Wednesday, November 28, 2007

A Prayer from Saint Anselm

O Lord my God.
Teach my heart this day
where and how to find you.
You have made me and re-made me,
and you have bestowed on me
all the good things I possess,
and still I do not know you.
I have not yet done
that for which I was made.

Teach me to seek you,
for I cannot seek you
unless you teach me,
or find you
unless you show yourself to me.
Let me seek you in my desire;
let me desire you in my seeking.
Let me find you by loving you;
let me love you when I find you.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Tired of Speaking Sweetly (poem)

God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.
The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.
But when we hear
He is in such a "playful drunken mood"
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town. — Hafiz

Logical Fallacies and Faith

I get into trouble in debates sometimes. I'm perfectly capable of using rational, deductive methods to make my point, but I seem determined to abandon all reason at a certain point in every argument. Sometimes, however, I think faith calls for that. I would never pit faith and reason against each other; they can always work in tandem, and at times when they seem divergent, they seem to me to be occupy such different planes that it's like comparing apples and oranges—or maybe apples and elephants. In any case, I went back and looked up some of those formulaic logical fallacies I learned to avoid in high school philosophy class and found that two of them—appeal to emotion and appeal to tradition—could get me into a lot of trouble with a philosopher but are valuable, maybe even necessary, within Christianity.

The one that gets me most often is the appeal to emotion. I'll follow a logical argument and hold my own for a while, but at a certain point, it all breaks down and I make a flot-out appeal to the other person's heart. I know I can't stop bringing up this issue lately, but the place where thisgets me the most is in the homosexuality debate. I can be convinced by logic of the soundness of church tradition (which will come up later, obviously) and the sanctity of marriage, but in the end I always want to ask—what about Christ's mandate to love your neighbor? What do I do when a dear friend senses a call to ordination and is unable to pursue it—and I don't know whether to support him/her? Although in a strictly logical argument, my comment would be out of line and fallacious, I firmly believe that these questions are vital within Christianity. The way our logic causes us to treat other member of the body of Christ matters a great deal, and so I will not relinquish my insistence on the appeal to emotion even—and especially—when the logic is so sound.

I found it amusing that the appeal to tradition was listed in the fallacies I looked up; I had forgotten about that one. I was recently told by a friend that to resort to tradition (again on the issue of homosexuality) was ultimately a cop-out. I think this is incorrect, and I think this is what the fallacy of appeal to tradition assumes. However, 2,000 years of tradition cannot simply be ignored; we may indeed need to wrestle with it, and sometimes changes should be made—take the ordination of women, for example—but to discount it entirely is foolish and completely against the nature and continuity of the Christian faith over time. In the case of homosexuality, the appeal to emotion and the appeal to tradition both come up a lot and are often at odds one with the other. Both are valuable and need to be considered as more than logical fallacies.

Just to add on to the two fallacies I've discussed, another good one is the Ad Hominem fallacy. This is when an attack is made on the person making an argument, and that attack presumes to make the argument itself invalid. I see this a lot in Christianity. People are often turned off of the church because its members say one thing and do another. Philosophically speaking, hypocritical or inconsistent actions do not discount the credibility of the argument, but in the church, it matters that the words and the actions match up. Certainly no one is going to be able to have a perfect record in any given area; we all struggle with our sexuality in one way or another, so taking the moral high ground should never be the goal or the method of the debate on homosexuality. On one hand, we cannot claim that because Bob is a sinner, Bob cannot tell me not to sin; on the other hand, Bob should be aware of his sin and honest about it, because it does matter.

Just some thoughts about logic and faith I wanted to throw out there...

Friday, November 23, 2007

Thank you, Captain Obvious

I recently had a blog post on Theolog, Christian Century's blog, that was a shorter version of my post on 10/25. One thing I learned through the comments I received (and they came from a variety of people and opinions) is that a lot of people think that it is obvious that (in this example) homosexuality is wrong, or, conversely, that it is obvious that homosexuality is fine. What happens is that you get arguments over full inclusion, ordination and marriage rights among people whose basic assumptions about the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality itself are sharply at odds.

On many issues, though not on the question of homosexuality, I am often one of those people who presumes that certain tenets of the faith are self-evident. A lot of this comes about because I have grown up in the church and am—in some cases, but not all—more familiar with the scriptural and/or theological arguments surrounding an issue than your average person. Once I got to college, I started learning that this tendency towards the obvious is not always helpful. Suddenly I was around intelligent Christians who thought that certain things about faith were perfectly obvious—things about which I thought in polar opposite terms, which I, too, thought were obvious.

One of my friends supports the death penalty from a Christian perspective and claims that its use preserves the right to life. Just hearing this makes my head spin because it seems like such a blatant internal contradiction. However, my friend thinks his reasoning is perfectly sound, and when I counter his point, it's not as if it's the first time he's thought about it from a different perspective—he's heard similar views before, he's thought about it before. I will maintain that his argument is inconsistent, but if I am not careful about how I approach the argument, I shut off all further debate, which seems to me to be ultimately unhelpful.

What this calls for, I think, is a certain level of intellectual generosity—something, I admit, I'm not very good at practicing. Especially on the issue of homosexuality, plenty of people have thought long and hard about it and crafted scripturally based arguments that end up being utterly divergent in many cases. One does not have to relinquish one's own position in order to seek to understand another point of view, and one does not have to agree with the other person, but as Christians I believe it is important that even—and especially—when we hold to seeming extremes of interpretation, we cannot do so without allowing space for the other side to articulate its points, even if we think their ideas ludicrous.

The heart of the Gospel is not that we need to prove ourselves right in opposition to all those who are wrong. I am by no means calling for a wishy-washy universality or relativity of belief (heaven forbid); I am not saying that some things are not ultimately right, because some things are. The Trinity, Christ's death and resurrection, Christ's divinity and humanity—these things, and other dogma outlined in the Nicene Creed, are non-negotiable. However, where it concerns the adiaphora of the Christian faith, we must be able to understand, if not necessarily embrace, other points of view—or risk the fragmentation of Christ's body, the Church.

Friday, November 16, 2007

Confession

I recently went on a retreat with the Catholic Student Center here at Duke. The Awakening retreat happens every semester, and Duke just had their ninth one. Texas A&M, who passed the retreat tradition on to our school, will have Aggie Awakening #82 in the spring.

Although the whole weekend was an incredible experience for me—in ways I could not have anticipated or even hoped for—one thing in particular that we did the first night of Awakening got me thinking. After we had all been introduced, we ate dinner and heard a talk from a fellow student. Then the priest, Father Joe, stood up and announced that we would be participating in the sacrament of reconciliation that night.

I was fascinated. Having grown up United Methodist, I was used to the communal prayer of confession that we say together during worship, so the idea of confessing individually to a priest was new for me. I asked a friend if I could confess even if I were Protestant (the only one there, I should add), and when he said yes, I went in to see one of the priests who were stationed in various rooms around our retreat site.

As soon as I sat down, I announced that I was Protestant and had no idea what I was doing. The priest was very friendly and helpful, explaining the practice of confession to me before listening to me talk. When I was done, he said that they usually assign penance. Penance?! I thought. How cool!! I had to say three Our Fathers and was told to work on a relationship I had confessed to have been neglecting.

Since this experience, I've thought a lot about what it means to confess one's sins, and whether Protestants are missing out on an important part of the Christian life by foregoing individual confession. Certainly to confess the corporate sin of the church in one voice is vital, especially before taking part in the Eucharist. Then, too, many Protestants participate in accountability groups that require them to be honest about their sins and to be held to a standard of Christian living by fellow believers.

I wonder if it would behoove all Christians, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, to confess not only to the sins of the whole body of Christ but also to their own specific sins. Confessing to that priest encouraged me to take specific actions to ameliorate a situation with a loved one. On the ride home, I listened as one of the freshmen I was driving called her parents and asked their permission to take part in an activity about which she had been lying to them. She had confessed this to the priest, he had told her to be truthful with them—and she had done it.

The corporate prayer of confession may be an important way for a worshiping body to acknowledge shared sin, but does it motivate the individual to make real changes to combat his or her own shortcomings? Even if it means doing something as simple as being in truth-telling relationships of Christian accountability, I think Protestants especially ought to explore possibilities for confessing individual sin and being held responsible for answering to them.

This Is My Father's World (hymn)

This is my Father's world.
O let me ne'er forget
That though the wrong seems oft so strong,
God is the ruler yet. — Maltbie D. Babcock

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Equipping the Called (quote)

"God does not call the equipped; he equips the called." — Unknown

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

A Poem by Emily Dickinson

It was too late for Man —
But early, yet, for God —
Creation — impotent to help —
But Prayer — remained — Our Side

How excellent the Heaven —
When Earth — cannot be had —
How hospitable — then — the face
Of our Old Neighbor — God —

"Miss Emily D," as my professor calls her

Peace Is the Opposite of Security (quote)

"How does peace come about? Through a system of political treaties? Through the investment of international capital in different countries? Through the big banks, through money? Or through universal peaceful rearmament in order to guarantee peace? Through none of these, for the single reason that in all of them peace is confused with safety. There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared. It is the great venture. It can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to mistrust, and this mistrust in turn brings forth war. To look for guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means to give oneself altogether to the law of God, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of Almighty God, not trying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won where the way leads to the cross. Which of us can say he or she knows what it might mean for the world if one nation should meet the aggressor, not with weapons in hand, but praying, defenseless, and for that very reason protected by 'a bulwark never failing'?" — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Church and the People of the World

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Tegel prison, summer 1944

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

A Prayer from Saint Anselm

O Lord my God.
Teach my heart this day
where and how to find you.
You have made me and re-made me,
and you have bestowed on me
all the good things I possess,
and still I do not know you.
I have not yet done
that for which I was made.

Teach me to seek you,
for I cannot seek you
unless you teach me,
or find you
unless you show yourself to me.
Let me seek you in my desire;
let me desire you in my seeking.
Let me find you by loving you;
let me love you when I find you.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Tired of Speaking Sweetly (poem)

God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.
The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.
But when we hear
He is in such a "playful drunken mood"
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town. — Hafiz

Logical Fallacies and Faith

I get into trouble in debates sometimes. I'm perfectly capable of using rational, deductive methods to make my point, but I seem determined to abandon all reason at a certain point in every argument. Sometimes, however, I think faith calls for that. I would never pit faith and reason against each other; they can always work in tandem, and at times when they seem divergent, they seem to me to be occupy such different planes that it's like comparing apples and oranges—or maybe apples and elephants. In any case, I went back and looked up some of those formulaic logical fallacies I learned to avoid in high school philosophy class and found that two of them—appeal to emotion and appeal to tradition—could get me into a lot of trouble with a philosopher but are valuable, maybe even necessary, within Christianity.

The one that gets me most often is the appeal to emotion. I'll follow a logical argument and hold my own for a while, but at a certain point, it all breaks down and I make a flot-out appeal to the other person's heart. I know I can't stop bringing up this issue lately, but the place where thisgets me the most is in the homosexuality debate. I can be convinced by logic of the soundness of church tradition (which will come up later, obviously) and the sanctity of marriage, but in the end I always want to ask—what about Christ's mandate to love your neighbor? What do I do when a dear friend senses a call to ordination and is unable to pursue it—and I don't know whether to support him/her? Although in a strictly logical argument, my comment would be out of line and fallacious, I firmly believe that these questions are vital within Christianity. The way our logic causes us to treat other member of the body of Christ matters a great deal, and so I will not relinquish my insistence on the appeal to emotion even—and especially—when the logic is so sound.

I found it amusing that the appeal to tradition was listed in the fallacies I looked up; I had forgotten about that one. I was recently told by a friend that to resort to tradition (again on the issue of homosexuality) was ultimately a cop-out. I think this is incorrect, and I think this is what the fallacy of appeal to tradition assumes. However, 2,000 years of tradition cannot simply be ignored; we may indeed need to wrestle with it, and sometimes changes should be made—take the ordination of women, for example—but to discount it entirely is foolish and completely against the nature and continuity of the Christian faith over time. In the case of homosexuality, the appeal to emotion and the appeal to tradition both come up a lot and are often at odds one with the other. Both are valuable and need to be considered as more than logical fallacies.

Just to add on to the two fallacies I've discussed, another good one is the Ad Hominem fallacy. This is when an attack is made on the person making an argument, and that attack presumes to make the argument itself invalid. I see this a lot in Christianity. People are often turned off of the church because its members say one thing and do another. Philosophically speaking, hypocritical or inconsistent actions do not discount the credibility of the argument, but in the church, it matters that the words and the actions match up. Certainly no one is going to be able to have a perfect record in any given area; we all struggle with our sexuality in one way or another, so taking the moral high ground should never be the goal or the method of the debate on homosexuality. On one hand, we cannot claim that because Bob is a sinner, Bob cannot tell me not to sin; on the other hand, Bob should be aware of his sin and honest about it, because it does matter.

Just some thoughts about logic and faith I wanted to throw out there...

Friday, November 23, 2007

Thank you, Captain Obvious

I recently had a blog post on Theolog, Christian Century's blog, that was a shorter version of my post on 10/25. One thing I learned through the comments I received (and they came from a variety of people and opinions) is that a lot of people think that it is obvious that (in this example) homosexuality is wrong, or, conversely, that it is obvious that homosexuality is fine. What happens is that you get arguments over full inclusion, ordination and marriage rights among people whose basic assumptions about the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality itself are sharply at odds.

On many issues, though not on the question of homosexuality, I am often one of those people who presumes that certain tenets of the faith are self-evident. A lot of this comes about because I have grown up in the church and am—in some cases, but not all—more familiar with the scriptural and/or theological arguments surrounding an issue than your average person. Once I got to college, I started learning that this tendency towards the obvious is not always helpful. Suddenly I was around intelligent Christians who thought that certain things about faith were perfectly obvious—things about which I thought in polar opposite terms, which I, too, thought were obvious.

One of my friends supports the death penalty from a Christian perspective and claims that its use preserves the right to life. Just hearing this makes my head spin because it seems like such a blatant internal contradiction. However, my friend thinks his reasoning is perfectly sound, and when I counter his point, it's not as if it's the first time he's thought about it from a different perspective—he's heard similar views before, he's thought about it before. I will maintain that his argument is inconsistent, but if I am not careful about how I approach the argument, I shut off all further debate, which seems to me to be ultimately unhelpful.

What this calls for, I think, is a certain level of intellectual generosity—something, I admit, I'm not very good at practicing. Especially on the issue of homosexuality, plenty of people have thought long and hard about it and crafted scripturally based arguments that end up being utterly divergent in many cases. One does not have to relinquish one's own position in order to seek to understand another point of view, and one does not have to agree with the other person, but as Christians I believe it is important that even—and especially—when we hold to seeming extremes of interpretation, we cannot do so without allowing space for the other side to articulate its points, even if we think their ideas ludicrous.

The heart of the Gospel is not that we need to prove ourselves right in opposition to all those who are wrong. I am by no means calling for a wishy-washy universality or relativity of belief (heaven forbid); I am not saying that some things are not ultimately right, because some things are. The Trinity, Christ's death and resurrection, Christ's divinity and humanity—these things, and other dogma outlined in the Nicene Creed, are non-negotiable. However, where it concerns the adiaphora of the Christian faith, we must be able to understand, if not necessarily embrace, other points of view—or risk the fragmentation of Christ's body, the Church.

Friday, November 16, 2007

Confession

I recently went on a retreat with the Catholic Student Center here at Duke. The Awakening retreat happens every semester, and Duke just had their ninth one. Texas A&M, who passed the retreat tradition on to our school, will have Aggie Awakening #82 in the spring.

Although the whole weekend was an incredible experience for me—in ways I could not have anticipated or even hoped for—one thing in particular that we did the first night of Awakening got me thinking. After we had all been introduced, we ate dinner and heard a talk from a fellow student. Then the priest, Father Joe, stood up and announced that we would be participating in the sacrament of reconciliation that night.

I was fascinated. Having grown up United Methodist, I was used to the communal prayer of confession that we say together during worship, so the idea of confessing individually to a priest was new for me. I asked a friend if I could confess even if I were Protestant (the only one there, I should add), and when he said yes, I went in to see one of the priests who were stationed in various rooms around our retreat site.

As soon as I sat down, I announced that I was Protestant and had no idea what I was doing. The priest was very friendly and helpful, explaining the practice of confession to me before listening to me talk. When I was done, he said that they usually assign penance. Penance?! I thought. How cool!! I had to say three Our Fathers and was told to work on a relationship I had confessed to have been neglecting.

Since this experience, I've thought a lot about what it means to confess one's sins, and whether Protestants are missing out on an important part of the Christian life by foregoing individual confession. Certainly to confess the corporate sin of the church in one voice is vital, especially before taking part in the Eucharist. Then, too, many Protestants participate in accountability groups that require them to be honest about their sins and to be held to a standard of Christian living by fellow believers.

I wonder if it would behoove all Christians, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, to confess not only to the sins of the whole body of Christ but also to their own specific sins. Confessing to that priest encouraged me to take specific actions to ameliorate a situation with a loved one. On the ride home, I listened as one of the freshmen I was driving called her parents and asked their permission to take part in an activity about which she had been lying to them. She had confessed this to the priest, he had told her to be truthful with them—and she had done it.

The corporate prayer of confession may be an important way for a worshiping body to acknowledge shared sin, but does it motivate the individual to make real changes to combat his or her own shortcomings? Even if it means doing something as simple as being in truth-telling relationships of Christian accountability, I think Protestants especially ought to explore possibilities for confessing individual sin and being held responsible for answering to them.

This Is My Father's World (hymn)

This is my Father's world.
O let me ne'er forget
That though the wrong seems oft so strong,
God is the ruler yet. — Maltbie D. Babcock

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Equipping the Called (quote)

"God does not call the equipped; he equips the called." — Unknown

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

A Poem by Emily Dickinson

It was too late for Man —
But early, yet, for God —
Creation — impotent to help —
But Prayer — remained — Our Side

How excellent the Heaven —
When Earth — cannot be had —
How hospitable — then — the face
Of our Old Neighbor — God —

"Miss Emily D," as my professor calls her

Peace Is the Opposite of Security (quote)

"How does peace come about? Through a system of political treaties? Through the investment of international capital in different countries? Through the big banks, through money? Or through universal peaceful rearmament in order to guarantee peace? Through none of these, for the single reason that in all of them peace is confused with safety. There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared. It is the great venture. It can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to mistrust, and this mistrust in turn brings forth war. To look for guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means to give oneself altogether to the law of God, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of Almighty God, not trying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won where the way leads to the cross. Which of us can say he or she knows what it might mean for the world if one nation should meet the aggressor, not with weapons in hand, but praying, defenseless, and for that very reason protected by 'a bulwark never failing'?" — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Church and the People of the World

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Tegel prison, summer 1944

 

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