“…an egalitarian destroys the very things whose equality he asserts.”
Touchstone Magazine – Mere Comments: All Flattened Things are Equal
In academe, it is simply assumed by almost everybody that sex differences are at most superficial. To quote a coarse and not terribly perceptive female member of the Army: “The only thing the men can do that the women can’t do is urinate through a hole in a fence.” It takes an effort of the imagination to pretend that you know nothing about men and women, and then to pay close attention to their voices, their gestures, their habits of speech (the sorts of sentences they use, for instance), what they do with their eyes while they speak, the sorts of things they speak about and how, and on and on. I know you agree with me here. I don’t think the egalitarians agree.And this thought leads me to another conclusion, parallel to what I said about powerful interpretations of Scripture: the indifferentist cannot really appreciate the beauty of woman (or of man, for that matter). There’s nothing much to say, if everything that we associate with women is merely superficial, or, if not superficial, then merely “socially constructed” and thus not essential, or, if in some way natural, not socially or anthropologically important, and thus not reaching deep into the woman’s being. Such an egalitarian destroys the very things whose equality he asserts.
Posted by: Tony Esolen | Sep 26, 2006 12:09:22 PM
“All Flattened Things Are Equal”
Touchstone Magazine – Mere Comments: All Flattened Things are Equal
All Flattened Things are Equal…how can Christians fail to see that equality and hierarchy are not necessarily contradictory, seeing that they have the examples of the obedience of the Son to the Father, and of the inner life of the Trinity itself?
Which brings me to a point I’ve made before in Touchstone: all the really interesting interpretations of Scripture prescind from the assumption that, in one fashion or another, the Bible is inerrant. Failing that assumption, every time we come upon a crux we “resolve” it by consigning one of the truths to the flames. We say that A is true, but that B is culturally conditioned — or whatever the equivalent of “horsefeathers” happens to be at the time. Thus we avoid the difficult work of theological reflection, in submission to the word of God, and instead set ourselves up as judges over the word. We make things “easier,” in the same way that a steamroller makes things easier. It is not easy, for instance, to think that the eternally begotten Son of God became incarnate; so we level the trouble by denying the co-equality of the Son with the Father, as Arius did (and Milton, alas), or we level it by denying the reality of the incarnation. It is not easy to consider that one God exists in three distinct Persons, so we level the trouble by collapsing the three Persons into modes of one Being.
The “egalitarian” steamroller does the same sort of thing. Nor have the “egalitarians” anything really interesting to say about the sexes — because their form of egalitarianism is really indifferentism, leveling distinctions by denying that they exist. (By contrast, I think that a single baseball card — closely considered, as if it were an artifact from another planet about whose creatures we have absolutely no preconceptions — reveals a veritable encyclopedia of features that distinguish the human male!). Since it is incoherent to suppose that God is Father, but has left no traces of his Fatherhood, specifically, in the universe or in the human race — that the patriarchy of the Father is a kind of embarrassing exception –, the next step is to deny that his Fatherhood has any ontological reality; Jesus was simply using a metaphor, and one metaphor may be as useful as another. Then his Sonship (rather than the abstract Offspringship or Begottenship) too loses its claim to reality; and the connection between the Logos and the man Jesus is severed — Jesus simply happened to be male. And once we have done that, it is doubtful that we have remained Christian. The egalitarian — the indifferentist — becomes unitarian, reconceiving the self-revealed God according to the vanity of his own rather dull imagination.
Cassandra: on keeping promises
Villainous Company: Adultery: Plan B For The PoMo Female?
It was never lack of interest that kept me from cheating during those long years when my husband was overseas, or in the field. Nor was it some spellbound sense of female submission, or pleasure avoidance.It was the knowledge that something precious would have been violated, even if I got away with it (and I almost certainly would have – I never got caught as a teen, when leading my friends through this or that crazy scheme). I would have known that the promise had been broken, even if no one else ever knew. And aside from all the other very good reasons not to do an obviously wrong and destructive thing, aside from not wanting to lose something I valued, there was simply this: I would never look at myself or my husband in the same way again. I would become, like Laura Kipnis, one of the disappointed who settle for illusory promises they don’t believe in, then find themselves feeling unsatisfied because they have ignored one of the oldest truths in human existence.
Read the whole post. She writes in dismay at some feminist or other who thinks we all ought to toss away the very notion of fidelity, embrace adultery, and scratch every itch whenever it itches. I turn to amateur psychoanalysis in moments like these, because the normal tools for diagnosing vapidity fail: people who say things like that must have been betrayed by their parents at an early age.
Dear God in heaven, think about where it all ends. Our society is now fleshing out the ethic that integrity is bad — a view that once would only have been emitted from the mouth of the devil in some tired byronic college drama. Now, we’re officially toying with the cosmology that There Is No-one In The Universe Other Than Me. When you become a liar to maximise your pleasure, you kill the ones you love, whether you actually have time to see them die or not before you die alone.
The courage to Be, you say? Why not just take it all the way? If you can betray your spouse for a shudder in the loins, why not drown your children in the bathtub for an afternoon of quiet? Why not?
Can you begin, now, for the first time in your life, to imagine that when Genesis says God looked down from heaven, saw that every thought of man was evil, and repented that He made man — can you begin now to see that was not “just poetry”?
That there are multiple darknesses, part 2
The Corner on National Review Online
From the Sep 22, 2006 blog, Jonah Goldberg’s post at 12:53 PM:
During a Eucharistic Congress, a number of priests from different orders are gathered in a church for Vespers. While they are praying, a fuse blows and all the lights go out. The Benedictines continue praying from memory, without missing a beat. The Jesuits begin to discuss whether the blown fuse means they are dispensed from the obligation to pray Vespers. The Franciscans compose a song of praise for God’s gift of darkness. The Dominicans revisit their ongoing debate on light as a signification of the transmission of divine knowledge. The Carmelites fall into silence and slow, steady breathing. The parish priest, who is hosting the others, goes to the basement and replaces the fuse.
Bernard Lewis: the Fascist-Islamofascist connection
Imprimis Archive – Hillsdale College
This is the September 2006 edition, “Freedom and Justice in Islam”, by Bernard Lewis. This illuminative paragraph is about 1/3 of the way through the essay:
In the year 1940, the government of France surrendered to the Axis and formed a collaborationist government in a place called Vichy. The French colonial empire was, for the most part, beyond the reach of the Nazis, which meant that the governors of the French colonies had a free choice: To stay with Vichy or to join Charles de Gaulle, who had set up a Free French Committee in London. The overwhelming majority chose Vichy, which meant that Syria-Lebanon—a French-mandated territory in the heart of the Arab East—was now wide open to the Nazis. The governor and his high officials in the administration in Syria-Lebanon took their orders from Vichy, which in turn took orders from Berlin. The Nazis moved in, made a tremendous propaganda effort, and were even able to move from Syria eastwards into Iraq and for a while set up a pro-Nazi, fascist regime. It was in this period that political parties were formed that were the nucleus of what later became the Baath Party. The Western Allies eventually drove the Nazis out of the Middle East and suppressed these organizations. But the war ended in 1945, and the Allies left. A few years later the Soviets moved in, established an immensely powerful presence in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and various other countries, and introduced Soviet-style political practice. The adaptation from the Nazi model to the communist model was very simple and easy, requiring only a few minor adjustments, and it proceeded pretty well. That is the origin of the Baath Party and of the kind of governments that we have been confronting in the Middle East in recent years. That, as I would again repeat and emphasize, has nothing whatever to do with the traditional Arab or Islamic past.
The One and the Many Solved
So they say. If only someone had found a way of demonstrating that unity and multiplicity were in some way equally fundamental to reality, however paradoxical that might seem. Say, for example, that the whole shebang – life, the universe, everything! – had been made by Somebody whose very nature embraced both one-ness and many-ness. But how “many”? Hmm, well “two”-ness would just imply duality. To imply true multiplicity and diversity you’d need at least “three”. And you’d not really gain much by adding more than three to that picture. So, “three”-ness would seem to do the trick.
You laugh, fine. But nobody has ever done better, no matter how many polysyllables they spun.
Jacques Ellul on alienation
Quotes are from “The Ethics of Freedom”…
The Bible often talks about the bondage of man…We read of the institution of slavery. We also find bondage to corruption, to the stoicheia of this world….The ending of formal slavery has softened the term. But the situation described remains the same. In our own age the equivalent of slavery is alienation. This is not just a matter of modernizing our vocabulary and changing a word to give better understanding. The reference is to a concrete condition of man today just as the reference in the prophets and Paul is to a concrete situation in their day…
Now don’t zip past this. Paul’s soteriological vocabulary is heavily drawn from the institution of slavery. He got it from the Old Testament as a good rabbinical scholar and he got it from the Roman society around him, as a citizen and traveller. When that institution disappears, as it has in America, then it is natural for the language drawn from it to get transmuted into something else weaker. Today, when we read Paul say something like “slave to sin”, we think something like “bad habits I can’t break”. But Ellul is going to fill the term “slave” back in with the substance it has lost:
“The Hyenas Did Not Touch Him”
EDIT: LINK IS DEAD
Delighted by Doctrine – Christianity Today Magazine
As a capstone to his lifelong interest in the central texts of the Christian faith, [Jaroslav] Pelikan edited (with Valerie Hotchkiss) what could only be called a second magnum opus—Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, a four-volume critical edition with a one-volume historical and theological guide called simply Credo.Judaism has its shema and Islam its shahadah, but Christians, responding to Jesus’ question “Who do you say that I am?” have produced literally thousands of statements of faith across the centuries. Pelikan’s collection includes several hundred of these, among them the Masai Creed from Nigeria. This creed Africanizes Christianity by declaring that Jesus “was always on safari doing good.” It also declares that after Jesus had been “tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died, he lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day, he rose from the grave. He ascended unto the skies. He is the Lord.”
This creed was brought to Pelikan’s attention by one of his students, a woman who had been a member of a religious order working in a hospital in East Nigeria. Pelikan commented on his reaction to this text: “And so she brought it to me, and I just got shivers, just the thought, you know, the hyenas did not touch him and the act of defiance—God lives even in spite of the hyenas.”
Despair dot com
You know those chintzy motivational posters you see hanging in offices? Here are better ones. Make sure you scroll down the page and look at all the posters. Send your spouse the “Destiny” one; send your little brother “Persistence”.
Dallas Willard: Paralyzed by grace
The Apprentices – Leadership journal – ChristianityTodayLibrary.com
In most churches we’re not only saved by grace, we’re paralyzed by it. We’re afraid to do anything that might be a “work.” The funny thing is we will preach to people for an hour that they can’t do anything to be saved, and then sing to them for a half an hour trying to get them to do something. This is confusing. People need to see that action is a receptacle for grace, not a substitute for it. Grace is God acting in our lives to do things we can’t do on our own. Grace is not opposed to effort; it’s opposed to earning.
