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The War on Advent
Nov. 26th, 2017 10:03 pmToday is Stir-Up Sunday (technically the "Sunday Next Before Advent"), the classic day for steaming plum pudding. I would like to take this opportunity, as the days grow shorter and fake greenery fills the downtown merchants' windows, to take a stand against relatively recent developments in the long-running war on Advent.
Advent is a season of observance with roots dating back to late antiquity, although not as old as the feast for which it is a preparation. It has been watered down somewhat in the last few centuries - it used to be a true fast season, but is now generally treated as a season "of expectation".
Except in some Anglican, Lutheran, and Catholic circles, it has generally had to suffer under a kind of benign neglect. Indeed, it's been more or less under siege for some time. (This is less true in England, where Eric Milner-White's invention of the Advent Carol Service has a larger space in the common awareness, courtesy of the BBC.)
However, a particularly ill-informed assault on Advent has developed in the last few years. Instead of accepting the neutral "Happy Holidays" (and Advent, though not festal, has a claim to be holy) some ill-informed types are aggressively assaulting it by insisting on injecting "Merry Christmas" weeks before its proper time (which is, after all, after midnight on December 24).
This assault should not be tolerated. A suggested appropriate response would be to point out that "it's still Advent", and hand over, as a gesture of goodwill, a song-sheet with "Conditor Alme Siderum" and "Jordanis oras praevia" for their perusal.
Not Angels, but Anglicans
Jan. 18th, 2016 02:16 pmSo the primates of the Anglican Communion have imposed some minor sanctions on the ECUSA (essentially booting it off some committees -- stronger sanctions were voted on but failed 15 to 20) for allowing a redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples. No steps were taken regarding other churches within the Anglican Communion which, at least de facto, allow for same-sex blessings.
The oddity of this may be summarized by saying that the groups pushing for sanctions do not recognize marriage as a sacrament -- they are overwhelmingly Evangelical and Protestant, and, now that Rowan Williams has gone, there may be no primate firmly enough in the Anglo-Catholic camp to worry about the special status of marriage, derived from its sacramentality, per se, which is the only concern specifically addressed by this particular line in the sand.
There's a whole sheaf of issues which swirl around the question of the sacramentality of marriage in the Church, and there are a number of ways of framing them.
One is to point out that the solemnization of marriage was not (until after the Reformation) a function of the clergy (this changed with the Anglican Canon Law and in the Roman decree Tametsi both of which were put in place to put social control on the problem of forced or "unauthorized" marriages (i.e. elopements). This has led to the proposal in some quarters (to which I am sympathetic) that the Church should get out of the business of conducting marriages altogether, leaving that to the state (following the Civil Law model) and merely bless unions once created. (See, for example, Mtr. Maggie Helwig's submission to the Commission on the Marriage Canon (PDF warning).) This recognizes that in this day when most marriages are by licence (and where the licence is a superior control to that provided by the traditional banns) the rationale for a clerical involvement in the marriage itself (as opposed to a blessing or recognition of the union) is long past.
This neatly sidesteps the immediate practical problem regarding having to make a decision regarding how to treat civil same-sex unions from a sacramental position. It remains open to somebody concerned about this to treat a same-sex blessing as a sacramental with a similar external form to the sacrament of marriage, just as a blessing of a "traditional" marriage by the church would be another sacramental (the marriage, the sacrament itself, having been performed outside the church). It means that discussion about marriage as a sacrament become a side-issue to the broader social justice issues.
There are two problems with this. The first is that it is unlikely to be adopted: Mtr. Helwig's submission was not picked up by the final report of the commission, and the sentimental / social attachment to marriage in a church setting is too strong to get it easily accepted. The second is that taking as a ground to stand on the historical fact that requiring solemnizations of marriage "by" the Church is a late development ignores the fact that the Church was heavily involved in the regulation of marriage after the ceremony (not only in its handling of annulments but in e.g. the regulation of allowed periods during which sexual activity was curtailed such as Lent). (See Haw, The State of Matrimony for a treatment of the rules regarding marriage and annulment in the late mediaeval and early modern English Church.) The "clericalization" of marriage is not directly tied to the church's concern with marriage. Even if we push the period of focus back to the late Roman period, and shortly after, when the actual rules governing marriage were those of the old Roman Law (or Germanic customary law in some cases: see Julia M.H. Smith, Europe After Rome, for some discussion of this) the theological analysis of marriage was built up on a different basis.
It is sometimes said that marriage was a civil institution which the church recognized and (eventually) treated as a sacrament. This is not really true. In none of the relevant contexts for the Church in the first four centuries could marriage have been considered purely "civil". Jewish marriage customs and rules followed the Jewish Law, which was emphatically religious; the Roman marriage was equally grounded in (pagan) religion, as it treats the family as a cultus of which the paterfamilias is a domestic priest (see La Cité Antique by Fustel de Coulanges). However, it is certainly true that the institution of marriage as Paul found it (critically Paul, as his writings on marriage are the primary basis on which a sacramental understanding has been built) was one having an existence external to and independent of the Church. And the Dominical words regarding marriage (which the East has taken as one of the counsels of perfection and the traditional West as binding legislation) make no claims about the institutional nature, or the specific implications of the vows themselves.
This is where things begin to become interesting, long before we get to the issue of the sacramentality of same-sex unions. What Paul extracts from the institution of marriage as he encounters it, and what was common to "marriage" in its various forms from Jewish through Hellenistic to Roman, through the Germanic period and that of Christendom until the last half century of so is the idea that an essential inequality in the relationship whereby the husband is dominant but loving ("the head") and the wife is submissive and loving is a sacramental mirror of the relationship between Christ and the Church, and more generally between the human and the divine. The sacramental theology of marriage has been built on this particular feature.
However, just as the previously unquestioned assumption that a primary purpose of matrimony was "for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name" began to be questioned in the early 20th Century (note the Lambeth declaration on contraceptives as early as 1930) and has now run head on into issues of overpopulation as a violation of the stewardship of the earth, so the assumptions of the inherent inequality of women within the estate marriage have been under attack for well over a century (the first Married Woman's Property Act, which deep-sixed the concept of coverture, was passed by the Imperial Parliament in 1882), and it would be fair to say that in much of the West (or at least the urban West -- there are definitely holdouts such as the Southern Baptists) the majority view of marriage is that it is a relationship between equals. (It would not be overdoing it to say, though, that this is still an ongoing war, given the virulence of the dismissive and/or abusive language directed at women in many fora who act as equals in general social contexts, let alone marriage.)
You can see the traces of this changing in the early parts of Busman's Honeymoon where Peter and Harriet are arguing over using the 1662 or the 1928/1929 marriage vows (which removed the word "obey"). It is on that changed underlying understanding of marriage that same-sex unions are based, socially and in law.
Does the "matter" of the sacrament, the one that Paul knew, continue to exist with such a changed understanding? Or is it the case that an inherently "better" (on other grounds) state as a norm has succeeded it (one which can at most claim to be a sacramental, with a special status as a successor to one of the seven sacraments? Because the Dominical commendation of marriage is not the basis of the way in which its sacramentality has been understood, and it is not an exclusive statement.
Yet this is effectively the particular line in the sand that the Primates' meeting drew. It will please nobody: the conservative block do not regard it as nearly enough: they want a thoroughgoing purge of the liberals, along with an equally thoroughgoing protestantization of the Anglican Communion -- many of the really conservative ACs have already left for Rome or points East and are not a significant force outside Forward in Faith in the UK, and they are probably the only conservative group for which a defence of marriage as a sacrament is likely to be the primary issue (in principle, ACs on the left can share the same concern while generally supporting LGBTQIA-friendly endeavours in just about every other way. The progressive block is outraged at this level of sanction and given the history of social change (in England in particular) on this matter and there will still be the question of what to do when the three-year sanction of the ECUSA is finished.
The oddity of this may be summarized by saying that the groups pushing for sanctions do not recognize marriage as a sacrament -- they are overwhelmingly Evangelical and Protestant, and, now that Rowan Williams has gone, there may be no primate firmly enough in the Anglo-Catholic camp to worry about the special status of marriage, derived from its sacramentality, per se, which is the only concern specifically addressed by this particular line in the sand.
There's a whole sheaf of issues which swirl around the question of the sacramentality of marriage in the Church, and there are a number of ways of framing them.
One is to point out that the solemnization of marriage was not (until after the Reformation) a function of the clergy (this changed with the Anglican Canon Law and in the Roman decree Tametsi both of which were put in place to put social control on the problem of forced or "unauthorized" marriages (i.e. elopements). This has led to the proposal in some quarters (to which I am sympathetic) that the Church should get out of the business of conducting marriages altogether, leaving that to the state (following the Civil Law model) and merely bless unions once created. (See, for example, Mtr. Maggie Helwig's submission to the Commission on the Marriage Canon (PDF warning).) This recognizes that in this day when most marriages are by licence (and where the licence is a superior control to that provided by the traditional banns) the rationale for a clerical involvement in the marriage itself (as opposed to a blessing or recognition of the union) is long past.
This neatly sidesteps the immediate practical problem regarding having to make a decision regarding how to treat civil same-sex unions from a sacramental position. It remains open to somebody concerned about this to treat a same-sex blessing as a sacramental with a similar external form to the sacrament of marriage, just as a blessing of a "traditional" marriage by the church would be another sacramental (the marriage, the sacrament itself, having been performed outside the church). It means that discussion about marriage as a sacrament become a side-issue to the broader social justice issues.
There are two problems with this. The first is that it is unlikely to be adopted: Mtr. Helwig's submission was not picked up by the final report of the commission, and the sentimental / social attachment to marriage in a church setting is too strong to get it easily accepted. The second is that taking as a ground to stand on the historical fact that requiring solemnizations of marriage "by" the Church is a late development ignores the fact that the Church was heavily involved in the regulation of marriage after the ceremony (not only in its handling of annulments but in e.g. the regulation of allowed periods during which sexual activity was curtailed such as Lent). (See Haw, The State of Matrimony for a treatment of the rules regarding marriage and annulment in the late mediaeval and early modern English Church.) The "clericalization" of marriage is not directly tied to the church's concern with marriage. Even if we push the period of focus back to the late Roman period, and shortly after, when the actual rules governing marriage were those of the old Roman Law (or Germanic customary law in some cases: see Julia M.H. Smith, Europe After Rome, for some discussion of this) the theological analysis of marriage was built up on a different basis.
It is sometimes said that marriage was a civil institution which the church recognized and (eventually) treated as a sacrament. This is not really true. In none of the relevant contexts for the Church in the first four centuries could marriage have been considered purely "civil". Jewish marriage customs and rules followed the Jewish Law, which was emphatically religious; the Roman marriage was equally grounded in (pagan) religion, as it treats the family as a cultus of which the paterfamilias is a domestic priest (see La Cité Antique by Fustel de Coulanges). However, it is certainly true that the institution of marriage as Paul found it (critically Paul, as his writings on marriage are the primary basis on which a sacramental understanding has been built) was one having an existence external to and independent of the Church. And the Dominical words regarding marriage (which the East has taken as one of the counsels of perfection and the traditional West as binding legislation) make no claims about the institutional nature, or the specific implications of the vows themselves.
This is where things begin to become interesting, long before we get to the issue of the sacramentality of same-sex unions. What Paul extracts from the institution of marriage as he encounters it, and what was common to "marriage" in its various forms from Jewish through Hellenistic to Roman, through the Germanic period and that of Christendom until the last half century of so is the idea that an essential inequality in the relationship whereby the husband is dominant but loving ("the head") and the wife is submissive and loving is a sacramental mirror of the relationship between Christ and the Church, and more generally between the human and the divine. The sacramental theology of marriage has been built on this particular feature.
However, just as the previously unquestioned assumption that a primary purpose of matrimony was "for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name" began to be questioned in the early 20th Century (note the Lambeth declaration on contraceptives as early as 1930) and has now run head on into issues of overpopulation as a violation of the stewardship of the earth, so the assumptions of the inherent inequality of women within the estate marriage have been under attack for well over a century (the first Married Woman's Property Act, which deep-sixed the concept of coverture, was passed by the Imperial Parliament in 1882), and it would be fair to say that in much of the West (or at least the urban West -- there are definitely holdouts such as the Southern Baptists) the majority view of marriage is that it is a relationship between equals. (It would not be overdoing it to say, though, that this is still an ongoing war, given the virulence of the dismissive and/or abusive language directed at women in many fora who act as equals in general social contexts, let alone marriage.)
You can see the traces of this changing in the early parts of Busman's Honeymoon where Peter and Harriet are arguing over using the 1662 or the 1928/1929 marriage vows (which removed the word "obey"). It is on that changed underlying understanding of marriage that same-sex unions are based, socially and in law.
Does the "matter" of the sacrament, the one that Paul knew, continue to exist with such a changed understanding? Or is it the case that an inherently "better" (on other grounds) state as a norm has succeeded it (one which can at most claim to be a sacramental, with a special status as a successor to one of the seven sacraments? Because the Dominical commendation of marriage is not the basis of the way in which its sacramentality has been understood, and it is not an exclusive statement.
Yet this is effectively the particular line in the sand that the Primates' meeting drew. It will please nobody: the conservative block do not regard it as nearly enough: they want a thoroughgoing purge of the liberals, along with an equally thoroughgoing protestantization of the Anglican Communion -- many of the really conservative ACs have already left for Rome or points East and are not a significant force outside Forward in Faith in the UK, and they are probably the only conservative group for which a defence of marriage as a sacrament is likely to be the primary issue (in principle, ACs on the left can share the same concern while generally supporting LGBTQIA-friendly endeavours in just about every other way. The progressive block is outraged at this level of sanction and given the history of social change (in England in particular) on this matter and there will still be the question of what to do when the three-year sanction of the ECUSA is finished.
Inveni David: Inexpert Reflections
Jul. 13th, 2015 05:14 pmIt being Year B in the Revised Common Lectionary, we've been getting highlights of the career of David in (one version of) the OT lesson.
The David (and Solomonic) material in 2 Samuel is ... interesting. There is a modern archaeological school which would deny any historicity at all to David. (Up until the discovery of the Tel Dan Stele in the 1990s there was no archaeological evidence even for the "House of David" contemporary with its existence.) More moderate archaeologists, while entirely willing to grant that David and Solomon may very well have existed, have identified serious disconnects between the archaeological record and the building programmes associated with the two. At the same time, there is also a school of textual study which would identify the core of the narrative with a contemporary or near-contemporary "Court Historian", and sees it as a development of historical writing independent of Herodotus. ("Near-contemporary" might mean that the narrative was first assembled under Solomon or one of his immediate successors, (much of the narrative can be seen as either indicating why Solomon's own line of descent is firm (the Bathsheba story, while negative as regards David's ethical character, establishes Solomon as the child of a formalized marriage) or why the other potential lines are not attractive (the Michal and Absolom stories)).
For any part of the narrative, there are at least four possibilities: it goes back to an original source within living memory of the events; it was assembled later based on oral recollections; it is a composition dating from early in the monarchical period; it is a late composition by the Deuteronomistic school (which assembled the current books of Samuel and Kings). In any of these cases except the last, there is the certainty that the text was chosen, shaped and probably enhanced[1] by the Deuteronomist[s].
Any given text may reflect multiple reasons for being shaped as it is.
The items that caught my attention involved the anointings of David. There are actually two referred to: one which looks as though it came out of a standard chronicle ("So all the elders of Israel came to the king at Hebron; and King David made a covenant with them at Hebron before the LORD, and they anointed David king over Israel. David was thirty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned forty years. At Hebron he reigned over Judah seven years and six months; and at Jerusalem he reigned over all Israel and Judah thirty-three years.") and one, more famous, in which Samuel anoints David as a young man, long before he came to prominence as a military leader, which definitely does not read like a standard chronicle.
For the Deuteronomist, the story of Samuel's anointing of David served a straightforward purpose: it validates the line of David in general with a direct link to the pre-monarchical prophets, and it makes the Davidic line's claim to the throne dependent on Yahweh (and implicitly on the Yahwist cultus) only. (The following narrative makes it clear that whatever sacral claim David could make, it was also very much driven by his success as a military leader.) This theme is reinforced by the authority of Nathan to rebuke David (in the Bathsheba episode) -- and note that Nathan is one of the anointers of Solomon when he gains the kingship. This is the flip side of denying success to later kings who were known to have been polytheistic or at least tolerant of multiple cults, or even supportive of modes of worship which were not centred on the Temple in Jerusalem.
The original context of the story is a more interesting question. Even assuming a relatively high degree of historicity in the core David narrative, it's hard to see David, or even Solomon, wanting to push a narrative which cedes the power of making and unmaking kings entirely to the Yahwistic cultus, and (like the Goliath story, which is equally likely to be a story either composed for or transferred from another figure (Elhanan) to David -- in the Goliath story the differences between the Septuagint and Masoretic texts show the process continuing after the composition of the Books of Samuel) it is not connected at all directly to the court narrative from David's/Solomon's own day. David would have been far more likely to stress memes along the lines of "Saul hath slain his thousands and David his ten thousands" rather than an early anointing by Samuel as a basis for ruling. Its only function would be to defend against a continuing claim by the party that supported Saul regarding David's legitimacy -- Samuel bestowed Saul's legitimacy and he then took it away; but as David seems to have been careful to eliminate claimants from Saul's family to the throne (while disavowing responsibility for the actual killing), and as he had a perfectly good sacral claim based on his anointing at Hebron, that is also not very convincing.
A few generations later, however, it may have been convenient for the post-Rehoboam Kings of Judah as a way of improving their claim over against Israel to publicise, or circulate in an official capacity, the story with a possibly folkloric origin. (Certainly there is a folkloric element to this anointing which is kept secret by Samuel because he is afraid of Saul being later produced as a validation of David's legitimacy.) And it was always in the interest of the Yahwistic cultus to provide a narrative which gave primacy to their authority.
Original context for these stories will have been reformulated during the Deuteronomistic composition: bits scraped off, other bits attached.
For what it's worth, the Psalms form an independent witness that the anointing of David was a cultic focus to some degree ("I have found David my servant: with my holy oil have I anointed him"), although the dating of the psalm is uncertain: there is some disagreement over whether it should be considered pre or post-exilic. It later, of course, became an even more major focus, as it is at the root of the post-exilic development of the figure of a messiah of the House of David.
[1]Certainly much of the text describing Solomonic building has to have been added much later and assigns him construction which took place much later than Solomon; there is no reason to believe that the David story is any less enhanced by later redaction.
The David (and Solomonic) material in 2 Samuel is ... interesting. There is a modern archaeological school which would deny any historicity at all to David. (Up until the discovery of the Tel Dan Stele in the 1990s there was no archaeological evidence even for the "House of David" contemporary with its existence.) More moderate archaeologists, while entirely willing to grant that David and Solomon may very well have existed, have identified serious disconnects between the archaeological record and the building programmes associated with the two. At the same time, there is also a school of textual study which would identify the core of the narrative with a contemporary or near-contemporary "Court Historian", and sees it as a development of historical writing independent of Herodotus. ("Near-contemporary" might mean that the narrative was first assembled under Solomon or one of his immediate successors, (much of the narrative can be seen as either indicating why Solomon's own line of descent is firm (the Bathsheba story, while negative as regards David's ethical character, establishes Solomon as the child of a formalized marriage) or why the other potential lines are not attractive (the Michal and Absolom stories)).
For any part of the narrative, there are at least four possibilities: it goes back to an original source within living memory of the events; it was assembled later based on oral recollections; it is a composition dating from early in the monarchical period; it is a late composition by the Deuteronomistic school (which assembled the current books of Samuel and Kings). In any of these cases except the last, there is the certainty that the text was chosen, shaped and probably enhanced[1] by the Deuteronomist[s].
Any given text may reflect multiple reasons for being shaped as it is.
The items that caught my attention involved the anointings of David. There are actually two referred to: one which looks as though it came out of a standard chronicle ("So all the elders of Israel came to the king at Hebron; and King David made a covenant with them at Hebron before the LORD, and they anointed David king over Israel. David was thirty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned forty years. At Hebron he reigned over Judah seven years and six months; and at Jerusalem he reigned over all Israel and Judah thirty-three years.") and one, more famous, in which Samuel anoints David as a young man, long before he came to prominence as a military leader, which definitely does not read like a standard chronicle.
For the Deuteronomist, the story of Samuel's anointing of David served a straightforward purpose: it validates the line of David in general with a direct link to the pre-monarchical prophets, and it makes the Davidic line's claim to the throne dependent on Yahweh (and implicitly on the Yahwist cultus) only. (The following narrative makes it clear that whatever sacral claim David could make, it was also very much driven by his success as a military leader.) This theme is reinforced by the authority of Nathan to rebuke David (in the Bathsheba episode) -- and note that Nathan is one of the anointers of Solomon when he gains the kingship. This is the flip side of denying success to later kings who were known to have been polytheistic or at least tolerant of multiple cults, or even supportive of modes of worship which were not centred on the Temple in Jerusalem.
The original context of the story is a more interesting question. Even assuming a relatively high degree of historicity in the core David narrative, it's hard to see David, or even Solomon, wanting to push a narrative which cedes the power of making and unmaking kings entirely to the Yahwistic cultus, and (like the Goliath story, which is equally likely to be a story either composed for or transferred from another figure (Elhanan) to David -- in the Goliath story the differences between the Septuagint and Masoretic texts show the process continuing after the composition of the Books of Samuel) it is not connected at all directly to the court narrative from David's/Solomon's own day. David would have been far more likely to stress memes along the lines of "Saul hath slain his thousands and David his ten thousands" rather than an early anointing by Samuel as a basis for ruling. Its only function would be to defend against a continuing claim by the party that supported Saul regarding David's legitimacy -- Samuel bestowed Saul's legitimacy and he then took it away; but as David seems to have been careful to eliminate claimants from Saul's family to the throne (while disavowing responsibility for the actual killing), and as he had a perfectly good sacral claim based on his anointing at Hebron, that is also not very convincing.
A few generations later, however, it may have been convenient for the post-Rehoboam Kings of Judah as a way of improving their claim over against Israel to publicise, or circulate in an official capacity, the story with a possibly folkloric origin. (Certainly there is a folkloric element to this anointing which is kept secret by Samuel because he is afraid of Saul being later produced as a validation of David's legitimacy.) And it was always in the interest of the Yahwistic cultus to provide a narrative which gave primacy to their authority.
Original context for these stories will have been reformulated during the Deuteronomistic composition: bits scraped off, other bits attached.
For what it's worth, the Psalms form an independent witness that the anointing of David was a cultic focus to some degree ("I have found David my servant: with my holy oil have I anointed him"), although the dating of the psalm is uncertain: there is some disagreement over whether it should be considered pre or post-exilic. It later, of course, became an even more major focus, as it is at the root of the post-exilic development of the figure of a messiah of the House of David.
[1]Certainly much of the text describing Solomonic building has to have been added much later and assigns him construction which took place much later than Solomon; there is no reason to believe that the David story is any less enhanced by later redaction.
On Monday night, Rob Ford appears to have blanketed the 416 area code with robocalls, timed just to irritate observant Jews at a Passover seder.
These were pushing his campaign launch, which takes place ... tonight, which is Maundy Thursday, when observant Catholics will be at the Mandatum, and where most observant Christians of any sort are heading into Good Friday.
So his campaign seems to be going out, if not to alienate, then to irritate, religious potential voters, or at least a large block of them.
These were pushing his campaign launch, which takes place ... tonight, which is Maundy Thursday, when observant Catholics will be at the Mandatum, and where most observant Christians of any sort are heading into Good Friday.
So his campaign seems to be going out, if not to alienate, then to irritate, religious potential voters, or at least a large block of them.
Sometimes even cradle RCs get it wrong
Mar. 11th, 2014 10:03 amFrom Tim Powers' Declare, referring to the 1920s:
"On Easter, Andrew and his mother would attend midnight Easter Vigil Mass at Stow-on-the-Wold..."
In the 1920s, universally, the Easter Vigil was held at 11:00 AM on Holy Saturday morning, allowing the Triduum fast to end at 12:00 noon. It was not restored to its midnight position until the mid-1950s.
(AC use varied: some parishes followed the Sacred Congregations strictly; SMM, at least by the 1940s, had the vigil late on Saturday afternoon "followed by a spaghetti supper", according to an informant who was there. But no RC parish would have had Vigil at midnight.)
"On Easter, Andrew and his mother would attend midnight Easter Vigil Mass at Stow-on-the-Wold..."
In the 1920s, universally, the Easter Vigil was held at 11:00 AM on Holy Saturday morning, allowing the Triduum fast to end at 12:00 noon. It was not restored to its midnight position until the mid-1950s.
(AC use varied: some parishes followed the Sacred Congregations strictly; SMM, at least by the 1940s, had the vigil late on Saturday afternoon "followed by a spaghetti supper", according to an informant who was there. But no RC parish would have had Vigil at midnight.)
I would like to say at the outset that the book is, overall, valuable and readable. Its general overview of scribal culture in a broadly pre-literate society [1] is an effective summary (confined to middle-eastern sources, admittedly), and many of its general observations regarding the composition of the books of the bible are of equal use.
However, van der Toorn seems to want to jump to conclusions in ways which make it inevitable that some of his conclusions, although possible, are by no means as inevitable as he makes them look; and in other cases, he doesn't seem to think things through carefully. Possible counter-positions are not set out and middle stages in arguments are missing. This may be the result of directing the book towards a general audience rather than a scholarly one, with a consequent over-attempt to make the text more easily readable.
Other reviewers have noted that his situating of the biblical scribes in the temple as opposed to the palace is highly reliant on post-Exilic evidence and is not nearly as well-founded as one moves earlier. I'll come back to this when we get to Deuteronomy.
I would like to point out as a more fundamental problem his model of the issuing of editions. He wants to see the MS of a major text as being not only private to the scribal caste but also existing in only one unique copy (so that when that copy is re-copied on wearing out there would be an automatic "new edition" created without competing exemplars).
He has not thought this through. For a text such as Deuteronomy, which is a law text, copies need to be available for local judges to refer to. You can't run a law system with a single central copy of a critical master text. Of course, by the same token, a text which has not been completely "canonized" but which is a reference document can be recalled and reissued as a working text when updated, just as we republish the Criminal Code every year for reference, so in the earlier period the distinction may make a minimal difference. Indeed, a law text in actual use and reflecting a broadly casuistic system pretty well has to be regularly reissued as new instances come up and are decided. (I think he also underestimates the likelihood of a higher degree of substantial variation between the versions of the books in the pre-Masoretic period.)
In addition, I think it unlikely that control over texts operated in the same way during the Exilic period than either before or after. At that time it may very well have been the case that texts held by Levites in exile might have had a much more minimal circulation, since there was no social infrastructure of which they were part.
So, to his treatment of Deuteronomy. His model of re-editions for this book looks to be broadly persuasive in terms of its thematic traits for each level, as well as his observations regarding additions appearing at interstitial points, beginnings and endings[2]. However, there seems to be no very good reason for seeing the original edition — focussed principally on the promulgation of the Josianic reforms — as having an origin in the temple cultus rather than the royal palace — indeed, on the plausible possibility that the Josianic reforms were driven from the palace rather than the temple, it would make more sense as a palace production. (He also skips over what to me is the most interesting question about Deuteronomy, which is the relation of its text to prior oral or written sources, although he handwaves at the relation of part of it to the older texts in Exodus.) The "Torah" and "History" editions (which he plausibly places during the exile on internal evidence) would have been developed outside the Temple context as an ideal text, not as an active law text, as would the "Wisdom" edition. The factor which set the choice of version of text in stone and finally displaced the others would then have been (following his own later argument) the choice of this fourth edition as the version which Ezra included in his Torah to be used as the local law under the Persian authority. In this case he needs no special mechanism to explain the supersession of the earlier versions.
He also makes broad jumps of logic in treating Jeremiah as a type of the prophetic literature. He seems to be quite ready to jump from the specific example of Baruch's relation to Jeremiah to a general scribal / prophetic relationship, despite the facts that (1) the example of Baruch has no explicit parallel in any other prophetic texts and (2) Jeremiah as a book is unusual in many respects and may not be the best exemplar for drawing general conclusions about the prophets. In addition, I think he may gloss over some of the factors which would have led to the production of relatively "authoritative" editions of pre-Exilic prophets during the exile (notably, the prophets who were likely to be reproduced would have been those who predicted and provided an explanatory model for the exile — and these would have been just the ones to be least appealing before the exile as compared to prophets who assured the kings of victory).
The most potentially interesting area for applying the models of scribal culture would seem to me to be the earlier phase of the formation of the bible — the assembly of the oldest sources into more general sources, with attention paid to what parts involved editing at the Deuteronomic History stage and what parts were the output of earlier scribal activity. This would also involve a longer discussion of the different ways in which oral and written sources fed into the flow of documentary creation and revision. However, this would involve focussing on the period of the monarchies (note the plural - by mainly treating the Josianic and later periods he manages to sidestep any differences between the cultures of the two kingdoms) and on the differences between Israelite and Judaean contexts during that period — a topic which van der Toorn at best gestures toward.
[1]I did do a course in manuscript culture and issues in graduate school, but it was focussed on the literate culture of the high middle ages. There are significant differences in the classical and, even more, the pre-classical periods, although there are also some commonalities.
[2]The same pattern shows up in Christian liturgical development — additions tend to have occurred at the beginning and ending of the mass, or at the join point between the old synaxis and the eucharist proper. His characterisations of the different layers are not, of course, peculiar to him. Of course, this suggests that the model for development of canonical but not invariant texts such as that of the mass may be very close to his pre-literate scribal pattern; it certainly illustrates how a sacred text can be seen as authoritative and yet be subject to change.
However, van der Toorn seems to want to jump to conclusions in ways which make it inevitable that some of his conclusions, although possible, are by no means as inevitable as he makes them look; and in other cases, he doesn't seem to think things through carefully. Possible counter-positions are not set out and middle stages in arguments are missing. This may be the result of directing the book towards a general audience rather than a scholarly one, with a consequent over-attempt to make the text more easily readable.
Other reviewers have noted that his situating of the biblical scribes in the temple as opposed to the palace is highly reliant on post-Exilic evidence and is not nearly as well-founded as one moves earlier. I'll come back to this when we get to Deuteronomy.
I would like to point out as a more fundamental problem his model of the issuing of editions. He wants to see the MS of a major text as being not only private to the scribal caste but also existing in only one unique copy (so that when that copy is re-copied on wearing out there would be an automatic "new edition" created without competing exemplars).
He has not thought this through. For a text such as Deuteronomy, which is a law text, copies need to be available for local judges to refer to. You can't run a law system with a single central copy of a critical master text. Of course, by the same token, a text which has not been completely "canonized" but which is a reference document can be recalled and reissued as a working text when updated, just as we republish the Criminal Code every year for reference, so in the earlier period the distinction may make a minimal difference. Indeed, a law text in actual use and reflecting a broadly casuistic system pretty well has to be regularly reissued as new instances come up and are decided. (I think he also underestimates the likelihood of a higher degree of substantial variation between the versions of the books in the pre-Masoretic period.)
In addition, I think it unlikely that control over texts operated in the same way during the Exilic period than either before or after. At that time it may very well have been the case that texts held by Levites in exile might have had a much more minimal circulation, since there was no social infrastructure of which they were part.
So, to his treatment of Deuteronomy. His model of re-editions for this book looks to be broadly persuasive in terms of its thematic traits for each level, as well as his observations regarding additions appearing at interstitial points, beginnings and endings[2]. However, there seems to be no very good reason for seeing the original edition — focussed principally on the promulgation of the Josianic reforms — as having an origin in the temple cultus rather than the royal palace — indeed, on the plausible possibility that the Josianic reforms were driven from the palace rather than the temple, it would make more sense as a palace production. (He also skips over what to me is the most interesting question about Deuteronomy, which is the relation of its text to prior oral or written sources, although he handwaves at the relation of part of it to the older texts in Exodus.) The "Torah" and "History" editions (which he plausibly places during the exile on internal evidence) would have been developed outside the Temple context as an ideal text, not as an active law text, as would the "Wisdom" edition. The factor which set the choice of version of text in stone and finally displaced the others would then have been (following his own later argument) the choice of this fourth edition as the version which Ezra included in his Torah to be used as the local law under the Persian authority. In this case he needs no special mechanism to explain the supersession of the earlier versions.
He also makes broad jumps of logic in treating Jeremiah as a type of the prophetic literature. He seems to be quite ready to jump from the specific example of Baruch's relation to Jeremiah to a general scribal / prophetic relationship, despite the facts that (1) the example of Baruch has no explicit parallel in any other prophetic texts and (2) Jeremiah as a book is unusual in many respects and may not be the best exemplar for drawing general conclusions about the prophets. In addition, I think he may gloss over some of the factors which would have led to the production of relatively "authoritative" editions of pre-Exilic prophets during the exile (notably, the prophets who were likely to be reproduced would have been those who predicted and provided an explanatory model for the exile — and these would have been just the ones to be least appealing before the exile as compared to prophets who assured the kings of victory).
The most potentially interesting area for applying the models of scribal culture would seem to me to be the earlier phase of the formation of the bible — the assembly of the oldest sources into more general sources, with attention paid to what parts involved editing at the Deuteronomic History stage and what parts were the output of earlier scribal activity. This would also involve a longer discussion of the different ways in which oral and written sources fed into the flow of documentary creation and revision. However, this would involve focussing on the period of the monarchies (note the plural - by mainly treating the Josianic and later periods he manages to sidestep any differences between the cultures of the two kingdoms) and on the differences between Israelite and Judaean contexts during that period — a topic which van der Toorn at best gestures toward.
[1]I did do a course in manuscript culture and issues in graduate school, but it was focussed on the literate culture of the high middle ages. There are significant differences in the classical and, even more, the pre-classical periods, although there are also some commonalities.
[2]The same pattern shows up in Christian liturgical development — additions tend to have occurred at the beginning and ending of the mass, or at the join point between the old synaxis and the eucharist proper. His characterisations of the different layers are not, of course, peculiar to him. Of course, this suggests that the model for development of canonical but not invariant texts such as that of the mass may be very close to his pre-literate scribal pattern; it certainly illustrates how a sacred text can be seen as authoritative and yet be subject to change.
A few days ago I was talking with a friend who has an undergraduate degree in Religious Studies from the University of Toronto. I made some broad reference to the current (for values of "current" == "since the 1950s, at least") views regarding the historicity of the Exodus narrative and found that she hadn't been exposed to them, despite the fact that she had taken an introductory Old Testament course. She brought out her Old Testament texts and I was appalled to find that her main reference (Anderson's Understanding the Old Testament), although it had some references to good sources buried deep in its bibliography, did not canvass the issues at all. This was in the late 70s, at which time this had been the responsible consensus for a generation: at least the position should have been set out clearly as one of several alternative approaches. The book itself still is in print and is being sold, with generally laudatory reviews.
So, OK, historicity and Biblical narrative. A quick summary before the main (cynical) point.
For the OT, the major sense of "historicity" which is in play is "can we reasonably argue that X might have happened". (There's another sense of the word which comes into play in, for example, the "search for the historical Jesus". In this context, it's more, "what can be said about X while staying strictly within the bounds of the discipline of history". The two uses are not identical. For example, one frequent criterion used to exclude sayings in the gospels as sayings of Jesus is if the saying reflects a view popular in Judaism at the time (in which case it may have been derived from the environment, and not from Jesus). Now, this works as long as one keeps in mind the aim of being _really sure_ that something can be considered authentic, but a little reflection will indicate that Jesus must have said many things which were in congruence with what other people around him thought, and that this criterion must exclude a fair amount of sayings which really could go back to Jesus.) That is, arguments are not over what can be said with certitude about what happened, but what can be admitted as possibly having happened, combined with close reading around the agenda of the redactors / authors to explain how the text got to be the way it was.
The books of the Tanakh / OT were assembled over the course of several centuries, with varying levels of redaction. Many of the books seem to have reached close to their final form at the time of "the Deuteronomist" (who may actually have been several editors/writers in the same school) in about the 6th century BCE. Many contain embedded sources of greater or lesser historical value; some (Daniel, Ruth, and Esther, for example) are essentially novels; and some belong to genres which don't give rise to much argument about historical truth-claims (for example, the wisdom literature).
In the 1950s it would be fair to say that there were two schools regarding the historicity of OT narrative from Genesis through Kings among responsible historical scholars, i.e. those who were at least officially willing to approach the issues without simply assuming that the authority of the text on its face provided an a priori answer. The first was an American school associated with Albright which argued for broad confirmation of the biblical narratives (the main focus being on Genesis through Judges) by archaeological evidence. (It's this school which the Anderson textbook reflects.) A second school was German in origin and represented by Martin Noth and Gerhardt von Rad; these scholars were (based on textual studies) rather more dubious about the historicity of the narratives in Genesis through Judges. Noth regarded the patriarchal traditions as being originally independent and fused into a single tradition late on; considered the Exodus and Sinai narratives to be originally completely independent, with the figure of Moses not originally associated with the Sinai theophanic tradition, and that neither tradition could be taken as historical on its face (although both probably preserved some historical reminiscences); and argued that the development of the tribal structure of Israel occurred in situ in Canaan as an amphyctyonic coalition focused on access to religious shrines, and had no ancestral basis. (Note that the scholars of this school were by no means hostile to the religion they were treating: most continued to be firmly attached to their confessional faiths).
By the early 1970's, the Albright position was falling apart. In some cases there was simple absence of evidence (nothing much could be found reflecting the Davidic line), but in many more cases this extended to evidence of absence: details of the patriarchal narratives were increasingly difficult to reconcile with archaeological findings/datings, there was no evidence supporting an invasion of Canaan corresponding to Joshua, the narrative of the Exodus did not line up with what was known of the period it was to be placed in on a straightforward reading.
Most of the German school's positions are still reasonable, although there are many places where individual details or specific theses are argued over. There have been arguments regarding the unified kingdom which would modify the details, and there's a lot of argument about Noth's specific position regarding an amphyctyonic coalition (although it would certainly be modern consensus that Israel as a coalition / concept came into existence in situ rather than as an invasion, the details are under debate). Similarly, there are varying vies regarding the composition of the "Deuteronomic history". But these are all basically arguments within a generally accepted framework rather than a challenge to the framework as a whole.
There are, of course, large numbers of teachers at post-secondary institutions who ignore all of this, I may note, and for whom even the position of Albright and his school is inadmissible. If your theology is based on a position regarding the literal inerrancy of the bible then any divergence from its being an exact record of what happened is verboten. So there are protestant fundamentalist/evangelical scholars who simply reject archaeological findings: if the findings disagree with the bible, too bad for the findings. This is at least a consistent position, if a determinedly ignorant one (and, to my mind, reflecting a fundamentally defective theology) but it's a little beside the point of why I was so disappointed in the textbook my friend had.
The U of T course was not based on any sort of assumption about inerrancy. A secondary text by Otto Kaiser on the authorship/composition of the OT books was fully up to date on form-critical (and similar) conclusions. The Anderson text would not be acceptable in any rigorously fundamentalist school: it explicitly accepts modern historical/critical methodology. It was just shoddy and deliberately limited in its scope by 1975, when the third edition (which my friend had) was published.
The first edition of the Anderson text dates from 1957, when it would have been acceptable (although somewhat deceptive) for an introductory text written by a member of the American / Albright school to present an exclusively Albright approach, with a few German sources referenced in the bibliography for completeness. By 1975, the approach was really a zombie. So why was (is) it retained[1]?
Let me point out three things: the 1975 edition is very much a student text published by Prentice-Hall (fifth edition is Pearson). (Sometimes "introductions" are meant to remain usable on a scholar's shelf long after they finish several levels of studies; the Kaiser book is a good example, in that it surveys positions from a high level and provides detailed references to all of the substantive and more specialized studies at the head of each section, so it acts as a useful index. The Anderson book is not that kind of introduction.) Secondly, the description provided on Amazon for the Fifth Edition is blurbs by teachers about how usable the book is as an assigned text (its market is not students: in typical textbook style, its market is instructors). Thirdly, the trade paperback of the fifth edition has a cover price of 134.95 (CAD), which nobody would pay for this unless they had to.
I think that the book has remained defective in this way to allow American universities to assign it for courses containing a large number of students, many of whom will have a relatively literalist understanding of the bible, without upsetting too many of them too much. In other words, this is driven by the same sort of commercial interests which lead to American biology textbooks which ignore evolution, and (more broadly) media presentations which present what the producers think more people will want to see/hear than the truth.
[1]The current edition available is the fifth edition. I haven't seen this edition, so I'm limiting myself to a critique "as of 1975". However, the reviews I see of the fifth edition do not suggest a major change in the content of the book.
So, OK, historicity and Biblical narrative. A quick summary before the main (cynical) point.
For the OT, the major sense of "historicity" which is in play is "can we reasonably argue that X might have happened". (There's another sense of the word which comes into play in, for example, the "search for the historical Jesus". In this context, it's more, "what can be said about X while staying strictly within the bounds of the discipline of history". The two uses are not identical. For example, one frequent criterion used to exclude sayings in the gospels as sayings of Jesus is if the saying reflects a view popular in Judaism at the time (in which case it may have been derived from the environment, and not from Jesus). Now, this works as long as one keeps in mind the aim of being _really sure_ that something can be considered authentic, but a little reflection will indicate that Jesus must have said many things which were in congruence with what other people around him thought, and that this criterion must exclude a fair amount of sayings which really could go back to Jesus.) That is, arguments are not over what can be said with certitude about what happened, but what can be admitted as possibly having happened, combined with close reading around the agenda of the redactors / authors to explain how the text got to be the way it was.
The books of the Tanakh / OT were assembled over the course of several centuries, with varying levels of redaction. Many of the books seem to have reached close to their final form at the time of "the Deuteronomist" (who may actually have been several editors/writers in the same school) in about the 6th century BCE. Many contain embedded sources of greater or lesser historical value; some (Daniel, Ruth, and Esther, for example) are essentially novels; and some belong to genres which don't give rise to much argument about historical truth-claims (for example, the wisdom literature).
In the 1950s it would be fair to say that there were two schools regarding the historicity of OT narrative from Genesis through Kings among responsible historical scholars, i.e. those who were at least officially willing to approach the issues without simply assuming that the authority of the text on its face provided an a priori answer. The first was an American school associated with Albright which argued for broad confirmation of the biblical narratives (the main focus being on Genesis through Judges) by archaeological evidence. (It's this school which the Anderson textbook reflects.) A second school was German in origin and represented by Martin Noth and Gerhardt von Rad; these scholars were (based on textual studies) rather more dubious about the historicity of the narratives in Genesis through Judges. Noth regarded the patriarchal traditions as being originally independent and fused into a single tradition late on; considered the Exodus and Sinai narratives to be originally completely independent, with the figure of Moses not originally associated with the Sinai theophanic tradition, and that neither tradition could be taken as historical on its face (although both probably preserved some historical reminiscences); and argued that the development of the tribal structure of Israel occurred in situ in Canaan as an amphyctyonic coalition focused on access to religious shrines, and had no ancestral basis. (Note that the scholars of this school were by no means hostile to the religion they were treating: most continued to be firmly attached to their confessional faiths).
By the early 1970's, the Albright position was falling apart. In some cases there was simple absence of evidence (nothing much could be found reflecting the Davidic line), but in many more cases this extended to evidence of absence: details of the patriarchal narratives were increasingly difficult to reconcile with archaeological findings/datings, there was no evidence supporting an invasion of Canaan corresponding to Joshua, the narrative of the Exodus did not line up with what was known of the period it was to be placed in on a straightforward reading.
Most of the German school's positions are still reasonable, although there are many places where individual details or specific theses are argued over. There have been arguments regarding the unified kingdom which would modify the details, and there's a lot of argument about Noth's specific position regarding an amphyctyonic coalition (although it would certainly be modern consensus that Israel as a coalition / concept came into existence in situ rather than as an invasion, the details are under debate). Similarly, there are varying vies regarding the composition of the "Deuteronomic history". But these are all basically arguments within a generally accepted framework rather than a challenge to the framework as a whole.
There are, of course, large numbers of teachers at post-secondary institutions who ignore all of this, I may note, and for whom even the position of Albright and his school is inadmissible. If your theology is based on a position regarding the literal inerrancy of the bible then any divergence from its being an exact record of what happened is verboten. So there are protestant fundamentalist/evangelical scholars who simply reject archaeological findings: if the findings disagree with the bible, too bad for the findings. This is at least a consistent position, if a determinedly ignorant one (and, to my mind, reflecting a fundamentally defective theology) but it's a little beside the point of why I was so disappointed in the textbook my friend had.
The U of T course was not based on any sort of assumption about inerrancy. A secondary text by Otto Kaiser on the authorship/composition of the OT books was fully up to date on form-critical (and similar) conclusions. The Anderson text would not be acceptable in any rigorously fundamentalist school: it explicitly accepts modern historical/critical methodology. It was just shoddy and deliberately limited in its scope by 1975, when the third edition (which my friend had) was published.
The first edition of the Anderson text dates from 1957, when it would have been acceptable (although somewhat deceptive) for an introductory text written by a member of the American / Albright school to present an exclusively Albright approach, with a few German sources referenced in the bibliography for completeness. By 1975, the approach was really a zombie. So why was (is) it retained[1]?
Let me point out three things: the 1975 edition is very much a student text published by Prentice-Hall (fifth edition is Pearson). (Sometimes "introductions" are meant to remain usable on a scholar's shelf long after they finish several levels of studies; the Kaiser book is a good example, in that it surveys positions from a high level and provides detailed references to all of the substantive and more specialized studies at the head of each section, so it acts as a useful index. The Anderson book is not that kind of introduction.) Secondly, the description provided on Amazon for the Fifth Edition is blurbs by teachers about how usable the book is as an assigned text (its market is not students: in typical textbook style, its market is instructors). Thirdly, the trade paperback of the fifth edition has a cover price of 134.95 (CAD), which nobody would pay for this unless they had to.
I think that the book has remained defective in this way to allow American universities to assign it for courses containing a large number of students, many of whom will have a relatively literalist understanding of the bible, without upsetting too many of them too much. In other words, this is driven by the same sort of commercial interests which lead to American biology textbooks which ignore evolution, and (more broadly) media presentations which present what the producers think more people will want to see/hear than the truth.
[1]The current edition available is the fifth edition. I haven't seen this edition, so I'm limiting myself to a critique "as of 1975". However, the reviews I see of the fifth edition do not suggest a major change in the content of the book.
The Tridentine Rite and Social Models
May. 27th, 2013 01:01 pmA couple of weeks back I was the MC for a celebration of a Tridentine Rite high mass.
There tend to be two reactions to the rite: either people like it because it's picturesque, or they dislike it because it's more intricate and arguably fussy than the modern rite -- which is seen as "old fashioned" and by association with the positions of the Church of Rome during the period during which it was used actually reactionary.
But it's interesting to note that during the period from about 1890 to 1960 during which the rite was used by Anglo-Catholics with "advanced views" the parishes tended to be more likely to be politically left-wing than their low-church counterparts -- Labour or CCF in their associations rather than the "Conservative Party at prayer".
I think that there's more than an accident of history here. The understanding of human society which underlies the old rite is that of humans as members of groups -- participants function as representative of their orders, and individuality is secondary to having a representative role (this extends in principle to the laity, the sancta plebs Dei, as well, in their participation). Although this allies relatively well with the really old Crown-and-Altar conservatism of Metternich et al., it also has more in common with understandings on the left which make use of class analysis or (these days) identity politics. What it doesn't mesh with is the worldview of Victorian Liberalism (now that of much "conservatism") which is centred around the individual with a laissez-faire, laissez-aller view of government, and a reliance on contract rather than status as a model for regulating human affairs. (Studies such as those in Thompson's Customs in Common indicate that there were in fact frequently larger or smaller-scale alliances between the landowners with old values and the lower classes as against the emerging commercial classes and New Men.)
Well, there aren't very many followers of Metternich, or Bolingbroke (The Idea of a Patriot King), or even Wellington around today: the right-wing space has largely been occupied by followers of Smith and Mill, and the same is true of much of the centre, where it's tempered by slightly less rigorous views of our responsibilities to the unfortunate. It's the left, alone, which retains an understanding of society based on groups. So, somewhat ironically, it's arguable that the old rite, which is less easily reducible to an individual-centred model than the new rite, may be a better expression of Christian Socialism than its more modern successor.
1) This Wired article on The Avengers Homework Assignments has several questions along the lines of:
Bzzt. There's a basic physics literacy issue here: acceleration/velocity of a falling object is independent of mass. It's completely irrelevant what the mass is. We do not live in an Aristotelian universe. I give the assignment itself an F based on this alone (note that there are several questions which have the same view of mass in relation to velocity of a falling body).
2) Some things never change: I was reminded of the following by a post on Slacktivist (one irony being that Slacktivist (properly) paints the British Evangelical tradition as more flexible than the American one.
"There is a section of the church, numbering perhaps a quarter of its members, the 'Evangelical' party, whose set and fixed practice, if not principle, is opposition to the recognition of any sort of change in the status quo in the church. (They themselves have changed considerably both in teaching and practice since the time of Charles Simeon. It is not so much change as the acknowledgement of it that they dislike.) The nineteenth century bishops were so preoccupied with opposing the Oxford Movement that they took no steps to prevent what the Elizabethan bishops in their own day more wisely foresaw must be a danger to the cohesion of the church -- the formation of a puritan imperium in imperio within the church, permanently impenetrable behind a financial rampart to any ideas current in the rest of the church. By the system of Evangelical schools, Evangelical halls at the Universities, Evangelical theological colleges and Evangelical patronage trusts, it is now quite possible for a boy to be educated and grow up, take a degree, be ordained and serve a ministerial lifetime, without once encountering directly any theological idea unacceptable to the founders of the party in the period of the Crimean War."
The quotation is from Dom Gregory Dix's Shape of the Liturgy, published in 1945. You can see already the kernel of what has become the Anglican Network; if its current impetus derives from more recent changes, the first thing to galvanize the subgroups which later made it up was the introduction of non-BCP liturgies in the 1970s and 1980s. (Note that "Evangelical" in the Anglican context does not mean the same thing as it does in the American context, although if you look at Network fora based in the US you will find considerable overlap between the two groups as far as political and moral opinions goes -- i.e. conservative Episcopalian Evangelicals (Anglican meaning) heavily resemble antinomian American Evangelicals (second meaning) in many areas not having to do with liturgy (and class -- Episcopalians are usually from further up the class hierarchy)).
3) There is a CBC Radio tagline about providing 100% of your music listening requirements. I have news for them: unless they start playing a lot more pre-baroque and baroque music, they're nowhere near 50%, let alone 100%.
In case you don't recall, S.H.I.E.L.D. built a special container for The Hulk. The idea was that no one could break through the glass (it was probably transparent aluminum) – but if someone DID, they could just drop the whole thing out of the helicopter. Loki ends of tricking Thor to get him trapped in there and then drops it.
- If the container is a cylinder about 8 meters in diameter, what would be the terminal velocity of this cylinder? You are going to have to an educated approximation for the mass.
Bzzt. There's a basic physics literacy issue here: acceleration/velocity of a falling object is independent of mass. It's completely irrelevant what the mass is. We do not live in an Aristotelian universe. I give the assignment itself an F based on this alone (note that there are several questions which have the same view of mass in relation to velocity of a falling body).
2) Some things never change: I was reminded of the following by a post on Slacktivist (one irony being that Slacktivist (properly) paints the British Evangelical tradition as more flexible than the American one.
"There is a section of the church, numbering perhaps a quarter of its members, the 'Evangelical' party, whose set and fixed practice, if not principle, is opposition to the recognition of any sort of change in the status quo in the church. (They themselves have changed considerably both in teaching and practice since the time of Charles Simeon. It is not so much change as the acknowledgement of it that they dislike.) The nineteenth century bishops were so preoccupied with opposing the Oxford Movement that they took no steps to prevent what the Elizabethan bishops in their own day more wisely foresaw must be a danger to the cohesion of the church -- the formation of a puritan imperium in imperio within the church, permanently impenetrable behind a financial rampart to any ideas current in the rest of the church. By the system of Evangelical schools, Evangelical halls at the Universities, Evangelical theological colleges and Evangelical patronage trusts, it is now quite possible for a boy to be educated and grow up, take a degree, be ordained and serve a ministerial lifetime, without once encountering directly any theological idea unacceptable to the founders of the party in the period of the Crimean War."
The quotation is from Dom Gregory Dix's Shape of the Liturgy, published in 1945. You can see already the kernel of what has become the Anglican Network; if its current impetus derives from more recent changes, the first thing to galvanize the subgroups which later made it up was the introduction of non-BCP liturgies in the 1970s and 1980s. (Note that "Evangelical" in the Anglican context does not mean the same thing as it does in the American context, although if you look at Network fora based in the US you will find considerable overlap between the two groups as far as political and moral opinions goes -- i.e. conservative Episcopalian Evangelicals (Anglican meaning) heavily resemble antinomian American Evangelicals (second meaning) in many areas not having to do with liturgy (and class -- Episcopalians are usually from further up the class hierarchy)).
3) There is a CBC Radio tagline about providing 100% of your music listening requirements. I have news for them: unless they start playing a lot more pre-baroque and baroque music, they're nowhere near 50%, let alone 100%.
The RC hierarchy in Ontario is getting more thoroughly involved in the tussle over Gay/Straight Alliances (see ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rfmcdpei's post for the general background). What I find interesting from a more general perspective is what this type of reaction indicates about the shifting of the RCs on the church - sect spectrum.
The Church of Rome has, for about a thousand years, give or take a few centuries[1] identified itself as "the Church", with some vague accommodations regarding the Eastern Orthodox and a detailed theory of church-like bodies coming out of the Reformation. Since the days of Theodosius it has (until recently) also assumed itself (at least in theory) to be coterminous with society -- a church in Troeltsch's classification. There have been irregularities locally -- e.g. the situation in England prior to the "late Roman aggression" where there was no local hierarchy and where the C of E made the same assumptions but only locally -- but broadly speaking the two positions have coexisted hand in hand.
It continues to hold the first position: the relative thawing of oecumenical relations after Vatican II were accompanied by a clear delineation of the traditional view in the Council documents, restated in Dominus Iesus from the Sacred Congregation of the Faith in 2000. However, especially since the accession of Benedict to the papacy, it's possible to argue that it is moving deliberately in the direction of a remnant theology-driven view of the position of the church in (Western) society. It would like to be coterminous with society, and sees itself as the guardian of universal ethical values on which it has a duty to speak out, but much of Benedict's agenda can be seen as adjustments to make the distinction between inside and outside starker. Effectively, it is deliberately taking on more of the sociological shape of a sect and less that of a church.
Put simply, Benedict's approach involves a willingness to pay the price of losing adherents in favour of protecting its doctrine and structure.[2] The upper hierarchy would like to eliminate "cafeteria Catholicism". Of course, the closer to the ground you get the priests and bishops also want to retain the resources which come from larger congregations, so there has been a lot of a sort of DADT attitude at the ground level towards dissenting views on women's orders, female participation in the liturgy as lay ministers, divorce, contraception, abortion, and homosexuality (all areas where the divergence between Catholic doctrine and popular practice is particularly marked[3]) as long as they are kept relatively private. (This has been accompanied by a considerable relaxation in the principle that anyone receiving communion should go to confession immediately before the eucharist, and a tendency not to ask about certain areas of opinion which a penitent might not mention in the confessional.) There has been increasing pressure, however, to enforce greater conformity in all of these matters, as well as liturgical distinctiveness[4]. Ecumenical dialogue has also become less fluid and more take-it-or-leave-it.
You might expect this to lead to large-scale defections. From where I stand, it looks very much as though the fact that there hasn't been a mass schism in western Europe and North America as a sort of delayed Modernist controversy is due to the increase in a personal, almost fetishistic, devotion to the papacy over the last thirty years or so. Most of the people I know who have left the RCs formally (as opposed to lapsing) have done so either as a reaction to the administrative -- not doctrinal -- catastrophic mishandling of abuse issues by the hierarchy, which is a very different issue (there are complicated connections involving the RC desire to be autonomous, but this is shared by many other ecclesial and non-ecclesial bodies (e.g. Boy Scouts and many school boards) which all seem to share the knee-jerk reaction of trying to manage abuse issues internally to avoid scandal), or because they are GL (usually not BTQ), feel personally excluded by the RCs, and now find other groups (Anglicans, notably) to be gay-friendly in a way which they were not a generation ago. There has been no large-scale breakaway along the lines of the Old Catholics in 1870.
The shift in the direction of sect is a long way from complete, though. The hierarchy (and many of the laity) still want / assume the benefits of churchiness while pushing in the direction of sectiness. The consistent thing for Cardinal Archbishop Collins to push for would be the severing of ties between the province and the Catholic board system. If you want to erect limina between the inside and the outside then it's a good idea to render yourselves as independent of the outside as possible. But just as the low-level handling of cafeteria Catholicism has been grudging and slow, nobody in the hierarchy wants to jeopardize the substantial flow of funds which supports the Catholic Board system. It's a complicated dance (after all, there's also a significant component of Catholic school supporters who support the GSA legislation, including the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association) which becomes less tenable the more firmly delimited the gap between society as a whole and the Church of Rome becomes.
[1]It's actually rather hard to pin down, because the only reference point is the Eastern church (the Oriental Orthodox, Monophysite, and Nestorian churches, largely Syriac-speaking, were effectively invisible to the West (except for the Armenians) during much of the period, and certainly didn't bulk large in ecumenical discussions), and even at the beginning of the Great Schism it's not really clear how the two sides viewed each other. I think it's fair to say that by the thirteenth century or so Roman ecclesiology simply assumed that it was the church as such (conveniently ignoring the East whenever possible), and that prior to about the eighth century formulating the idea of the Latin-speaking church as "the church" would have been ludicrous to just about anyone -- plus there's the fact that as long as East and West were in communion the issues just didn't arise. The fully developed set of distinctions don't appear until Trent, but they were implicit a long time before.
[2] The giveaway is where it is structure and not doctrine which is involved, principally on matters of order. There is nothing doctrinal preventing the Western Rite church from allowing married priests or from having women as lay eucharistic ministers, but the hierarchy has set its face firmly against both (well, except for married ex-Anglicans, which are a narrow special case, and which much of the ordinary hierarchy dislikes in any case).
[3] The convergence of all of these issues together is a mark of conservative protestantism as well, but evangelical and antinomian protestantism has always had a more sect-like set of traits. The convergence -- tending towards treating these disparate[5] issues as one big issue -- becomes especially disconcerting when publications which are supposedly single-issue (on abortion, usually) also are vocal about contraception and gay rights. (After all, in principle it would make sense for anti-abortion activists to be wildly in favour of contraception, as effective contraception ought to render abortion much rarer.)
[4]The introduction of the new translation of the missal is interesting here: it really adds nothing new and (from where I stand) it's a better representation of what was there in the normative rite. But it was hotly resisted and even more firmly imposed in part because it sets the space of worship more firmly apart from the secular, by retaining a different level of formality of language. It's not Latin or Old Church Slavonic, or even Cranmer, but it marks off the RC rite as different and distinct. (The ICET language was not only less formal, it had also been adopted by everyone and his/her sibling.)
[5] Theologically, there's a tight connection between the opposition to contraception and the opposition to homosexuality, but issues with women's orders (for conservative protestants, the presence of women in positions of authority in ministry), divorce (the RC position is quite different from that of the Eastern Orthodox here, for example), and abortion are all distinct issues. Socially, they have become the bundle of values that is, de facto, the defining set of shibboleths for social conservatives.
rfmcdpei's post for the general background). What I find interesting from a more general perspective is what this type of reaction indicates about the shifting of the RCs on the church - sect spectrum.The Church of Rome has, for about a thousand years, give or take a few centuries[1] identified itself as "the Church", with some vague accommodations regarding the Eastern Orthodox and a detailed theory of church-like bodies coming out of the Reformation. Since the days of Theodosius it has (until recently) also assumed itself (at least in theory) to be coterminous with society -- a church in Troeltsch's classification. There have been irregularities locally -- e.g. the situation in England prior to the "late Roman aggression" where there was no local hierarchy and where the C of E made the same assumptions but only locally -- but broadly speaking the two positions have coexisted hand in hand.
It continues to hold the first position: the relative thawing of oecumenical relations after Vatican II were accompanied by a clear delineation of the traditional view in the Council documents, restated in Dominus Iesus from the Sacred Congregation of the Faith in 2000. However, especially since the accession of Benedict to the papacy, it's possible to argue that it is moving deliberately in the direction of a remnant theology-driven view of the position of the church in (Western) society. It would like to be coterminous with society, and sees itself as the guardian of universal ethical values on which it has a duty to speak out, but much of Benedict's agenda can be seen as adjustments to make the distinction between inside and outside starker. Effectively, it is deliberately taking on more of the sociological shape of a sect and less that of a church.
Put simply, Benedict's approach involves a willingness to pay the price of losing adherents in favour of protecting its doctrine and structure.[2] The upper hierarchy would like to eliminate "cafeteria Catholicism". Of course, the closer to the ground you get the priests and bishops also want to retain the resources which come from larger congregations, so there has been a lot of a sort of DADT attitude at the ground level towards dissenting views on women's orders, female participation in the liturgy as lay ministers, divorce, contraception, abortion, and homosexuality (all areas where the divergence between Catholic doctrine and popular practice is particularly marked[3]) as long as they are kept relatively private. (This has been accompanied by a considerable relaxation in the principle that anyone receiving communion should go to confession immediately before the eucharist, and a tendency not to ask about certain areas of opinion which a penitent might not mention in the confessional.) There has been increasing pressure, however, to enforce greater conformity in all of these matters, as well as liturgical distinctiveness[4]. Ecumenical dialogue has also become less fluid and more take-it-or-leave-it.
You might expect this to lead to large-scale defections. From where I stand, it looks very much as though the fact that there hasn't been a mass schism in western Europe and North America as a sort of delayed Modernist controversy is due to the increase in a personal, almost fetishistic, devotion to the papacy over the last thirty years or so. Most of the people I know who have left the RCs formally (as opposed to lapsing) have done so either as a reaction to the administrative -- not doctrinal -- catastrophic mishandling of abuse issues by the hierarchy, which is a very different issue (there are complicated connections involving the RC desire to be autonomous, but this is shared by many other ecclesial and non-ecclesial bodies (e.g. Boy Scouts and many school boards) which all seem to share the knee-jerk reaction of trying to manage abuse issues internally to avoid scandal), or because they are GL (usually not BTQ), feel personally excluded by the RCs, and now find other groups (Anglicans, notably) to be gay-friendly in a way which they were not a generation ago. There has been no large-scale breakaway along the lines of the Old Catholics in 1870.
The shift in the direction of sect is a long way from complete, though. The hierarchy (and many of the laity) still want / assume the benefits of churchiness while pushing in the direction of sectiness. The consistent thing for Cardinal Archbishop Collins to push for would be the severing of ties between the province and the Catholic board system. If you want to erect limina between the inside and the outside then it's a good idea to render yourselves as independent of the outside as possible. But just as the low-level handling of cafeteria Catholicism has been grudging and slow, nobody in the hierarchy wants to jeopardize the substantial flow of funds which supports the Catholic Board system. It's a complicated dance (after all, there's also a significant component of Catholic school supporters who support the GSA legislation, including the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association) which becomes less tenable the more firmly delimited the gap between society as a whole and the Church of Rome becomes.
[1]It's actually rather hard to pin down, because the only reference point is the Eastern church (the Oriental Orthodox, Monophysite, and Nestorian churches, largely Syriac-speaking, were effectively invisible to the West (except for the Armenians) during much of the period, and certainly didn't bulk large in ecumenical discussions), and even at the beginning of the Great Schism it's not really clear how the two sides viewed each other. I think it's fair to say that by the thirteenth century or so Roman ecclesiology simply assumed that it was the church as such (conveniently ignoring the East whenever possible), and that prior to about the eighth century formulating the idea of the Latin-speaking church as "the church" would have been ludicrous to just about anyone -- plus there's the fact that as long as East and West were in communion the issues just didn't arise. The fully developed set of distinctions don't appear until Trent, but they were implicit a long time before.
[2] The giveaway is where it is structure and not doctrine which is involved, principally on matters of order. There is nothing doctrinal preventing the Western Rite church from allowing married priests or from having women as lay eucharistic ministers, but the hierarchy has set its face firmly against both (well, except for married ex-Anglicans, which are a narrow special case, and which much of the ordinary hierarchy dislikes in any case).
[3] The convergence of all of these issues together is a mark of conservative protestantism as well, but evangelical and antinomian protestantism has always had a more sect-like set of traits. The convergence -- tending towards treating these disparate[5] issues as one big issue -- becomes especially disconcerting when publications which are supposedly single-issue (on abortion, usually) also are vocal about contraception and gay rights. (After all, in principle it would make sense for anti-abortion activists to be wildly in favour of contraception, as effective contraception ought to render abortion much rarer.)
[4]The introduction of the new translation of the missal is interesting here: it really adds nothing new and (from where I stand) it's a better representation of what was there in the normative rite. But it was hotly resisted and even more firmly imposed in part because it sets the space of worship more firmly apart from the secular, by retaining a different level of formality of language. It's not Latin or Old Church Slavonic, or even Cranmer, but it marks off the RC rite as different and distinct. (The ICET language was not only less formal, it had also been adopted by everyone and his/her sibling.)
[5] Theologically, there's a tight connection between the opposition to contraception and the opposition to homosexuality, but issues with women's orders (for conservative protestants, the presence of women in positions of authority in ministry), divorce (the RC position is quite different from that of the Eastern Orthodox here, for example), and abortion are all distinct issues. Socially, they have become the bundle of values that is, de facto, the defining set of shibboleths for social conservatives.
Wachet auf: Sundays after Trinity
Nov. 7th, 2011 01:47 pmYesterday's lection in the RCL was (and has been since the Common Lectionary was introduced) the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins: it's the beginning of a more apocalyptic, or at least judgement-focused, shift in Year A (next up is the parable of the Talents, followed by the Sheep and the Goats on the Sunday Next Before Advent / Feast of Christ the King).
There are really only two hymns I know for the gospel. One was in the old English Hymnal, but is not in the New English Hymnal: it's a 19th-century translation of a Greek 8th-century original, set to a very nice Tallis tune originally composed for Archbishop Parker's Psalter, and isn't the one I'm interested in here[1]. The other is a Philip Nikolai hymn which has been translated into English several times: Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. The hymn is helped a great deal by the fact that there is a Bach chorale harmonization of the tune, as well as a Cantata (BWV 140) built around it.
The interesting thing is why there's a Lutheran hymn that was major enough for Bach to build a cantata around. Many people these days assume that it was an Advent piece, but the parable has never, to my knowledge, been an Advent lection.[2] Prior to the three-year lectionary in the 20th century it seems to have been a Sunday lection only in the Lutheran order of service.[3]
The Calendar for what is usually referred to as Ordinary Time ("Tempus per Ordinarium") has a problem. The Christian year begins within four days of St. Andrew's Day with the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which is essentially, modulo the lunar week, a solar date. But it has a large block of movable time beginning (in the old calendar) with Septuagesima and ending with Corpus Christi (Sacred Heart, if you want to be finicky about it, but Corpus frequently gets transferred to the following Sunday and Sacred Heart doesn't). This block is centred on Easter, which is determined by the relationship between the vernal equinox and the phases of the moon, and it has a range of almost five weeks variability (Septuagesima can be as early as January 19 and as late as Feb 20[4]). Traditionally, this was dealt with by having a long set of Sundays after Epiphany and patching unused ones between the second-last Sunday after Pentecost/Trinity[5] with specified lections (Trinity 24/Pentecost 23) and the Sunday Next Before Advent. (The modern calendar assigns every Sunday at least one date within a week's span, but provides pairs of dates before/after the Easter block, so that Sundays which drop off before Lent (Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quniquagesima having gone the way of all flesh) reappear right after Pentecost; Sundays at the end of the Church year are therfore always the same for the same year in the three-year cycle.)
The Lutherans seem to have done something different. At some point the German Lutherans (or at least those in Leipzig, although the pattern seems to be rather more widespread) assigned a set of new lections to the end of Trinity season. One of these was the Wise and Foolish Virgins, assigned to Trinity 27 -- which is why Bach wrote a Cantata for the Sunday (and it may very well be why Nikolai chose to use the text as the basis for a Chorale in the first place).
[1] My guess is that it's been dropped because you have to have an extremely serious-minded congregation, these days, to sing a hymn which begins "Behold, the bridegroom cometh in the middle of the night".
[2]One of the volumes of Carols for Choirs suggests Zion hört, the second verse, as a part of the Advent Carol Service derived from King's College Cambridge.
[3] I'm sure if I hunted around in the old missal I could find it used somewhere, but it's not a Sunday lection.
[4] This means that the extended Christmas cycle, which ends with Candlemas on February 2, can overlap with the extended Easter cycle. Older settings of the propers include a tract as an alternative to the Alleluia for Candlemas for this .
[5]Pentecost for Roman and very advaced Anglo-Catholics; Trinity for Anglicans and Lutherans.
There are really only two hymns I know for the gospel. One was in the old English Hymnal, but is not in the New English Hymnal: it's a 19th-century translation of a Greek 8th-century original, set to a very nice Tallis tune originally composed for Archbishop Parker's Psalter, and isn't the one I'm interested in here[1]. The other is a Philip Nikolai hymn which has been translated into English several times: Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. The hymn is helped a great deal by the fact that there is a Bach chorale harmonization of the tune, as well as a Cantata (BWV 140) built around it.
The interesting thing is why there's a Lutheran hymn that was major enough for Bach to build a cantata around. Many people these days assume that it was an Advent piece, but the parable has never, to my knowledge, been an Advent lection.[2] Prior to the three-year lectionary in the 20th century it seems to have been a Sunday lection only in the Lutheran order of service.[3]
The Calendar for what is usually referred to as Ordinary Time ("Tempus per Ordinarium") has a problem. The Christian year begins within four days of St. Andrew's Day with the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which is essentially, modulo the lunar week, a solar date. But it has a large block of movable time beginning (in the old calendar) with Septuagesima and ending with Corpus Christi (Sacred Heart, if you want to be finicky about it, but Corpus frequently gets transferred to the following Sunday and Sacred Heart doesn't). This block is centred on Easter, which is determined by the relationship between the vernal equinox and the phases of the moon, and it has a range of almost five weeks variability (Septuagesima can be as early as January 19 and as late as Feb 20[4]). Traditionally, this was dealt with by having a long set of Sundays after Epiphany and patching unused ones between the second-last Sunday after Pentecost/Trinity[5] with specified lections (Trinity 24/Pentecost 23) and the Sunday Next Before Advent. (The modern calendar assigns every Sunday at least one date within a week's span, but provides pairs of dates before/after the Easter block, so that Sundays which drop off before Lent (Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quniquagesima having gone the way of all flesh) reappear right after Pentecost; Sundays at the end of the Church year are therfore always the same for the same year in the three-year cycle.)
The Lutherans seem to have done something different. At some point the German Lutherans (or at least those in Leipzig, although the pattern seems to be rather more widespread) assigned a set of new lections to the end of Trinity season. One of these was the Wise and Foolish Virgins, assigned to Trinity 27 -- which is why Bach wrote a Cantata for the Sunday (and it may very well be why Nikolai chose to use the text as the basis for a Chorale in the first place).
[1] My guess is that it's been dropped because you have to have an extremely serious-minded congregation, these days, to sing a hymn which begins "Behold, the bridegroom cometh in the middle of the night".
[2]One of the volumes of Carols for Choirs suggests Zion hört, the second verse, as a part of the Advent Carol Service derived from King's College Cambridge.
[3] I'm sure if I hunted around in the old missal I could find it used somewhere, but it's not a Sunday lection.
[4] This means that the extended Christmas cycle, which ends with Candlemas on February 2, can overlap with the extended Easter cycle. Older settings of the propers include a tract as an alternative to the Alleluia for Candlemas for this .
[5]Pentecost for Roman and very advaced Anglo-Catholics; Trinity for Anglicans and Lutherans.
Constantine
Sep. 27th, 2011 10:45 am... no, not John Constantine, the other one.
It's interesting reading "chronologically backward". I've just been reading Charles Norris Cochrane's Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine -- which is, let me stress, still a valuable and worthwhile resource, especially for its treatment of the classical background, even though it was published in the mid-1940s. (Cochrane was a classicist by discipline.) However, I had previously read Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians, which focusses on the pre-Constantinian period and finishes with a treatment of Constantine, as well as several more recent studies of the Christianisation of the empire such as Peter Brown's Authority and the Sacred.
Cochrane represents the normative narrative against which the later authors' positions are set, and although many of the items remain the same, the overall picture changes remarkably with a change in perspective. The later writers draw on the same prominent authors from the period as principal sources, but draw more heavily on lower-level "social history" data where it can be determined.
In both cases, there's a reaction against identifying a core orthodox Christianity with a prominent "rigorist" perspective. In both cases, there is an argument that the rigorist view which is visible throughout the period -- Tertullian is an early example at an extreme -- is not representative of the Church as a whole at least until relatively late on, near or after the time of Augustine. Most Christians during the pre-Constantinian period were more flexible, and less idealized (and less like the members of a small vehement fringe movement) than we would have said a century ago; many converts to Christianity under Constantine were flexible and "worldly" not because their conversion was "surface" or incomplete but because the Church which they joined already had a sizeable flexible and worldly component.
Accordingly, where Cochrane sees, say, Lactantius as a figure who imcompletely absorbs Christianity because of his continuing attachment to a classical, Roman philosophical view Brown argues that there's a couple of generations (at least -- and probably more in the East where later discontinuities were less marked politically) in which one "mainstream" (and theologically orthodox, along Nicene lines -- we aren't worrying about the Catholic/Arian split here) Christian current was much more tolerant of continuing social patterns which were part of the structure of society than what eventually became the case.[1]
The other big difference is in the treatment of Constantine. Where Cochrane sees him as a "surface" quasi-convert, Fox makes a strong argument for him as a strong convert (to the version of Christianity which blends classicism and orthodoxy).
This is actually a significant difference -- because Cochrane's view of Constantine in the context of his competitors makes the adoption by the Empire of Christianity seem like an almost inevitable thing: if it was strong enough to hold on during the persecution under Diocletian, it was a significant enough power bloc that it had to be admitted into the arena of the licit and engaged as an imperial support rather than an adversary. In the alternative narrative, there was rather less inevitability about it -- we're far more in the domain of pure contingency, with changes hinging on the personal views of one man.
[1] This isn't necessarily even as much a change in Christianity as a change in the environment -- where the Church had to take over holding the social structure together, in the West, where there was a power vacuum, there was no longer a strong classical civic tradition to rely on, and the new overlords certainly were not steeped in it. With no balancing strong cultural tradition on the other side figures like Boethius or Fortunatus become odd survivals and have no successors.
It's interesting reading "chronologically backward". I've just been reading Charles Norris Cochrane's Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine -- which is, let me stress, still a valuable and worthwhile resource, especially for its treatment of the classical background, even though it was published in the mid-1940s. (Cochrane was a classicist by discipline.) However, I had previously read Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians, which focusses on the pre-Constantinian period and finishes with a treatment of Constantine, as well as several more recent studies of the Christianisation of the empire such as Peter Brown's Authority and the Sacred.
Cochrane represents the normative narrative against which the later authors' positions are set, and although many of the items remain the same, the overall picture changes remarkably with a change in perspective. The later writers draw on the same prominent authors from the period as principal sources, but draw more heavily on lower-level "social history" data where it can be determined.
In both cases, there's a reaction against identifying a core orthodox Christianity with a prominent "rigorist" perspective. In both cases, there is an argument that the rigorist view which is visible throughout the period -- Tertullian is an early example at an extreme -- is not representative of the Church as a whole at least until relatively late on, near or after the time of Augustine. Most Christians during the pre-Constantinian period were more flexible, and less idealized (and less like the members of a small vehement fringe movement) than we would have said a century ago; many converts to Christianity under Constantine were flexible and "worldly" not because their conversion was "surface" or incomplete but because the Church which they joined already had a sizeable flexible and worldly component.
Accordingly, where Cochrane sees, say, Lactantius as a figure who imcompletely absorbs Christianity because of his continuing attachment to a classical, Roman philosophical view Brown argues that there's a couple of generations (at least -- and probably more in the East where later discontinuities were less marked politically) in which one "mainstream" (and theologically orthodox, along Nicene lines -- we aren't worrying about the Catholic/Arian split here) Christian current was much more tolerant of continuing social patterns which were part of the structure of society than what eventually became the case.[1]
The other big difference is in the treatment of Constantine. Where Cochrane sees him as a "surface" quasi-convert, Fox makes a strong argument for him as a strong convert (to the version of Christianity which blends classicism and orthodoxy).
This is actually a significant difference -- because Cochrane's view of Constantine in the context of his competitors makes the adoption by the Empire of Christianity seem like an almost inevitable thing: if it was strong enough to hold on during the persecution under Diocletian, it was a significant enough power bloc that it had to be admitted into the arena of the licit and engaged as an imperial support rather than an adversary. In the alternative narrative, there was rather less inevitability about it -- we're far more in the domain of pure contingency, with changes hinging on the personal views of one man.
[1] This isn't necessarily even as much a change in Christianity as a change in the environment -- where the Church had to take over holding the social structure together, in the West, where there was a power vacuum, there was no longer a strong classical civic tradition to rely on, and the new overlords certainly were not steeped in it. With no balancing strong cultural tradition on the other side figures like Boethius or Fortunatus become odd survivals and have no successors.
An observation
Jun. 27th, 2011 02:16 pmThis is one of the very rare years when the Feast of the Sacred Heart and the Feast of the Precious Blood fall on the same day. (One is part of the Easter cycle, and is thus a moveable feast. The other is a fixed date (and was dropped from the universal calendar after Vatican II, but that's neither here nor there).
While it is somewhat newsworthy that the Sacred Congregation for the Faith published the Normae de gravioribus delictis as a single revised document including the most recent updates (the category was created about a decade ago pursuant to the moto propriu Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela); that among the newest additions to the normae there are not only significant updates to the treatment of clerical abuse of minors (etc.) but also several regarding sacramental issues; and that among the latter they have included the (several years old - December 19, 2007) delict regarding the attempted ordination of women in an unmodified form: it is neither shocking nor surprising that they have done so.
To hear the news reports you would think that the abuse and ordination items are the only two things in the document. In fact, the document contains a significant number of sacramental delicts (under which the ordination of women falls), some of which have been slightly modified in the revision. Most of the sacramental delicts have a very long pedigree.
The original list of delicts regarding the sacrament of the Eucharist, for example, was as follows:
Delicts against the sanctity of the Most Holy Sacrament and Sacrifice of the Eucharist:
1. Throwing away, taking or retaining the consecrated species for a sacrilegious purpose, or profaning the consecrated species.
2. Attempting the liturgical action of the Eucharistic sacrifice or the simulation thereof.
3. Concelebrating the Eucharistic Sacrifice together with ministers of ecclesial communities which do not have Apostolic succession nor recognize the Sacramental dignity of priestly ordination.
4. Consecrating one matter without the other in a Eucharistic celebration or both outside of a Eucharistic celebration.
These have been modified in the revised document as follows:
9. Regarding the Eucharist, the two delicts of attentatio liturgicae eucharistici Sacrificii actionis (CIC can. 1378 § 2 n.1) and the simulation of the same (CIC can. 1379; CCEO can. 1443) are now considered under separate numbers (art 3 § 1 nn. 2 and 3);
10. Also concerning delicts against the Eucharist, with respect to the previous version of the text, the phrase “alterius materiae sine altera” has been replaced with the expression “unius materiae vel utriusque” and the phrase “aut etiam utriusque extra eucharisticam celebrationem” has been replaced with “aut extra eam” (art. 3 § 2);
There really is little news here on the sacramental delicts side, and certainly no reason for the reactions I'm seeing. A little bit of diligent research would have shown this. Yes, we already know the Roman position regarding the attempted ordination of women -- it's been out for nearly three years in the form in which it is being republished. We know that a lot of people disagree with it (myself included, but then I'm Anglo-, not Roman, Catholic). But the administrative step of publishing the consolidated revisions to the list including the new extension of the moral delicts is newsworthy only insofar as it does introduce the formal classification of the new moral delicts.
Corpus Christi
Jun. 7th, 2010 11:06 amThis is the octave of the feast of Corpus Christi (last Thirsday): we had the observance of the Solemnity on Sunday (procession outside with the Blessed Sacrament, followed by Benediction).
I've been pinged by a handlful of posts that seem to be confused about exactly what is involved in Transubstantiation, so this seemed like a good time to make it clear exactly what it is.
Let's start with Aristotle. In Aristotelian philosophy, there is a distinction made beween the substance of something and the accidents by which we percieve it. Accidents include sensibilia (texture, colour, sound, weight, etc.) but also any characteristics of something which may be measured. In classical Aristotelian philosophy one perceives the substance of something through its accidents.
This view of perception was adopted by Thomas (among others) in the Scholastic period. (Subsequently, there's been a strong trend away from this -- more recent brands of philosophy have tended to hold that all that we can know are the accidents -- that instead of perceiving the thing through its accidents we perceive, directly, only the accidents.)
Dealing with the question of what could be said about the Real Presence in the Sacrament led to the formulation of the view that in the consecration, the Sacrament's substance is converted to that of the body and blood of Christ, but that the accidents remain unchanged. In other words, any measurements you may take of the matter will still reflect the accidents of the bread and wine: you can still, for example, be intoxicated by the pretiossimum, or have a celiac reaction to the Host. (In other words yet again, snarky comments by people like P.Z. Myers that science can't tell the difference between a consecrated Host and and unconsecrated one would have a Thomist nodding and saying "I just said that. And your point is?")
Theologians have generally moved away from the term because not many people are still Thomists, and the term makes sense only within a Thomist (or at least Scholastic) context. Most recent discussions concern a real sacrificial presence in the host and consecrated wine.
As an aside on the epistemological status of this sort of discussion: experimental science begand (and has continued) explicitly as an approach towards measuring and quantifying the accidents of the things in the universe. (More narrowly, it deals with measuring repeatable things, but that's a different issue.) It is mildly ironic that the trend in philosophy over the same period has been to downgrade what can be measured from reliable indicators of the substance of something to appearances which may not be tightly correlated to its substance.
I've been pinged by a handlful of posts that seem to be confused about exactly what is involved in Transubstantiation, so this seemed like a good time to make it clear exactly what it is.
Let's start with Aristotle. In Aristotelian philosophy, there is a distinction made beween the substance of something and the accidents by which we percieve it. Accidents include sensibilia (texture, colour, sound, weight, etc.) but also any characteristics of something which may be measured. In classical Aristotelian philosophy one perceives the substance of something through its accidents.
This view of perception was adopted by Thomas (among others) in the Scholastic period. (Subsequently, there's been a strong trend away from this -- more recent brands of philosophy have tended to hold that all that we can know are the accidents -- that instead of perceiving the thing through its accidents we perceive, directly, only the accidents.)
Dealing with the question of what could be said about the Real Presence in the Sacrament led to the formulation of the view that in the consecration, the Sacrament's substance is converted to that of the body and blood of Christ, but that the accidents remain unchanged. In other words, any measurements you may take of the matter will still reflect the accidents of the bread and wine: you can still, for example, be intoxicated by the pretiossimum, or have a celiac reaction to the Host. (In other words yet again, snarky comments by people like P.Z. Myers that science can't tell the difference between a consecrated Host and and unconsecrated one would have a Thomist nodding and saying "I just said that. And your point is?")
Theologians have generally moved away from the term because not many people are still Thomists, and the term makes sense only within a Thomist (or at least Scholastic) context. Most recent discussions concern a real sacrificial presence in the host and consecrated wine.
As an aside on the epistemological status of this sort of discussion: experimental science begand (and has continued) explicitly as an approach towards measuring and quantifying the accidents of the things in the universe. (More narrowly, it deals with measuring repeatable things, but that's a different issue.) It is mildly ironic that the trend in philosophy over the same period has been to downgrade what can be measured from reliable indicators of the substance of something to appearances which may not be tightly correlated to its substance.
Category error
Apr. 13th, 2010 02:55 pmThis is transaccidentation, not transubstantiation.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/04/someone_is_going_to_burn_in_he.php
It's a sad day when people can't even get their most basic terms right.
(N.B. except in a few really wierd mediaeval visions involving bleeding babies, transaccidentation is completely excluded in the theological tradition of the Church.)
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/04/someone_is_going_to_burn_in_he.php
It's a sad day when people can't even get their most basic terms right.
(N.B. except in a few really wierd mediaeval visions involving bleeding babies, transaccidentation is completely excluded in the theological tradition of the Church.)
Textual retention in bible translations
Mar. 15th, 2010 12:50 pmA comment in a thread on Making Light raised the familiar point that much of the AV was derived from the earlier translations; which got me wondering. So I chose a pattern at semi-random (the first four verses of Hebrews, which form a moderately complex sentence in the original Greek) and took both earlier translations (Tyndale, Geneva) which fed into the AV as well as the RV and RSV which are revisions of it. (I've also thrown in the Catholic Douay-Rheims, which was a competitor with the AV but was heavily dependent on it.) I've bolded sequences of theree or more words which, spelling aside, is common to the text in question than the AV.
Tyndale:
God in tyme past diversly and many wayes spake vnto the fathers by Prophetes: but in these last dayes he hath spoken vnto vs by his sonne whom he hath made heyre of all thinges: by who also he made the worlde. Which sonne beynge the brightnes of his glory and very ymage of his substance bearinge vp all thinges with the worde of his power hath in his awne person pourged oure synnes and is sitten on the right honde of the maiestie an hye and is more excellent then the angels in as moche as he hath by inheritaunce obteyned an excellenter name then have they.
Geneva:
At sundry times and in divers manners God spake in the old time to our fathers by the Prophets, In these last days he hath spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath made heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds, Who being the brightness of the glory, and the engraved form of his person, and bearing up all things by his mighty word, hath by himself purged our sins, and sitteth at the right hand of the Majesty in the highest places, And is made so much more excellent than the Angels, in as much as he hath obtained a more excellent Name than they.
AV:
God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; Being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.
Douay:
God, who, at sundry times and in divers manners, spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all, In these days hath spoken to us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the world. Who being the brightness of his glory, and the figure of his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power, making purgation of sins, sitteth on the right hand of the majesty on high. Being made so much better than the angels, as he hath inherited a more excellent name than they.
RV:
God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds; who being the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; having become by so much better than the angels, as he hath inherited a more excellent name than they.
RSV:
In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has obtained is more excellent than theirs.
NRSV:
Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.
There seem to be a few things to note:
1) The relation between the Geneva text and the AV text is not especially close -- the two share many phrases, enough to be clearly related, but differ enough to make it clear that one did not become the other by a light editorial once-over.
2) The most closely-related text would seem to be the Douay one.
3) The RV would seem to have modified the AV a bit more than the AV modified the Geneva.
4) The RSV and NRSV (which are extremely close in this passage) are both so distantly related to be in effect new translations. Most of the (few) shared textual sequences have been preserved since Tyndale.
5) Many of the minor changes in this text, unsurprisingly, seem to be concerned with straightening out the word order. The AV is probably closest to the Greek, preserving most of the subordination in the clause structures; the other translations (except for Douay) try to flatten things out to some degree into parallel clauses.
Tyndale:
God in tyme past diversly and many wayes spake vnto the fathers by Prophetes: but in these last dayes he hath spoken vnto vs by his sonne whom he hath made heyre of all thinges: by who also he made the worlde. Which sonne beynge the brightnes of his glory and very ymage of his substance bearinge vp all thinges with the worde of his power hath in his awne person pourged oure synnes and is sitten on the right honde of the maiestie an hye and is more excellent then the angels in as moche as he hath by inheritaunce obteyned an excellenter name then have they.
Geneva:
At sundry times and in divers manners God spake in the old time to our fathers by the Prophets, In these last days he hath spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath made heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds, Who being the brightness of the glory, and the engraved form of his person, and bearing up all things by his mighty word, hath by himself purged our sins, and sitteth at the right hand of the Majesty in the highest places, And is made so much more excellent than the Angels, in as much as he hath obtained a more excellent Name than they.
AV:
God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; Being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.
Douay:
God, who, at sundry times and in divers manners, spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all, In these days hath spoken to us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the world. Who being the brightness of his glory, and the figure of his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power, making purgation of sins, sitteth on the right hand of the majesty on high. Being made so much better than the angels, as he hath inherited a more excellent name than they.
RV:
God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds; who being the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; having become by so much better than the angels, as he hath inherited a more excellent name than they.
RSV:
In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has obtained is more excellent than theirs.
NRSV:
Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.
There seem to be a few things to note:
1) The relation between the Geneva text and the AV text is not especially close -- the two share many phrases, enough to be clearly related, but differ enough to make it clear that one did not become the other by a light editorial once-over.
2) The most closely-related text would seem to be the Douay one.
3) The RV would seem to have modified the AV a bit more than the AV modified the Geneva.
4) The RSV and NRSV (which are extremely close in this passage) are both so distantly related to be in effect new translations. Most of the (few) shared textual sequences have been preserved since Tyndale.
5) Many of the minor changes in this text, unsurprisingly, seem to be concerned with straightening out the word order. The AV is probably closest to the Greek, preserving most of the subordination in the clause structures; the other translations (except for Douay) try to flatten things out to some degree into parallel clauses.
Bishop Baines and Christmas Music
Dec. 7th, 2009 09:52 amI was irritated into this by a bit of slow news which has been replicated across various outlets: a typical example is http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/6680422/Traditional-carols-are-nonsense-says-bishop.html .
This particular piece shows a C. of E. bishop as (no particular surprise) clueless, lacking context, and fundamentally misinformed.
Before moving to the general argument (which is about the Church as an historical body and the general issues of historicity and Christianity), let's look at some of the specific points.
First and most adrift from reality: Adeste Fideles (an 18th century Latin hymn translated fairly closely in the 19th - none of the pieces mentioned in the article is an actual carol) is not directed even notionally to the shepherds or the magi, but to the contemporaneous body of the faithful. There are two verses referring to them in the third person. The song refers to an interior journey to the nativity, corresponding directly to the custom of the crib visit.
Secondly: "Away in a Manger" (again, not a carol, but a Victorian hymn) may be sentimental (and hardly a favourite of mine, although my seven-year-old daughter likes it) but it commits no solecism with "no crying he makes": rather, this is one allowable interpretation of the orthodox position that Christ was fully human but without sin. You can get to "no crying he makes" in two ways from there: first, by viewing the crying as a result of the alienation from nature which is a result of the Fall; alternatvely, by viewing the lack of crying (and hence lack of troubling his parents) as an avoidance of a negative activity. It is, of course, also allowable to see a newborn crying as nature even in its restored state; but since we have no actual evidence of the dividing line between marred and restored nature the question is open to debate. But the point is that it is open to debate, not automatically excluded.
Finally we come to "Once in Royal David's City", which will lead us into the larger and more general point. It "invites children to be 'mild, obedient, good as he’, which means what, exactly? This sounds suspiciously like Victorian behaviour control to me", Baines is quoted as saying (What is wrong with Victorian behaviour? Well, potentially quite a bit if you're disauthoritarian, but that is for a different post. Also, and more to the point, the thrust of the hymn isn't really Victorian: it's more an anticipation of the peculiarly 20th century (and peculiar) idea of the Holy Family as a model for the modern family; but that is also a topic for a different post.) Of course it has that sort of thrust; this is Mrs. Alexander. The one who wrote "All Things Bright and Beautiful" with its immortal verse
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made the great and lowly
And ordered their estate.
For something like 1400 years, if not more, this was seen as not only compatible with Christian doctrine but part of Christian doctrine (consider Piers Plowman for a moment, or some nice Elizabethan setting forth of the Great Chain of Being). Children were supposed to be deferential just as the third estate ("pays for all") was supposed to defer to the first and second estates.
Now I'm highly unlikely to back this view of society, and I can't say I know anyone who does (although I still know people who expect deference from children just because they are adults). But it is arrogant and parochial to take the view that just because we are in the present that our views are necessarily right by comparison to our precursors; it's just a mask under another form for the Victorian view of Progress and the Whig version of history.
When we edit out bits of hymns or carols which we dislike because they clash with our sensibilities we effectively try to pretend that our way of being Christian is and always was the only way. More generally, and outside the Church, whenever we suppress or downplay part of the past in this way we lose one thread of the overall understanding of the complexity of human experience and of how we got here.
There's been a wave of this, in hymn books and history curricula, for the past few decades. (Percy Dearmer tried to be respectful of hymn and carol writers and generally preserved words intact in The English Hymnal and The Oxford Book of Carols; his successors have not been so respectful.) And don't get me started on historical novels whose point of view characters and other sympathetic figures somehow hold twentieth-century values.
It's important to instill in people the ideas (1) that they should have some humility as regards the necessary correctness of even their most deeply-held conceptions, (2) that because the past is a foreign country you have to make some imaginative effort to understand it, and (3) that it's important to understand history as well as we can, because the present is rooted in the past and because it shines a set of lights from a variety of perspectives on our own understanding.
This is all the more impotant when the arena in question is the Church, whose theological foundations are bound up in the nature of historicity.
We need the full range of Christmas pieces to complement and check each other: the ancient office hymns such as Christe Redemptor Omnium or Veni Redemptor Gentium (note that these tend to downplay the manger in favour of a theme emphasising the theme of descendit de caelis, much as many of the high mediaeval carols tend to focus on the Blessed Virgin), the genuine carols and mediaeval lyrics such as "The Lord at first did Adam make" and Angelus ad Virginem; modern pieces like "Bethlehem Down"; and even the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century hymns which make up the bulk of the popular repertoire.
This particular piece shows a C. of E. bishop as (no particular surprise) clueless, lacking context, and fundamentally misinformed.
Before moving to the general argument (which is about the Church as an historical body and the general issues of historicity and Christianity), let's look at some of the specific points.
First and most adrift from reality: Adeste Fideles (an 18th century Latin hymn translated fairly closely in the 19th - none of the pieces mentioned in the article is an actual carol) is not directed even notionally to the shepherds or the magi, but to the contemporaneous body of the faithful. There are two verses referring to them in the third person. The song refers to an interior journey to the nativity, corresponding directly to the custom of the crib visit.
Secondly: "Away in a Manger" (again, not a carol, but a Victorian hymn) may be sentimental (and hardly a favourite of mine, although my seven-year-old daughter likes it) but it commits no solecism with "no crying he makes": rather, this is one allowable interpretation of the orthodox position that Christ was fully human but without sin. You can get to "no crying he makes" in two ways from there: first, by viewing the crying as a result of the alienation from nature which is a result of the Fall; alternatvely, by viewing the lack of crying (and hence lack of troubling his parents) as an avoidance of a negative activity. It is, of course, also allowable to see a newborn crying as nature even in its restored state; but since we have no actual evidence of the dividing line between marred and restored nature the question is open to debate. But the point is that it is open to debate, not automatically excluded.
Finally we come to "Once in Royal David's City", which will lead us into the larger and more general point. It "invites children to be 'mild, obedient, good as he’, which means what, exactly? This sounds suspiciously like Victorian behaviour control to me", Baines is quoted as saying (What is wrong with Victorian behaviour? Well, potentially quite a bit if you're disauthoritarian, but that is for a different post. Also, and more to the point, the thrust of the hymn isn't really Victorian: it's more an anticipation of the peculiarly 20th century (and peculiar) idea of the Holy Family as a model for the modern family; but that is also a topic for a different post.) Of course it has that sort of thrust; this is Mrs. Alexander. The one who wrote "All Things Bright and Beautiful" with its immortal verse
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made the great and lowly
And ordered their estate.
For something like 1400 years, if not more, this was seen as not only compatible with Christian doctrine but part of Christian doctrine (consider Piers Plowman for a moment, or some nice Elizabethan setting forth of the Great Chain of Being). Children were supposed to be deferential just as the third estate ("pays for all") was supposed to defer to the first and second estates.
Now I'm highly unlikely to back this view of society, and I can't say I know anyone who does (although I still know people who expect deference from children just because they are adults). But it is arrogant and parochial to take the view that just because we are in the present that our views are necessarily right by comparison to our precursors; it's just a mask under another form for the Victorian view of Progress and the Whig version of history.
When we edit out bits of hymns or carols which we dislike because they clash with our sensibilities we effectively try to pretend that our way of being Christian is and always was the only way. More generally, and outside the Church, whenever we suppress or downplay part of the past in this way we lose one thread of the overall understanding of the complexity of human experience and of how we got here.
There's been a wave of this, in hymn books and history curricula, for the past few decades. (Percy Dearmer tried to be respectful of hymn and carol writers and generally preserved words intact in The English Hymnal and The Oxford Book of Carols; his successors have not been so respectful.) And don't get me started on historical novels whose point of view characters and other sympathetic figures somehow hold twentieth-century values.
It's important to instill in people the ideas (1) that they should have some humility as regards the necessary correctness of even their most deeply-held conceptions, (2) that because the past is a foreign country you have to make some imaginative effort to understand it, and (3) that it's important to understand history as well as we can, because the present is rooted in the past and because it shines a set of lights from a variety of perspectives on our own understanding.
This is all the more impotant when the arena in question is the Church, whose theological foundations are bound up in the nature of historicity.
We need the full range of Christmas pieces to complement and check each other: the ancient office hymns such as Christe Redemptor Omnium or Veni Redemptor Gentium (note that these tend to downplay the manger in favour of a theme emphasising the theme of descendit de caelis, much as many of the high mediaeval carols tend to focus on the Blessed Virgin), the genuine carols and mediaeval lyrics such as "The Lord at first did Adam make" and Angelus ad Virginem; modern pieces like "Bethlehem Down"; and even the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century hymns which make up the bulk of the popular repertoire.
