Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Archives for December 2018

Christmas Reading

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Now, I don’t expect you to read these on the first day of Christmas, but there are 12 whole days of Christmas (that’s right Adam Sandler).

James Chastek, who is just a Thomist, reflects carefully on what it means to call Mary, the Mother of God:

Nestorius insisted on the seemingly innocent theological clarification of referring to Mary as mother of Christ and not as Mother of God since “Christ” was an awaited figure in history but to take this “Mother of God” talk literally would give us the sheer contradiction of generating the ingenerable. Nestorianism mirrored the earlier and more widespread Arian heresy, which also boiled down to the same seemingly innocent desire to clarify that, whatever this “son of god” talk amounted to, there wasn’t literally a generated God.

William Briggs (whose book Uncertainty was recently gifted me) writes about the mathematics of Santa’s feats of power. It’s a unique and helpful look at how a saint and theologian, embued with Elven toy-making prowess is able to deliver presents to Christians children in a world where over 1,000,000,000 people are professing Christians:

Santa’s sleigh ride is largely ceremonial at this point, though he does go out and personally deliver some presents. He does this in cases where the math indicates that certain children are unlikely to get exactly what they want. This is because the methods that we use are not perfect: Santa and his elves can only “flap their wings” in so many places and in so many ways.

As far as the darker corners of the web are concerned, the anonymous pro-Christian heathen at the Chateau asks an important question:

[W]hich Christmas song is most triggering to non-Christians?

I would wager God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. Billy Idol has a great version (as one of the CH commenters noted):

But it must said the Christopher Lee (who played a James Bond Villain, an evil Jedi, Dracula, and a wicked Wizard) has a fairly metal version of the Little Drummer Boy:

Edward Feser reminds us (in a very Catholic way) that every day is a day to welcome our Lord:

That, as I told my friend, is why the doctrine of transubstantiation is so important.  Meditating on the meaning of the Eucharist can help make sin detestable and horrific to us, because God’s dwelling place ought to be spotless, and we know that every time we take Holy Communion God Himself dwells in us.  We can do so daily – God with us, not just at Christmas, but throughout the year.  And throughout the year, not merely at Christmas, we need to welcome Christ with the unreserved yes that His mother exemplified.

Then two silly political tweets. First, Rand Paul:

So everyone enjoy your feats of strength today. Air your grievances here or in your home. But remember, thanks to Donald Trump we are ALL saying Merry Christmas this year — so repeat after me: MERRY CHRISTMAS and HAPPY HOLIDAYS to everyone even the haters and losers.— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) December 23, 2018

But it doesn’t live up to the original:

Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 31, 2016

Bruce Charlton and John’s Gospel

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Over the past few months, Bruce Charlton has been reading John’s Gospel exclusively in order to better understand the meaning of Jesus. He’s come to some startling conclusions. He compiled them all here. In his final post reporting on this process, he made these observations:

I regard the Fourth Gospel as chronologically the first, and qualitatively the most authoritative, source on the life and teachings of Jesus. As I read and re-read, I found that the discipline created a situation as if the Fourth Gospel was the only scripture.

And indeed, whenever I turned to other Gospels, or to the Epistles and Revelation, they looked very much inferior; very much like rag-bag collections of theology, memoirs, theories and folk tales about Jesus; and of very mixed validity – since many things in them contradict the Fourth Gospel…

This downgrading [of John’s gospel through church history and in academic theology] seems inevitable, given that the Fourth Gospel provides no authority for churches, nor for a priesthood, nor for celibacy, nor for the ritual communal life that has often dominated Christian practice; the Gospel’s vision of the Christian life is highly individual, personal, un-institutional. 

In the Fourth Gospel; Christians are seen to more like a new kind of family, than a new version of ancient religions. 

And the historical church has mostly portrayed Jesus as a rescuer of an otherwise-doomed Mankind – a double-negative description, with Jesus negating the negative state of a ‘fallen’ world. Whereas the Fourth Gospel shows a Jesus dealing with individual persons to enhance their existence – a positive addition to human possibility, with Jesus making possible a qualitative transformation of mortal to divine Life.

I think it’s best to portray apparently contrasting pictures in the Bible as complementary. I will say that John’s gospel does include hints of the institution of a Church:

  1. In John 20:19-23, Jesus gives a specific group of people a form of authority with respect to distributing God’s benefaction. Jesus is still the Way, but the disciples are ways to the way in an institutional manner.
  2. In John 15:9-17, there is a distinction made between general disciples and believers (those who became loyal students of Jesus) and his inner circle of potential preachers (whom Jesus instructs specifically to reap the harvest of potential believers in John 14:31-38). To be a friend of Jesus is, in John’s gospel, to follow his commands but it also carries the connotation of being one of those to whom he revealed the secrets of his ministry (the 12 and maybe a few others).
  3. John’s gospel was written and given to a trusted individual or groupwith an implication that it needed to be read, copied, and even explained (see 1 John 1:1-4). In other words, there was a church with institutional features that supported the writing and transmission of John’s gospel.

Charlton’s points are helpful, but may need some tweaking. His article and collection of articles are certainly worth reading. He’s thinking big ideas about Jesus, which is something that few these days dare to do.

Tales of the Mountain Men

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My book club recently read Tales of the Mountain Men, a collection of excerpts about mountain men, edited by Lamar Underwood. While it has interesting stories, each segment ended right when it got interesting. It felt like I paid Underwood 12 dollars to advertise other authors’ books. So as a book, it gets like 5/10 or even less. But the experience of reading the excerpts was pretty good. It would be a great book to get from a library. Two of the paragraphs were so good, that I’ll reproduce them here with some comments.

Excerpt from Across the Wide Missouri by Bernard Devoto quoted in Tales of the Mountain Men:

Skill develops from controlled, corrected repetitions of an act for which one has some knack. Skill is a product of experience and criticism and intelligence. Analysis cannot much transcend those truisms. Between the amateur and the professional, between the duffer and the expert, between the novice and the veteran there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different integration, a different nervous and muscular and psychological organization. He has specialized responses of great intricacy. His associative faculties have patterns of screening, acceptance and rejection, analysis and sifting, evaluation and selective adjustment much too complex for conscious direction. Yet as the pat. terns of appraisal and adjustment exert their automatic and perhaps metabolic energy, they are accompanied by a conscious process fully as complex. A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom…It is hardly too much to say that a mountain man’s life was skill. He not only worked in the wilderness, he also lived there and he did so from sun to sun by the exercise of total skill. It was probably as intricate a skill as any ever developed by any way of working or living anywhere.

This is one of the best paragraphs and a half I’ve read on habit acquisition. A neurosurgeon friend of mind said that it would be worth reading daily for anybody in a profession requiring highly developed habits, he know this because he knows the brain and because he said, “It perfectly describes neurosurgery.”  

Excerpt from The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie quoted in Tales of the Mountain Men:

When they were going again his thoughts went back. As a man got older he felt different about things in other ways. He liked rendezvous still and to see the hills and travel the streams and all, but half the pleasure was in the remembering mind. A place didn’t stand alone after a man had been there once. It stood along with the times he had had, with the thoughts he had thought, with the men he had played and fought and drunk with, so when he got there again he was always asking whatever became of so-and-so, asking if the others minded a certain time. It stood with the young him and the former feelings. A river wasn’t the same once a man had camped by it. The tree he saw again wasn’t the same tree if he had only so much as pissed against it. There was the first time and the place alone, and afterwards there was the place and the time and the man he used to be, all mixed up, one with the other.

It’s funny how going to a place brings you back to the best memories you had there and the sorrow connected to the fact that those times have passed you by. From a Platonic point of view, it’s a good bit of evidence for the hereafter. If our consciousness is shaped by the form of consciousness, then the best we long for in each place, which shapes our consciousness of everywhere we revisit, is actually a picture of how that place ought to be or will be in some unspecified future. It was a thought-provoking paragraph for sure.

“Natural” Atheism

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The ever-interesting Bruce Charlton explains why people are “naturally atheists.”

The fact that all modern public discourse excludes the divine.

As a modern child grows up, he becomes socialised, he becomes trained in modern public discourse of many kinds: school work, everything to do with the mass media, sports, pastimes, hobbies… and all of these exclude the divine.

It Just Isn’t There. The lexicon of objects that function in the system exclude the divine; the causality of the system excludes the divine.

As the child reaches adolescence – these modes of thought become more dominant, and they become habitual to the extent of being simply taken for granted; and eventually they become so habitual as to be extremely difficult to break out from.

This process is exacerbated in the world of work, where nearly all jobs exclude the divine (in whatever social system, the law, medicine, science, government, politics, police, the military, engineering – as well as the mass media and academia) – becoming competent means internalising these ‘materialist’ ways of thinking; thus, excluding the divine.

Dallas Willard once remarked, though I forget where, that Christians will never become convincing until they reacquire the ability to speak of Christianity as something known to be true.