The Wing-Beat

Whom have I in heaven but Thee?  And there is none upon the earth that I desire beside Thee.  My flesh and my heart may fail; but God is the rocky summit of my heart and my portion (secure place of life and refuge–home place).  For, behold, they that are far from Thee will perish; Thou has destroyed all those who are unfaithful to thee (a-whoring, adulterous, looking for lesser substitutes, entrusting one’s life and passions to anything or anyone else). But drawing near to God is good to me; I have made Adonoi The Lord Hashem The Name my refuge, that I may declare all Thy deeds.

What is it like to be distinctly, securely a member of God’s people?

(With restricted liberty and faint apology to translators of the NET Bible, the Orthodox Jewish Bible, and the NASB.)

Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) continues to challenge and engage me.  So, too, his mentor, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973), the steel to Rosenzweig’s flint.  They escort me roughly out of the easy seats onto the stone seats of a contentious forum; there they bid me listen until I squirm, my butt on the hard limestone, my brain on their hard arguments.

Yet this I want to do, it’s worth the effort and discomfort.  Rosenzweig was the skeptical Jew converted to his own people’s religion; Rosenstock the acculturated Jew who was baptized a Christian in his teens, and who eviscerated Rosenzweig’s sloppy thinking about reality, forcing him to dare to face God.

Right now I am working through Judaism Despite Christianity and find in Rosenstock’s letter to Cynthia Harris in 1943 many stunning comments making a unified argument that prayer is an absolute necessity–and his definition of prayer encompasses the entire life of a people.  Nineteenth-century biblical scholars did not represent Jewish history accurately or fairly.  The missed the “No” of the Jews to idols–Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and God’s three “No’s”:  the Fall, the Great Flood, and the Exodus.  “‘Revelation’ is a knowledge of God’s will, after his ‘No’ to our will has become known.” (181)  But the “No” was necessary if Israel was to recognize “herself as God’s servant, merely a man in the face of God’s majesty.”  (181)  This is not just strong stuff, it is the basic stuff.  It undergirds everything else Rosenstock wrote in the letter to Cynthia Harris in 1943.

One example will be enough:

The Germans all knew in 1918 that the World War had been lost deservedly.  Faith accepted the defeat.  But it takes faith in God to accept defeat fully.  If there be no divine will, then our will must reign supreme.  Naturally the whisperers came–those all-knowing ones who cannot be named but who are always being quoted–those who said, “It was a stab in the back,” “It was this or that,” “It was unnecessary,” etc.  The reaction was inevitable:  “We shall undo the defeat.”  Whispering is unauthorized speech.  The devil is any person who does not wish to be quoted; and so he never attains the rank of a person.  For a person accepts God’s judgement over what he has said or done.  Thus can he come to know the truth.  The devil never receives his verdict because he whispers only and never speaks truly and confidently.

. . . The people who had believed only in science, and who could not distinguish between spell-binding magic and prayer, now fell for the stump speakers.

Rosenstock summarizes the German history of persecution and repression against Lutherans (after 1825) and Catholics (certainly after 1871) and identifies Hitler as “the third attempt to free the German nation from any check on its nationalistic conscience.  This time, the triangle Luther-Rome-Israel is attacked foremost at the Jewish corner.  Also, the attack is far more violent than the two former.”  The furor Teutonicus runs a system of hatred, and there are other arguments to illustrate, but I will finish this statement with a few more of Rosenstock’s sentences:

Hitler hates everything started by the Jews, including democracy and the Freemasons.  Why?  They all know of the insertion of God’s “No” into history as a vital element.  But a spellbinder must be sure that his spell will work under all circumstances.  This prevents him from admitting God’s “No” to the fabric of history.

Hitler’s will and his god’s will are nauseatingly one.  The great art of speech has made Hitler crazy.  Since he has the privilege of speaking, of inflaming the masses, he spellbinds.  And so he hovers as a ghost from the abyss of paganism, a ghost of the days before God touched Israel’s lips with his fiery coal:  ”My will, O mortal, not thine, be done.”

The specific character of biblical prayer explains the uniqueness of the Bible.  We can’t forget the Bible because the divine “No” was created, in our speech, during those thousand years of Jewish prayer.  And all the other departments of our linguistic faculty rest on this clear distinction between prayer, on the one side, and science, poetry, fiction, and law, on the other.  If we do not pray with Israel, we cannot retain our Greek mathematics or our Roman law.  This will sound arbitrary or exaggerated at first reading.  But it is simple truth. (183)

Rosenstock goes on to illustrate examples that bind ancient and modern paganisms together while they show biblical prayer (faith, religion, core of revelation) to be absolutely distinct from them.  It is the distinction and emphasis that energized the philosophical, faithful thinking and dialogue that Rosenstock and Rosenzweig conducted over many years — theirs was an astonishing interchange between Christian and Jew; it started a century ago and lasted until Rosenzweig died.  Rosenstock lived to write voluminously on themes that grew out of scholarship as — I would like to say this —  a form of prayer.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, letter to Cynthia Harris (in 1943 a freshman at Radcliffe College): “Hitler and Israel, or On Prayer,” first published in The Journal of Religion (University of Chicago Press, April 1945).  Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, ed., Judaism Despite Christianity:  The 1916 Wartime Correspondence between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig (with a new  foreword by Paul Mendes-Flohr, a new preface by Harold Stahmer, and a new chronology by Michael Gormann-Thelen (Chicago and London:  University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Yes, Barton is forceful.  He saws heavily on the “Judeo-Christian principles of our Founding Fathers,” and in that he is right, but less so because he ignores the equally, perhaps more important founding principles based in Enlightenment rationality and the then truly liberal economic and political principles (having no king is radical as is equality of all before the law) that undergird our Constitution.  And no, I do not discount but do recognize the strong influence of Christianity that helped to shape those principles, as for example in Puritanism–yes, Puritanism (John Locke was a Puritan, for one)!  And yes, Jefferson and Madison and other leading Fathers saw reality both through the Enlightenment rationalist lens that recognized either a Deistic God (Jefferson, Franklin) or the God of orthodox theism and trinitarianism (Washington may be there, for example, but he is truly hard to gauge as to his churchmanship). That is different from the contemporary lens through which many leaders, even some Christian leaders and scholars see reality, that is, through a modern, naturalistic lens, dismissive of the orthodox Judeo-Christian tradition. Thankfully, many do not. Most do not see sharply enough the implications of their own fuzzy thinking about the relationship between public life and policy and biblical faith.  Beyond that, to say that America is a Christian nation is a statement that always requires explanation:  does that mean cultural Christianity, or does it refer to a vibrant biblical, orthodox (that is “right teaching”) Christianity that dominates the thought life, moral and ethical way of life, and our relationships domestic and international?  How do most Americans live?  There’s quite a range, there!  I wonder whether Barton is to the point of admitting that despite the Judeo-Christian influences on our Constitution and civic life in the Revolutionary Period, the Founding Fathers decided it was best that our founding documents and government constitute a secular establishment and that the government would have no sway over religion in the nation.  That would be the citizens’ responsibility, individually and corporately, and initially that was left to the states.  The First Amendment religious liberty and free exercise clauses were the product of the citizens holding out for protection from the interference of government in religious matters.  I think knowing the distinction would help to solve confusion about whether America is a “Christian nation.”  If nation refers to the society, even there we have plenty of evidence to the contrary, and that kind of evidence has always been present to varying degrees (major instance–institutionalized slavery); if it refers to majority opinion or identification, then even there I have some questions–it seems that so many professing Christians do not understand their responsibilities and obligations actually to live as Christians; many actually live contrary to Christian principles and convictions.  Christianity is divorced from actual lifestyle and commitments. Perhaps our president is in that camp; uncomfortable as it is, there are many who profess Christianity whose values and political identification are indeed “liberal” in that sense–that is, modernist, naturalistic, pragmatic, anti-faith and unevenly tolerant in practice.

Traditional Chinese philosophy/religion assumes a continuity between the world and the above-world, between nature and the supernatural, between earth and heaven.  This appears in Confucianism and Daoism, especially in their blending.  That Chinese tradition is “secular” as we would say yet there is a difference:  the object is to achieve or accept harmony between heaven and earth, “nature” as the fundamental order of things and the conduct of life, governance and relationships in collective society.  The Chinese tradition carries insights into basic ethical and moral rules familiar in various ways in all the major historical complex societies and their traditions.  Throughout the human past we also find exceptions or violations of those general standards agreed on during an axial period about 2,500 years ago.

Before that period a sizable group of Hebrews had become Israel in a sustained revelatory experience.  God gave the Covenant amid a growing and distinctive relationship.  The Covenant was the mode and the result of the continuing revelation, yet undergirding the Covenant was, and is, the God who revealed himself in it.  Even at that point, if I hear Hans Boersma correctly in his writing on “heavenly participation,” the Christ of God himself took full part in that Covenant (yes, and came to fulfill it) just as he always has been in relationship to the Creation.  Trinitarian teaching demands that conclusion; the Scriptures are shot through with references to the presence of God, with emphasis on his presence and availability or his presence even when he is hidden.

The Chinese cosmology entertained the presence of ancestors and exalted leading ancestors to a type of godhood–the Yellow Emperor is an example.  From the Zhou period forward, kings and then emperors carried the title tianzi or Son of Heaven.  They were expected to be sage–knowledgeable and wise; virtuous; beyond reproach; and committed to the proper ordering of things, to the Ordinances of Heaven, by which authority they sat on heaven’s throne.  Starting with the first emperor Qinshihuangdi, it was earth’s throne, the throne of the “Middle Kingdom,” Zhongguo.  My understanding of the system stops not far beyond this point.

Chinese tradition leaves no room in itself for Christology; the Old Testament does, and the New Testament tells us so.  The hunger of God for relationship (not out of any deficiency of fellowship in the Trinity) shows through and in all of the Creation, even if the general revelation stops at a certain point as in the Chinese tradition.  Yet I find that the human hunger for both transcendent and immediate relationships (and security, relief, protection) is expressed in that tradition.  And that tradition allows that people are predisposed to respond appropriately to authority, even more so the authority that can come right down among the people, to share in their hunger for purpose and relationship, and to fulfill it.  Not through the ancestors, not through the emperor, but in a renewed family that we sometimes thoughtlessly call the “family of God.”  We are right to say it, but we must also take its importance more to heart.

It is no wonder that so many Chinese are following Christ.  They, too recognize in Christ the satisfactions intended for them in the hunger of God.  Again, it is not that God needs more fellowship than the Trinitarian perfection in Himself, it is that he yearns to expand that fellowship among his family, those he created in his own image and ordained to enjoy the fellowship as He does–as well, as deeply, as joyfully, and as long as time beyond time–on earth as in Heaven.

A “must-quote” here in connection with current investigations.  Leo Strauss has been discussing the challenge of the literary expression of truth in “a society which is not liberal,” such as we find in many countries today and in the past.  He writes about “exoteric” writing–attractive and accessible to the reading public on the outside, but containing truths that have to be dug out through hard thinking or reading between the lines:

The works of the great writers of the past are very beautiful even from without.  And yet their visible beauty is sheer ugliness, compared with the beauty of those hidden treasures which disclose themselves only after very long, never easy, but always pleasant work.  This always difficult but always pleasant work is, I believe, what the philosophers had in mind when they recommended education.  Education, they felt, is the only answer to the always pressing question, to the political question par excellence, of how to reconcile order which is not oppression with freedom that is not license.  [Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Free Press, 1952, 1980; University of Chicago Press, 1988), 37.]

By philosophers he means Plato and Aristotle, primarily.  The education he mentioned produces discernment, prudence, and wisdom, and presumes a level of intellectual and moral maturity as evidence of its effectiveness.  That reminds me that Jesus did say, “Be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48) Perfect: “fully made or formed”, “mature”, “grown-up”, but like God.  Jesus was teaching–this is the Sermon on the Mount, not just some offhand comments.  But be like God?  Who were his hearers?  Beyond his disciples and a nameless crowd at the time, or intervening generations of people, most certainly you and I are his hearers today.  We are to be like God in some specific ways.  But he pronounced two key things, one at the start, one at the end:  do what you know to do and profess to believe in order to show that God’s truth really lives in you (Matt. 7:26), and be sure you know you get nothing unless you see yourself honestly as spiritually impoverished, and needing clean intention, and so forth in the “Beatitudes” (Matt. 5:3, 8).  Jesus customarily spoke in ways that required long, hard thinking and personal honesty in order to know personal liberation.  Socrates probably would approve.

What about that “order which is not oppression”?  I hasten to wrap up the present thought by quoting James Schall on the Trinity:

The trinitarian life of God is reflected in what is not God on the vastest of scales, the scales both of cosmos and of history.  But the paradigm of the order that we encounter in the world is already found in the Trinity of Persons and their inner relation to one another.  We are to imitate the divine order in all ways that it can be imitated–in making, in living, in thinking, in loving.  But ultimately the point of contact is where Gift meets gift, where what proceeds out of the inner life of the Godhead meets the inner life of the finite persons who have, in the end, nothing higher to do than to accept a gift, the gift of revelation with its description of the inner life of the Godhead, that which we call the Trinity of Persons:  Father, Son, and Spirit.  [James V. Schall, S.J., The Order of Things, Ignatius Press, 2007].

I understand the Trinity much better from having read Schall’s chapter “The Order within the Godhead” and his book.  Cannot recommend it highly enough.  Blessings on you.

My neighbors and correspondents may not buy my argument that we should celebrate the holy days all the way through the 12th Day of Christmas (yesterday, January 5).  Yet even my Baptist family would say it is good to make each day of the year a celebration of Christ.  But I am late with the Christmas greetings this year to many friends, too, so you discern one of my motives for writing as I do this morning.

Well, TODAY the Magi have come to honor the baby, the king, at Bethlehem, to resolve their questions about that Star of the East, and we can do the same.  Today is Epiphany in the traditional calendar of Western Christianity.  Christ is revealed, Truth is known, Insight and Light are ours.  How we need that for today and for this year!  May I recommend an MP3 program?  It’s for anyone, at BBC Radio 4 Podcasts:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/belief along with other downloads.  The one I’m recommending directly is “The Magi.”  Actually, it’s well balanced and thought-provoking.  Let me know what you think.

I cannot resist musing about the avaunts in the concents of Stephenson’s Anathem who just might occasionally suffer from the acedia Kathleen Norris exposes in her new book Acedia & me:  a marriage, monks, and a writer’s life. Can you see, with me, the auts (avaunts) poking their heads out their doors and windows to see what everyone else is doing?

And among the four groups — the Unarians, Decenarians, Centenarians, and Millennarians — does the denomination suggest its members vary in their ability to cope with “the noonday demon” called acedia?  Do the Millennarians, who are allowed to emerge once every thousand years, have a special gift of focused discipline that allows them to endure?  Or do the others do better?  How do they vary in their encounters with boredom, or depression, or apathy?  Stephenson may have some answers from the geek-sci-fi- side; I’m reading Norris for hers.

Here’s an entry to build on past this evening. What do techno-hypermodernism, medieval monastics, and we in our own frictional existence have in common?

9/16–The primary reference is to Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which should be in release since September 9th.  (See the article in the Sep 2008 Wired .) Set on the planet Arbe where the people are either the Saecular (anti-environmental consumerist, sybaritics) or the monastic avaunts or auts who live and think amid ritual in the mathic world inside walled concents (sounds a bit like “cloisters,” eh?).  The four divisions of auts — Unarians, Decenarians, Centenarians, and Millennarians — are free to venture out of their assigned or chosen (?) concents according to classification:  by year, decade, century, and millennium.

Time is the central focus.

Already this sounds restrictive.  But suppose there could be an inversion of socio-cultural values that prized slowed time rather than life-lived-at-ever-increasing-velocity-with-no-end-in-sight — and decreasing returns on one’s efforts?

Some things to consider short of further comment for today:

First, the Christian tradition holds and provides an ideal, or varieties of the ideal, for maximizing time:  one in forms of the monastic tradition; another in expressions of Pietism; and another in personal expressions of piety and devotion, to name three examples.  And then — shall we never forget? — Sabbath, with an extra bolt of wisdom from the Israelitic/Judaic tradition.

Second, Jesus said something about rest; perhaps we should attend to that, too.

More later . . . .

It’s old news, except in the mainstream. The Associated Press Story ran in the Cox newspapers this week. Donald Miller wrote Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality about five years ago. It’s selling like hotcakes (I-Pods?) and has been for some time. He is not alone in wanting a culturally relevant Christianity that repudiates exclusivism and judgmentalism, rules, hard-shell traditions that don’t promote the Christ-life for all people. Read more…

So, Advent is “Coming,” and we grapple with mystery. Some of us with abstractions, others with personal fervor. Can one who has in delight cradled a newborn transfer all the reciprocal sensations into his or her heart — the center of being, of life? The “Yes” is possible because we are whole, integrated beings, whose cradling arms enable our hearts to cradle the Child, or is it the other way around? Read more…