Matthew 18 does not apply to criticizing public articles

This should not need to be said, but I've become aware (most recently through some reactions to a post at W4) that some in the evangelical community are developing the oddest notions about public writings and public refutations. Apparently Jesus' injunctions about how to handle it if "your brother trespasses against you" in Matthew 18 are being applied to criticism of the public writings of people who claim to be Christians or even who simply may be Christians based on some affiliation of theirs. (I even saw it lately applied to a group of homosexual activists who, as far as I know, make no claim to be Christians at all!)

Now, this is a wild misapplication of the verses. Obviously, if someone unknown to me has written something in public, this isn't a matter "between me and him alone." The whole point of Jesus' instruction is that if something is, initially, a private dispute between two Christians, it should be escalated to a public matter involving the opinion of the whole church only by degrees and only if it cannot be resolved at a lower level. But this has no point to it at all if we are talking about the public writings of one Christian (much less a merely possible Christian or putative Christian, still less a non-Christian). There is no dispute between two individuals. The matter is public ab initio. There is no specific person who has been "trespassed against" who might try to "gain his brother" by getting a private apology and resolution. The entire set of instructions is obviously inapplicable.

I have been told that this misuse of Matthew 18 has even been applied to authors like Rob Bell who write arguably heretical books. When pastors and theologians try to criticize them, they are in turn criticized if they did not first go to Bell privately concerning his published books! This, even if they have no independent private acquaintance with Bell. What absurdity.

Moreover, of course, if the principle applies, it should also apply to public criticism of public critics, which would mean that no Christian could be publically criticized for anything at all before "the steps of Matthew 18" were followed. So the critics of public critics, if they have not first "followed the steps of Matthew 18," are subject to their own criticism of acting unbiblically. This is a reductio of the entire application of the passage, though I suppose it's asking too much for those who misuse it in this way to see that.

So, what does this come to? Well, to quote an old Internet friend of mine, the inimitable Zippy: No, we won't shut up.

Suppressing the truth

This is an amazing video clip at Gates of Vienna:

A reporter interviews a man who was an eyewitness to the raiding of his store. She's supposedly trying to get an eyewitness account. When the man says that 100 or 200 "black dudes in hoodies" raided his store, she immediately interrupts him. She rides over his words again and again trying to pressure him to say that the crowd of raiders was not all black. She believes that she knows that it could not have been all black, and she won't let him say it. Eventually he says something like, "Okay, then...Let me just say they weren't all black." She says, "Yes!" apparently expecting that now he will say what she wants him to say. He continues, "I was the white guy there." She interrupts again, "There probably were other white guys there..."

It's that bad. She literally will not let the eyewitness tell what he saw.

I know that there are conservatives who say that we should never refer to things like "black flash mobs" or "blacks" as the constituency that might oppose certain law-and-order crackdowns. Their idea seems to be to ask, "What's the point? Why say that? It does no good."

But truth is important. That flash mob attacks in America are a black phenomenon is not a trivial truth. That the riots in Britain were vastly disproportionately minority (I've seen one estimate of 70-80% and another of 60-70%) is not a trivial truth.

And the danger is that if we tell ourselves that we must not speak these truths, eventually we get a society full of people like that reporter who refuse to know the truth even when told it by a credible witness. This is not good.

HT for the link to GoV--VFR

Me on everything

For anyone who is wondering, "What does Lydia McGrew think about the fact that London has burned for several nights in a row?" I'll give you a couple of things I've said on Facebook recently. I give them here because this is my personal blog, where I reign as Personal Potentate, so I don't have to deal so much with difficult liberal commentators. One of my comments was that the police in England seem more likely to crack down on a school child accused of "racism" than on violent mobs who loot and burn London. I don't have time to google the stories, but some of you have doubtless read them: Some ten-year-old kid uses some word, or is accused of doing so, in school in Britain, and the police visit his house and put him under investigation.

Another of my comments was that perhaps T.S. Eliot was wrong and the world does end with a bang instead of a whimper, though Britain's leaders seem to be the ones doing the whimpering.

If indeed things have quieted down there (this is me now, not anything I've written elsewhere), as the news stories are telling us this morning, I'm rather surprised. Is it just that there's nothing more to loot? Or did the thousands of thugs actually believe the government's bluff that it would use (gasp!) water cannons and plastic bullets against them? I think if they'd called the bluff they would have found they could go on with their wave of pillage and destruction, their paean of horrible joy to the gods of hate against all that is productive and orderly. The so-called forces of law and order in England are clearly non-functional. It is absolutely appalling.

Still more appalling was the beginning of an AP story I saw last night. It has since disappeared from the news feed when I call up Yahoo, and I consider this good riddance, so instead of trying to find it, I'll just give the gist from memory. It said something to the effect that Cameron's government would now be called on to improve policing (um, yeah) and also to "help struggling communities in economic hard times." I feel ill. That's positively angering. Talk about appeasement. Talk about Danegeld. What does this mean? More government goodies and handouts for the very people who have just been tearing down England brick by brick and burning the rest? Yep, that has worked really well so far. Sickening. What it should have said was something like, "Making sure communities know that the law will be enforced" or "Cracking down on the lawless communities who have come to believe that they can do anything they like." (And, yes, by the way, all this talk about "communities" does point, in the eerily coded fashion of the liberal news media, to the racial nature of this anarchy, especially in its inception.)

No one who has loved English literature and taught English history can fail to be saddened to the point of near-speechlessness by this undeniable further evidence that England is dying. England the fair. England the Sceptred Isle. England of the Book of Common Prayer, of Churchill, of the brave fighters of the Battle of Britain. England the plucky, the quirky. England of the glorious literature and the lovable variety of accents. England of the peaceful countryside, of the orchards and the bees. England of the tough Yorkshire farmers. England now dying of the cancer of liberalism and anarcho-totalitarianism.

Requiescat in pacem, my beloved ancestor. What you once were will not be forgotten.

John Who Saw

From Adrian Green-Armytage, John Who Saw (1952)

There is a world -- I do not say a world in which all scholars live but one at any rate into which all of them sometimes stray, and which some of them seem permanently to inhabit -- which is not the world in which I live.

In my world, if The Times and The Telegraph both tell one story in somewhat different terms, nobody concludes that one of them must have copied the other, nor that the variations in the story have some esoteric significance. But in that world of which I am speaking this would be taken for granted. There, no story is ever derived from the facts but always from somebody else's version of the same story.

In my world, almost every book, except some of those produced by Government departments, is written by one author. In that world almost every book is produced by a committee, and some of them by a whole series of committees.

In my world, if I read that Mr. Churchill, in 1935, said that Europe was heading for a disastrous war, I applaud his foresight. In that world no prophecy, however vaguely worded, is ever made except after the fact.

In my world we say, "The first world-war took place in 1914–1918." In that world they say, "The world-war narrative took shape in the third decade of the twentieth century."

In my world men and women live for a considerable time -- seventy, eighty, even a hundred years -- and they are equipped with a thing called memory. In that world (it would appear) they come into being, write a book, and forthwith perish, all in a flash, and it is noted of them with astonishment that they "preserve traces of primitive tradition" about things which happened well within their own adult lifetime.

HT: Esteemed Husband

Reality, magic, and temptation

The issue of magic has been on my mind a bit lately, partly because of this post by Jeff Culbreath at W4.

There are, I'm sure, many reasons why contemporary people are attracted to magic. But one attraction of magic has got to be the thrill of making the supernatural real, of having real things happen via something other than the rather boring agency of natural means. To be sure, in an age when we can speak with some truth of the miracles of science, it hardly seems that one needs to turn to magic for that. When I was a child the Internet would have seemed akin to magic. Still, one knows in one's heart that there is some natural explanation for all of this, and one even has some idea of what it is, and that takes the magic out of it. Which is all to the good, in the end.

I imagine that Jesus' followers must have been awestruck when He healed a blind man or made the lame to walk: He really did it, just like that! He has the power to do that. It's real! It's a miracle.

Magic promises that thrill, and promises to give that thrill to the magician: Now you can be the one who can "really do it." That's why, in Acts, Simon Magus (that is, Simon the Magician) offered to pay the apostles for the power to confer the Holy Spirit on people (Acts 18:17-24)! He believed that this "Holy Spirit" thing was a new form of magic power and wanted to be able to do what the apostles did. Peter responded angrily, "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money."

The difference between miracle and magic is that miracles are the gift of God. Even the extraordinary abilities (e.g., the ability to do some miracles) which God gave to his apostles when founding the church were recognized by Peter as gifts that came immediately from God in each individual case, not as "powers" which the apostles possessed in themselves. There is no techne, no magical art, to receiving or bestowing the gifts of God.

Moreover, God does not always do miracles. Many people are not healed. Most people (to put it mildly) are not raised from the dead.

God bestows His miraculous gifts sparingly to remind us that they are gifts. We seek after signs and wonders, after the excitement of personally seeing the real supernatural in action. (Wow! He really did it! It really happened! She was healed just like that!) But for most of us, the sign that is given is the sign, as Jesus said, of Jonah the Prophet (Matthew 12:38-40). For as Jonah was three days in the belly of the fish, so Our Lord rose after three days in the tomb. Powerful evidence? Indeed. But it happened a long time ago, and the study of it does not, for most of us, bring that special magic thrill. And that's all right.

Meanwhile, we walk by faith, hope, and charity. What we have instead of signs and wonders before our eyes or within our power are prayer, obedience, love, and Holy Communion, which, whatever else it is, looks just like bread and wine.

All these, too, are gifts.

"Before the Throne of God Above"

It has been a long time since I've learned of a new (to me) hymn that is actually old, historically--that I like, that is. It turns out that the evangelical community of the 1980's was ahead of me on this one, and more power to 'em. As I've recently learned from Eldest Daughter, this hymn text written around the time of the U.S. Civil War by an Irish lady named Charitie Bancroft was revived and given a brand-new tune in the late 20th century. Here it is as sung by the Haven of Rest quartet:



Some brief but intense googling has failed to turn up reliable information on the tune the hymn text was originally sung to. This new (that is, 20th century) tune is by Vikki Cook.

Here are the lyrics:

Before the throne of God above
I have a strong, a perfect plea,
A great high Priest whose Name is Love
Who ever lives and pleads for me.
My name is graven on His hands,
My name is written on His heart.
I know that while in Heaven He stands
No tongue can bid me thence depart.

When Satan tempts me to despair
And tells me of the guilt within,
Upward I look and see Him there
Who made an end to all my sin.
Because the sinless Savior died
My sinful soul is counted free.
For God the just is satisfied
To look on Him and pardon me.

Behold Him there the risen Lamb,
My perfect spotless righteousness,
The great unchangeable I AM,
The King of glory and of grace.
One with Himself I cannot die.
My soul is purchased with His blood,
My life is hid with Christ on high,
With Christ my Savior and my God!

Here is a post that has a pretty comprehensive list of the Scripture allusions and possible Scripture allusions in the lyrics. I haven't checked them out systematically, but they look accurate.

Moral equivalence about homosexuality is a serious confusion

Below, I made a comment about Thomas Cranmer. In his response, commentator Alex mentioned in passing that he began to read a biography of Cranmer but was put off and lost interest in reading more when he found that the author of the biography dedicated the book to his homosexual "partner."

Subsequently, someone who occasionally reads this blog (but does not comment) came to me and said, apropos of that exchange, "Well, if you're going to refuse to read any book written by a sinner..."

The implication was pretty clear: Alex shouldn't have been put off from reading the book, because all books are written by sinners, after all.

Now, this is a completely misguided way of looking at it, as I tried to tell the reader. But I lacked time and clarity, being, among other things, taken very much by surprise at the remark. So here is further detail.

First, the author of that book about Cranmer (I haven't tried to look it up, so I don't know the author's name) is not simply "a sinner." The remark about "not reading any book written by a sinner" reflects a failure, or a refusal, to acknowledge that homosexual activities are not just generic sins. They are sins against nature. They are perversions. Hence, the author is not just "a sinner," he is a person with a seriously warped sexuality, a person with a serious problem. Moreover, he glories in and is proud of this perversion. He is openly living in a sexual relationship with another man and is so proud of this that he dedicates his book to him. One wonders: Suppose the author had dedicated the book to a minor child with whom he was having an affair. Would my reader then have made the remark about "refusing to read any book written by a sinner"? It is completely understandable that someone would feel less inclined to read a book, and especially a book about Cranmer, upon seeing the dedication to the homosexual "partner."

Second, the author of the book is attempting to normalize his perversion in society by publically dedicating the book to his sexual partner. He is being "in your face" with the reader in an attempt to promote acceptance of his sin. This attempt to corrupt the morals of society, and in particular, of Christians in society (likely a large part of the audience) is an additional wrong.

Third, and relatedly, by spitting in the face of the Christian morality of two thousand years, the author of the book is insulting his likely audience by making this reference. So on top of everything else, the author of the book is rude to his readers.

Fourth, self-identified "gay scholars" often have an agenda. In literature, this takes the form of bizarre reading of texts in order to talk about sexual matters frequently, to turn all literature into pornography. In history this can take the form of weird psychologizing of historical figures and baseless implications that these characters were homosexual. "Queer studies" has been a horrible blight on the humanities for quite a while, but I suspect my reader has never heard of it and hence was unaware of the fact that the dedication calls into question the quality of the book's scholarship.

Having (unfortunately) paid good money for the book, Alex might have decided to see how good or bad it was by further reading. But I fully support his decision to stop reading and would also support him if he simply dropped it into the slot for the local library book sale. Or into the garbage can. Life is short, and of the making of books there is no end.

I write this, because it is important that someone be willing to come out and say such things. Increasingly it is considered simply "not done" to call homosexuality a perversion in public or even to be annoyed or put off by proud displays of it, as in the dedication of the book about Cranmer. So upside-down has our society become that the author's action in dedicating his book to his homosexual lover is not considered bad manners but saying frankly why there is a problem with his doing so is considered bad manners. Unfortunately, such acceptance of proud, active, and blatant homosexuality as, at most, "just another sin," is becoming prevalent among Christians, even among Christians one would have thought to be conservative. But such moral equivalence is part of what has gotten our country into the mess we are presently in. It should therefore be answered clearly.

Under God

A happy 4th of July to all my readers. Here is "Under God" by the Booth Brothers:




I used it in this post back in the winter at W4.

Comment testing

This will sound like a shameless ploy to get more comments, but I've decided to post it anyway: I've recently learned of a person who tried to comment on one of my posts but whose comment was mysteriously eaten twice by Blogger. I couldn't find it either time, even in Blogger's spam filter, and am baffled as to why this problem arose. During approximately this same period of time no one else has happened to comment here either. Not that things are usually hopping, but that's exactly what makes it difficult to know if Blogger suddenly has some general problem with accepting comments to the blog.

I've been able to sign out and post test comments anonymously, but as this is still from my own IP I'm not sure that it is a good test.

So if you are not a member of my household and should feel the Spirit (or spirit) moving you to comment on a post, especially a recent post, this would be a good time, as it would let me see that Blogger isn't just eating all my readers' comments.

The cross and Mr. Hiles

In doing research for my Messiah post, below, I learned about the case, now several years old, of chaplain Michael Hiles. The basic facts from 2008 don't appear to be in question: The U.S. military has a very limited number of insignias for its chaplains to wear. After examining the tenets of Messianic Judaism, the Navy decided that Hiles, as a Messianic Jewish chaplain, should wear the cross instead of the tablets of the law. Hiles refused and chose to leave the military rather than wearing the cross.

This bothers me. For the record, I do not believe that Hiles wanted to deceive anyone by wearing the rabbinic insignia. That is not where my concern lies. But there really is a problem with a person who claims to be a committed and loving follower of Our Lord Jesus Christ but who is unwilling to be identified with the cross. For these purposes I'm simply uninterested in hearing about, e.g., the evils of the Crusades.

The Apostle Paul said, "God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of Christ." (Galatians 6:14) Significantly, in the context Paul is specifically contrasting his glorying in the cross with his glorying in the legal observance of circumcision. Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself told us that if we will be His disciples we must take up our cross and follow Him (Matt. 16:24).

Paul called the crucifixion of Christ a "stumbling block" to the Jews (I Cor. 1:23). But he meant the unbelieving Jews. If one has accepted the claims of Jesus and believes in His resurrection, one is supposed to see the stumbling block as the chief cornerstone (Mark 12:10-11, I Peter 2:6-8).

I see part of the problem here as coming from the idea that we can define everything for ourselves. The idea appears to be that, if the cross meant something offensive or historically bothersome "to" Mr. Hiles, or if he preferred to define his own identity more closely in terms of the tablets of the law, he should be free to choose the Jewish symbol instead of the Christian one.

But reality doesn't work that way. Sometimes symbols are chosen for us. We are not simply self-created beings who get to make all our own meanings for all our own symbols. This is particularly true when we are talking about God-made and God-chosen symbols. There, if nowhere else, it behooves us to shut up and row (as my old blogging friend Zippy says in a different context). And in this case, "shut up and row" means, "Wear the cross, Chaplain Hiles. Be not ashamed."

There are not any mere symbols. If ever it were true that a symbol is not a mere symbol, it is true of the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, that sign of ultimate shame which God chose to make the glorious means of victory--that he who by a tree was once the vanquisher might also by a Tree be vanquished.

Therefore, my beloved brethren, let us glory in the cross.

At the Name of Jesus

For Palm Sunday a few weeks back the epistle reading in the BCP was the famous kenosis passage from Philippians 2:

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

When we read that in church on Palm Sunday and come to "that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow," everybody is supposed to genuflect. It's a glorious passage, one which Christian children all should memorize.

Understandably the glorification of the name of Jesus has had a prominent place in Christian music, and when I heard this wonderful Cathedrals gospel song recently I had an urge to genuflect once or twice at the title phrase:



In a comment at W4 recently, Jeff Singer mentioned a new significance put on the phrase "Hallowed be thy name" by a priest he was listening to on the radio. The priest connected the phrase with the idea of martyrdom, based on the Jewish use of "sanctify the Name [of God]" to refer to martyrdom.

I do find that it's a bit difficult for the contemporary Western mind to grasp the notion of the Name of God as holy and thence to see that, when the Apostle Paul said that God has given Jesus "a name above every name" and that everyone will bow at the name of Jesus, Paul was associating Our Lord with a distinctly Jewish concept, a concept specially applied to God Himself.

While on earth, Jesus was constantly asking people who they thought He was. And He Himself said, "I and my Father are one," at which His audience, understanding Him quite well, tried to stone Him.

So when we praise and magnify the name of Jesus, we are, precisely, worshiping Him. We are worshiping Him as God, whose Name is holy.

Here is the wonderful tune King's Weston, by Vaughan Williams, to the Anglican hymn "At the Name of Jesus":



At the Name of Jesus
every knee shall bow,
every tongue confess him
King of glory now;
'tis the Father's pleasure
we should call him Lord,
who from the beginning
was the mighty Word.

High and Lifted Up

In keeping with the digression in my Messiah post below (on Jesus' words, "If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me"), here are the Cathedrals singing "High and Lifted Up." The Grooveshark copy has best sound quality.



But it's impossible to beat actually watching Glen Payne sing:

Blessed Trinitytide

A blessed Trinity Sunday to my readers. Instead of giving you the collect for Trinity Sunday this week, I'm going to give you one of the exhortations, which we heard in church today. Ain't Cranmer great?

Dearly beloved in the Lord, ye who mind to come to the holy Communion of the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ, must consider how Saint Paul exhorteth all persons diligently to try and examine themselves, before they presume to eat of that Bread, and drink of that Cup. For as the benefit is great; if with a true penitent heart and lively faith we receive that holy Sacrament; (for then we spiritually eat the flesh of Christ, and drink his blood) so is the danger great, if we receive the fame unworthily. For then we are guilty of the body and blood of Christ our Saviour. Judge therefore yourselves, brethren, that ye be not judged of the Lord; repent ye truly for your sins past; have a lively and stedfast faith in Christ our Saviour; amend your lives, and be in perfect charity with all men; so shall ye be meet partakers of those holy Mysteries. And above all things ye must give most humble and hearty thanks to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, for the redemption of the world by the death and passion of our Saviour Christ, both God and man; who did humble himself, even to the death upon the cross, for us, miserable sinners, who lay in darkness and the shadow of death; that he might make us the children of God, and exalt us to everlasting life. And to the end that we would alway remember the exceeding great love of our Master and only Saviour Jesus Christ, thus dying for us, and the innumerable benefits which by his precious bloodshedding he hath obtained to us; he hath instituted and ordained holy Mysteries, as pledges of his love, and for a continual remembrance of his death to our great and endless comfort. To him therefore, with the Father, and the Holy Ghost, let us give (as we are most bounden) continual thanks submitting ourselves wholly to his holy will and pleasure, and studying to serve him in true holiness and righteousness all the days of our life. Amen.

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