to government.

Having been present as Dr. Ervine delivered this sermon (which can be heard here), I can testify that the congregation was unusually quiet throughout, perhaps wondering where he would be going next in his argument. It somehow felt like a controversial sermon, although his conclusion is entirely biblical and falls squarely in the centre of the larger Reformed tradition.

A powerful preacher, Dr. Ervine's sermons are worth listening to. If you are ever in the neighbourhood, please do come to Central Presbyterian Church, Hamilton, Ontario, at 10.30 sunday morning.

KJV quadricentenary

2011-01-08T19:28:00.058-05:00

I am part of what may have been the last generation of English-speaking Christians to grow up with the King James Version of the Bible. This was the Bible we read in church and it shaped the liturgical patterns of our worship. We children memorized verses from it in sunday school, thereby giving it an intimate familiarity to us that has not been matched by any subsequent translation.

To be sure, the Revised Standard Version had come out three years before I was born, but our church, a confessionally Reformed church, did not read from it, perhaps because of such controversial translations as that for Isaiah 7:14, which substituted "young woman" for "virgin." What we did not know, of course, is that, when the KJV was first published back in 1611, the Geneva Bible was the translation preferred by our Reformed forebears, who were suspicious of the king's motives in commissioning a replacement. Nevertheless, over the long term the KJV won out over competing translations, retaining a cherished place in the hearts of English-speaking Christians for 350 years.

Protestant Christians, that is. In that world of half a century ago our use of the KJV underscored our differences with Roman Catholics, who read the 16th/17th-century Douai-Rheims Bible, a translation from the Latin Vulgate. In the KJV we English-speaking protestants possessed a common Bible whose cadences we knew thoroughly and which constituted a shared heritage that in some sense we took for granted. This was our Bible and always would be. We had a duty to read it and hear it in church. To be sure, given its archaic language, the KJV was not always easy to understand. Moreover, despite the claim of some contemporary KJV loyalists to love its superb literary qualities, it is no longer clear to us whether its language really is poetic or whether it sounds poetic to us simply because it is from the KJV.

We all know the flaws in the KJV. It was translated from texts finalized in the 16th century, which have long since been superseded by superior Hebrew and Greek texts based on much earlier manuscripts. It contains numerous readings not attested to in the latter and of questionable authenticity — and presumably canonicity as well. I myself am far from urging a wholesale return to the KJV, although I believe it definitely worth celebrating during its 400th anniversary year.

The problem is that, while my generation of protestants grew up with a common Bible, no subsequent translation, however superior, has managed altogether to replace the KJV. By 1977 an expanded edition of the RSV had come to include the apocryphal/deuterocanonical books, thereby making it the closest we would come to a Common Bible for all Christians — protestants, Catholics and Orthodox. Yet ultimately it failed to catch on at the grassroots level. We now live with a ridiculously large number of Bible translations in English at the beginning of the second decade of this century. The multiplication of Bible versions shows no signs of slowing down, much less stopping.

For 30-some years the New International Version was the largest-selling Bible in the English-speaking world, considerably outpacing the RSV and KJV alike. But two months ago the International Bible Society released an updated version of the NIV which may fail to catch on, if recent controversies are any indication. Although I was initially sceptical that the English Standard Version would supplant the NIV, I now think it has a fighting chance if the NIV 1984 is no longer to be available, except online.

Will any of these translations still be read 400 years from now? It would be foolish to predict so far into the future, but it seems unlikely that any will equal the King James Version not only in terms of longevity, but in its capacity to shape the language and culture of the English-speaking peoples.

Hopeful news from Egypt

2011-01-07T15:28:00.001-05:00

With attacks on middle eastern and south Asian Christians apparently increasing in recent weeks, it is encouraging to read news like this: Egypt Muslims to act as “human shields” at Coptic Christmas Eve mass.

“Although 2011 started tragically, I feel it will be a year of eagerly anticipated change, where Egyptians will stand against sectarianism and unite as one,” Father Rafaeil Sarwat of the Mar-Mina church told Ahram Online. The Coptic priest was commenting on the now widespread call by Muslim intellectuals and activists upon Egyptian Muslims at large to flock to Coptic churches across the country to attend Coptic Christmas Eve mass, to show solidarity with the nation’s Coptic minority, but also to serve as “human shields” against possible attacks by Islamist militants.

Today is Christmas in the Coptic and Orthodox calendars. Let us wish our brothers and sisters in Egypt and elsewhere God’s blessings as they celebrate today the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Let us also give thanks that there are Egyptian Muslims willing to stand with their Christian fellow citizens against terrorist threats. It is a sign of hope in a part of the world where hope is so often in short supply.

Persecution updates: Egypt, Iraq, Sudan, Pakistan

2011-01-03T16:32:00.036-05:00

Until virtually the dawn of the modern age the historic heartland of Christianity — possibly containing most of the world's Christians at the time — included the lands of north Africa and what we now know as the Middle East. Yet over successive centuries the Christians there have been subject to harsh treatment by their Muslim rulers, and consequently their numbers have diminished substantially. In those countries where Christian communities remain, they have been targeted by terrorists bent on making their lives more difficult in their historic homelands. Here are only a few incidents:

Two days ago a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria, Egypt, was bombed, killing 21 people. President Hosni Mubarak has promised action, and the city's governor is pointing to al-Qaeda as the culprit. Meanwhile, the Tehran Times blames Israel, asserting that "it goes without saying that no Muslim, whatever their political leanings may be, will ever commit such an inhumane act."

Attacks continue on Christians in Iraq, with a survivor of an October church attack being shot to death in her bed, apparently for her religious beliefs. More such news can be found at the Assyrian International News Agency. According to Assyrian Christian News, Iraqi Christians Want Their Own Province. The likelihood of that happening seems rather slim.

Somewhat more likely is the possibility that the largely Christian south Sudan will peacefully separate from the Islamic north in a referendum to be held next sunday, 9 January. This was provided for in an agreement that ended the Sudanese civil war half a decade ago. Redrawing boundaries in Africa has long been unthinkable for most governments in that continent, but a peaceful, if not exactly amicable, division of Sudan looks increasingly probable. However, partition is never a simple matter, and the issue of boundaries could lead to further trouble, as it has elsewhere.

Last month our family had breakfast with two representatives of International Christian Voice, an organization that monitors the plight of Christians in Pakistan. They are working to repeal that country's blasphemy laws, under which Asia Bibi is in prison awaiting execution. Although there have been intimations that Bibi could be released, her future remains in the balance.

Please pray for these persecuted brothers and sisters overseas, as they live in precarious circumstances which put their faith constantly to the test.

Almighty God and Father, as we are members of the one body of Christ, we share in the sufferings of your people around the world; deliver now the oppressed from their persecutors, and equip us to stand publicly with your servants in their adversity. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God now and for ever. Amen.

Singing the Psalms: in German, Czech and Dutch

2011-01-02T15:21:00.000-05:00

For Christmas this year my beloved wife gave me an antiquarian copy of the Lobwasser Psalter, a sturdy little volume that has weathered the centuries remarkably well. The Lobwasser Psalter was a German-language translation of the Genevan Psalms set to verse in 1573 by Ambrosius Lobwasser (1515-1585), a Lutheran teaching law at Königsberg in East Prussia. His translation was based on the French text he had heard the Huguenots singing during his stay in the Berry region of France. Lobwasser intended his Psalter primarily for private use. This edition was published in Zürich in 1770, by which time it was evidently being used in public worship as well.

At age 21 during a visit to Prague (in what was then still communist Czechoslovakia) I purchased a Czech-language psalter and hymnal published in 1900 by the Unity of the Brethren, also known variously as the Bohemian Brethren, the Moravian Brethren and the Unitas Fratrum. I have now scanned and posted the psalter portion of this Malý Kancionál (Little Hymnal) for the benefit of those interested in a lesser known tradition of metrical psalm-singing. This Czech translation, to be sung to the Genevan melodies, was made by Jiří Strejc (also known as Georg Vetter, 1536-1599), a minister in this church from Zábřeh in Moravia. Strejc studied in Tübingen and Königsberg and came into contact with the Lobwasser Psalter, which impressed him so favourably that he decided to model his own Czech versification on it, an undertaking he completed in 1587. Strejc is probably best known for his German-language hymn text, Mit Freuden Zart, familiar in English as Sing Praise to God, Who Reigns Above, the tune to which comes from the Bohemian Brethren's Kirchengesänge (1566) and bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Genevan Psalm 138.

My thus far preliminary research has raised some intriguing questions worth further exploration. First, might Strejc have met Lobwasser personally in Königsberg and thereby come under his more direct influence?

Second, given that the Kirchengesänge were produced by the same group of which Strejc was a minister, might this be evidence of a connection between the tunes for Psalm 138 and Mit Freuden Zart? To be sure, Strejc's versification of that Psalm came later, but might the Unity of the Brethren have become aware of the Genevan tunes earlier, and might it have been through Strejc? Tellingly, the Lutheran Book of Worship (1978) ascribes the tune directly to the "Trente quatre pseaumes de David, Geneva, 1551." These two possibilities are probably mutually exclusive.

Third, if Lobwasser based his translations on the French text of Marot and Bèze (for which he was criticized by his Lutheran colleagues), and if Strejc based his translations on Lobwasser's German text, how true are Strejc's texts to the Hebrew? Only someone conversant in Czech and Hebrew, and perhaps all four languages, would be able to answer this question satisfactorily.

By the way, the city of Königsberg has been called Kaliningrad since 1945 and has been part of the Russian Federation. At some point there was talk of changing the name (Kalinin was a Stalin-era Soviet functionary) to honour its most famous citizen, Immanuel Kant. I would like to suggest as an alternative that it be renamed for either Lobwasser or Strejc. Or even both: Lobwasserstrejcgrad!

Those interested in becoming better acquainted with congregational psalm-singing in the Netherlands would do well to check out Ijsselm's Channel on youtube (short for Ijsselmeer perhaps?). Here one finds a number of recently-posted Genevan Psalms sung in the traditional 19th-century Dutch fashion characterized by four distinctive features: (1) they are sung at a slow pace; (2) they are often sung in isometric rhythm (i.e., every note having equal value), as opposed to the more syncopated rhythms of the original tunes; (3) the organist plays the initial note for a few seconds before the congregation joins in, leaving the impression that the congregation is lagging behind; and (4) the arrangements used suppress the modal flavour of the original tunes. Here is one example:

I might point out that, amongst the Dutch Canadians I know personally, many dislike intensely this style of singing and their churches have thus altogether abandoned the Genevan Psalms for more contemporary fare. I find this tragic, and my own Genevan Psalter website is part of a larger ongoing project to recover the Genevan tradition and to make it more singable for younger generations of Christians in a variety of traditions.

O Magnum Mysterium

2010-12-27T12:14:00.005-05:00

The best-known version of this ancient Christmas matins hymn may be that of Tomas Luis de Victoria, but American composer Morten Johannes Lauridsen's lovely setting movingly conveys the spirit of the text:

O great mystery,
and wonderful sacrament,
that animals should see the new-born Lord,
lying in a manger!
Blessed is the Virgin whose womb
was worthy to bear
Christ the Lord.
Alleluia!

Christ is born

2010-12-25T10:49:00.009-05:00

Kalinine exhibit

2010-12-07T08:30:00.016-05:00

On sunday afternoon our family drove down to St. James Church in nearby Dundas to attend the opening of an exhibit by local Hamilton artist Guennadi Kalinine, a trained iconographer, painter and restorer of art. As Kalinine himself was present, I was able to converse with him about his approach to iconography in particular. As is typical, his own painted icons bear no signature, as they simply replicate much earlier works and are governed by the strict canons of Orthodox Christianity. There is no effort to express one's individuality. Kalinine told me he is often asked whether a particular icon is his own. He responds that it is not; it comes from, say, the 12th century. He is then asked whether he painted it. Yes, he replies, but it is not his own. When a musician plays a piece by Bach, he would never think of claiming it as his own; it remains Bach's. So it is with icons. Such an attitude is foreign to westerners.

We especially enjoyed Kalinine's efforts to incorporate traditional iconic images into his landscapes, which do bear his signature. Websters Falls is one of the more famous scenic locations in Hamilton. Kalinine managed to place an angel at Websters Falls in one of his "Fantazy" paintings.

The exhibit runs through 7 January 2011, which coincides with Christmas in the Julian calendar followed by the Orthodox Church. Definitely worth a visit.

December snippets

2010-12-02T09:32:00.047-05:00

The December issue of National Geographic Magazine carries an article, Kings of Controversy, exploring the debate over whether a united Israelite kingdom under David and Solomon ever existed or whether an overly fertile Hebrew imagination created these iconic figures — perhaps out of thin air or by elevating two tribal chieftains to their current mythical status. The debate pits biblical minimalists against those who assume that the Bible is a genuine record of events that actually occurred.

I have recently acquired an old copy of William Jennings Bryan's In His Image, published in 1922 from the James Sprunt Lectures the author delivered at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. Bryan, who lived from 1860 to 1925, ran three times for the US presidency for the People's and Democratic Parties and served as President Woodrow Wilson's first Secretary of State. Both Bryan and Wilson were devout Reformed Christians with a vision for living out the kingdom of God in the political realm — comparable in many respects to Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands. Bryan would come to be associated with the fundamentalist movement within the northern Presbyterian Church and gained notoriety for his testimony in the so-called Scopes "Monkey" Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, only days before his death. This book, published three years earlier, contains Bryan's reflections on human origins. I look forward to reading In His Image, which also has some relevance to my current book project on authority and the imago Dei.

Fundamentalists have a bad name nowadays, partly through association with radical islamist groups who have been thus labelled. However, the original fundamentalist movement started in the first years of the last century as an effort by confessional Presbyterians to combat the influence of liberalism in that denomination. Last year was the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. Far from being narrow-minded and obscurantist, the authors of the essays making up this collection were Presbyterians, Anglicans, Methodists and others with solid academic credentials and teaching at such institutions as Wycliffe and Knox Colleges (Toronto), Oberlin (Ohio), and Princeton and McCormick Seminaries. The church in which I grew up, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, had its origins in the Presbyterian controversies of the 1920s and '30s.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) is currently on a campaign to blacklist faith-based universities on the grounds that they deny academic freedom to their faculty. Peter Stockland takes them on here: 'Academic freedom' turns to religious persecution. CAUT's approach to academic freedom is narrowly individualistic and is based on the epistemologically naïve assumption that knowledge can best be attained apart from one's basic worldview orientation. One notes that CAUT's bylaws prescribe as one of the organization's core functions "the defence of academic freedom, tenure, equality and human rights." One notes further that the CAUT Council may "suspend or terminate the membership of an Organizational Member or individual Associate Member of the Association" due to the latter's "adoption of a constitution or of local practices or actions which in the judgment of Council are contrary to those of the Association." Would this include disagreement with CAUT's interpretation of "academic freedom, tenure, equality and human rights"? CAUT is obviously devoted to a particular vision of life embodied in its bylaws. And how exactly does this differ from a university having a faith-based vision statement? It seems CAUT follows its own form of fundamentalism.

I have called attention before to the valuable work of my friend Stanley Carlson-Thies and his Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance. We were privileged to have him speak here at Redeemer University College in October on the subject. His speech has now been posted at the Cardus website: Liberty or Liability: The Future of Institutional Religious Freedom.

I have just received a pdf file of an Afrikaans-language metrical psalter from one Josef du Toit, who incidentally shares the surname of the famous South African poet Jakob Daniël du Toit, better known as Totius. Read more here.

In some fields, including archeology and biblical studies, it is common practice to add CE or BCE to the end of dates, as in 1453 CE or 587 BCE. We saw this on historical markers during our travels in Israel and the Occupied Territories 15 years ago. These initials stand for Common Era and Before the Common Era respectively and stand in for AD (Anno Domini) and BC (Before Christ). The theory behind this usage is that it removes the references to Christ and Lord, thereby making them more acceptable to adherents of other religions. However well-intended this effort at inclusivity may be, I do not find it altogether persuasive. According to the muslim calendar the year 1432 begins in five days. By islamic reckoning we are living in the 15th century after Muhammad's migration from Mecca to Medina. Under the jewish calendar today is the 25th day of Kislev, 5771, that is, 5,771 years following the creation of the world. Despite the best efforts of some to hide the christian belief that the coming of Christ into the world is the turning point in human history, the mere fact that the common era begins when it does is powerful testimony to the centrality of Jesus Christ, even to those who do not acknowledge him.

Cardus makes The Globe

2010-11-29T10:29:00.006-05:00

My esteemed protégé and part-time colleague, Rob Joustra, has teamed up with his Cardus colleague Alissa Wilkinson to author Not their parents' conservatism, which appears in today's Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper. Definitely must-read material.

Thomistic penmanship

2010-11-17T13:42:00.003-05:00

Who knew? When Fordham University posted this sample of Thomas Aquinas' handwriting on its page for today's Natural Law Colloquium, it provided needed evidence for something that had been only conjecture up to now: the late mediaeval theologian's writings were obviously transcribed for the printed page by pharmacists.

Constantinople

2010-11-16T09:45:00.006-05:00

A song beloved by Byzantine-Rite Calvinists everywhere, though it's been decades since I last heard it. The University Six perform.

A dwindling minority: Assyrian Christians

2010-11-11T09:41:00.000-05:00

Several years ago I had a student in my classes who was born in Baghdad and claimed to have grown up speaking both Aramaic and Arabic. Her family are Christian and consider themselves Assyrian, one of the most ancient communities in that part of the world. They had come to Canada some years earlier but had many relatives still in their ancestral Mesopotamian homeland.

However, since the American attack on Iraq seven years ago, many if not most Assyrian Christians have left that country due to persecution. The BBC's Jim Muir reports that Christian neighbourhoods have been targeted in deadly Baghdad attacks. To follow ongoing developments concerning the Assyrian Christian communities, one may consult the Assyrian International News Agency and Assyrian Christian News. Open Doors USA prepared the following video to alert people to the trials of Assyrian Christians in Iraq:

Please remember to pray for our beleaguered brothers and sisters in Christ living in that troubled land. Lord have mercy!

Random act of worship

2010-11-08T19:29:00.001-05:00

Upcoming anniversaries

2010-11-08T16:44:00.002-05:00

Here is an incomplete list of some of the significant anniversaries taking place over the next several years.

2011 — 400th anniversary of the King James Version Bible

2012 — 450th anniversary of the completion of the Genevan Psalter

2013 — 450th anniversary of the Heidelberg Catechism

2014 — 450th anniversary of John Calvin’s death

2015 — 800th anniversary of Magna Carta

2016 — 500th anniversary of the publication of Erasmus’ Greek New Testament

2017 — Martin Luther’s Reformation

Mark these in your calendar, and be sure to order your greeting cards early to avoid the rush.

Theologians thinking through theodicy

2010-11-03T09:44:00.001-04:00

Although I am not an academic theologian, I have recently been grappling with a seemingly insuperable problem which for centuries has stumped the best minds in Christendom: How could a good God be so slow to answer a prayer for patience? Proposed solutions may be left in the comments below.

NIV update published

2010-11-01T11:06:00.000-04:00

As of today the 2011 update of the New International Version Bible is available online here. Will it be accepted by longtime NIV aficionados, or will it suffer the fate of the TNIV? Time with tell.

October snippets

2010-10-30T18:04:00.024-04:00

A few days ago I saw a parhelion in the evening sky, commonly known as a sun dog. Apparently they are more frequent on the Canadian prairies and less so in Ontario. The ancient Greeks must have known it too, judging from its name.

Though I have lived most of my life in the Great Lakes region of North America, I had not known until recently that, from an hydrological point of view, Lakes Michigan and Huron are a single lake, with water levels rising and falling together. The "two" lakes come together at the Mackinac Bridge, which opened in 1957 and connects the two peninsulas of Michigan.

The Society for the Advancement of Ecclesial Theology has posted several interviews "on Christian political responsibility and the significance (or lack thereof!) of various biblical texts." Among those interviewed are James W. Skillen, yours truly, Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Land and Oliver O'Donovan, with more coming from Amy Sherman, William Willimon and John Frame.

Tolerance, like inclusivity, is one of those buzz words used in some circles as an unmitigated good, but generally without much reflection on its implications for specific communities. I have just posted something on the topic at First Things: Evangel: Normed tolerance, which is an expansion of something I posted here a few years ago.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this:

Next year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Walter Rauschenbusch, one of the luminaries of the Social Gospel movement of a century ago. While we might justifiably applaud the Social Gospel's emphasis on the corporate character of redemption, we should certainly disagree with its tendency to identify redemption with social reform. My own thesis is that the Social Gospel, liberation theology and similar movements are rooted in a conflation of the cultural mandate, given to man at creation (Genesis 1:28), with the redemptive focus of history as accomplished in Jesus Christ. In short, it improperly makes us our own redeemers. I hope to expand on this thesis at some point.

Municipal elections were held across Ontario this past week. Hamilton's new mayor, Bob Bratina, won the election with only 37.3% of the vote. With only 39.9% turnout, that means he received the support of a grand total of 14.9% of eligible voters. Am I the only one to think something's badly amiss here? A runoff election or instant runoff voting would be more appropriate than simply relying on such a small plurality to fill the mayoral spot.

CPJ: Capital Commentary revamp

2010-10-22T19:26:00.000-04:00

The Center for Public Justice was founded in 1977 and since then has undertaken to articulate a Christian vision for public policy in the United States based on the principle of what I would call societal pluriformity. Recently its long time president, James W. Skillen, retired and was replaced by my friend and sometime colleague Gideon Strauss, who is now overseeing its activities.

Among the changes that Strauss has effected is to revamp CPJ’s Capital Commentary series, making it an online magazine with its own website. In today’s issue Strauss, who served as an interpreter on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, writes on Wonder, Heartbreak and Hope, the second instalment of a series on the Psalms that grows out of this difficult experience.

I am pleased to be playing a small part in the new Capital Commentary. Every other week for the next six months, Michael Gerson, former speech writer to President Bush, will be analyzing a political issue of significance from the previous two weeks under the general title, The Decision. The following week I will post a response to Gerson called Deliberation. Gerson’s first contribution appeared a week ago today: Fighting Disease in the Developing World. Today my response appears: Making Tough Decisions. Stay tuned. There’s more to come.

Another milestone

2010-10-13T11:20:00.003-04:00

This fourth printing comes only 14 months after it went into a third. I am, of course, gratified that readers continue to find my book of value.

Yet another English Bible . . .

2010-10-09T08:44:00.002-04:00

. . . to fill what some persist in believing to be a desperate need for good translations of the Good Book. This one’s called the Common English Bible, which is an improvement over existing translations because of . . . what? I’m not sure, except that it appears to use more contractions than most other versions. Which prompts me to ask: after so many decades, is the runaway proliferation of bible translations in English still about making the Word of God more comprehensible to ordinary people? Or is it by now about niche marketing?

On the Brink of pluralism

2010-10-04T10:45:00.003-04:00

The Center for Public Justice continues its series on pluralism with this contribution from my esteemed protégé, Dr. Paul Brink: On Dreams of Justice and Cups of Cool Water.

From Wellhausen to 'God's politics'?

2010-10-01T12:30:00.064-04:00

Several years ago my friend and former colleague Paul Marshall wrote a review of Jim Wallis' God's Politics for The Review of Faith & International Affairs: Jim Wallis’ Politics — or Lack Thereof. Marshall's paragraph below is worth rereading:

Obviously, no popular book should be weighed down with ponderous theological reflection, but it should show some sign of having considered such reflection. For example, Wallis writes, “The place to begin to understand God is with the prophets.” There is no wisp of an argument justifying this unusual contention. He never asks why the Bible does not begin with the prophets, but with Genesis. He never mentions that the majority of Christian reflection on politics has begun with Genesis. He never carefully relates what the prophets say to the Torah, hence acknowledging that they challenge their rulers on the basis of God’s law, not on their own feelings of injustice. Maybe most of the church has been wrong for two millennia on how it addresses politics; it has certainly been wrong on other things. But Wallis never says why. He simply asserts a novel doctrine as indubitable fact.

This critique seemed obviously right to me when I read it. Of course the prophets were calling the people of Israel back to obey God's law. How could anyone doubt it?

Since reading this review, however, I've come to wonder whether there might be something else behind Wallis' "unusual contention" — one related to some of the more contestable assumptions of modern biblical scholarship. Since Julius Wellhausen and others articulated the Documentary Hypothesis on the origin of the Pentateuch more than a hundred years ago, it has generally been thought that the first five books of the Bible were written long after Moses. Indeed there are indications of later authorship embedded in the text itself (e.g., Genesis 36:31–43, Deuteronomy 34:5–10), as Spinoza pointed out already in the 17th century.

The Documentary Hypothesis ascribes the bulk of the Torah's legal code to the priestly source (or P), who ostensibly wrote around 500 BC during the Babylonian exile. Deuteronomy is similarly thought to have been written around the time of King Josiah, who is assumed to have instructed Hilkiah to "find" this in the temple to justify his reforms (2 Kings 22). These late dates are crucial because they imply that the law, so extolled in Psalm 119, was written well after such prophets as Isaiah and Amos had railed against the wickedness and injustices committed by the peoples of Israel and Judah. If so, then perhaps there was no actual law at that time to which the prophets could refer their hearers. Yet the prophets managed to demand forcefully that the people do justice, especially to the widow, the orphan and the sojourner — something that came to resonate with the people who codified these precepts a century or two later.

It is entirely possible that I am off base here, but I do wonder whether the Documentary Hypothesis might in part account for Wallis' "novel" approach of beginning his discussion with the prophets. If, on the other hand, one accepts the tradition that the bulk of the material in the Pentateuch is Mosaic in origin, one is more likely to start one's reflections on "God's politics" where the Bible itself starts: with Genesis.

Crossposted at First Things: Evangel

Studying (cautiously) the Qur'an

2010-09-26T20:25:00.002-04:00

This story from the New English Review blog is worthy of an Indiana Jones film plot:

On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here [Munich] housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.

The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God's word. The wartime destruction made the project "outright impossible," Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.

Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars -- and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.

Of course, any attempt to explore the evolution of the current text of the Qur'an risks igniting controversy in the Islamic world, which is why such scholars as the pseudonymous Christoph Luxenberg are not anxious to attach their given names to their own work.

Beginning with Spinoza in the 17th century, scholars have been using modern critical methods to analyze the text of the Bible, which virtually all Jews and Christians agree was written by multiple authors over a period of at least a thousand years. Despite the resulting expansion of knowledge of the biblical text, this has not been an entirely unproblematic venture, as the mainstream of biblical scholarship, especially what goes by the label higher criticism, has accepted the presuppositions of modernity, including the dichotomy between faith and fact, the impossibility of predictive prophecy and the belief that no single author could have referred to God as both Elohim and YHWH.

In principle there may be good stylistic reasons to conclude that Isaiah was not the author of Isaiah chapters 40-66, but there is nevertheless a prechristian tradition that God revealed to the 8th-century BC prophet events in the far distant future [Sirach 48:22-25], something to which the New Testament writers themselves testify, e.g., Matthew 3:3 and Acts 8:26-40. Moreover, there is no tangible manuscript evidence for two or more books of Isaiah either. Contemporary scholars need to take these factors seriously.

All the same, despite such reservations, Christians have little difficulty accepting that different authors produced the biblical texts at different times and that these texts were gradually sifted and collected into a body of canonical scripture. No one disputes the value of lower criticism, with its empirical focus on actual manuscripts.

Unlike Christians and Jews, Muslims believe that the Qur'an is a direct and immediate revelation by God to Muhammad. If Qur'an scholars bring the assumptions of western-style higher criticism to Islam's sacred text, believing Muslims are certain to question its validity, especially if it excludes ipso facto the possibility of miraculous divine interventions in the natural order.

However, as I understand it, the current efforts at studying the Qur'an, are not (yet) of a higher critical character. At issue is establishing the evolutionary history of the Qur'an based on ancient manuscripts or at least photographic evidence of these manuscripts. Muslims will find it difficult to deny the validity of such a modest endeavour. The findings of such Qur'an scholarship need not challenge outright the faith of devout Muslims, but the latter may be forced to rethink the belief that the Qur'an, in its present form, came directly from Muhammad. One can only guess at the repercussions of this for the Islamic world as a whole.

Crossposted at First Things: Evangel

September snippets

2010-09-25T21:15:00.027-04:00

Those of us who grew up with the biblical account of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea never thought it the least fantastic or implausible. Now someone has come up with a fascinating model of what may have happened: Parting the waters: Computer modeling applies physics to Red Sea escape route.

My young colleague and protégé, Rob Joustra, has written a review of Jordan Ballor's Ecumenical Babel that, in my opinion, hits the right note: The Ecumenical Social Justice Ship: Full Steam Ahead or Teetering Titanic? Here's Joustra:

The [institutional] church is not just another activist NGO for socially-minded Millennials. True: It does mission. It has a concern for justice, absolutely. But the church is not a think tank, a policy shop, or a political party. Where critical advocacy should be done, Christian citizens are called together for the common good to present their arguments in the public square—not as denominational representatives, but as Christian citizens formed in the liturgies and practices of the church. . . .

This does not mean that churches have no place in the political process. They can be critical institutions that provide a principled ballast in the fast and easy world of politics. And policy prescription is certainly not outside Christian competence! Christians, as citizens, should and must be doing the range of economic and political work.

Speaking of the Titanic, this story will interest aficionados of the ocean liner, which sank on its maiden voyage 98 years ago: Titanic sunk by steering mistake, author says. Could be. I'll leave it up to the experts in nautical matters to judge this one.

The Center for Public Justice, which some of us are coming to think of as the American counterpart to Canada's Cardus, is publishing a series of Capital Commentaries on pluralism. Earlier in the month Ashley Woodiwiss published The Problem With Pluralism, in which he advocated a "Christian agonism" as a more realistic alternative to pluralism. One week later yours truly responded with Pluralism in the plural. Joel Hunter has made the most recent contribution: Radical Responsibility for the Presence of Justice. The entire series can be found here. Watch for future instalments.

Loving theoretical activity

2010-09-17T12:58:00.002-04:00

In the absence of a general cross-referencing apparatus to aid readers in negotiating the multiple First Things blogs, I thought I would draw the attention of Evangel readers to R. R. Reno's Love Rather Than Theory, published yesterday at On the Square. It's an important piece well worth reflecting upon. Reno writes:

There is nothing uniquely modern about the move toward theory and abstraction. . . . However, an exaltation of theory is unique to late modern culture, and it’s what makes an intellectual an intellectual rather than what used to be called a “man of letters.” For example, Dr. Johnson and Matthew Arnold—two men with very different views of religion, morals, and literature—achieved a rhetorical rather than theoretical synthesis. They analyzed their experience with an integrated sensibility rather than an all-explaining system of thought. The same was true for Edmund Burke, who gave a rhetorical defense of the interplay of prejudice and tradition that he thought allows us to achieve an integrated sensibility. . . .

Ortega y Gasset once wrote against the theoretical impulse: “To create a concept is to leave the world behind.” An overstatement, no doubt. . . . But there is a real temptation in theory, one to be resisted. It is the temptation to become an intellectual in the modern sense of the term. We search for a magical key, a general theory, a philosopher’s stone of the intellect that will turn the vast heterogeneity of life into the filigreed gold of a comprehended coherence. We hope for vision that will give us mastery, and through mastery release, release from the need to return again and again and again to the question of how to live.

I don’t think we can underestimate the power this temptation today. It is easy to become an intellectual, someone intoxicated with the promise of theory and addicted to vain images of its triumph. . . .

The fullness of reality we can only reach by abandoning ourselves to life’s particularity, allowing the truth of things—especially the truth of other human beings and our common life together—to dissect our souls. The proper word for this abandonment is love. Love works very differently from theory. It conquers the lover rather than the beloved. Love renders, and thankfully so, for truth shines from the outside.

It is appropriate that Reno's reflections came one day after my review of Jamie Smith's Desiring the Kingdom, whose author affirms the primacy of love as the sine qua non of humanity. Reno is in large measure right in alerting us to the dangers of misdirected theory. Academics in particular are always tempted to assume that the theories by which they undertake to account for reality are identical to that reality. For most of us the prospect of being ruled by one of Plato's philosopher-kings is not a pleasant one. Anyone convinced of the certainty of his own knowledge will not be of a mind to listen to his supposed intellectual inferiors, which is a recipe for autocracy at best and tyranny at worst.

Nevertheless, I would like to suggest that there is such a thing as loving theoretical activity, assuming, of course, that this is a rightly-ordered love. This entails nothing less than the loving use of our intellectual gifts for the service of God and neighbour. What does it look like? To begin with, it is not arrogant but is undertaken with great humility, recognizing that our theories will never completely grasp, much less control, the complexity of God's creation and must therefore be open to constant correction from lived experience.

Loving theoretical activity also eschews reductionism, that is, the assumption that there is a "magical key" enabling us to unlock all the mysteries of reality. Man is not simply homo economicus, as Marx and his followers would have it, even if economic motives are genuinely present in all human actions. Similarly, we cannot be reduced to psycho-sexual beings, as if sexual desire accounts for everything we do. Contrary to Darwin's adherents, the single biological mechanism of natural selection cannot adequately account for the unfathomable complexity of human cultural activity, in which we adapt the environment for our own ends rather than the other way round.

Theoretical systems need not be reductionistic, as long as they are open systems capable of being modified and corrected by reality. Over the decades I have found very useful the Christian philosophical framework articulated by several philosophers in the Kuyperian tradition, including Herman Dooyeweerd and D. H. Th. Vollenhoven. I have appreciated especially Dooyeweerd's effort to articulate the place of political life in the larger context of a normative creation order. His is an excellent example of loving theoretical activity, deliberately undertaken in the recognition that our world belongs to God.

Theory undertaken without rightly-ordered love will amount to little more than "a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal" (1 Corinthians 13:1). Yet love and theory are not intrinsically opposed to each other. The best theory is that which is ordered to the love of God and the love of our neighbours as ourselves.

Crossposted at First Things: Evangel

Shaping the heart, not just the mind

2010-09-15T10:00:00.031-04:00

Over the past twenty or so years, publishers have turned out a steady stream of Christian worldview books, which together have altered the conversation over the relationship between faith and cultural activities in God’s world. Most of these have sought to reshape a “Christian mind.” From Harry Blamires and Francis Schaeffer to Nancy Pearcey and Al Wolters, there has emanated a growing library of writings dedicated to fashioning a Christian worldview from which to approach all of life.

But are such efforts adequate to the realities of living in the real world? Probably the worst title I have seen among such efforts comes out of Australia: A spectator’s guide to world views: Ten ways of understanding life, to which I myself contributed a chapter on liberalism. (Don’t let the title deter you from reading an otherwise excellent book!) Of course we are by no means mere spectators; we are active participants, intimately involved in a way of life, with all its rituals, customs and usages, which inevitably shape us as persons created in God’s image.

This is something that philosopher James K. A. Smith understands well and it forms the thesis of his Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. We are not simply thinking beings. We are not even believing creatures, as important as this facet is. We are, rather, desiring beings, motivated in a basic visceral way by what we love. We do not necessarily consciously decide what or whom to love; we are in fact shaped by certain rituals, by pedagogies of desire that form us without our even being aware of them. We are habituated to desire certain things by the larger culture, and it is Smith’s task to get us to recognize these secular “liturgies” and how they work themselves into our hearts. Following Augustine’s insight, Smith asserts that we inevitably worship what we love. We are homo liturgicus – liturgical man.

Furthermore, human beings are teleological creatures, structurally constituted by God to seek and follow a particular vision of the good life. Either we seek the kingdom of God or we pursue a counterfeit kingdom, and we do so as members of a community in the grip of what Charles Taylor calls a social imaginary. A social imaginary is more basic than a worldview, with the latter’s focus on the cognitive element. To be sure, the cognitive is important, but it is not the place to begin if we hope to understand our deepest motivations. We must instead focus on what we are passionate about, what drives our deepest longings. These are in turn shaped by the various liturgies in which we are caught up.

Smith shows us how these liturgical rituals work in our lives by asking us to pretend we are Martian anthropologists, looking afresh at something as mundane and familiar as the shopping mall and the university. If we look at the mall as a centre of pilgrimage, as a grand cathedral with numerous side-chapels (stores) and icons (advertisements) stationed at the entrances, we become conscious of the role of the rituals of shopping in shaping our desires, culminating in the “sacramental” act of the purchase of the desired good, which, we are trained to expect, will bring happiness and salvation.

Similarly, the university might well be understood as a cathedral of learning, “because the university is a formative, liturgical institution, animated by rituals and liturgies that constitute a pedagogy of desire” (p. 112). Even such extracurricular activities as “Fresher Week,” i.e., the fun-filled orientation period for newly arrived first-year students, are put together so as to build team spirit and a visceral commitment to the ends (τέλη) of the university, viz., the formation of “productive, successful consumers” animated by the achievement of “the goods of prosperity, accumulation, status, and power” (p. 116).

What the Christian university should be doing instead is to posit counter-liturgies to break the hold on students of these secular liturgies. These can be found in the patterns and cadences of Christian worship in the churches and in daily prayer, to which Smith devotes the latter part of his book.

Augustine’s influence on Smith is evident. The bishop of Hippo famously distinguished between the two cities, the city of God (civitas Dei) and the city of this world (civitas terrena), each of which is motivated by different loves. The city of God loves God above all that he has created. The city of this world loves the creation above the Creator. Each city lives out its loves, and each seeks a different vision of the good life.

What is love? Every introductory-level Greek student knows the differences among έρως (eros), φιλία (philia), στοργή (storge) and αγάπη (agapē) – among desire, friendship, affection, and charity or self-sacrificial love, the last of which is generally deemed superior to the others. However, Smith argues “that agapē is rightly ordered eros” (p. 79), i.e., that all love is desiring love, but that what the Christian tradition labels charity is properly-directed desire, growing out of our visceral (a favourite word!), bodily selves as shaped by various pedagogies of desire.

Smith has done a great service to those of us teaching at Christian universities with this book, which we Redeemer faculty will be discussing as part of an ongoing spiritual formation project during the current academic year. He has successfully compensated for what is sorely lacking in many worldview books, where the emphasis is lopsidedly placed on the intellect at the expense of the heart – on reason over the deep piety that has fashioned the Christian imagination over the course of centuries. In this he takes his cues more from Augustine than from Thomas Aquinas. Given my own commitment to the Reformed tradition, I cannot but resonate with this approach.

No book is perfect, of course, and I do have some reservations about this one, but these should not be misconstrued to detract from my overall appreciation for what Smith has done here. I will group my criticisms under four themes:

1. Mind and heart. Because Smith teaches philosophy at Calvin College, whose motto is “Minds in the Making,” it is understandable that he would undertake to show that shaping young lives is more than simply moulding minds. Minds are, of course, embodied and not disconnected platonic intellects hovering in some vague ethereal realm above the created order. Yet it is precisely because of this embodiment that the appeal of intellectual constructs should not be underestimated. Whether or not Locke’s social contract was an adequate account of people’s lived experience in society, it had a huge impact on Thomas Jefferson’s defence of the American cause as articulated in the Declaration of Independence. Over the course of successive generations, school children would memorize and recite the Declaration – again in liturgical fashion. Thus its ideas about the origins of government worked their way into the hearts of the young and helped to shape a political culture. Both Republicans and Democrats presuppose a Lockean account of political community, which is rooted in a basic religious worldview that too often goes unnoticed. Similarly Karl Marx articulated what he claimed was a scientific philosophy of history, claiming to be able to predict the future course of events based on an understanding of past productive patterns. That his theory was reductionist was part of its appeal for so many decades. It claimed to simplify a complex reality – to give adherents a key to understanding human society and in particular why so many lived in abject poverty. Clearly mind and heart are related in reciprocal ways.

2. Love and desire. Is love the same as desire? Desire is certainly one facet of love, but I doubt that it should be deemed identical to it. Smith defines love as the desire or longing for some perceived good. But what if we already possess a good and are thus happily released from our longing? Can we no longer be said to love it? Before marriage my wife and I courted at a distance. I grew to love her and longed to be with her when we were apart. But after our marriage this changed. My longing had been satisfied and the element of desire was turned in a somewhat different direction. I naturally desired her good and the good of our marriage. But my love was for her as a person, resting less in desire than in strong attachment to someone present. Could love not also be defined as the enjoyment of the person or thing now at hand?

More basically, I wonder whether Smith’s identification of love with desire does not unduly reduce love to an emotion. Again the affective side of love is important and should not be denied. Yet the Bible tells us to love God with all our heart, all our soul and all our mind, and to love our neighbour as ourselves (Matthew 2:37-39). Similarly, God says that, if we love him, we will keep his commandments (John 14:15). This love encompasses the whole person, including his deepest longings, but also his thoughts (2 Corinthians 10:5) and beliefs (Acts 16:31). Every married couple can tell stories of being irritated with each other and perhaps even disliking each other at that moment. Yet they continue to love each other, even if their feelings of mutual affection may fluctuate. Love in this respect is a fundamental attitude of the heart, irreducible to shifting sentiments. Again I don’t think Smith would deny this, but it would be good to have further clarity from him on the matter.

3. Creation order. One of the persistent elements of life under communism was that the régime deliberately created liturgical rituals to inculcate loyalty to its goals, beginning with the youngest of children. This was all part of a grand effort to create a new socialist person whose deepest longings would differ from those of a bourgeois person. It would presumably eliminate national/ethnic antagonisms and the bourgeois profit motive, replacing them with a nearly instinctive urge towards large-scale communal solidarity.

However, this endeavour failed miserably. When communism collapsed some two decades ago, human beings were still human beings with all of their particular attachments and commitments, but now with a pronounced cynicism towards the ideology in which they had been catechized. In short, all of the rituals had become empty and had failed to take root in the hearts of the people, despite the rulers’ intentions. This was my experience visiting Czechoslovakia in 1976: everyone went through the motions, but nobody actually believed the official ideology. Why did this happen? Because God upholds his creation and is faithful to it, even in the midst of our unfaithfulness. An ideology can mould people to only a limited extent before its efforts bump up against the hard reality of this creation order, to which his human image-bearers are also subject. People’s loyalties can be bent only so far.

To be sure, Smith does acknowledge this in the section where he deals with the liturgical reading of the law (p. 173-176), but he would have done well to draw out its implications for his overall argument. Yes, we are formed by the secular liturgies of the market, the university and so forth, but we are not infinitely malleable. As Christians we do not simply come up with counter-liturgies to oppose those of the larger culture, as if both were equally matched in their formative capacities, requiring us to come up with means of tipping the balance in our favour. We are, rather, inculcating ways that go with the grain of creation and not against it (p. 175). We are demonstrating a better way rooted in obedience to God’s word. His commands are not arbitrary, but are a kind of owner’s manual, telling us how to live well in his world. In short, our liturgies are normed liturgies.

Like many Reformed Christians, I too grew up in a church where the Decalogue was read every Sunday morning. This took place in connection with the confession of sin and the assurance of pardon, which were drawn from 1 John 1:6-2:2. It is only recently that I have become aware of how much this weekly liturgy shaped me. Nevertheless, this was not just one more liturgy or yet another way of living; it is the Way, rooted in God’s intentions for us at creation. We need to show more confidence in this as we go about educating our young. This is a theme I would love to see sounded repeatedly throughout the book, because it would strengthen considerably Smith’s argument as a whole.

4. Structure and direction. Smith claims to accept this distinction, which is found in Herman Bavinck, Dirk Vollenhoven and Wolters, among others (pp. 52, 75-79). The meaning of this distinction is that, while God’s creation is good with respect to its basic structural components, it is subject to abuse by sinful human beings. The ancient Greeks notwithstanding, there is nothing intrinsically evil in the emotions, which are the good creation of God, but they are subject to proper and improper directions. It is not a matter of restraining intrinsically chaotic emotions with an intrinsically orderly reason. Both reason and emotions are capable of being rightly or wrongly directed. So far, so good.

However, Smith is not consistent in affirming this insight across the board. For example, in assessing the liturgies of American nationalism he sharply criticizes their valorization of competition and holds up instead “the creational ideal of collaboration and cooperation” (pp. 107, 201). But this is too facile a contrast. The line between good and evil does not run between co-operation and competition; it runs through both. Competition can lead to violence, but it need not. Competition can be a positive thing if, for example, it sees employees competing with each other to provide the best service to customers. In the context of games or other forms of recreation, it can contribute to a healthy sense of sportsmanship and camaraderie, as well as to physical fitness. Similarly, co-operation may induce people to help each other in beneficial ways. But its darker side is evident when corporations collaborate to fix prices, an illegal practice that puts other businesses at an unfair disadvantage. (See the 2009 film, The Informant!, for a cinematic account of one such price-fixing episode.) Clearly competition is not always bad, and co-operation is not always good.

In this respect Smith’s book is something of an amalgam of Abraham Kuyper and Stanley Hauerwas, or, to use Richard Niebuhr’s well-worn categories, between Christ transforming culture and Christ against culture. This can be seen in his reference to the church as “a new polis – a new sociopolitical community constituted by God in baptism” (p. 196). Although this is in one sense an Augustinian insight, Smith needs to clarify whether he here envisions the church as a specific differentiated institution (structure) with its own task in God’s world or as the body of Christ or corpus Christi (direction) called to live out the kingdom in every area of life. The latter can justifiably be called a new polis, i.e., Augustine’s civitas Dei. However, in the former sense the church legitimately shares space with a variety of communities, such as family, marriage, business enterprise, state and school. Here it would be misleading to call the institutional church a new polis.

The distinction between structure and direction has definite implications for an understanding of the shopping mall experience Smith describes in the introductory chapter. If the liturgies of the mall misshape the desires of participants, yet if market transactions themselves are part of the created structural reality of human life, then the alternative must entail more than just sending people to church each Sunday to imbibe an alternative liturgy, as important as this is. It should also send them back into the market to do the hard work of reclaiming it for the cause of Christ. What would a renewed marketplace look like? Would it resemble the old Maxwell Street Market in Chicago? The Friday Market in Cairo? An old-fashioned big-city department store? The small-town five and dimes of yesteryear? What would properly-directed, nonidolatrous rituals of the market look like? This needs to be thought through carefully and indeed prayerfully.

Desiring the Kingdom is billed as volume 1 in a larger series under the general title, Cultural Liturgies. Two more volumes are forthcoming, in which I hope the issues raised above will be treated in some fashion. In any event, based on a reading of volume 1, there is every reason to expect that volumes 2 and 3 will be as good, and perhaps even better. Smith’s fans have much to look forward to.

Crossposted at First Things: Evangel

Juristocracy versus democracy

2010-09-07T13:03:00.004-04:00

Under its late founding editor, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, First Things made its reputation in part by its opposition to the judicial usurpation of democracy, culminating in its controversial 1996 symposium under that title. Those interested in the topic would do well to read James Grant's fascinating article, The Scourge of Juristocracy, published in the spring 2010 issue of The Wilson Quarterly. In the United States, and increasingly in Canada, opposition to an apparent judicial supremacy comes in conservative guise. The courts are presumed to be imposing progressive values on a recalcitrant public in the habit of maintaining older institutions and mores. In this respect First Things has tended towards what I would call a highbrow populism, based on the (not altogether incontestable) assumption that the people possess an innate wisdom superior to the political illusions of their élites.

However, by Grant's account, the historical development of juristocracy is more complicated than this: in the first years of the last century American courts were often seen as obstructing the progressive will of elected legislatures, culminating in the Supreme Court's early opposition to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal legislation. Grant traces the diverging paths of Britain and the US in their respective attitudes to the role of judges and courts in the political process, with Britain embracing parliamentary supremacy after 1688 and the United States adopting Blackstone's more conservative respect for the judge-made English common law. In the latter a political role for the courts could be seen as a concession to the classical mixed constitution:

Modern judicial activism is in many ways an expression of the old belief that democracy must be tempered by aristocracy—an idea that was prevalent in the late 18th century and now masquerades in democratic garb. The main vehicle by which judicial activism has been brought about is, of course, the language of rights. Coinciding with the articulation of the secular, anti-religious feelings of the Enlightenment, the flourishing of constitutional debate in the 18th century witnessed regular appeals to the idea of inalienable natural rights, which took on a sacred role. But it was only in the latter half of the 20th century that the idea (now described as human rights) became an intrinsic part of legal and political discourse. For many today, a world without rights enforced by a judiciary is unthinkable. Especially in undemocratic regimes and in new or unstable democracies beset by deep corruption and other ills, rights-based judicial review is a necessary protection against arbitrary government. But in ostensibly healthier democracies, it inevitably comes at a cost.

For the most part I find Grant persuasive. However, conspicuously absent from his analysis is a recognition of the important role of political culture in the protection of rights and in the smooth functioning of a constitution. A political culture includes a variety of attitudes, usages and mores that condition the ways people act politically. Respect for the rule of law, for example, cannot be legislated into existence where it does not already enjoy longstanding support in the culture of a particular body politic.

Americans have long esteemed their 18th-century founders as near geniuses who crafted a carefully balanced system of government that has proved durable over the course of more than two centuries. However, from the standpoint of the student of political culture, this esteem, while not altogether misplaced, somewhat misses the point. Without a supportive culture of respect for constitutional government, no political framework, however well-thought-out, could have survived for long.

This has implications for the functioning of courts as well. Here's Grant once again: "Especially in undemocratic regimes and in new or unstable democracies beset by deep corruption and other ills, rights-based judicial review is a necessary protection against arbitrary government." This conclusion is open to question at the very least. If corruption is as deep-seated as it is in many countries, it is a rather tall order to expect the courts to function in a way that places them above such ingrained patterns of public life. Moreover, even if the courts somehow manage to free themselves from the taint of corruption and tyranny, there is no inevitability that the governments at issue will heed their rulings, especially if the citizenry is accustomed to such governmental arbitrariness.

It would be interesting to see how a recognition of the pivotal role of political culture might change the debate surrounding the role of the courts in a political system.

Crossposted at First Things: Evangel

Czechs chuck church, prefer pub

2010-09-03T15:17:00.001-04:00

The Economist carries two stories that may or may not be related to each other. First, in a story about beer consumption in Asia, we find a nifty map showing the levels of beer-drinking per capita for several countries around the world. Second, in an article on Europe’s irreligious, there is a bar graph showing for each European country the proportion of the population that never attends religious services.

Reading these prompts me to wonder whether there might be a correlation between beer-drinking and the level of religious observance in these countries. For example, the Czech Republic has the highest percentage (60% plus) of people who never attend religious services, and it also boasts a whopping 161 litres per person in beer consumption, by far the highest among the countries surveyed. On this basis might one be justified in speculating that those specializing in spirits tend to spurn spirituality?

Hawking's 'god'

2010-09-02T16:51:00.003-04:00

The eminent British physicist has issued this seemingly troubling pronouncement ex cathedra: Stephen Hawking: God was not needed to create the Universe. Though some may find this disillusioning, others will easily (and gratefully) recognize the measure of truth in his conclusion:

Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist. . . . It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.

Hawking is right: the god he describes does not exist. The true God did not simply set the cosmos in motion. He does not merely inhabit the gaps in our explanatory theories. Rather he upholds his creation, including the laws of physics, at every conceivable moment. Without his doing so, it would cease immediately to exist. A god who is subsequent to the law of gravity is definitely not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who became incarnate in Jesus Christ. Thank God there is no such god as Hawking conceives of him.

Citizenship and the kingdom of God

2010-08-28T10:39:00.034-04:00

In the midst of his peripatetic activities, my friend Gideon Strauss has managed to come up with another thoughtful post for the Center for Public Justice’s Capital Commentary series: Becoming an American.

This decision [to pursue US citizenship] raises big questions for me: What does it mean to become an American? What does it mean to be an American? Is it possible to fulfill the responsibilities of American citizenship while retaining citizenship in Canada and South Africa, or must those citizenships be relinquished? What is the relationship between the duties of a citizen of the USA and the duties one has to all of humanity—that is, can one be both an American citizen and in some sense a cosmopolitan? And perhaps the biggest question of all: what is the relationship between being a citizen of the USA and being a citizen of the kingdom of God?

This is not the stuff one typically hears from those American Christians who speak too readily of "saving America" or of a supposed American exceptionalism. Yet I can easily resonate with Strauss's questions, given my highest allegiance to the kingdom of God coupled with my subordinate citizenships in two (and possibly as many as four) political communities.

My own view is that, in a federal system, one already owes overlapping and simultaneous political loyalties to municipality, province/state and federation. Moreover, in a complex differentiated society an ordinary person has multiple commitments to such pluriform communities as state, church institution, marriage, family and a variety of voluntary associations. If any one of these claims ultimacy, in effect it assumes an illegitimate godlike status. True, many states may stake such a claim to the citizen's ultimate allegiance, but the Christian's citizenship in these is always a tempered and limited allegiance subject to the higher loyalty to God's kingdom. The just state will recognize this and will refrain from asking more than it should from its citizenry.

Notre Dame on life

2010-08-26T22:30:00.012-04:00

My alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, released an Institutional Statement Supporting the Choice for Life on 8 April 2010:

Consistent with the teaching of the Catholic Church on such issues as abortion, research involving human embryos, euthanasia, the death penalty, and other related life issues, the University of Notre Dame recognizes and upholds the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death.

Although this brief statement is fine as far as it goes, one might question the wording of the title. Why "the choice for life" rather than, say, "the defence of life"?