Author: BrJames

15Jun

Florida Police Frame Teen

Another example of police malfeasance emerged recently. In order to boast of a perfect clearance record, Biscayne Park police chief Raimundo Atesiano and two other police officers resorted to a disgusting tactic.

Atesiano, with the help of two officers from his department, conspired to falsely arrest and charge a 16-year-old with four unsolved burglary cases that year, prosecutors said Monday.

The incident began on June 13, 2013, when Atesiano told Dayoub and Fernandez that he “wanted them to unlawfully arrest T.D. for unsolved burglaries despite knowing that there was no evidence that T.D. had committed the burglaries,” prosecutors said. Dayoub and Fernandez gathered information for the arrest “knowing there was no evidence and no lawful basis to arrest and charge T.D,” officials said.

Read more at Washington Post.

12Jun

Loneliness is Rampant According to Study

The health insurer Cigna recently published results of a nationwide survey of 20,000 people, showing that most Americans are lonely.

More than half of survey respondents — 54 percent — said they always or sometimes feel that no one knows them well. Fifty-six percent reported they sometimes or always felt like the people around them “are not necessarily with them.” And 2 in 5 felt like “they lack companionship,” that their “relationships aren’t meaningful” and that they “are isolated from others.”

The results were more pronounced among younger people.

Members of Generation Z, born between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, had an overall loneliness score of 48.3. Millennials, just a little bit older, scored 45.3. By comparison, baby boomers scored 42.4. The Greatest Generation, people ages 72 and above, had a score of 38.6 on the loneliness scale.

Loneliness has been shown to be a contributor to heart attacks, strokes, and premature death.

Read more at NPR.

The full report is here.

This study is an indictment of the shifts in our culture away from meaningful friendships and relationships, and toward shallow, ephemeral ones.

It also provides a challenge for people of faith. Here is an opportunity for churches to alleviate that loneliness and provide a source of community.

19May

Death in Texas

Even as the royal wedding overshadows all other news today, I wish to reach out in love and sympathy to all the folks in Santa Fe, Texas, who are still reeling after a grisly school shooting, which is becoming a depressingly common occurrence. According to Reuters,

A 17-year-old student dressed in a trench coat and armed with a shotgun and pistol opened fire at his high school outside Houston on Friday, killing nine students and a teacher, before surrendering to officers, authorities said.

May God’s arms of love be around all those affected and disturbed by this violent act.

19May

Professor Tries to Boost Grades Based on Gender

In a new salvo of the assault by the warriors of social justice upon the integrity of higher education, a professor was caught trying to inflate grades based on gender. The culprit was Liping Liu, a professor of information sciences at the University of Akron. According to Insidehighered.com:

In an email to students in his systems analysis and design class that has since been made public, Liping Liu reportedly wrote that women “may see their grades raised one level or two” as part of a “national movement to encourage female students to go [into] information sciences.”

When this blatant effort became known, the university administration praised his “laudable” intentions, but rebuked professor Liu for his methods, and reassured the public that no grades were altered.

17May

Former Transgender Man Embraces The Spirit

Jeffrey McCall was a transgender activist with the alternate name “Scarlet”. In 2016, McCall had hit bottom. He was looking into surgical measures to complete his transformation. He was also contemplating suicide. He had been secretly listening to sermons from an Evangelical pastor and felt a tug from the Holy Spirit:

I had one night where I had been out partying, and I came home and started crying on my bed in March of 2016. And that was the night I said “Lord, I know people really live for you. Not just go to church on Sunday, but they really live for you. They have a relationship with you.”

And I said, through tears: “God, will I ever have a relationship with you?”

And all of a sudden my thoughts in my mind and everything was just interrupted. And I heard the Lord say: “Yes, you will live for me.”
(Christian Post, online here).

We wish him well on his journey.

09May

95 Theses: Spiraling Out of Control

95 Theses

Out of love for the truth and from desire to elucidate it, the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology, and ordinary lecturer at Wittenberg, intends to defend the following statements and to dispute on them in that place. Therefore he asks that those who cannot be present and dispute with him orally shall do so in their absence by letter.

When Martin Luther posted his “95 Theses” on the church door at Wittenberg, he may have intended no more than an academic dispute among faculty at the local university. At the time, he was Professor of Moral Theology, and the “Theses” were in Latin, the language of the academy. There is debate about when, or even if, this nailing of the theses occurred.

The drama of Luther walking through Wittenberg with his hammer and his nails is very, very unlikely to have happened,” says Professor Andrew Pettegree, an expert on the Reformation from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. “The castle church door was the normal noticeboard of the university. This was not an act of defiance on Luther’s part, it was simply what you did to make a formal publication. It would probably have been pasted to the door rather than nailed up.” (Time).

Luther’s bold statements were circulated widely among scholars, and soon “went viral” (The Economist). His work was translated into German, without Luther’s knowledge, and thanks to the printing press, within weeks his ideas had circulated throughout Germany and beyond.

“They are printed and circulated far beyond my expectation,” he wrote in March 1518 to a publisher in Nuremberg who had published a German translation of the theses. But writing in scholarly Latin and then translating it into German was not the best way to address the wider public. Luther wrote that he “should have spoken far differently and more distinctly had I known what was going to happen.”

You are surprised that I did not send them to you. But I did not want to circulate them widely. I only intended to submit them to a few close friends for discussion, and if they disapproved of the Theses, to suppress them. I wanted to publish them, only if they met with approval. But now they are being printed and spread everywhere far beyond my expectation, a result that I regret. It is not that I am against telling the people the truth, in fact that is all that I want, but this is not the proper way to instruct the people. For I have doubts about some of the Theses, and others I would have put much differently and more cogently, and some I would have omitted, had I known what was to come. Still, the spread of my Theses shows what people everywhere really think of Indulgences… (Martin Luther, Letter to Christoph Schuerl, March 5, 1518)

Nonetheless, he persisted in advocating his views, and at first, not much happened. The Bishop of Brandenburg merely passed Luther’s letter and the Theses on up to his superiors in Rome. Pope Leo’s initial reaction was “Brother Martin is a man of fine genius, and this outbreak is a mere squabble of envious monks.” Later he wrote, “It is a drunken German who wrote the Theses; when sober he will change his mind.”

However, as the furor for reform continued to brew, Luther was quickly viewed by the church hierarchy as a threat. He was called to recant his views, refused, and was excommunicated.

Whatever Luther’s original intent, the 95 Theses brought sudden fame to Luther and his ideas, and precipitated a break with Roman Catholicism. Events quickly spun out of the control of either Luther or the Pope. The Indulgence controversy was the soil out of which a political, social, and ecclesiastical revolution grew. A quiet academic dispute went viral. The ideas of Luther challenged the established order and remade Europe.

Addendum:

The traditional date of the start of the Protestant Reformation, October 31, 1517, more properly reflects the day that Luther mailed a letter, along with a copy of the Theses, to Albert, the archbishop of Brandenburg. This letter read, in part:

Under your most distinguished name, papal indulgences are offered over all the land for the construction of St. Peter … I do not so much complain about the quacking of the preachers which I haven’t heard, but I bewail the gross misunderstanding among the people which comes from these preachers … Evidently the poor souls believe that when they have bought indulgence letters they are assured salvation. They are likewise convinced that souls escape purgatory as soon as they have placed a contribution in the chest.

The first and only duty of the bishops is to see that the people learn the gospel and the love of Christ … for on no occasion has Christ ordered that indulgences should be preached … what a horror, what a danger for a bishop to permit the loud noise of indulgences among his people, while the gospel is silenced …

04May

Jesus Is The Death Cure

“The hearts of the sons of men are full of evil and insanity is in their hearts throughout their lives” (Ecclesiastes 9:3)

"Death Cure" Poster

Our most recent family movie night at home culminated with a viewing of “The Death Cure”, which is the conclusion of James Dashner’s apocalyptic dystopian vision launched by the “Maze Runner.” One particular feature of the stories sticks out for me as a metaphor of the human condition.

The “flare virus”, and the desperate search for a cure for it, constitutes the dominant backstory upon which all of the action, and all of the emotional moments among the young friends, is plastered. I will limit the remainder of my comments to a further discussion of this issue.

The premise of the “Maze Runner” movies (and the books upon which they were based) is that a terrifying engineered virus has been unleashed upon humanity. It is an aberration of nature, created by a lab in secret, and released with the intent of destroying part of humanity. The Mazerunner wikia describes the effects of the infection:

It is a virus that slowly eats away at the brain, eventually turning its victims into bloodthirsty and irrational humans who consider cannibalism an everyday objective. People who have the Flare are commonly called Cranks.

The “Flare” darkens the minds of those who contract it. They exhibit rage and act irrationally and violently. They experience physical and psychic pain. Eventually they succumb to the effects of their affliction and die.

Most of humanity has become infected by the “Flare”. Even the powerful government agency, WCKD, the elite remnant of humanity living and working in the “Last City” in gleaming high-rises, barricaded behind heavily defended walls, has discovered that their defensive measures are futile. The virus is now airborne and residents of the “Last City” are becoming infected.

Sin is like the “Flare”. We are all affected by it. Sin is an aberration from God’s intended order. Sin robs us of our happiness, our dignity, and our wits. Sin puts us out of our right minds, causing us to commit acts of evil and violence.

St. Paul opened his letter to the Romans with a catalog of the devastating effects of sin. People have suppressed the truth about God, and God in turn has “given people over” to their debased thinking and behaviors:

They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

Much has been written about the “noetic effects” of sin–the consequent darkening of the human mind. Echoing Aquinas and Calvin, philosopher Alvin Plantinga states:

we human beings have indeed fallen from a pristine state into sin, a condition that involves both intellect and will. It is an affective malaise, a malfunction or madness of the will. But it is also a cognitive condition

Tim Keller, using the example of King Nebuchadnezzar, speaks of pride–one form of sin. What caught my ear was the following turn of phrase, in describing what pride does to us: “In seeking to become more than human, he became less than human.”

We all find ourselves in a state of having become less than human by the deleterious effect of sin. We are all “Cranks”. And the affliction is universal.

What is the cure for the “Flare”? The movie hints that the blood of the main character, Thomas, possesses something that can reverse the effects of the virus. This has been used successfully on his friend, Brenda. His friend (and traitor) Theresa, takes some blood and pipettes it into a batch of virus, and the virus is killed. The cure is in the blood. At one point, Thomas decides to give himself up self-sacrificially to WCKD, so that they may extract it (painfully and at great cost to himself).

Likewise, our cure is in someone’s blood. In Christian theology, Jesus gave himself up, to his enemies, at great pain and cost to himself, in order to provide a cure for the virus of our sin. His blood is our death cure.

For more information:
“The Noetic Effect of Sin” is an essay by Christian writer/educator Steven Cook, available on his website.

Plantinga, Alvin. Warranted Christian Belief. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Timothy Keller, “Pride: The Case of Nebuchadnezzar”, sermon audio file available for free at Gospelinlife.

20Apr

Saint Anselm of Canterbury

image
(Statue of Anselm at Canterbury Cathedral, taken May 2010, by Ealdgyth, obtained from Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons 3.0 license)

If you have taken a philosophy class somewhere, you probably encountered this great thinker from antiquity, and his famous definition of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”. In his work, proslogion, he endeavored to demonstrate God’s existence in what has since been labelled the “ontological argument”. Basically, If you can conceive of something like God, defined as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”, but God doesn’t actually exist, then anything that does exist would be greater. Hence God must exist in reality and not just in thought. It’s clever, though it can be (and has been) punctured by others, such as Immanuel Kant. Variants of the argument have been put forward by Descartes, Leibniz, and Goedel. Even today the argument provides grist for reflection. Few would regard it as an absolute proof of God, but perhaps in its best forms it demonstrates that belief in God isn’t unreasonable, as the loudest screamers of the atheist community would insist. 1

Another sign of the importance of St. Anselm is that in the divide between East and West in Christianity, the theological focus in the West since St Anselm has been upon the mystery of the atonement. In his book Cur Deus Homo (“Why God Man?”) Anselm reflects upon the atonement. Jesus is regarded by the church universal as a being with two natures–“fully God and fully Man”. As St Athanasius put it centuries earlier:

…For the right Faith is, that we believe and confess,
that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man;
God, of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds;
and Man of the substance of his Mother, born in the world;
Perfect God and perfect Man,
of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.

(You may read the Athanasian creed in its entirety here).

Anselm started with this accepted christology and asked, “why?” His answer became a powerful reflection upon the nature of the atonement. The thesis is essentially that we humans owe a cosmic debt that we cannot pay. Only God is qualified to pay off that debt, but can’t do so because He doesn’t owe it. With Jesus you have one who both owes the debt and can pay it.

Anselm (1033-1109) joined the Benedictine monastery at Bec in Normandy, in 1060, rising to become Abbot. Not long afterward, England was conquered by Anselm’s king, William the Conqueror. Many of Anselm’s friends went to England, and he made trips to oversee property belonging to Bec. In 1093 Anselm became Archbishop of Canterbury. His years in Canterbury were stormy, as he clashed with the English monarch over what is known to history as the “investiture controversy”, and twice had to go into exile. After his death he was canonized, and is today regarded as the father of scholasticism. He is considered one of the “doctors of the church” (from Latin docere, “to teach”), men regarded as great intellects who profoundly influenced Western Christianity.

In addition to the heady philosophical treatises, we have the following prayer from Saint Anselm:

O Lord my God,
Teach my heart this day where and how to see you,
Where and how to find you.
You have made me and remade me,
And you have bestowed on me
All the good things I possess,
And still I do not know you.
I have not yet done that
For which I was made.
Teach me to seek you,
For I cannot seek you
Unless you teach me,
Or find you
Unless you show yourself to me.
Let me seek you in my desire,
Let me desire you in my seeking.
Let me find you by loving you,
Let me love you when I find you.

(Read more at BeliefNet).

We also have a song of St Anselm,
Jesus, as a mother you gather your people to you:
you are gentle with us as a mother with her children;
Often you weep over our sins and our pride:
tenderly you draw us from hatred and judgement.
You comfort us in sorrow and bind up our wounds:
in sickness you nurse us,
and with pure milk you feed us.
Jesus, by your dying we are born to new life:
by your anguish and labour we come forth in joy.
Despair turns to hope through your sweet goodness:
through your gentleness we find comfort in fear.
Your warmth gives life to the dead:
your touch makes sinners righteous.
Lord Jesus, in your mercy heal us:
in your love and tenderness remake us.
In your compassion bring grace and forgiveness:
for the beauty of heaven may your love prepare us.
(From James Kiefer).

A Prayer for the Feast Day of Saint Anselm

Almighty God, who didst raise up thy servant Anselm to teach the Church of his day to understand its faith in thine eternal Being, perfect justice, and saving mercy: Provide thy Church in every age with devout and learned scholars and teachers, that we may be able to give a reason for the hope that is in us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Further information about Saint Anselm:

For Further Reading
Resources about the Satisfaction Theory of the Atonement:

  • Saint Anselm, Cur Deus Homo. (Full text available online).
  • Theologian and popular teacher RC Sproul has discussed this issue in an essay.

Resources about the “Ontological Argument”, including modern restatements:

  • Saint Anselm, proslogium, available online courtesy of Fordham University.
  • A repository of items at Lastseminary.com.
  • Waterloo Univ statistics professor Christopher Small’s blog and essay. (Discussion of the more recent version of the ontological argument by the mathematician Goedel).
  • Der Spiegel. (A computer program validates Goedel’s argument).

1 One of the funnier misrepresentations of an ontological argument, which I can no longer find, is a statement to the effect of, “I can f**k around with language and therefore God exists, now go to church.”

01Apr

Christ is Risen!

A joyful Eastertide to you.

Rembrandt van Rijn – Christ and St Mary Magdalen at the Tomb