Traditional

How many times does a family have to repeat an activity before it can be called a "ritual"? How many years must contain the same activity, in the same season, before it can be called a "tradition"?

For our household, blueberry picking has become a tradition.When Stone Hill Blueberry Farm opens up in July, we schedule a day to pluck several buckets of the little blue lovelies. Picking our own fruit continues to be one of the few activities which, for all four of us, can be productive, healthy, energetic, and fun all at the same time.

For scale, here's the haul, drying on the kitchen counter, with my two-year-old son looking on with excitement:

Jam and jelly, here we come!

~ emrys

Meet Christian Ethics

In preparation for my seminar on the connection between atonement and ethics, I perused Stephen Long's Christian Ethics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2010). It is one of the many "Very Short Introductions" offered by the OUP on topics ranging from Advertising to Fractals to Neoliberalism to Writing and Script. The pocket-sized book boasts only 135 pages, including notes and index; its clear brevity is a literary achievement in itself.

Long's work produces a useful balance between the theological foundations of Christian ethics and the practical issues to which such ethics applies. It does so without slipping into obscure theological or philosophical rabbit-trails. It also deftly handles the separate parts of the compound term "Christian ethics" so as to clarify the field in view. Long's writing is lucid, engaging, at times humorous (though in 135 pages there is precious little space to be spared for wit), and as complete as a "very short" introduction can be. The book spans the spectra of denominations and epochs from the early Church to the postmodern period, marking the full height and breadth of traditions.

For someone who seeks to begin a library of perspectives on Christian ethics (or even ethics in general), Long's book is the perfect place to start. In (very) short, this tiny tome is quite good.

~ emrys

The Fullness of Calvin

Following the recommendation of a wise friend, I dug into Bruce Gordon's 2009 biography: Calvin. Though dense with the fullness of academic rigor, Gordon's exploration of the life of the Genevan reformer moved with enough speed and direction to keep my interest. (Gordon even managed to slip in periodic references to the works of Tolkien, betraying either a personal hobby or perhaps a bet made with a student.)

Much more faithful to chronology than Selderhuis' text, Gordon avoided the danger of a wooden timeline by astute attention to the rich complexity of Calvin, his actions, and his circumstances. Calvin successfully connects essential components of the reformer's doctrines (like election, predestination, and the Lord's Supper) to the history and relationships in the sixteenth-century Church without digressing too far into historical theology.

Like Selderhuis, Gordon presents an honest balance between both the clear achievements and personal imperfections of the man John Calvin. He uses not only Calvin's own writings but also both the works of his contemporaries and other historians' efforts to shed a wide light on Geneva's prime churchman. The breadth of research for Calvin predestined the book to be a long read. But I found it well worth the patience it requires of the student who wants to appreciate the intricacies of the Protestant Reformation.

Much of the last quarter of the book showed me something I had not attended before: the significant impact Calvin desired to have--and to great extent did have--on the Protestant movement in France. Though Calvin's own writings can be interpreted equivocally regarding his desire for personal involvement in France, the evidence that Gordon brings forth reveals Calvin's prominent place in a great gospel tide surging from the Bernese and Genevan highlands to breadth of his homeland. Would that all we Christians could be so devoted both to Christ's kingdom in our own communities and also to its spread further into the world.

~ emrys

Can We Have Too Much Atonement?

The next book in my research is A Community Called Atonement by Scot McKnight (2007). The title and the blurb online enticed me with the promise that the text would bring together matters of atonement and ethics in Christian theology--the precise topic of my seminar at the end of this month.

A Community Called Atonement attempts to build an understanding of atonement that moves beyond the simplicity of penal substitution which has gripped the thinking and preaching of much of the last fifty years of Evangelical Christianity. Using the metaphor of a bag of golf clubs, McKnight builds an argument that in order to play the full game of atonement, one must have more than just a driver or a putter. One's atonement theory must include more than a narrow forensic view of Jesus' death on the cross. It must include Christus victor, recapitulation, and part of the exemplar theories of atonement. In this, McKnight approaches the view called "Kaleidoscopic" in Joel Green's part of Atonement: Four Views (see earlier post).

What is even more tantalizing is McKnight's attempt to bring ethics into atonement. He argues that an atonement theory is incomplete unless it includes "missional praxis" in the form of fellowship, justice, mission, scripture, baptism, eucharist, and prayer. In what increasingly seemed to be a reaction to decades of "four spiritual laws" theology, McKnight's book brought every theological, ecclesial, and ethical facet of the Christian life into the "golf bag" of atonement. It seemed to me, by the end of a work that functioned more like a systemic theology than topical study, McKnight's atonement could be identified with just about any piece of Christian theology. Fellowship exists in the Church "for atonement"; "Scripture plays an atoning role in the life of the church"; and "the Lord's Supper is a praxis of atonement."

It sounds beautiful and poetic to make every aspect of Christianity a part of God's mysterious work we call atonement. As many authors have shown, describing atonement as a mechanism or event out of which the rest of Christianity flows presents difficulties of logic, metaphor, and language. But McKnight's approach to avoiding the classic difficulties by expanding the definition of atonement results only in a neologism for atonement that contains too much stuff to be meaningful. There's no use in talking about atonement if atonement can refer to anything at all.

Yes, atonement should be the font of the Christian life. God's reconciling us to the divine is central to the good news of Jesus Christ. I agree that if justice, fellowship, mission, and all the marks of the Church do not flow from us, then we probably have not grasped atonement. But saying that many things result from atonement is not the same as saying that atonement includes those many things in itself.

The only place where McKnight offers useful precision is in his attempt to describe the "bag" that carries all his "atonement clubs." He chooses a modification of the recapitulation theory, calling it "identification for incorporation." God taking on flesh in Christ ("identification") leads to our being "in Christ" through faith ("incorporation"). I would have appreciated more expansion of this new term. Without that expansion, I am left to suspect that it does not differ much from the recapitulation theories of Irenaeus and Athanasius, to which McKnight enthusiastically directs our attention.

Despite its limited usefulness in describing a precise theory of atonement, A Community Called Atonement reminds us, with erudite zeal, that atonement is not a legal fiction for the comfort of the individual believer. Atonement, rightly understood, opens the door to transformation of the individual, the Church, and society into the image of God. May it be so for us!

~ emrys

Dad's Long Drive

When my brother and I were young, in the early 1980s, we took a few family vacations to Chincoteague, Virginia. There we would inhabit a little cottage for a few days, go crabbing off the community pier, and find all the trouble for which two young boys search.

As a surgeon, Dad was often on call, which meant that at any time of day or night he could be called in to the Emergency Room or the Operating Room for a case. But even physicians get to take real, honest-to-goodness vacations, by getting one of their colleagues to cover on-call duty while they're gone. During our trips to Chincoteague Dad was covered by his fellow physicians.

On one occasion, however, even having coverage did not allow Dad to escape the duties of medicine. While we were in Virginia, one of his patients fell into a state in which emergency surgery was necessary. This patient refused the procedure if Dad wasn't the one doing the operation. So the hospital got hold of Dad, three states away, and he made the drive back to Bethlehem. As he told the story later, Dad drove 80 mph the whole way home, hoping and praying for a police car to pull him over so that he could get an escort. (Dad never intentionally drove over the speed limit, which at the time was 55 mph.) Of course, on that trip home, not an officer was to be found on the highway between Chincoteague and Bethlehem.

Those were the days when Dad was driving the brown Datsun station wagon (remember station wagons?), the boxy precursor to the boxy Nissan models. I remember kids at school calling them "rice-grinders," as a derogatory epithet. But that year the little Datsun made it back and forth to Chincoteague twice without a hitch (or an escort), and lasted several years more, to boot.

~ emrys

Atonement: How You Look At It

In preparation for a seminar course I'm teaching at the end of this month, I recently read The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views, edited by James Beilby and Paul Eddy (2006). This piece of IVP Academic's Spectrum Multiview series performs a wonderful service to readers seeking insight into multiple facets of atonement theory: It publishes four authors' perspectives on atonement, along with responses from the remaining three authors to each author's position. The book as a whole, then, constitutes a conversation between points of view.

I appreciated that the four views on atonement (penal substitution, Christus victor, healing, and kaleidoscopic) came from contemporary scholars describing their personal positions rather than offering historical surveys of atonement theories. The latter have their place (my hat is off to John Thompson, among others, who helped me to understand the significance of past generations' theologies), but I find arguments written for the present decade more engaging and more helpful in my search for clarity.

Atonement is one of the Gordian knots of Christian theology. The spectrum of imagery and logic used in the scriptures to elucidate how God and humanity are reconciled does not lend the topic to simple explanation. For a faith that seeks understanding, the atonement is an awfully elusive goose to chase.

Four Views offers a piercing analysis of four perspectives on the atonement. All four authors take the scriptures as the authoritative starting point; all four end up at different (though not entirely exclusive) positions. I received great illumination from the substitution, Christus victor, and kaleidoscopic perspectives; all three helped to enrich my own ruminations on the atonement. The healing view did not seem to me a cogent argument on par with the other three. I left that part of the discussion wondering why the editors did not choose a more classic view (such as recapitulation or exemplar). Of the other three however, each had very strong points for itself and could offer important criticisms of the others, which interaction helped me to learn what questions one must ask of an atonement theory to see if it is worth its salt.

It is rare that I read a scholarly piece in which the author has occasion to address another author directly. So I took some amusement from watching the rules of etiquette play out on the page. In his response to the other authors (all were male), each author offered a paragraph or two of affirmations about his colleague's work, then proceeded to poke a series of potentially lethal holes in his argument. There must be a scholarly Geneva Convention for how to criticize another scholar's writing.

Taken as a whole: an enlightening and helpful read. I recommend it to anyone interested in diving into the mystery of how Christ reconciles us to God.

~ emrys

Finally . . . That Last Little Thing

Since the day we bought the house, Sara has been complaining about the carpet in the upstairs bathroom. "Why do people put carpets in bathrooms? Don't they know it's just going to get wet?" Having two small children who love to splash during bath time brought the question continually to the forefront of our minds. And we have wondered, since the first time water splashed out of our shower, whether water was soaking into the carpet and corrupting the sheeting beneath our feet.

In September of last year we bit the bullet and decided to change the upstairs bath: new paint on the walls and linoleum on the floor. Here's a glimpse of its original state, complete with Little Splasher #2 and the foreshadowing cordless drill on the left:

 Note the dirty cream walls:

At 14 months, Micah is ready to take on the 14V DeWalt:

As you can see, no expense was spared in the original construction--not quite wall-to-wall carpeting:

 We are big fans of having main colors and accent colors in our rooms. Instead of uniform dirty cream, we went for a light blue main and bright blue accent color. (By the way, I can't recommend strongly enough the yellow pour spout that attaches to the rim of the paint can: saves paint, mess, and is reusable!):

Of course, all home improvement projects are family projects. Here is my lovely partner in decorating:

 Much of this project was done while Monkey See was off at school, which left Monkey Do to help. He's very serious about his role in the painting process:

This renovation happened as Hurricane Dos was entering his Serious Climbing Phase. So he got up on the toilet and reached for some tool on the changing table. I thought this was a good photo op, and grabbed the camera for a couple of shots:

And I was in mid-shutter-click when the changing pad slid and Micah lost his balance. This was my view right before reaching out to catch him:

He was fine.
When the painting was finished, the carpet awaited removal and replacement. Here's the scene with all the trim removed:

To our surprise, twenty-four years of shower spillage had not rotted out the sheeting.

It turns out that the easiest way to cut linoleum flooring for your bathroom is to use the recently removed carpet as a pattern, laid out in the living room. No measuring necessary! It is a testament to the size of our bathrooms that marking and cutting the linoleum flooring had to be done in two phases; the whole cutout of the bathroom floor would not fit in our living room:

When it came time to install the trim, Handyman Deux was ready to swing 22 ounces of nail-driving power. All right: his spirit was ready, but the flesh was a little too young.

So he set himself instead to understanding the tool at rest:

And with new color, new floor, and trim almost completely replaced, we have a new bathroom:

I said that the trim was almost completely replaced. The job was almost done in November of last year. This is June of this year. Even though we plowed through the big parts of this project in good stead, I didn't make time to cut, sand, and seal the one piece of trim that I had to totally replace. (And I needed to replace the leaky sweat valve on the toilet.) I had the wood; I had the tools; I had the polycrylic. I just didn't make the three hours in my schedule to get it done. That's how it often is with my projects: They are not completely finished because of some Last Little Thing that gets put off, as if its small size makes it unworthy of attention before all the Big Things of this world.

Well, two weeks ago I finally got That Last Little Thing done: replacing the sweat valve and trim behind the toilet:

Now the bathroom is done!

~ emrys

Reformation Pilgrim

The church tradition in which I serve traces its roots back to John Calvin, the 16th-century Reformer. I had read bits and pieces of Calvin's life and work over the course of my theological studies. In anticipation of a seminar I'm teaching in July, I have the opportunity to read much more about him.

John Calvin: A Pilgrim's Life, by Herman J. Selderhuis (IVP Academic, 2009), is a biography of John Calvin. One of its characteristics (which the author invites us to view as an enticement rather than a liability) is that it tells Calvin's story using only primary source material about his life: such as letters to and from Calvin, introductions to his sermons and books, and documents from the church in Geneva. This selectivity of source material, combined with an informal writing style, makes the book much easier to read than an academic textbook.

Selderhuis invites us to view phases in Calvin's life through the lenses of one-word epithets: he could be viewed as "orphan," "preacher," "widower," and "sailor." Aided by this flexibility of metaphor, Selderhuis attempts to break down some of the stereotypes loaded upon Calvin by later Calvinist traditions.Though Selderhuis does not shy away from judging some of Calvin's (and Geneva's) actions in light of 21st-century worldviews, he confronts the reader with places where the record needs to be set straight. For instance, the caricature of Calvin as the despot of Reformation Geneva is belied by the conflicts between the church and the civil government in that city; and the reputation of Calvin as the strutting champion of "double predestination" requires correction in every generation. For the insights which Selderhuis mines from the source material, I appreciate his work.

The divisions between and within chapters, while always cued by intriguing one- or two-word titles, often left me with a sense of discontinuity. The book's declared aim of walking through Calvin's life according to his own letters may make this sort of zig-zagging unavoidable; a thematic biography of Calvin would make for a work radically different than this collection of vignettes. And at times Selderhuis' writing is so jocular as to seem flip, which felt jarring at times, given the seriousness with which he expects his readers to take the life of this famous Reformer.

These shortcomings did not, however, prevent me from learning much about Calvin's life and how it shaped (and was shaped by) the theological and ecclesiastical movements of his day. A Pilgrim's Life, as the subtitle suggests, takes seriously the fact that John Calvin--like all theologians, no matter how significant their work--was a human being in part guided and defined by his circumstances and relationships. Reforming the Church in our day requires, too, knowing ourselves and our place in God's eternity. Whether we shall be remembered five hundred years after our deaths is not up to us; but we can imitate Calvin's resolve to live as a pilgrim for Christ today.

~ emrys

This Is Not a Blog Post

"You shall not bow down to idols or worship them, for I, Yhwh your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of their parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments."
~ Exodus 20: 5-6

In my calling as student of scripture I find myself confronting paradoxes on a regular basis. The text from Exodus contributes to a paradox when we note that almost no two successive generations of Israelites were faithful to Yhwh; their history is a pendulum of back-and-forth commitment to God. How, then, can punishment or blessing be promised so categorically across generations?

Add to the paradoxes of scripture those of theology--the Incarnation and Trinity, to name the two catholic examples--and I find myself swimming in apparent contradictions.

You might imagine, then, how a book entitled Paradox (Margaret Cuonzo, MIT Press, 2014) caught my eye. Cuonzo offers, in a handbook-sized volume, a brief historical survey of classic paradoxes, various solutions to them, and intriguing descriptions of how paradoxes function in our world.

Paradox reads easily by virtue of its conversational style. As a 210-page book with such a sweeping trajectory must, it keeps the reader moving through Zeno, bald people with full heads of hair, bivalence versus excluded middles, and philosophy of science. The writing has the tone of a professor who has invited us over for lunch on a summer afternoon to chat about her favorite topics. Paradox is a friendly read.

This amicable flavor, however, does not neutralize the challenging character of the material. Cuonzo does not shy away from tackling the conundra of the Liar's Paradox, the Sorites Paradox, or whether scientific inquiry can actually prove anything. She also offers a helpful way of thinking about solutions to (or ways out of) paradoxes by drawing distinctions between typical approaches. In a mind-stretching effort, subjective probability is enlisted to produce an novel assessment of paradoxicality, by which we might determine which paradoxes are more paradoxical than others.

At these innovative junctures the work of Paradox shows its limitation. Subjective probability has its usefulness, I think, but the premise of a paradox is precisely that statements assembled together show inconsistency under the objective order of logic. Introducing subjectivity at the place where objectivity presents the challenge seems dodgy. I am not convinced that paradoxes, even with Cuonzo's rubric of subjective probability, can be ranked quantitatively. She has convinced me that their solution-types bear out qualitative differences, but numerically assessing paradoxicality is, I think, not especially helpful.

The book's real power is in showing that struggling with apparent paradoxes bears the fruit of important distinctions and, in the realm of science, further discovery. However we evaluate, categorize, or quantify paradoxes, it is in struggling with the seeming contradictions in life that we uncover our assumptions and discover new ways of thinking. The work of swimming through life's inconsistencies is some of the most important work of all. For the fascinating, challenging, and entertaining opportunity to learn this lesson, I am grateful for Cuonzo's work.

~ emrys

Socrates Must Die

I very rarely purchase a book because I see it advertised in a magazine. In fact, it has happened only three times in my life, and all of them in March of this year. I read the advert for Rebecca Newberger Goldstien's Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away (2014) and immediately got online to order my copy.

Goldstein is a fully-credentialed philosopher with a brilliant analytical style and a penchant for narrative. Plato at the Googleplex masterfully weaves together a full introduction to the work of Plato and a tantalizing rendering of what Plato would say to 21st century interviewers. I write "full introduction," because Goldstein writes in such a way that a reader who has never picked up a Platonic text can merge quickly into the stream of his thought, but also in such a way that readers familiar with the biographer of Socrates will learn something new. And they might even be challenged in ways even Plato himself did not imagine.

Every other chapter is a move deeper into scholarly--but often playful and always accessible--analysis of Plato and his Socrates in situ in the 5th-century B.C. The chapters between are imagined dialogues between Plato (magically transported to 21st-century America) and various characters: a media escort at the Googleplex, a thinly-disguised FoxNews interviewer, and two radically different child-rearing experts, to name a few. I found myself drawn in by Goldstein's dialogical style, alternately enjoying new ideas, laughing aloud, and knitting my brow at philosophical zingers.

In spite of the book's title, Goldstein does not spend much energy building a direct argument that philosophy won't go away. The arc and sweep of the book does that heavy lifting: the plausibility of her imagined interviews with Plato draws the reader out of the cavern of the mundane. We are carried gently into the realization that yes, pursuit of "the real-the beautiful-the good" is still the bedrock of human life and yes, those that don't grasp this truth are staring at the back of a cave.

The power of Goldstein's work is epitomized, for me, in one point made about half-way through the book. She gradually builds a persuasive case that Socrates' real offense--the real reason that the Athenians decided he must die--was declaring that being a good Athenian citizen did not make one truly virtuous. Many of us--even those who have never studied the works of Plato--have heard the assertion attributed to Socrates, "The unexamined life is not worth living." This phrase seems innocuous philosophical banter at best, navel-gazing trope at worst, if it stands alone. But in its context, where Goldstein places it like a gem in the perfect setting, the phrase is destabilizing and offensive.

I live in a nation whose government has been described as "a bad form of government but better than any other," which claim I am inclined to believe. And I believe that a life lived as a "patriot" in the United States may be much better than a life lived in loyalty to a good many other lesser things. But I also see patriotism too often conflated with virtue, the latter being something that requires exhaustive (and exhausting) examination and dialogue which do not privilege the assumptions of patriotism. Goldstein's masterful new dialogues of Plato brought me further into the light of our pursuit of "the real-the beautiful-the good." I take new zeal for the examination of life from her erosophy--her passionate pursuit of wisdom.

For anyone who is interested in Plato's work, who enjoys well-written dialogue, or who seeks wisdom with a passion, Plato at the Googleplex will be a rewarding experience.

~ emrys