The annunciation, the two Messiahs, and Divine Justice

There is a certain type of sermon one hears from time to time that has always bothered me. It goes roughly like this: "The reason the Jewish leaders of Jesus' own time rejected him was that their thoughts of the Messiah were earthly. They wanted a military Messiah who would set up a kingdom on earth. Therefore their minds were closed to recognizing and accepting Jesus for who he was."

The problem with this is that it gives the entirely false impression that an "earthly" concept of the Messiah was something manmade, that it arose simply out of the inexplicably "earthly" minds of the Jews of Jesus' time, and that it was their attempt to impose their selfish human desires onto God's plans.

But this is simply untrue. Consider the following passages, among many others.

Psalm 72 (passim):

He shall judge thy people with righteousness, and thy poor with judgment, the mountains shall bring peace to the people, and the little hills, by righteousness. He shall judge the poor of the people, he shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor. They shall fear thee as long as the sun and moon endure...He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth. They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him; and his enemies shall lick the dust. The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents: the kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts. Yea, all kings shall fall down before him: all nations shall serve him.

Jeremiah 23:3ff:

And I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all countries whither I have driven them, and will bring them again to their folds...Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth. In his days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely, and this is his name whereby he shall be called, THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.

Micah 4:1ff:

But in the last days it shall come to pass, that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established in the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and people shall flow into it. And many nations shall come, and say, Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord...And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off, and they shall beat their swords into plowshares...

Micah 5:2

But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel...

Is this enough to make the point? There was nothing at all presumptuous about an expectation that Messiah would set up an earthly kingdom, would rule Israel as a nation, and would bring them peace and safety by means of defeating their earthly enemies.

But when my slight irritation at confused sermons prompted me to think this way, I had a small problem of my own: Why, then, was it a problem for Jesus to be rejected as the Messiah? Was God playing some sort of trick on His people--giving them all these prophecies of one kind of Messiah and then saying, "Aha! But I'm going to send you something completely different"? Were Jesus' miracles during his lifetime supposed to overcome a prima facie case that he was not the Messiah, based on the whole corpus of the Messianic prophecies, because he showed no signs of ruling from the sea to the uttermost parts of the earth or of making Israel safe from her enemies? And isn't this asking rather a lot, especially of people who were not personally present to witness Jesus' miracles?

In fact, just to make things still tougher, listen to what the angel Gabriel says to the Virgin Mary, in Luke 1:31-33:

And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest, and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David. And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.

Well, goodness! What was Mary going to think after receiving that prophecy? She would quite naturally expect an earthly Messiah.

A similar point comes up in the Song of Zechariah (which has become part of the liturgy of Morning Prayer in the BCP). There is definitely a prophetic aura about that passage. Zechariah was struck dumb because of his unbelief when he spoke to the Angel Gabriel. He shows that he's "come around" by writing that his son should be named John, and his tongue is loosed then, miraculously. So there's something rather authoritative about his words:

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he hath visited and redeemed his people, and hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he spake by the mouth of his holy prophets, which have been since the world began, that we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all that hate us....That he would grant unto us, that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life. (Luke 1:68-75)

Sounds a lot like the Jeremiah 23 passage, doesn't it? The people of the time would have been steeped in such passages. But here we are, two thousand years later, and Israel still hasn't been saved from her enemies or from the hands of those that hate her! Nothing like. Nor did Jesus make any apparent move to do anything visibly like that during his earthly ministry.

It just shows the complete reasonableness of the disciples' question, just before Jesus' Ascension, "Wilt thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" (Acts 1:6) And it's hard not to feel a bit impatient with Jesus' brusque dismissal of the disciples as not having the right to know the times or seasons kept in the power of the Father (Acts 1:7).

It's all very well for us Christians to say with 20/20 hindsight that these prophecies are eschatological. How were Jesus' disciples to know that? And if we're honest, we'll admit quite frankly that we have no very good idea what their fulfillment will look like even in eschatological terms. How can the end of the world come but separate nations remain for Jesus to rule over as in the Old Testament prophecies? How can there be no more giving in marriage (as Jesus said in Matthew 22:30) while history appears to continue with an earthly kingdom? And what in the world does the Apostle Paul mean when he prophesies that "all Israel shall be saved" (Romans 11:26)? I have no idea.

So here we have the challenge, the accusation: Did God play mind games with His people Israel by giving them confusing prophecies and then sending a Messiah who did not fulfill them, at least not at that time?

No doubt by this time many of my readers will have been fidgeting in their seats and wanting to blurt out the answer. Yes: It's true. There is another entirely separate, and rather surprisingly different, set of Messianic prophecies, of a Messiah who does not rule (at least not when he's fulfilling this set of prophecies), who instead suffers.

Psalm 22:

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?...They pierced my hands and my feet...They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.

Zechariah 12:10

And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications, and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son...

Daniel 9:25-26 (NIV)

Know and understand this: From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens.’...26 After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing [or, "but not for himself"].

And probably the most important and striking suffering Messiah passage of all, Isaiah 52:13-53:12:

Behold, my servant shall deal prudently, he shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high. As many were astonied at thee; his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men:...He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken.

The contrasts between these two views of the Messiah could hardly have escaped the notice of the people of Israel. It is therefore not surprising that a tradition developed that there would actually be two Messiahs. One, the descendent of David, would be the ruling Messiah, while the other, the son of Joseph (why Joseph I have not yet entirely figured out) would be the suffering Messiah.

Dating the origins of traditions found in the Talmud is about as difficult as herding cats, and I make no claim to be a Talmudist. It seems safe, however, to say that, while the Talmudic traditions were written down well into the AD period, they represent lines of thought that could plausibly go back to the BC period and the time of Jesus.

Here is a mention of the Messiah son of Joseph, who was to be killed, in a commentary on Zechariah 12:10. From Succah 52a, in the Babylonian Talmud:

What was the mourning for? R. Dosa and the rabbis differ: One holds that it was for the Messiah the son of Joseph, who was killed; and one holds that it was for the evil angel, who was killed. It would be right according to one who holds that it was for the Messiah the son of Joseph, because he explains as supporting him the passage [Zech. xii. 10]: "And they will look up toward me (for every one) whom they have thrust through, and they will lament for him, as one lamenteth for an only son, and weep bitterly for him, as one weepeth bitterly for the firstborn"

[snip]

The rabbis taught: The Messiah b. David, who (as we hope) will appear in the near future, the Holy One, blessed be He, will say to him: Ask something of me and I will give it to thee, as it is written [Ps. ii. 7-8]: "I will announce the decree . . . Ask it of me, and I will give," etc. But as the Messiah b. David will have seen that the Messiah b. Joseph who preceded him was killed, he will say before the Lord: Lord of the Universe, I will ask nothing of Thee but life. And the Lord will answer: This was prophesied already for thee by thy father David [Ps. xxi. 5]: "Life hath he asked of thee, thou gavest it to him."

An editorial footnote to this edition of the Talmud, to the phrase "Messiah the son of Joseph, who was killed" says,

There was a tradition among the ancient Hebrews that two Messiahs would appear before the redemption of Israel[,] one of the tribe of Joseph and one of the tribe of Jehudah, a descendant of David[,] and the expression "who was killed" means who will have been killed.

In further support of a tradition of a suffering Messiah, here is Sanhedrin 98b:

The Rabbis said: His name is 'the leper scholar,' as it is written, Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him a leper, smitten of God, and afflicted.

Here is a suggestive passage from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which of course date a good deal earlier than the written compilation of the Talmud:

...his Wisdom [will be great.] He will make atonement for all the children of his generation. He will be sent to all the sons of his [generation]. His word shall be as the word of Heaven and his teaching shall be according to the will of God. His eternal sun shall burn brilliantly. The fire shall be kindled in all the corners of the earth. Upon the Darkness it will shine. Then the Darkness will pass away [from] the earth and the deep Darkness from the dry land. They will speak many words against him. There will be many [lie]s. They will invent stories about him. They will say shameful things about him. He will overthrow his evil generation and there will be [great wrath]. When he arises there will be lying and violence, and the people will wander astray [in] his days and be confounded.

- Dead Sea Scrolls, 4Q541, Column 4

And here is a fascinating quotation from a document that appears to be originally Jewish but interpolated with Christian commentary. Nonetheless it is quite ancient; fragments from the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs have been found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Notice the reference to Joseph in the Testament of Benjamin:

And thus Jacob cried out, My child Joseph, thou hast prevailed over the bowels of thy father Jacob. And he embraced him, and kissed him for two hours, saying, In thee shall be fulfilled the prophecy of heaven concerning the Lamb of God, even the Saviour of the world, that spotless shall He be delivered up for transgressors, and sinless shall He be put to death for ungodly men in the blood of the covenant, for the salvation of the Gentiles and of Israel, and shall destroy Beliar, and them that serve him.

Even if we assume that the reference to the "saviour of the world," etc., was a Christian addition, any Christian interpolator that existed seems to have been picking up on the Messiah son of Joseph tradition, for otherwise one would have expected him to relate this reference to the Messiah to Judah.

Further arguments for some degree of Jewish realization at the time of Christ that Messiah (or a Messiah) must suffer are these:

--The apostles began immediately to apply Isaiah 53 (at least, but also presumably other suffering Messiah passages) to Jesus, as we can see most explicitly in Philip's conversation with the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8). Such applications are early implied when Peter preaches, "[T]hose things, which God before had showed by the mouth of all his prophets, that Christ should suffer, he hath so fulfilled" (Acts 3:18). While some of this can of course be attributed to their newly confirmed zeal to proclaim that Jesus was the Messiah (which we Christians of course attribute to their knowledge of the resurrection), it is not a far-fetched conjecture that in their preaching they were taking it as a given that there were acknowledged "suffering Messiah" prophecies.

--It seems implausible that the Messiah son of Joseph tradition would have first arisen de novo in the Christian era. If it were already firmly established that there was only a single, reigning Messiah tradition, this would have been the tradition to stick with in order not to cede any ground to the Christians.

--Circa AD 150, Justin Martyr records a stylized dialogue with Trypho the Jew which plausibly reflects the real state of Jewish-Christian debate at the time. Justin presses Isaiah 53 hard, and Trypho's response is not (at all) to deny its messianic nature nor that Messiah must suffer. Trypho says, "[W]e know that He should suffer and be led as a sheep" (Chapter XC) Rather, the sticking point for Trypho is the fact that the suffering took the form of crucifixion, and anyone who hangs on a tree is cursed in the law (Deuteronomy 21:23). It seems that even at this time the idea of denying a suffering Messiah altogether was not the preferred Jewish response, presumably because the prophetic texts make such a total denial very difficult. (Trypho also, I must note, does not try to divide the Messiah into two persons. Evidently that was only one possible way to resolve the apparent tension between the suffering and reigning Messianic passages. The more important point, however, is that he does not deny a suffering Messiah.)

If Jesus' lowly manner of life and lack of military ambition were puzzling in connection with the "ruling Messiah" prophesies, it would have been possible for the Jews during Jesus' ministry to advert to the suffering Messiah passages instead. The view that one Messiah would suffer and another Messiah would reign would make this even easier.

[Digression prompted by the coolness of this connection: In John 12:32, Jesus says, "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me." John glosses this as a reference to the literal "lifting up" in the crucifixion. The audience seems to have understood it that way too (perhaps it was an idiom), and they say in vs. 34, "We have heard out of the law that Christ [i.e. Messiah] abideth for ever, and how sayest thou, The Son of man must be lifted up?" So the people are clearly bothered by the notion of a crucified Messiah. Jesus responds by telling them (vss. 35-36) to walk in the light while they have it--apparently, to believe in him on the basis of the miracles he has performed while there is still time. John immediately afterwards says that they did not believe on him despite all his miracles and that this fulfilled Isaiah 53:1, "Who hath believed our report?" Now, here's the extra-cool thing, which I would not have known myself. It's discussed in Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, pp. 47ff. The word Jesus uses for "lifted up" is the same as the Greek word used in the Septuagint in Isaiah 52:13, when it says that the Servant of the Lord will be "exalted." It seems entirely plausible, and it would be quite in keeping with the Jewish love of plays on words, that Jesus was making a pun on the term "lifted up" or "exalted" to refer both to his final exaltation after his death and resurrection (see Philippians 2:9) and to the crucifixion itself. This would be in keeping with Jesus' reference, also in John, to his passion itself as his "glorification" (John 13:31-32). Here we see evidence both that Jesus' audience was fairly insistent on a successful and reigning Messiah who would not die (and especially would not be crucified) and also of Jesus' alluding to Isaiah 53--a passage that definitely indicates a suffering Messiah when taken as a whole. Jesus also did something that Christian liturgy and thought has done throughout the ages--he spoke of his death as a form of exaltation and triumph. End of digression.]

Prophecy in the nature of the case is often somewhat dark and understood only in hindsight. (Think even in fiction of the prophecy of the death of the Lord of the Nazgul in LOTR.) Two apparently quite different sets of prophecies about a person who might reasonably be expected to be a single person make matters more complicated still. But that very fact gives ample space for answering the charge of Divine injustice--at least on the assumption that Jesus gave some positive evidence that he was indeed the Messiah.

The contrast between the ruling and suffering traditions has yet another extremely nice evidential consequence: Let's go back to the account of the Annunciation in Luke. This passage is from a section of Luke in a Hebrew-influenced Greek style, quite different from Luke's usual style. (Luke's usual Greek style begins with the ministry of John the Baptist, in Luke 3:1. Something of the abrupt shift even comes across in the English, with the move from the narratives concerning Jesus' family to the historian's introduction: "Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee..." etc.)

We've already noted the fact that the angel's prophecy to Mary and the Song of Zechariah are permeated with messianic prophecy and specifically with prophecies naturally understood to refer to an earthly messianic reign.

Now consider what this means concerning the origins of the passages. This material is found only in Luke, and it would be pretty tempting for a skeptic to claim that it was a later "mythical accretion" (after all, we have two miraculous conceptions in the space of a single chapter!) added to fill in a perceived gap in our knowledge of Jesus' birth and childhood. But if the passages were later fictional addenda, it would be much more natural for the prophecies in them to reflect what by that time was well-known concerning Jesus' actual life: He did not set up an earthly kingdom. He died on the cross. He was not a conqueror or a visible king. He was crucified by the Romans for claiming to be the king of the Jews. Even though the early Christians believed firmly in Jesus' resurrection, the reigning and conquering Messiah passages from the Old Testament remained unfulfilled and had to be presumed to be eschatological. A story that was a later accretion would have been much more likely to give the angel a prophecy relating Jesus' future to that of the "suffering Messiah"--something about suffering for the sins of his people. We would not expect all of this material about his unending kingdom and, in the Song of Zechariah, about his bringing safety to Israel.

The very oddity of the focus on the reigning Messiah in these passages is evidence for their authenticity. Independently, based on language alone, we might plausibly conjecture that Luke was working with a source document written in Hebrew, possibly from Jesus' relatives. The un-retouched reigning Messiah prophecies are further evidence for this conjecture and even for the truth of the narratives.

Sherlock Holmes used to say that the very fact that seems recalcitrant is often a clue to the whole mystery. Something a bit like that has happened here. The somewhat obscure and frustrating reigning Messiah prophecies seem to generate a problem for Divine justice in God's dealings with His people. That challenge can be answered, and, as a bonus, the insistence of the early chapters of Luke on applying reigning Messiah prophecies to Jesus is evidence for the accuracy of the narrative.

(My humble thanks both to Esteemed Husband and to Eric Chabot for help on this post. Eric provided numerous e-mails, books, links, and references, including the Bauckham reference among many others, with unstinting generosity. Interested readers may like to read a related post by Eric here. Eric is less inclined than I to think that a Jewish tradition of a Suffering Messiah in addition to the OT passages referring to a Suffering Messiah was in place by the time of Jesus, and I would not want to associate him with my conjectured conclusions on that point, but the difference between us is not large.)

Ascension Sunday

Grant, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

O God, the King of glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven; We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

Here and here are two past posts of mine about the feast of the Ascension.

I should really have posted about Ascension on Thursday, but I was at the zoo with the children. Lovely day for it, with beautiful peacocks strutting about everywhere crying, "Help! Help!" I'd forgotten they do that.

Ascension is a feast that always lifts up my heart. A correspondent wrote me a short while ago that there is something a little sad about the Ascension, because Jesus is "no longer on earth" and the Paschal candle is blown out. But I can't find it in my heart to look at it that way. At the Ascension Jesus returned to the Father and intercedes for us there--and heaven knows we need plenty of intercession! At the Ascension Jesus went back in triumph ("Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates!"). And because of the Ascension, Jesus sent the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.

So, for what's left of the octave, a blessed Ascensiontide to my readers.

Rogation Sunday--"Great Is Thy Faithfulness"

Today is Rogation Sunday. That means that we pray for the farmers and for all those who plant and grow things for the good of mankind. Here is the collect, which reminds us that "every good and every perfect gift is from above."

O LORD, from whom all good things do come; Grant to us thy humble servants, that by thy holy inspiration we may think those things that are good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same; through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Fortunately, this collect allows those of us with black thumbs also to get some of the blessing. Perhaps we can bring forth spiritual fruit even though we are no good at growing physical fruits and flowers.

In line with the denomination-bending (or should I say blending?) purposes of this blog, I thought of a smack-dab-in-the-center typical Protestant hymn, a wonderful hymn, for Rogation Sunday. "Great is Thy Faithfulness" contains a definite reference to the seasons ("Summer and winter and spring-time and harvest...") and connects the faithfulness of God with God's blessing of the seasons and His blessing on man's work of planting and harvesting.

Here's Wes Hampton and the Gaither Homecoming group singing it:

The chimera of the peace process

The problem of the Israelis and the "Palestinians" is intractable. There is no good solution. And the reason that there is no good solution is that the "Palestinians" do not have good will and that they raise their children through successive generations not to have good will. Their goal is the eradication of the nation of Israel, an Arab "Palestine" that encompasses all the land from the river to the sea, and all concessions made will simply be used as stepping stones to that goal. A Palestinian state would simply be another such stepping stone. It would not be a functional, autonomous state whose rulers had anything like the normal goals of the rulers of a state--running infrastructure, governing their own people for something like the public good. It would simply be a rocket-launching pad against Israel, a dysfunctional pseudo-state funded by everyone else (including Israel, for that matter), and Israel's implacable enemy. Like Gaza, in fact, only bigger (and possibly, of course, including Gaza and cutting Israel literally in two).

Another way to put this is that most Israelis would be happy with some kind of two-state solution but that the Palestinians don't really want a state of their own in which to settle down and try to flourish as peaceful neighbors of the Israelis. They want the destruction of Israel. A no-win situation.

And the frightening fact, as Gaza has shown us, is that the outside world would blame Israel for both active and passive attempts to protect itself from this implacable enemy--for both border control and for defensive response to direct attack--and would hold Israel directly and permanently responsible for the self-inflicted misery of the Palestinian people. Ceding land to the Palestinians and demanding that they take responsibility for themselves will never be allowed to the Israelis as a way out of the no-win situation.

So, in my opinion, there should be no "peace process." It's a sham and worse than a sham.

While it's perhaps too much to expect Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal to draw this conclusion, it's possible that he's beginning to get it about the intractability of the problem and the foolishness of talking about peace negotiations as though peace is an attainable outcome. In a rather surprising op-ed last week, he said the following (emphasis added):

The fiction that is typically offered about the refugees by devotees of the peace process is that Palestinian leaders see them as a bargaining chip in their negotiations with Israel, perhaps in exchange for the re-division of Jerusalem. But listen in on the internal dialogue of Palestinians and you will hear that the “right of return” is an inviolable, inalienable and individual right of every refugee. In other words, a right that can never (and never safely) be bargained away by Palestinian leaders for the sake of a settlement with Israel.

In this belief the Palestinians are sustained by many things.

One is the mythology of 1948, which is long on tales of what Jews did to Arabs but short on what Arabs did to Jews—or to themselves. Another is the text of U.N. resolution 194, written in 1948, which plainly states that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” A third is UNRWA, the U.N. agency that has perpetuated the Palestinian refugee problem for generations when most other refugees have been successfully repatriated. A fourth is their ill treatment at the hands of their Arab hosts, which has caused them to yearn for the fantasy of a homeland—orchards and all—that modern-day Israel succeeds in looking very much like. A fifth is the incessant drone of Palestinian propaganda whose idea of Palestinian statehood traces the map of Israel itself.

Other things could be mentioned. But the roots of the problem are beside the point. The real point is that a grievance that has been nursed for 63 years and that can move people to acts like those witnessed on Sunday is never going to allow a political accommodation with Israel and would never be satisfied by one anyway.

No wonder Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s prime minister, can say he would be prepared to accept the 1967 borders—but that establishing those borders will never mean an end to the conflict. The same goes for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who praised Sunday’s slain protesters as martyrs who “died for the Palestinian people’s rights and freedom.” This from the “moderate” who is supposed to acquaint his people with the reality and purpose of a two-state solution.

Blogger David Isaac makes the point concerning the intractability of the situation:

One of the curious things about the Arab-Israel conflict is that the truth behind the conflict cannot be said: The simple truth that there is no “peace process”, there never was a “peace process”, and the Arabs want Israel eliminated. It’s a testament to how off-limits this truth is that, until this Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal...never published an op-ed saying so. It’s impossible to enact intelligent policy when it’s based on a lie. Of course, Israel contributes to the problem by endorsing the ‘two-state solution’. Israel needs to be the first to say this is a delusion. Only then can we expect things to change.

As Isaac points out, it's perhaps asking a lot of the Wall Street Journal to draw conclusions which even Israel's allegedly most hawkish political rulers don't seem willing to draw, at least not openly and consistently. As he puts it concerning Netanyahu, "We may indeed be entering a new era in the Arab-Israel conflict, one in which Israel’s leaders tell the unvarnished truth, only to dismiss it a moment later." (This is just one reason why the silly talk from the left about bloodthirsty "Likudniks" is such a joke--something coming from an alternative reality that bears no connection to the world we actually live in.)

Isaac quotes some home truths on this subject from The Hollow Peace by Shmuel Katz. (Emphasis added.)

[The spokesmen of the Establishment] refrained from mentioning the fact that the Arab nations meant to prevent the birth of the Jewish State, and that they continued, once the State was born, to hatch plots for its destruction. Israel’s policy ignored this bitter truth and centred mainly on the slogan that Israel wanted peace and that her leaders were prepared to negotiate with any Arab leader. This formula unwittingly distorted the image of the Arab leaders: it endowed them in the eyes of the world, with the quality of reasonableness, as though they were open to discussion. The image of the dispute itself was altered out of all recognition, and made to seem an ordinary border dispute, which could be eliminated by a chat with some Arab leader.

[snip]

To diplomats of the nations of the world – in Washington or in London, in Paris or in Stockholm – accustomed to “handling” territorial disputes in a commonly accepted format, which they could understand from their experience and education, it was “discomfiting” to have to hear that one party to this dispute, the Arabs, with whom they maintained friendly relations, were simply athirst for the blood of the other side and desired nothing but to liquidate them. As for the Israeli diplomats, it made them uncomfortable to have to tell the foreign diplomats that their routine thinking was worlds away from the realities, and that the solutions they proposed were chimerical.

Exactly. You cannot negotiate under these circumstances, and there is no point in doing so. If that were not obvious a priori, it should now be obvious a posteriori after decades of chimerical negotiations (with all-too-real negative consequences for Israeli citizens) and still more so after the withdrawal from Gaza with its inevitable consequences.

Two folk tunes

I've recently been reading a fun but not first-tier mystery novel in which the English folk tune "Bushes and Briars" features. I'd never heard it before, so I looked it up. Apparently it's very famous. I think this simple rendering by Julie Christie in the movie Far From the Madding Crowd makes it easy to pick up the tune.



Now listen to this Advent carol.



Similar, no? (HT to Eldest Daughter for noting the similarity.) In fact, strikingly so. The tune for "The King Shall Come" has various names (this site seems to be calling it "Consolation") and is an American folk tune. It appeared in the Kentucky Harmony published in 1816.

When it comes to simple modal tunes, it's very hard to be sure when there is a causal line and when one simply has a case of independent discovery. But I wouldn't be all that surprised if it turned out that someone (or several someones) carried the tune "Bushes and Briars" to America where it morphed into the tune later picked up and used with the words "The King Shall Come."

Both very lovely.

Rare Lipizzaner footage

Unless you find horses boring (and who could possibly find horses boring?), watch this video for refreshment of the spirit. Because things should be what they are.

May the memory of Alois Podhajsky remain ever green.

Breath of Life Quartet II--Found again!

Last year we went through a found-again-lost-again cycle for free, downloadable versions of the album Spirituals by the 1970's Breath of Life Quartet. It's back to "found again," this time on Grooveshark. But if you find this post by googling and are interested, I advise you to grab the tracks quickly lest they disappear again. Great black quartet singing. If you want to read a few more of my thoughts about the group, here's the post from last year.

And here they are, thanks to Grooveshark: The Breath of Life Quartet.

Connect the prose and the passion

(With apologies to E.M. Forster.)

There is only one religion that connects the prose and the passion, and that is Christianity. Christianity offers mankind all the scope the imagination and the heart could desire--God become man as a baby with a virgin mother, sin taken away mysteriously by means of the God-man's shameful death, His vindication by a glorious resurrection, the possibility of new life for each of us and the remission of sin, the final promise that all shall be made new.

For this very reason, some have feared that they believe Christianity only because they want it to be true, only because it would be so wonderful if it were true. For this very reason, too many Christians have played along, fearful that the prose might cancel the poetry, separating the "Christ of history" from the "Christ of faith" and assuring the faithful that they can have the latter on which to rest their hearts and feed their imaginations even if the former is...a bit lacking.

This is to separate the prose and the passion with a vengeance.

But this is not Christianity. For Christianity affirms, "He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, He descended into hell, and the third day He rose again from the dead." There is no separation between the great truths of the Gospel and the prosaic truths of history, between the massive miracle of Jesus risen and the all-too-human, bureaucratic hand-washing of a harassed Roman official two thousand years ago.

Down in the River to Pray--Take 2

It's difficult to decide which version of this I like best. Posted one by Allan Hall here.

Here is Alison Krauss's version from a concert of the music from O Brother, Where Art Thou?. (Embedding disabled on the video.) Alison's voice is perfect. It's just...there.

There's something about this song that gets to me. It reminds me of the Flannery O'Connor story "The River." A disturbing and powerful story about a little boy who gets baptized.

Looks like a great concert (though I haven't had time to watch it) is available here on Youtube with all the music from O Brother. (Strange-looking movie, but wonderful music.) (Link HT: Southern Gospel Yankee)

"Palestinian" "police" are terrorists

If you're an Israeli Jew and you have the audacity to try to go and pray at Joseph's tomb without carefully coordinating your visit with the IDF, you might just get gunned down by Kalashnikov-wielding "Palestinian" "police" shrieking, "Allahu akbar!" They can't just have people promiscuously praying at a Jewish holy site without special permission, can they? Obviously a highly dangerous activity justifying the immediate use of deadly force. And why not praise Allah while killing a Jew? Especially a Hasid? Sounds like a win-win from their perspective. (See also here.)

This is what the Israelis get for treating the "Palestinians" as a quasi-state entity in Judea and Samaria, aka the "West Bank." No good deed will go unpunished. Except that I'm not at all sure that giving the "Palestinians" partial control over Judea and Samaria was a good deed, if we include "wise, prudent, and good for all concerned" in "good."

Alleluia! He is risen!

The Lord Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. Alleluia! Never has there been such joyful news proclaimed throughout the earth, for because He lives, we too shall live. Our sins can be forgiven, we can be reconciled with God. Here is a link to my post today at W4 in which I give an interesting little evidential argument--just something extra on top of the massive testimony of the witnesses.

If the claim that Jesus rose from the dead is not true, really true, literally true, then we are still in our sins. In which spirit, I give you (not for the first time and probably not for the last) Updike's Seven Stanzas:

"Seven Stanzas At Easter"

By John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that--pierced--died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Good Friday: Behold and see

...if there be any sorrow like unto His sorrow. From Psalm 69, which also contains a remarkable prophecy: "They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink." I am amazed to report, what I had never noticed before: None of the evangelists even draws attention to this parallel. Maybe they thought they had enough already otherwise.

Palm Sunday Passion--"Ah, Holy Jesus"

Ah, holy Jesus, how hast Thou offended,
That man to judge Thee hath in hate pretended?
By foes derided, by Thine own rejected,
O most afflicted.

Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon Thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone Thee.
’Twas I, Lord, Jesus, I it was denied Thee!
I crucified Thee.

Lo, the Good Shepherd for the sheep is offered;
The slave hath sinned, and the Son hath suffered;
For man’s atonement, while he nothing heedeth,
God intercedeth.

For me, kind Jesus, was Thy incarnation,
Thy mortal sorrow, and Thy life’s oblation;
Thy death of anguish and Thy bitter passion,
For my salvation.

Therefore, kind Jesus, since I cannot pay Thee,
I do adore Thee, and will ever pray Thee,
Think on Thy pity and Thy love unswerving,
Not my deserving.

St. John's Episcopal Church sings these words (not the messed-up modern version) here.

And when the Passion of Our Lord is read, and the person who has agreed to play Pontius Pilate asks what shall be done with Jesus, the whole congregation joins in crying out, "Crucify him!" It's not something one wants to do, somehow. But it does drive home the point: "I crucified Thee."

Got 'em

Two "Palestinian" young men, entirely unrepentant (of course), have been arrested in the slaughter of the Fogel family. Thanks to Malcolm and Yaacov for the links (here and here). Kudos to the Shin Bet.

It appears (from last names) that they are related to the two Fatah men whose arrest was earlier reported in WorldNet Daily. In fact, it looks like a whole lot of people in the village of Awarta are related to one another and like covering up this particular massacre was something of a family affair. The young murderers may have dreamed up the idea on their own, but their uncle and other family members helped them hide and dispose of the evidence afterwards. Charming people. But give them a state, and I'm sure all will be well./sarc

I continue to say: May the Israelis vote in a death penalty, and may their courts not strike it down. It would be a real advance.

A possibly offensive post

My Catholic readers may want to skip this post. At the risk of offending, but hoping that I will not:

I do not believe that the Scriptures have been written for the purpose of inducing in men a great fear of being damned while at the same time hiding from them the knowledge of what they must do to be saved, which vital knowledge they must then seek from some other source. Yet a certain argument for Catholicism concerning our supposed need for a guide to essential doctrine asks that we take this possibility with the utmost seriousness.

"Journey's End"

This song is on a new album by Ernie Haase and Signature Sound. Yet it's not just by EHSS. For this album, producer Wayne Haun took the voice of the late George Younce off of old masters, extracted it from its background, and added new music and background vocals by the present EHSS. Very impressive, very classy album. The song below was new to me but is wonderful. Here's a review of the entire album. Lyrics for "Journey's End" to follow.



Verse 1

There is a land I long to see
It's across the river wide
It is there my Savior waits for me
Just on the other side

And his gentle calls encourage me
Not to fear the river's bend
But to steer the course he's given me
'Til I reach my journey's end

Verse 2

There is a place I long to be
It is by my Savior's side
He has there prepared a place for me
In his presence to abide

And he navigates my ship for me
Through the storms that life may send
And though the water's deep and wide
He'll be there 'til journey's end

(Bridge)

Oh I need not fear the wind and rain
As they wash away the sand
It is on the solid rock I stand
Waiting for my Lord's command

There is a land I long to see
It's across the river wide
It is there my Savior waits for me
Just on the other side

And his gentle calls encourage me
Not to fear the river's bend
But to steer the course he's given me
'Til I reach my journey's end

Various arrests in Fogel case by Israeli military

Since I fretted here about the dearth of information on the investigation of the Fogel family massacre in Israel, I thought it only fair to post this update. It seems that the Israeli military is in fact making arrests and taking fingerprints and DNA samples from quite a number of people at the "Palestinian" village of Awarta, near Itamar, where the murders took place. Apparently the investigation is being carried out more or less secretly--that is to say, without release of details to the public--by the IDF.

This could mean that the report in WND of the arrest of men from Fatah (hence, plausibly men who had been trained by the U.S.) was correct, though the IDF sweep seems to be trying to catch conspirators as well as for those who actually carried out the murders.

Hmmm. Good luck to the investigators. I still wish they had the d.p. there.

New manuscript, apparently from W.I.M.P.S.

Hah! Some of you may recall the "ancient manuscript" discovered and published here from the Worship! Iconium Ministerial Peace Society, rebuking the Apostle Paul for his confrontational manner.

The satire bug is difficult to resist. A new and similar manuscript has surfaced, in connection apparently with what is known as "hellgate"--the controversy over Rob Bell's universalism. Personally, I consider Rob Bell to be more or less beneath notice, though unfortunately very influential. I suppose (sigh) that someone has to write about him. This new discovery of further rebukes of Paul for being "unloving" (in the book of Galatians) is very funny. Enjoy.

Lent II collect

Almighty God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves; Keep us both outwardly in our bodies, and inwardly in our souls; that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

One of the most beautiful collects in the Prayer Book. It suddenly dawned on me today that I have always interpreted and prayed for myself about the "evil thoughts" in a way that may well be different from that intended by the author. (According to an invaluable book, The Collects of Thomas Cranmer, by C. Frederick Barbee and Paul F. M. Zahl, the "author" in this case is someone, name unknown, writing in the 500's or even earlier. The collect comes to us by way of the Gregorian Sacramentary. Thomas Cranmer translated it for the Prayer Book.) I have always taken the "evil thoughts" to be worries, nightmare scenarios that suddenly assault the mind (and it definitely feels like that), or the inability to stop thinking about pieces of horrible knowledge one wishes one didn't have. The Internet, of course, raises the odds that one will accumulate such pieces of knowledge. In this interpretation I have probably been influenced by Elizabeth Goudge, who takes the phrase that way in the novel Pilgrim's Inn, which deals in part, as so many of Goudge's novels do, with severe mental strain.

I suddenly realized, though, that the original writer probably intended the "evil thoughts" to be temptations--the desire to do evil, the sudden thought of doing evil, perhaps coming to the mind as an assault from the Wicked One. That would be more in keeping with Lent, and I gather that the collect was originally written for Lent.

But one can pray the collect to God with either meaning, or with both.

Criminal Justice

I regularly read (and link in the sidebar) an Israeli blog called Israel Matzav. The blogger, Carl in Jerusalem, is an Orthodox Jew who apparently lives over the "green line." He has been blogging a lot recently about the Fogel massacre, about which I've done a couple of posts here at Extra Thoughts.

The thing that as an American reader I find most frustrating about the coverage of this is the absence of any criminal justice approach to the evil. Carl has recently embedded a video, which I don't intend to watch and advise others to avoid, that contains and is headed by graphic pictures of the slain. (I'm deliberately not linking the blog from this particular post lest an unwary reader go, scroll down, and inadvertently see the picture heading the video.) Carl is trying to stir up appropriate outrage. With that I agree. But the proper response, the active and positive use of outrage, is to demand that evil men be brought to justice as individuals. Even though we in the rest of the world cannot personally do anything, we at least need to have something clearly appropriate, something a healthy mind rightly seeks, to say that others should do. Otherwise dwelling on horror becomes an end in itself, which is not healthy.

I've asked again and again at the site for confirmation of the report that two "Palestinians" have been arrested for the murder--no response. There is, in fact, no discussion of the topic of catching the murderers and of how that is going in any of the posts I have read at the site. It begins to look like the progress of the case and the facts about any arrest are secrets in Israel, even at a "right-wing" blog. In America, of course, whoever was in charge of the investigation would be hounded by the press and asked what progress he was making in catching the murderers. The arrest of the murderers could not possibly be a secret.

Actually, I have to admit that I don't even know how that works in Samaria (aka "the West Bank"), given the semi-independence of the "Palestinian Authority." Is it difficult or impossible for Israel even to make an arrest? But if so, why is there a report of arrests going around? Who would have made those arrests? Even just spelling that out for American readers would be helpful.

Perhaps someone will respond that one should not take a criminal justice approach to terrorism. I'm not sure what the point of such a response in this context would be. The right and natural next step after feeling due outrage is to want these evildoers arrested and punished.

But it's even more frustrating than that, because Israel does not have a death penalty. In fact, Israel has released even horrific Palestinian killers like Samir Kuntar, who also slaughtered an innocent Israeli child, in order to get back the dead bodies of Israeli soldiers. So the whole thing begins to look like a rather bitter game to an American eye. The murderers of the Fogel family will never get anything like justice. At the most they will be arrested and spend some time--almost certainly not the rest of their lives--in prison. And the world may or may not find out about that. It's terribly frustrating.

In that justice vacuum, if I may so call it, one begins to wonder about the point of harrowing readers with an embedded video headed with a graphic image that I, for one, did not want to see. Perhaps the idea is to get some on the left to start to see the darkness in the hearts of the Jew-hating "Palestinians" and the impossibility of making peace with them; I doubt if this tactic will succeed. In any event, the murder of real, concrete people should call forth first and foremost a cry for justice for them, the punishment, individually, of their killers.

I hope that this post will not enrage any Israeli readers and especially that it won't get me banned from commenting on a valuable site. I realize that there may be reasons for the news blackout on the criminal case, reasons that we in America simply do not know. But it may be useful for anyone on the Israeli right who happens to read this to know how these things play out in the minds of those already most sympathetic to "settlers" and most angered by the slaughter of the Fogels.

Anniversary of the beginning of Terri Schiavo's murder [Updated]

Bill Luse points out that March 18 was the sixth anniversary of the beginning of Terri Schiavo's lengthy murder by dehydration. He is kind enough to mention my articles along with others on this topic.

My article in The Christendom Review cites and links several trial transcripts of witness testimony in Terri's case. With the help of some of the lawyers involved in the case, I was able to gather these witness transcripts in one place. I'm not recommending that anyone read through them in their entirety, but I think that as original source documents they are important, and as far as I know they are available in their entirety only on my site. Here is the portal for those documents. Feel free to download them and also to upload and make them available elsewhere. (It would be courteous to link back to my site when you do so and also to give credit to Attys. Bell and Anderson for the material.) It was difficult to get these documents, and they should be able to be found in Google searches by researchers. My Touchstone article on Terri's death (unfortunately not available on-line) is "Road to a Kill," Touchstone Magazine, June, 2009, pp. 44-47, and in it I describe some ways in which the availability of the transcripts is important for understanding the cavalier and biased way in which the court approached Terri's case. The testimonies of Diane Meyer and Joan Schiavo are especially significant. [Update: The ever-alert Bill Luse pointed out to me that I am now allowed to post the Touchstone article on-line. Here is the link.]

Terri's slow death was an agony for her parents, and those who became heavily involved in the case at a distance via the Internet entered in some small and even mysterious way into that agony. Yet it would be an impertinence to imply that in any sense her murder was about the rest of us and what we felt, what we thought. Her murder was about her, about her parents' horrific pain, about those who killed her. It is difficult, but we must pray that they will repent of their great evil.

Here is a wonderful Easter video put together by Bill Luse and featuring pictures of Terri as well as of other people who had died during the year preceding the video.

"America will get at you?"

The murders of the Fogel family in Israel do not exactly reflect glory on the U.S. A report from World Net Daily claims that two arrests have been made in the case and that both of those arrested are members of Fatah forces--the forces that have received training from the U.S. I've been disgusted by this for a long time, and it goes back to the Bush administration. More of this Good Muslim/Bad Muslim nonsense, in which we, the rubes, go in and lavish help on those we've decided to define as "good Muslims." In this case, the Moderate Ones happen to be the PLO.

Anybody remember when Fatah was just called "the PLO" and was openly spoken of as a terrorist organization? Yeah, well, that was a long time ago. Maybe I'm showing my age. We changed our minds about considering them to be terrorists, and instead we trained them to fight the "bad Muslims"--that is, Hamas. And now it looks like the "good ones" are murdering Jews. Great. I've tried to get confirmation of this arrest story from a source other than WND but haven't yet succeeded. I will post if and when I do get some sort of independent confirmation.

There's an expenditure of foreign aid funds I could really get enthusiastic about: Funds spent training and aiding Palestinian terrorists.

Here's another zinger: Benjamin Netanyahu visited the family and friends during their mourning. He spoke to Tamar, the twelve-year-old daughter who came home from a youth activity and found the bodies of her parents and siblings. Guess what she says? "What will happen if you do anything? America will get at you?"

Ouch. Take that, Barack Obama.

Jeff Jacoby on the slaughter of the innocents in Itamar

Here's a good article on the horrible slaughter of most of an Israeli family, the Fogel family, by Palestinian Arabs. Best quotation (emphasis added):

There are those who believe passionately that all human beings are inherently good and rational creatures, essentially the same once you get beyond surface disagreements. Such people cannot accept the reality of a culture that extols death over life, that inculcates a vitriolic hatred of Jews, that induces children to idolize terrorists. Since they would never murder a family in its sleep without being driven to it by some overpowering horror, they imagine that nobody would. This is the mindset that sees a massacre of Jews and concludes that Jews must in some way have provoked it. It’s the mindset behind the narrative that continually blames Israel for the enmity of its neighbors and makes it Israel’s responsibility to end their violence.

The truth is simpler, and bleaker. Human goodness is not hard-wired. It takes sustained effort and healthy values to produce good people; in the absence of those values, cruelty and intolerance are far more likely to flourish.

I'll have a bit more to say about the slaughter of the Fogels in a later post. I'm trying to confirm or disconfirm reports of an arrest in the case. For the moment I'll just say--Israel definitely needs the death penalty.

All these will I give thee

Today's Gospel reading was the temptation of Jesus. I've often mused a bit about the temptation in which the Devil offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world if Jesus will fall down and worship him. Does the Devil have the kingdoms of the world to offer, or was the offer just a fake?

We know the Devil doesn't actually play fair, but I've always suspected that he really did have the kingdoms of the world to offer. Jesus Himself called the Devil "the prince of this world." Human beings have free will, but they're usually only too ready to listen to the wrong leaders and the wrong promptings. If Satan really wanted to set someone up to rule the world, unless God chose to intervene and stop it, I would guess that Satan could do it.

If this conjecture is right, then Jesus turned down a genuine offer of world-wide rule in place of the road to Golgotha.

And it may be, too, that the Devil sometimes offers us things as well--really offers them to us. If we will only be dishonest, we can get something we couldn't otherwise get. Maybe that's true. Maybe we could really get away with it. Jesus said that the children of this world are wiser than the children of light. If one is wise as a serpent but not harmless as a dove, one may do better than all the doves.

I don't imagine many of us feel anything like a direct temptation to bow down and worship Satan in exchange for earthly rule. But in any life there are temptations to gain earthly advantage by less-than-noble means--lying, fudging, faking, cheating, or even bullying and manipulation come to mind.

It's almost frightening to reflect that for a time, maybe even a long time, these techniques might really work. The Devil is far more likely to promise, and give, tangible success than God is. And the worst of it is that once one has been getting away with something for these many years it becomes extremely difficult to back out of it, especially if other people are involved.

Well. None of this is our business for anyone but ourselves. But it's worth reflecting and asking God to help us hear in the misleading thoughts that occur to us the voice softly whispering, "All these will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me..."

"Good" Muslim Brotherhood vs. Bad al-Qaeda

Here we go again. I hope I'm not the only one who gets sick of liberals (and paleoconservatives) who roll their eyes and tell the rest of us that we're ignorant cretins for not knowing all about how the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims somehow means that Islam is not all bad. (Al-Qaeda is Sunni. Hezbollah is Shia. Yep, that's real helpful in distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys.)

Get ready for a new manufactured excuse for the liberals to roll their eyes. The administration is telling us that Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood (both Sunni) are also very different in this same way. Barry Rubin skewers this:

Get it? Al-Qaeda is bad because it wants to attack U.S. embassies, the World Trade Center, and the Pentagon.

BUT the Muslim Brotherhood is good! Because it merely wants to seize state power, transform Egypt into an Islamist state, rule almost 90 million people with an iron hand, back Hamas in trying to destroy Israel, overthrow the Palestinian Authority, help Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood overthrow the monarchy, and sponsor terrorism against Americans in the Middle East.

Thanks, Barry. I couldn't have said it better.

HT: VFR

Eco-wackos and dirt

From the last post to this--from the sublime to the ridiculous. But, when inspired...

I've once or twice been asked why I say that environmentalism isn't about keeping things clean. You know those nice young Sierra Club people who come to your door and talk about the Clean Water Act? You know the naive people who still believe that environmentalism is about having a cleaner environment, cleaner air, cleaner water? Well, they're wrong. Environmentalism is about having things less modern, less comfortable, and hence, dirtier. I could give lots of examples, but as a new example inspired this post, here it is, via Drudge:

Those low-flow toilets that the eco-wackos have tried to get installed everywhere to save water? Well, they are causing a terrible smell in San Francisco because of a build-up of bacteria in the pipes when the icky sludge isn't washed down by that small quantity of water. How nice. Get "environmentally friendly" toilets, and now your whole town can smell like a giant Port-a-Potty.

But it's "green." See? "Green" means more like camping out, more like foregoing first-world conditions of life. Which is exactly the opposite of cleanliness. In fact, it means being dirtier, smellier, more insanitary, more unsafe, and less human-friendly. Also expensive. (See the linked article on the cost of smell abatement.)

I think I'm going to tell that to the Sierra Club kids next time they come to the door to collect a donation for clean water: "Oh, you mean like in San Francisco where they now have to dump gallons and gallons of bleach into the water to disinfect it because of 'green' toilets? No thanks."

Said Musa released

Friends who read this blog know that personal reasons have kept me out of the blogosphere for a little while. I'm slowly trying to get things back to normal and will begin here with just the announcement that our brother in Christ, Said Musa, has been released from prison. (Probably all my readers knew this already.) Just a week ago I was praying for God to strengthen him and help him, through martyrdom if that was what it was to be. The report says that he is safe in another country. Praise God! I have heard that another convert to Christianity is still imprisoned and in danger of his life in Afghanistan but have not found out who that is. If you know, feel free to put that information in the comments.

Songs to Die For--Angel Band

My generous husband bought me a new Gospel music CD the other evening at Cracker Barrel--a bunch of hymns hand-picked by Bill Gaither. It contained a country song I'd never heard before called "Angel Band." (I know, I've been living in a cave.)

The particular performance on the CD doesn't appear to be on-line, but it does feature the immortal Vestal Goodman. So here's the nearest thing I could find: Vestal singing it with country legend George Jones. The video has a great story at the beginning about how Vestal "ran off the devil" when Jones was sunk into a severe depression:

Epiphany VI: We shall be like him

Another wonderful collect, apparently (according to Blunt) an original composition by John Cosin, Bishop of Durham at the Restoration.

O GOD, whose blessed Son was manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil, and make us the sons of God, and heirs of eternal life; Grant us, we beseech thee, that, having this hope, we may purify ourselves, even as He is pure; that, when He shall appear again with power and great glory, we may be made like unto Him in His eternal and glorious kingdom; where with Thee, O Father, and thee, O Holy Ghost, He liveth and reigneth ever, one God, world without end. Amen.



Cosin's collect is obviously deliberately tied in with the Epistle reading for the day, that wonderful passage from I John 3:

BEHOLD, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew Him not. Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as he is. And every man that hath this hope in Him purifieth himself, even as He is pure. Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law. And ye know that He was manifested to take away our sins; and in Him is no sin. Whosoever abideth in Him sinneth not: whosoever sinneth hath not seen Him, neither known Him. Little children, let no man deceive you: he that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as He is righteous. He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil.

I tune my instrument at the door

Just thought of this poem today and wanted to post it. (This does not mean that I am ill. The line "I tune my instrument at the door" was just in my mind.)

John Donne, "Hymn to God, my God, in My Sickness"

SINCE I am coming to that Holy room,
Where, with Thy choir of saints for evermore,
I shall be made Thy music ; as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before ;

Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie
Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown
That this is my south-west discovery,
Per fretum febris, by these straits to die ;

I joy, that in these straits I see my west ;
For, though those currents yield return to none,
What shall my west hurt me ? As west and east
In all flat maps—and I am one—are one,
So death doth touch the resurrection.

Is the Pacific sea my home ? Or are
The eastern riches ? Is Jerusalem ?
Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar ?
All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them
Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem.

We think that Paradise and Calvary,
Christ's cross and Adam's tree, stood in one place ;
Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me ;
As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace.

So, in His purple wrapp'd, receive me, Lord ;
By these His thorns, give me His other crown ;
And as to others' souls I preach'd Thy word,
Be this my text, my sermon to mine own,
“Therefore that He may raise, the Lord throws down.”

Double standards

I suppose it's a bit boring to talk about double standards, but this happens to be on my mind.

Why is it, do you suppose, that one virtually never hears a person who has a big "thing" about not giving U.S. aid to Israel talk about stopping giving money to the UN? Hmmm?

Here's one of the many, many nifty things the UN is doing: Glorifying female terrorists as "women's role models." I know you're all shocked.

But seriously. The place where people begin talking about saving our tax dollars and cutting spending tells you a lot about their priorities.

Honor and the disciplines

It has been exactly twenty years since I was in graduate school getting a degree in English Literature. The state of the discipline was depressing then. Twenty years ago isn't "good old days" when it comes to English Literature.

I took one course entirely on Shakespeare's Richard III. That's a little narrow, but I got very familiar with Richard III, and the course was somewhat irritating but not crazy. I do not remember the professor's name, which is perhaps just as well, so I will call her Dr. N. She was ostensibly an academic conservative, and the word on the graduate student street was that her hiring had been considered something of a victory for the last of the old guard in the department, presumably because all of the other candidates were significantly crazier. She, personally, did not write articles with titles like "Queering Shakespeare," nor did she force us to read and write on such papers, and it was from this restraint that she presumably got her reputation for academic conservatism.

Each student had to make a short presentation on the paper he was writing for the course. One female fellow student was trying hard to learn the ways of the English lit. world, and she had grasped the fact that professors encouraged one to talk about gender roles in season and out. So her paper's thesis was going to be that Richard III displays a number of "stereotypically feminine qualities" such as the use of psychological manipulation.

I will never forget the moment when this ostensibly academically conservative professor gave the student a bit of hearty advice: "You need to be bolder. What you should do is write the paper instead claiming that Richard is a woman. Now that would probably get you a publication." Let me add that she was completely serious. This was practical advice. She was not being ironic.

Fortunately, I kept my mouth shut. In fact, as I recall, we were all a bit stunned. The students in the program seemed to me by and large more academically conservative than the professors, and no one quite knew what to say to this suggestion. Somehow, the class moved on.

For some reason this scene has come back to me recently, and I have allowed myself to write, mentally, what it would have been nice to be able to say to the professor. One could even hope that a little generous, youthful indignation might have shocked her into remembering the days of her own youth when, perhaps, she actually loved literature.

Here's one:

Dr. N., why do you advise L. to write that Richard is a woman? Is it because it's true? What would it even mean for such a statement to be true? If it isn't true, why do you suggest that she write it?

Here's another one:

Dr. N., let me get this straight. What you're saying here is that the plays of Shakespeare have no value apart from us. They are just opportunities for us to advance our careers by writing whatever tom-fool thoughts pop into our heads. Is that right?

Why am I doing this? Just out of grouchiness, just to complain, or just to be cruel to a former professor? I certainly hope not, though I'm as capable as anyone of mere grouchiness, complaint, or cruelty.

There is a point to be made here, though: If we academics are even to come close to justifying the prestige we have in society (and I don't think we can actually fully justify it, because academics have, in my opinion, too much prestige in Western society), we have to do worthwhile things, to love those things, and to have a deep desire to communicate those worthwhile things to other people. Nothing else will really do. If Philosophy and Literature (to take two examples) are just meaningless games we play to get career opportunities, they are nothing. It would be better for all the departments in the world to be closed than for the meaning of the disciplines to be reduced to the cynical pointlessness reflected in that professor's remark to that student.

Part of what it meant for there to be a "good old days," whenever those existed, in the academic world was that professors earned the respect accorded them. And they did so by knowing the value of what they did, a value apart from themselves and their careers and apart from their students' careers, and by passing on that value. Honor to all of you professors out there who still know and do that. You are the small candle to which students come--a vision of a world of learning and wisdom that is the only justification for a university.

"Tear down this wall"

In honor of the hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth:



And remember--they tried to get him to take out that historic line, but he wouldn't.

Somehow, too, I don't think it would have been the same with a teleprompter!

No Pity

A book I sometimes talk about but am hesitant to recommend is Richard Adams's The Girl in the Swing. I hesitate to recommend it because it is sexually explicit as well as being a thriller and quite haunting.

On the other hand, it has some important insights. I don't (for obvious reasons) own a copy of the book, so I will be speaking from memory here. At one point there is a conversation between an Anglican priest (perhaps the best character in the book) and a young couple. The bride, a pagan if there ever was one, presses the priest with some animation on what she sees as the unnecessary absence of sex in Christianity. Why, she wants to know, can't Christianity be more like pagan fertility cults? Wouldn't that make it a lot more attractive? Wouldn't that make it more affirming of the joy and beauty in the world?

The priest answers with care. He talks about the story of Kali, who comes up out of the river, suckles her child, and then kills it. He says that he believes that paganism, and pagan fertility religion specifically, without the taming influence of Christianity, is cruel. Speaking of a fertility goddess, any fertility goddess, he says, "She'd have no pity."

This is Adams's version of the insight I am always paraphrasing from C.S. Lewis, who in turn got it from Denis de Rougemont: When Eros is made a god, he becomes a devil.

There are those today (fortunately, not a very influential group, as yet) who want to promote paganism as an alternative to contemporary liberalism, and who miss no opportunity to attack Christianity as, supposedly, the cause of contemporary liberalism. We have at least one commentator in this camp at my group blog, What's Wrong With the World. When Christians lament the anti-natalism of our current culture and the crazy, postmodern attacks on the very meaning of marriage, the programmatic pagan thinks this is a great opportunity to suggest that the real origin of the redefinition of marriage lies 'way back in Christian asceticism. I will not trouble my readers here at Extra Thoughts with all the obvious responses that could be made to this agenda-driven historical silliness, reminiscent of all the trendy -isms that have left the university an intellectual wasteland.

But I will point out that one of the first supposed "advantages" of the supposedly "pro-natal" pagan view of marriage, pointed out by the advocate himself, is that if a pagan marriage was barren, divorce was possible on that basis alone. Right here we see the "no pity" principle in action--I guess Henry VIII was a good pagan when he ditched poor Catherine, though to be strictly accurate, Catherine was not barren, only unlucky enough to have baby boys who died and a baby girl who lived. Then again, considering the demographics-bending pagan preference for boys over girls and willingness to commit large-scale female infanticide, perhaps Henry was being a good pagan there, too.

The sexual revolution has given us an inkling of what a fertility cult is all about, and it isn't a pretty picture. Children are the first casualties. It is indeed true that when Eros is made a god, he becomes a devil. All the magic of sexuality and of the differences between the sexes needs, desperately requires, the Christian virtues of love, restraint, lifelong commitment, care for the weak, and denial of self. Man is fallen, and so, too, is man's sexual nature. Without the restoration of human nature in Jesus Christ, the worship of that nature leads to barbarism, cruelty, oppression of women, and the sacrificing of the weakest among us.

Adams was a good novelist, and a man of insight, and he understood this truth. (He was not really a good Christian, so he wasn't quite sure what to do with it.) Without committing too much of a plot spoiler, I will say that the saddest and most telling line in the book, in German, is this: "Ich hatte kein Mitleid"--"I had no pity."

Two Thanksgivings

My readers know that one purpose of this blog is making unexpected parallels between Anglican liturgy and Baptist or other low-Protestant songs, prayer, etc.

Here is one. From the Book of Common Prayer, the General Thanksgiving:

Almighty God, father of all mercies, we thine unworthy servants do give thee most humble and hearty thanks, for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all men. We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life, but above all, for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace and for the hope of glory. And, we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we shew forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up ourselves to thy service and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, world without end, Amen.


The other, from "Jesus, We Just Want to Thank You" by the Cathedrals--the prayer in the middle spoken by the late George Younce.

Thank you, Lord. Thank you for music and singing, and for giving us so much to sing about. Thank you for simple things: the sun coming up in the morning, rain when the ground is dry, for sleep when our bodies are tired, and a good meal when we’re hungry. Thank you we can feel things—that we can laugh and cry. Thank you for the good times, but thanks for the hard times too, that keep us depending on you. Thank you for homes and children, and for giving us the chance to know what it’s like to be loved. But most of all, thanks for giving us your Son. Help us to love like that. Lord, we just want to thank you. Thank you for being so good.

There must be something natural about that progression--"Thank you, Lord, for all the blessings of this life, but most of all, for your inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ." Christians from very different traditions naturally gravitate to it, for obvious reasons. On the one hand, we don't want to be ungrateful for the earthly blessings. "All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee." "We are his people and the sheep of his pasture. Enter into His gates with singing, and into His courts with praise." On the other hand, we want to tell Our Lord that His death was the most important blessing, the blessing above all blessings.

HT: Eldest Daughter

The end of chastity

This post is for my fellow conservatives. It's something for you to know, and possibly to say (though without any hope of convincing) when you're asked the stupid, tired, tedious question by homosexual activists, "How does it hurt you if two men can legally marry each other?"

There are so many answers to this that it's difficult to know where to begin or stop. It can make one speechless just being confronted by such a crazy question. We could start with, "You're going to try to make businessmen refer to two men or two women as married in multiple discrimination-type situations, and that's coercion of conscience." Or how about, "I don't want my children taught that two women or two men can be married, and this is going to make that more prevalent in society and harder to avoid." Or, "If anyone and/or his children have any connection with popular culture, this will lead to more public homosexual expressions of affection and to confronting us and our kids with the normalization of sodomy in our faces more, and I consider that highly undesirable."

One could, as I say, go on and on.

But here's something for Christians and conservatives to know, to have said for you, and to have in your own mind even if it will be loudly denied by homosexual activists: The very notions of chastity and purity, and the condemnation of fornication, which are so central to Christian sexual ethics, become meaningless once homosexuality is treated as normal.

Homosexual activists who deny this are lying to you. I suppose it's just barely possible that some Christian pro-homosexual activist who denies it is lying to himself first, but it would have to be a really determined lie.

Think about the throat-choking sick joke of talking seriously to, say, a church high-school youth group about sexual purity and saving yourself for marriage if the church in question blesses same-sex unions and has active homosexuals among its leadership. We are then supposed to pretend that homosexuals have the same notions of purity, chastity, and "waiting until marriage" that we are trying to teach to these young people, but that they just apply them to same-sex couples and unions. Rrrright. Imagine trying to teach a group of church boys at some sort of boys' retreat that pornography is wrong while some of the boys are openly pairing up in male homosexual "boyfriend" couples and while this is smiled upon by the youth group leadership. Oh, homosexual and lesbian sodomy, no problem, just "wait until marriage" (or, as we should say, "marriage"). But pornography--that's bad. Don't get involved with that. Because sins of the flesh are bad. Lust is bad. Fornication is bad. We want to keep ourselves, our minds and our bodies, pure in order to honor God. Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Ghost. Rrrrright.

Homosexuals do not have the same notions of faithfulness, even to one another, that heterosexuals do. Here (a link I've put up before) is just one bit of evidence for this--homosexuals helping us to define down "monogamy."

But beyond that, all those quaint, Biblical ideas about purity, the evils of lasciviousness and fornication, and keeping oneself for one's spouse, are part of a total worldview--a worldview that is, in the jargon, intrinsically "heteronormative." Let's not fool ourselves: The homosexual agenda, the push for approval of homosexual relationships, is part of the sexual revolution. It is part of the attack on the entire set of ideas, as a set, that includes all that stuff about saving yourself for marriage, not looking at pornography, keeping pure, and being faithful to your spouse. It is part of sexual liberation for omnisexual behavior. (That's why "Gay Pride" parades are what they are--namely, something you don't want to know more about and wish you didn't know about if you do.) Those Biblical and Christian concepts of sexual purity cannot be ported over to a pro-homosexual context. The sweet and glorious notions of the complementarity of the sexes and of God's plan for marriage, taught throughout Scripture and engraved in our hearts in the natural law, are woven into their very warp and woof. That's why it should make you just a little bit sick to imagine the church youth group scenarios I referred to above in which youth leaders attempt to continue to teach Christian sexual mores with the "adjustment" of applying them to same-sex couples. It's a no-can-do thing.

Remember this the next time someone asks you how homosexual "marriage" hurts you: It makes a joke of all the crucial, Biblical ideas of sexual purity that are so important to marriage itself and to preparing our young people for marriage. In this sense, every verse in the Bible about the evils of sexual sin and lust, every injunction to purity and chastity, is a verse against homosexuality, even if it isn't mentioned in that location.

If your church, God forbid, embraces the homosexual agenda and approves of homosexuality as not sinful, that is the end of chastity as a serious concept in your church. If you don't want your child taught in Sunday School and church youth group a crazed, warped notion of "chastity" that applies to Bill and Jimmy (high school "sweethearts" who ought to wait for sex until they get "married"), and if you also don't want these ideas simply to fall off the radar altogether while still bringing your child up in that church (which seems to me, actually, more likely) get out fast at the first indication that your church leadership approves of homosexuality.

The life you save may be one more precious to you than your own.

Blog housekeeping

To commentators:

I've noticed recently that a number of you have been reposting your comments by breaking them up into two or more parts.

This is to let you know that the "requested URL too large" message you sometimes get from Google when you write a long comment is misleading. I am getting these longer comments and could simply moderate them as they are. Give it a try and see whether your long comments come through without your having to go to the trouble to break them up and re-post. As it stands, I'm simply deleting the duplicates, but it does worry me sometimes that I might accidentally delete some part of what you have to say.

I've learned to ignore that "too large" message. The comment is always there anyway. Of course, that's easy for me to do, because my comments are unmoderated, since I'm the blog administrator. So I can simply go and look to see whether it posted. I'm sorry that this isn't as easy for you, my valued readers, to do. Unfortunately I have reason to believe that it's still a good idea to keep comments moderation turned on.

The only message I've ever gotten that really meant that my comment didn't post was something like, "We were unable to fulfill your request" or words to that effect. In that case, the comment was really simply lost, and I could not even use the back button to recover the content and break it up.

But the white screen with the "requested URL too large" message appears, so far, to be functionally meaningless. So you can save yourselves some time by just waiting to see if your long comment appears before trying again. Thanks!

Undesigned coincidences

Here is an exceedingly interesting talk by Esteemed Husband, given in New Orleans last Sunday, on undesigned coincidences in the Gospels. This is an argument that was well-known in the nineteenth century but has, for no really clear reason, simply been forgotten as time has gone on. It is a cumulative case argument that the Gospels reflect, to an important extent, independent knowledge of actual events. Please note that this argument is quite independent of one's preferred answer to the synoptic question. That is to say, even if, e.g., Mark was the first Gospel and others had access to Mark and show signs of literary dependence on Mark, the argument from undesigned coincidences provides evidence for independent knowledge of real events among the Gospel writers. There are many more of such coincidences beyond those given in the talk.

Hopefully there will eventually be links to two talks given at New Orleans Baptist Seminary on Sunday night and Monday morning, including some of the same material and a good deal of additional material. My understanding is that there may be a small fee for those downloads when they become available.

Cross-posted to W4

God's limitations

Recently my attention has been drawn to the controversy over whether or not God is in time. Always having been a convinced Boethian on this topic, I've been interested to see what the arguments on the other side are. Some of them appear to stem from what are known as "A-series time" intuitions which I simply do not share--for example, that there is a "real now" that is objective, not relative to any individual or any particular object, and that really does "move," so that in some sense independent of my location in time or the location in time of any other finite being or entity it really is "after Christmas now" but really was "before Christmas three weeks ago." This just seems incorrect to me, so any argument that God must be in time that starts with this as a premise is not going to move me.

Another argument is that, if God is not in time, God cannot enjoy the experience of listening to music, and this would be a lack of some kind in God. (The music argument is given in one of these two interview parts, though at the moment I don't have time to listen to them again and figure out which one it's in.) The idea is that listening to music is irreducibly a temporally ordered experience. I'm willing to grant that that is true, though I would hesitate to define "listening to music" as being identical with "knowing music" or "understanding music." It seems to me entirely plausible that there could be some sort of "all at once" comprehension of music that would not require listening to it temporally. But I'll grant that the experience of listening to a song or a sonata is a temporal experience.

It seems to me that this argument proves too much. There are many pleasant and joyful experiences that we have as human beings that depend crucially on our limitations. The experience, for example, of not knowing what happens at the end of a story and of gradually figuring it out depends upon our not being omniscient. The experience of being surprised depends on a lack of omniscience. The experience of traveling along a road and seeing a gorgeous vista open gradually before one's eyes depends on the ability to travel in space, or at least to experience as-if traveling in space. (But those who believe that God is in time typically, as I understand it, agree that God is not in space.) The experience of normal sexual love between man and woman depends upon the limitation of being just one of these--either a man or a woman--and being limited to that unique set of feelings and experiences.

It would be entirely possible to respond to the argument that a Boethian God cannot know what it is like to listen to music by pointing out that the Christian God also, presumably, does not know what it is like to hate God, to sin, and the like. I would guess that the anti-Boethian would reply that these would be bad things to experience, but that the experience of listening to music is a good experience.

So I think the set of examples above provide an even better argument. One of the things about being human is that we have not only the sorrows but also the joys and pleasures we have because God has given us a unique human nature, and that unique nature depends upon our being limited. To say that God (not incarnate--I'll say something about the incarnation in a moment) must be missing some perfection because he does not share those experiences of ours that depend upon our being limited seems perverse. It seems that we will then have to insist upon lowering the divine nature to the level of our own in order to allow God to experience our distinctly human pleasures. If we can insist on this for temporal limitation and listening to music temporally, why not for any of the other things named? Would we not also have to insist that God must be able to suspend his omniscience in order to have the great pleasure of some wonderful surprise? (And some surprises are truly great and truly wonderful.) Or that God would have to be able to avoid "reading the end of the book" in order to have the pleasure of finding out what happens "for the first time" when he gets to the end of a book?

The pleasure of listening to music temporally involves, crucially, the limitation of not hearing some parts of the music while one is hearing others. Even if one has heard the piece before, so that the rest of the piece is not exactly a surprise, when one listens again the pleasure requires that one set aside, to some degree, the previous memory of what comes next, that one experience only part of the music at a time and see it unfold in order. This is obviously a pleasure of limitation. Interestingly, those who disagree with the Boethian view apparently do affirm divine omniscience, which makes it extremely difficult to know what it would be like for God, even on their view, to listen to music sequentially. It would seem that God as they conceive him cannot be simultaneously knowing what it is like to hear the second movement (or the second measure) while he is knowing what it is like to hear the first movement (or the first measure). How is this compatible with omniscience?

To a very large degree we who believe in an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent God must accept that we do not know what it is like to be God. This is true of Boethians and non-Boethians alike. Since it is true, and since there seems to be no principled reason to stop at requiring God to have some, but not all, of our limitations (such as being in time) in order to share our innocent and valuable pleasures, I do not see a good reason to start making such requirements in the first place, even for the sake of music.

It also seems to me that the music argument for placing God in time tends to downplay the importance of the incarnation. One of the points of the incarnation is that in it God took upon himself our human nature. By that means, it came to pass that God had our experiences of limitation and also many of our uniquely human experiences of enjoyment. (Though not all the particular ones, of course; Jesus never was married, never listened to Mozart, and so forth.) It seems to me that to a very great extent we are supposed to defer questions of "does God know exactly what it's like to feel x" (the wind on his face, the pleasure of sleep after fatigue, the experience of listening to music) to the incarnation and to say that sharing our nature in those ways was one of the reasons cur deus homo. Why anticipate that by making the divine nature temporal apart from the incarnation?

Gospel Music--The Cathedrals

If you hang around this site, you'll soon learn that it's an odd and varied place. Probability theory and gospel music, lions and tigers and bears.

I've been recently enjoying a CD version of an old (I think over fifteen years old) concert by an immortal gospel group, the Cathedrals. The album is "The Cathedrals Alive: Deep in the Heart of Texas." As it happens, all the tracks are available on Youtube. Here's one--"Ride That Glory Train." Listen for the late, great gospel pianist Roger Bennett accompanying. This isn't as fancy a video as some, so you don't get to see Roger, but he's a real presence in the song. As I've mentioned on other posts, George Younce and Glen Payne, two of the greats of gospel music, have both gone home to heaven, as has Roger (a much younger man who died of leukemia). Ernie Haase, the tenor, and Scott Fowler, the baritone, both have groups of their own.



Here is "We Shall See Jesus," from the same concert.



In June of 2010, Ernie Haase and Signature Sound recorded their new Cathedrals Tribute project, and here is the video of "We Shall See Jesus" from that project, with Ernie's wonderful introduction:



Great decision on Ernie's part not to let the song die. It would be a terrible thing if good songs were allowed to become museum pieces because people regard them as "belonging" to a singer who is now dead. Songs should live on. (I feel the same way about reprinting books, by the way, not to mention the deplorable habit publishers have of making books so incredibly expensive that publishing on paper now is like burying an article. The author writes, as the songwriter writes, for an audience, for the work to be known and, in the case of a song, performed and heard.)

Here is a great paragraph from a blog review of the DVD Cathedrals Tribute project:

Glen stays with them through the remainder of the song, and it’s hard to describe just how powerful that is. When people lose a loved one today, too many of them turn to empty means of comfort like letter-writing, or worse, to the occult, to give themselves a feeling of communication with the person. Yet Glen’s presence through video with the group as they sing provides a powerful reminder of the communion of saints without any such desperate measures. We as Christians do not need to convince ourselves that Glen is alive—we know that he is alive. He was with the group that night in more ways than one. Yes, we will see him again one day, but in the meanwhile, we have the assurance that he is living still.

That connection between gospel music and a concept like "the communion of saints" sounds like the kind of thing I might talk about here.

The odds form of Bayes's Theorem [Updated]

It's been brought to my attention that an atheist styling himself some sort of probability expert has been going about implying that Tim and I are deceptive or slippery in our presentation of our argument for the resurrection, that I was misleading in my interview with Luke Muehlhauser on Common Sense Atheism, that our argument for the resurrection in our Blackwell anthology paper is worthless, and heaven knows what else.

The problem seems to stem from the fact that our article focuses on the likelihood ratio (known as the Bayes factor) for the evidence we adduce rather than on the prior probability of the resurrection.

First of all, for the record: No, we were not remotely deceptive or misleading about this in the article. We were painfully explicit about it. (The entire preprint text of the article is available on-line here.) Viz.:

Even as we focus on the resurrection of Jesus, our aim is limited. To show that the probability of R given all evidence relevant to it is high would require us to examine other evidence bearing on the existence of God, since such other evidence – both positive and negative – is indirectly relevant to the occurrence of the resurrection. Examining every piece of data relevant to R more directly – including, for example, the many issues in textual scholarship and archeology which we shall discuss only briefly – would require many volumes. Our intent, rather, is to examine a small set of salient public facts that strongly support R. The historical facts in question are, we believe, those most pertinent to the argument. Our aim is to show that this evidence, taken cumulatively, provides a strong argument of the sort Richard Swinburne calls “C-inductive” – that is, whether or not P(R) is greater than some specified value such as 0.5 or 0.9 given all evidence, this evidence itself heavily favors R over ~R.

and

But our estimated Bayes factors for these pieces of evidence were, respectively, 10^2, 10^39, and 10^3. Sheer multiplication through gives a Bayes factor of 10^44, a weight of evidence that would be sufficient to overcome a prior probability (or rather improbability) of 10^–40 for R and leave us with a posterior probability in excess of 0.9999.

In my interview with Luke M., I said this (transcribed from the podcast, available here, at approximately 16:10 to 19:30):

In Bayesian terms, what we do in the article is that we try to separate what...one might call...the indirect evidence, which would be relevant to that prior probability, from the direct evidence. So the things that would be relevant to the prior probability would be things like evidence for and against theism, for example, evidence for and against the existence specifically of the God of Israel, the God of the Jews, or other evidence prior to Jesus' purported resurrection regarding who Jesus was, and so forth. That would all be relevant to the prior. And what we focus on in the article instead is what we might call the direct evidence, the evidence that supposedly tells you what happened, what you might call reports...You might call it evidence after the fact. So what we focus on are the testimony of the disciples and of certain women that said that they saw and spoke with Jesus, the evidence of the disciples' willingness to die for that testimony, and the evidence of the conversion of the Apostle Paul. And what we try to do is we use a modeling device known as a Bayes factor. Roughly speaking, a Bayes factor tries to model, number one, which way the evidence is pointing and, number two, how strongly the evidence is pointing that way. And what you're trying to do at that point is you're trying to look at explanatory resources of the hypothesis, in this case, the resurrection, and the negation of the hypothesis. How well does each of these explain the evidence, and is there a big difference between how well each of these explains the evidence? I should clarify that when I say a difference, too, it's actually a ratio...it's very important that you measure it by the ratio, not by the difference. But you need to look at those two hypotheses and see which one gives you a better expectation of that evidence and how much better is that expectation. So we estimate Bayes factors for these various separate pieces of evidence, then we argue for the legitimacy of multiplying these Bayes factors, because that gives you a lot of kick, and you have to discuss that issue, and we do, of independence, and whether it's legitimate to multiply them in order to combine those Bayes factors, and that ends up with this very high, high combined Bayes factor in our estimate...And so what we estimate is that you could have this overwhelmingly low prior probability (and I don't actually think that the prior probability is this low. I think it's low, but I don't think it's this low) of 10^-40 and still give a probability to the resurrection in excess of .9999. And we don't get to that by saying in fact the evidence gives us a posterior probability in excess of .9999. We just say, well this is the power of the...combined Bayes factor, and a combined power that great could overcome this great of a prior improbability and would give you this high of a posterior probability. So that's the basic method.

This is all exceedingly clear: We were arguing for a certain magnitude of confirmation of the resurrection by the evidence we adduce.

I understand that the current atheist meme on this, which shows a rather striking lack of understanding of probability, is to say that if one does not argue for a particular prior probability for some proposition, one literally can say nothing meaningful about the confirmation provided by evidence beyond the statement that there is some confirmation or other.

This is flatly false, as both the second of the quotations above from the paper and my rather detailed explanation to Luke M. show.

Let me try to lay this out, step by step, for those who are interested:

The odds form of Bayes's Theorem works like multiplying a fraction by a fraction--a fairly simple mathematical operation we all learned to do in grammar school (hopefully).

The first fraction is the ratio of the prior probabilities. So, let's take an example. Suppose that, to begin with (that is, before you get some specific evidence) some proposition H is ten times less probable than its negation. The odds are ten to one against it. Then the ratio of the prior probabilities is

1/10.

Now, the second fraction we're going to multiply is the ratio of the likelihoods. So, for our simple example, suppose that the evidence is ten times more probable if H is true than if H is false. The evidence favors H by odds of 10/1. Then the ratio of the likelihoods (which is also called a Bayes factor) is

10/1.

If you multiply

1/10 x 10/1

you get

10/10.

The odds form of Bayes's Theorem says that the ratio of the posterior probabilities equals the ratio of the priors times the ratio of the likelihoods. What this means is that in this imaginary case, after taking that evidence into account, the probability that the event happened is equal to the probability that it didn't: what we would call colloquially 50/50. (You'll notice that the ratio 50/50 has the same value as the ratio 10/10. In this case, that's no accident.)

Okay, now, suppose, on the other hand, that the second fraction, the ratio of the likelihoods, is

1000/1. That is, the evidence is 1000 times more probable if H is true than if H is false. So the evidence favors H by odds of 1000 to 1.

Then, the ratio of the posteriors is

1/10 x 1000/1 = 1000/10 = 100/1,

which means that after taking that evidence into account (evidence that is a thousand times more probable if H is true than if it is false), we should think of the event itself as a hundred times more probable than its negation.

See how this works?

What this amounts to is that if we can argue for a high Bayes factor (that second fraction), even if we don't say what the prior odds are, we can say something very significant--namely, how low of a prior probability this evidence can overcome. That is exactly what we say in the second quotation from our paper that I gave above. It is exactly what I explain to Luke M. We say that we have argued for "a weight of evidence that would be sufficient to overcome a prior probability (or rather improbability) of 10^–40 for R and leave us with a posterior probability in excess of 0.9999."

In our paper, we concentrate on the Bayes factor. The Bayes factor shows the direction of the evidence and measures its force. We argue that it is staggeringly high in favor of R for the evidence we adduce. Naturally, the skeptics will not be likely to agree with us on that. My point here and now, however, is that neither in the paper nor in my interview was there a mistake about probability, any insignificance or triviality in our intended conclusion, nor any deception. We are clear that we are not specifying a prior probability (to do so and to argue for it in any detail would require us to evaluate all the other evidence for and against the existence of God, since that is highly relevant to the prior probability of the resurrection, which obviously would lie beyond the scope of a single paper). Nonetheless, what we do argue is, if we are successful, of great epistemic significance concerning the resurrection, because it means that this evidence is so good that it can overcome even an incredibly low prior probability.

I trust that this is now cleared up.

Update: See also this discussion of Bayesian probability and Richard Carrier at Victor Reppert's blog, here.

Update 2: See the comments thread. Luke and Richard have both apologized for their comments in the interview, and I do accept those apologies.