Thought for 06.30.11

The proposed Anglican Covenant threatens to destabilize, deface or destroy the one thing of value that Anglicanism has to offer: our polity as a comparatively loose fellowship of self-governing churches. Anglicans have little to offer world Christendom by way of doctrine, except in the choice language of some of the very best English around. We do have (variably throughout the communion) some wonderful liturgy, again in rather fine language and music (some of which has indeed been borrowed by other traditions.)

But it is the idea of being a fellowship, a communion — not a "church" or a "federation" — of self-governing churches whose individual decisions do not bind the others, even as they cooperate in mission and ministry, that forms our only peculiar offering to the tapestry of world Christendom. It is a model of service and fellowship, of work with rather than power over, commended by Christ himself as a model of churchly governance. If that is not worth preserving, then we have little else to offer.


Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1896

Gracious God, we thank you for the witness of Harriett Beecher Stowe, whose fiction inspired thousands with compassion for the shame and sufferings of enslaved peoples, and who enriched her writings with the cadences of The Book of Common Prayer. Help us, like her, to strive for your justice, that our eyes may see the glory of your Son, Jesus Christ, when he comes to reign with you and the Holy Spirit in reconciliation and peace, one God, now and always. Amen.

It is said that when Stowe met Abraham Lincoln, the President observed, “So you are the little lady whose book started this war.” Such is the power of prophetic witness for justice.

ikon written by Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Thanks, Savitri

Happy to see this morning that Savitri Hensman of the Guardian has cited my work, Reasonable and Holy, as an Anglican resource in the continuing sexuality discussions. Thanks, Savi!

TSH


[UPDATED:] Troubling Questions Raised by Bishop's Acceptance of Child Molester to Be Priest

[UPDATE 07/07/2011: The Diocese of Nevada has finally issued a clarifying statement about this matter, in which Bishop Dan Edwards insists: "As I review what was done 2002 - 2004, I find no fault with the actions of any of our people, lay or ordained. The bishop, priests, and lay people of Nevada kept children safe and they were true to our belief that people can be redeemed." Unfortunately, the statement proceeds solely on the basis of the information supplied to the Diocese at the time by Fr. Parry himself -- namely, that he told Bishop Jefferts Schori and her Commission on Ministry only about the single molestation in the summer of 1987. He did not tell them of the multiple incidents before that -- one in 1981, and three more between 1973 and 1979 -- which led to his being required to have psychological counseling before he repeated his behavior in 1987.

What the statement shows is a compassionate group of laity and clergy who were misled by their desire to reward a gifted musician, who (they thought) had strayed on just one occasion, with a clerical position in the Church:
Based on the known facts and interviews with Fr. Bede, lay and clergy church representatives agreed that he should be received as a priest. The record shows no dissent. Nonetheless, the bishop added the restriction that he should not have contact with minors. This was to add double protection and prevent even the appearance of any threat to minors. This restriction and the reasons for it were conveyed by the bishop to people who supervised Fr. Bede’s work. Further, the bishop, in consultation with the diocesan attorney, recommended abuse awareness workshops.

For nearly a decade since that decision, Fr. Bede has served faithfully, still without a hint of misconduct. . . [emphasis added].
No doubt -- he appreciated being given the chance. But what is curious in all this is that no one is willing to deal with the consequences of Father Parry's having lied to all of them about the incidents in his background -- and with their having failed to turn up that evidence after two years of checking his background. The attorney for the abused plaintiff in Missouri was able to flesh all this information out even before he filed his lawsuit -- why were not the Commission on Ministry, and Bishop Jefferts Schori, concerned enough to do the same?

And then there is the damning report done by the Catholic Church, which concluded in 2000 that Fr. Parry still had "the proclivity to reoffend with minors." Bishop Edwards protests, contrary to the allegation in the Missouri lawsuit, that:
No such report was sent to the Diocese of Nevada and, to this day, we have no knowledge of its existence other than an assertion by the plaintiff’s personal injury lawyer in a John Doe lawsuit against the monastery.
(Of course, Bishop Edwards appears to think the report was done in the 1980's -- since he makes the claim that "Reliable testing to predict such sexual abuse was not even developed until nearly two decades later . . ."[emphasis added; h/t: Douglas LeBlanc].) Even if he is correct that the Diocese has no record of receiving the report, there remains the fact that Father Parry knew about it and its conclusion, because it resulted in the denial of his application to join a monastery. So this is one more deception to chalk up in connection with his application to be received into the Episcopal Church (USA). At this point, should not at least an inquiry be made into the basis for the lawsuit's allegation that a copy of the report was given to "the Episcopal Bishop for the Diocese of Nevada"? How can Bishop Jefferts Schori continue to maintain her wall of silence on this point?]

A recent lawsuit filed in Missouri over child molestation and abuse charges against a Catholic monastery there contains allegations which, if proved, raise troubling questions about the conduct of ECUSA's Presiding Bishop when she was the Bishop of Nevada from 2000 until her election to the national post in 2006. The lawsuit alleges that one of the abbey's Benedictine monks, Bede Parry, molested the plaintiff at a summer camp in 1987, and had sexual contact with several other young men over an eight-year period between 1973 and 1981 while they were at school or sang in the Abbey Choir, of which Parry was the director. (See this news release for a link to download a .pdf of the petition - h/t: Pageantmaster.) When the facts of the abuse came out in 1987, Parry left the monastery for a course of treatment, and then used his position as a Catholic priest to work at a variety of Catholic and Lutheran parishes in the southwest.

In 2000, Parry apparently applied to join another Catholic monastery, and underwent psychological testing and evaluation. "The results of this testing revealed that Fr. Parry was a sexual abuser who had the proclivity to reoffend with minors," the lawsuit alleges. Instead of joining the monastery, Parry was hired as the music director at All Saints Episcopal Church, in Las Vegas, where Jefferts Schori was the diocesan. (She did not need to be consulted about his hiring, and Parry now says that he did not disclose the test results to the clergy at All Saints.)

After a few years in that position, Parry says, "[I noticed that] they needed clergy, and I felt called. I talked to the bishop, and she accepted me. And I told her at the time that there was an incident of sexual misconduct at Conception Abbey in ’87. The Episcopal Church doesn’t have a ‘one strike and you’re out’ policy, so it didn’t seem like I was any particular threat. She said she’d have to check the canons, and she did." However, he says he told her only of the single incident in 1987, and not about any of the earlier ones.

Jefferts Schori presided over Parry's reception into the Episcopal priesthood in Las Vegas in 2004. (Pictures of the ceremony are at this link.) The questions that arise have to do with how thoroughly she evaluated his psychological state before agreeing to his reception. (The Roman Catholic Church had ordained him to the priesthood in 1982.)

Church Canon III.11, as in effect in 2003-2004, provides at the outset as follows, with regard to receiving persons in the Church as priests who were originally ordained in a church which shares the historic apostolic succession, but which is not in communion with the Episcopal Church (emphasis added):
Sec. 1 (a) When a Priest or Deacon ordained in a Church by a Bishop of the Historic Episcopate but not in communion with this Church desires to be received as a Member of the Clergy in this Church, the person shall apply in writing to a Bishop, attaching the following:
(1) Evidence that the person is a confirmed adult communicant in good standing in a Congregation of this Church;

(2) Evidence of previous Ministry and that all other credentials are valid and authentic;

(3) Evidence of moral and godly character; and that the person is free from any vows or other engagements inconsistent with the exercise of Holy Orders in this Church;

(4) Transcripts of all relevant academic and theological studies;

(5) A certificate from at least two Presbyters of this Church stating that, from personal examination or from satisfactory evidence presented to them, they believe that the departure of the person from the Communion to which the person has belonged has not arisen from any circumstance unfavorable to moral or religious character, or on account of which it may not be expedient to admit the person to Holy Orders in this Church;

(6) Certificates in the forms provided in Canon III.8.6 and III.8.7 [attesting that the candidate meets all the requirements to be a deacon and a priest, respectively] from the Rector or Member of the Clergy in charge and Vestry of a Parish of this Church; and

(7) A statement of the reasons for seeking to enter Holy Orders in this Church.
Section 2(a) of Canon III.11 next provides (emphasis added):
Sec. 2(a) If the person furnishes evidence of satisfactory theological training in the previous Communion, and has exercised a ministry therein with good repute and success for at least five years, the applicant shall be examined by the [diocesan] Commission [on Ministry] . . .
The lawsuit alleges that a copy of the 2000 psychological evaluation report was given to Bishop Jefferts Schori as part of the process by which she and the diocesan Commission on Ministry evaluated Parry's fitness to be an Episcopal priest. If so, the report should have triggered a new evaluation on the spot, because Canon III.8.7 (a) requires, as a condition of the certificate of fitness being issued (emphasis again added):
A person may be ordained Priest:
. . .
(3) if the medical examination, psychological examination, and background check have taken place or been updated within 36 months prior to ordination as a Priest.
As stated earlier, Bishop Jefferts Schori received Parry in 2004; therefore, the evaluation done on him in 2000 was more than three years old at the time of his reception.

The report itself may have disclosed the fact, but a proper background check would also have turned up that Parry had left Conception Abbey in 1987 on charges relating to multiple incidents of abuse over a fourteen-year period, and not a single isolated one. If Parry is correct that he lied to Bishop Jefferts Schori on this point, she should have easily discovered the lie with a little investigation -- and that lie would have been sufficient for her to deny his ordination.

The questions of what Bishop Jefferts Schori was told, what information she had available to her in the 2000 report (and any subsequent updating of it), and as a result of the background check done on Parry, thus become key to evaluating her decision to allow him to become a priest under her jurisdiction. But her spokesman at 815 Second Avenue Episcopal headquarters says only this: "We do not comment on lawsuits or allegations."

The point is, Bishop Jefferts Schori is not being asked "to comment on lawsuits or the allegations [in lawsuits]." (Neither she nor the Episcopal Church is a party to the lawsuit.) She should come forward with all of the information she had to justify her overriding of the highly disturbing conclusion supposedly reached by the 2000 report: that Father Parry was a sexual abuser who had the proclivity to re-offend with minors. A "proclivity" means a present inclination, and is no sign of any meaningful repentance.

The report was sufficient to keep Father Parry out of a Catholic monastery. Was it not also sufficient to keep him out of a position as an Episcopal priest? If not, why not?

Bishop Jefferts Schori and the members of her then Commission on Ministry have some explaining to do. Moreover, it is worth pointing out that in just two days, the new disciplinary canons take effect. At that point, Bishop Jefferts Schori, and any clergy members of the Nevada Commission on Ministry in 2003, have an obligation to self-report any lapses in clerical standards of conduct which they may have committed in connection with the Parry application. (For example, if they did not call for an update to the 2000 report, then they violated Canon III.8.7 (a) quoted above. If the Commission missed it, the duty to have the report updated as canon law required fell squarely in the lap of Bishop Jefferts Schori.)

We shall soon see how seriously the Episcopal Church (USA) takes its new canons.

[UPDATE 06/30/2011: I have been asked to elaborate on the statute of limitations which would apply to any charges against Bishop Jefferts Schori in this matter. The issue is complicated because of the transition provisions in the new Title IV canons which take effect on July 1. The basic period of limitations is established by new Canon IV.19.4 (a) at ten years from the commission of the offense. Since the conduct in question occurred in 2003-2004, we are unquestionably within the general ten-year statute of limitations with regard to any failure to comply with the obligations of then-canon III.8.7 (a) to update the psychological evaluation on then-candidate Parry.

However, new Canon IV.19.4 (d) specifies a two-year limitation on any proceedings brought against a member of the clergy on account of his or her knowingly violating the Constitution or Canons of the Church, as specified in new Canon IV.3.1 (a). Under the facts as presented by the allegations in the petition, however, I think that Canon IV.19.4 (d) is a red herring.

First: there is no current contention that Bishop Jefferts Schori knowingly set out to violate the Canons of the Church in failing to call, in 2004, for any update to Candidate Parry's 2000 psychological evaluation -- it was far more likely a negligent violation of the Canons. (As readers of this blog are quite familiar with Bishop Jefferts Schori's innate inability to read or follow the Canons, I shall not dwell on the point further.)

Second: if she negligently (or carelessly) failed to follow the canonical requirements for priestly ordinations in 2004, her conduct violated the language of new Canon IV.4.1 (g) - in failing to update the psychological evaluation of a priest ordained elsewhere, she may be charged with failing to:
exercise . . . her ministry in accordance with applicable provisions of the Constitution and Canons of the Church . . .
Notice what a broad sweep this provision of the new canons, effective July 1, entails: For willful and knowing violation of the Constitution and Canons, the limitation on presentments is two years (as it was under the Canons in effect in 2004). But beginning July 1, 2011, the Canons now provide that for simply failing to "exercise" one's ministry in accordance with the Constitution and Canons, the statute of limitations is ten years.

Those who rushed through the canonical changes to Title IV, which included the Presiding Bishop in the House of Bishops, are now hoist by their own petard, so to speak. But surely the conclusive irony to note in this regard is that if the Presiding Bishop fails to self-report her violation of Canon IV.4.1 (g) as detailed above, she thereby violates new Canon IV.4.1 (f), which makes it a separate canonical offense to fail to:
. . . report to the Intake Officer all matters which may constitute an Offense as defined in Canon IV.2 meeting the standards of Canon IV.3.3 . . .
Canon IV.2 defines "Offense" as "any act or omission for which a Member of the Clergy may be held accountable under Canons IV.3 or IV.4." As we have just seen, any failure by Bishop Jefferts Schori to abide by the requirements of Canon IV.4.1 (g) is thus an "Offense" as defined by Canon IV.2. And the "standards of Canon IV.3.3 require that
. . . the Offense complained of must violate applicable provisions of Canon IV.3 or IV.4 and must be material and substantial or of clear and weighty importance to the ministry of the Church.
This canon lawyer would have little difficulty in finding that allowing an unrepentant pedophile, whose most recent testing showed a "proclivity to re-offend", to be received as a priest in the Episcopal Church without any meaningful background check most definitely was "material and substantial", as well as "of clear and weighty importance to the ministry of the Church." After all, if as Presiding Bishop, the Most Rev. Jefferts Schori has zero difficulty in deposing clergy without bothering to follow the requirements of the Canons, she can hardly be heard to complain about being subject to a similar lax standard with respect to her own violations of the Canons.

A violation of Canon IV.4.1 (g) is expressly not subject to the two-year statute of limitations set out in Canon IV.19.4 (d). Consequently, any failure now by the Presiding Bishop to self-report the possibility of her violation of the Canons in 2004 would constitute a brand new offense under the revised disciplinary Canons, for which the statute of limitations would run for a further ten years!

The icing on the cake is provided by this provision (Canon IV.19.4 [c]) in the new Canons taking effect tomorrow:
Except as provided in Subsection (b) above, the time limitations for initiation of proceedings in this Section shall be retroactive only to January 1, 1996.
So the statute of limitations in the new Canons as of July 1, 2011 are expressly made retroactive to all offenses committed from and after January 1, 1996! Despite the fact, in other words, that there was a two-year statute of limitations in effect in 2004, when Bishop Jefferts Schori may have committed her violation of the Canons, General Convention changed all that in 2009 by providing a retroactive liability for offenses committed up to ten years previously -- all in the name, presumably, of providing greater accountability for the Church's clergy. So be it.

If she knew in 2004 what the Missouri petition says she did, then there is no escape for Bishop Jefferts Schori under the new Title IV provisions which she helped push through the House of Bishops at General Convention in 2009, as a means of adding to her primatial powers. It is a delicious irony that those changes may now come back to haunt her. More than anything else, this case exercise in applying the new disciplinary Canons to a complicated fact situation may serve as a striking illustration of the degree to which those Canons now open wide the door to the prosecution of clergy on any number of grounds which, under the old rules, might have slipped through the cracks without notice.

I am not particularly happy about the vast and open-ended expansion in clergy liability under the new Canons. That one of the first hapless perpetrators to be caught in their greatly enlarged snare may be the Presiding Bishop, however, is a particularly satisfying instance of poetic justice.]






Why I always thought "Freakonomics" was a scam


This is the latest "debate" on the intertubes (at least according to Andrew Sullivan and Momocrats). It brings to mind again that fools rush in where angels fear to tread; and not because it's a scary space, but because fools are, well....fools.

As I was saying, we've dealt with these kinds of issues before: if you make a thought experiment of it, it's easy to craft a hypothetical situation which seems too dire to allow for a rational resolution. Yet such a resolution must be found, and suddenly you feel trapped on the horns of a dilemma. That, or you are a first year law student in torts class, where no answer you give seems right, and for every rule of law you'd swear was soundly established, there is a contrary court ruling setting an entirely different precedent.

That is, until you understand torts, and law, and court rulings, and precedent. Until, in other words, you do the hard work required in learning to think like a lawyer. Which is not to say all decisions about law should be left to lawyers, but it is to say there's a reason laws are complicated, and judges and lawyers are educated, and that nobody really gets to put into action arguments about public policy as simplistic as Steven Levitt's (or, if they do, they don't stay in public office long, and the laws get repealed or ridiculed off the books). Honestly, law makes enough mistakes without being this dumb.

There is in the law, for example, the standard of the reasonable and prudent person. Lawyers will immediately recognize that fictional being has almost no relevance here, but this is for the non-lawyers, so bear with me. In trying to figure out hard situation in which justice must be done, but also in which justice must be balanced, the courts long ago recognized the concerns of society and the concerns of the individual, and sought to balance those. Thus appeared the reasonable and prudent person, who...well, here, let me give you the classic definition, courtesy of A.P. Herbert:

The Common Law of England has been laboriously built about a mythical figure-the figure of ‘The Reasonable Man’. In the field of jurisprudence this legendary individual occupies the place which in another science is held by the Economic Man, and in social and political discussions by the Average or Plain Man. He is an ideal, a standard, the embodiment of all those qualities which we demand of the good citizen. No matter what may be the particular department of human life which falls to be considered in these Courts, sooner or later we have to face the question: Was this or was it not the conduct of a reasonable man?
....
This noble creature stands in singular contrast to his kinsman the Economic Man, whose every action is prompted by the single spur of selfish advantage and directed to the single end of monetary gain. The Reasonable Man is always thinking of others; prudence is his guide, and ‘Safety First’, if I may borrow a contemporary catchword, is his rule of life. All solid virtues are his, save only that peculiar quality by which the affection of other men is won. For it will not be pretended that socially he is much less objectionable than the Economic Man.

Though any given example of his behaviour must command our admiration, when taken in the mass his acts create a very different set of impressions.

He is one who invariably looks where he is going, and is careful to examine the immediate foreground before he executes a leap or bound; who neither star-gazes nor is lost in meditation when approaching trap-doors or the margin of a dock; who records in every case upon the counterfoils of cheques such ample details as are desirable, scrupulously substitutes the word ‘Order’ for the word ‘Bearer’, crosses the instrument ‘a/c Payee only’, and registers the package in which it is despatched; who never mounts a moving omnibus, and does not alight from any car while the train is in motion; who investigates exhaustively the bona fides of every mendicant [beggar] before distributing alms, and will inform himself of the history and habits of a dog before administering a caress; who believes no gossip, nor repeats it, without firm basis for believing it to be true; who never drives his ball till those in front of him have definitely vacated the putting-green which is his own objective; who never from one year’s end to another makes an excessive demand upon his wife, his neighbours, his servants, his ox, or his ass; who in the way of business looks only for that narrow margin of profit which twelve men such as himself would reckon to be ‘fair’, contemplates his fellow-merchants, their agents, and their goods, with that degree of suspicion and distrust which the law deems admirable; who never swears, gambles, or loses his temper; who uses nothing except in moderation, and even while he flogs his child is meditating only on the golden mean.
That is a satirical definition of a fictional figure, but you get the idea. The law (common, not necessarily legislative; there is a difference) considers carefully the difficulties involved in commonly encountered situations, and seeks a way to resolve them that is as fair and just to as many as possible. What it comes up with may be easily portrayed as farcical, but that's because the basis for it is not what any one person might prefer. It is a clear attempt to set a standard that the affected community would largely find equitable, especially given the competing interests present in even the most insignificant of legal disputes.

And then there's Steven Levitt's "Daughter test;" which, frankly, is just stupid. And being stupid, it prompts stupid responses:

There are lots of activities we AP-class types find acceptable — drug use, gambling, etc. — because we sort of assume that everyone has the same level of impulse control that we do. And if you have good impulse control, then drugs and gambling are just pleasant ways of filling in your free time. ... But if you're not part of the AP-class cohort, there's a pretty good chance that your impulse control isn't quite as good as all that, and an excellent chance that even if it is, you're keenly aware that good impulse control isn't exactly universal.
The question of what is acceptable to whom is a valid legislative, and even legal, question. But presuming "we" are different (hem-hem, i.e., "superior") from "them" is...need I go on? Perhaps I should, with a pertinent example:

I had a client, some 20+ years ago now, who was a former narcotics police officer. Driving to a deposition with him (on a personal financial matter, small potatoes, nothing to do with corruption or drugs or anything interesting), I asked him about the drug laws and the "drug war," then not yet 20 years old. He said that if some people could only get ahold of Sterno, they'd use that to get high. You weren't, he said, going to keep certain people from trying to get high, no matter what you did.

I suppose Kevin Drum would say those people had "impulse control" problems. Or maybe they just want to get high, and damn the consequences. I heard in passing that drug testing of wastewater indicates a higher use of methamphetamines in the U.S. than previously thought. I guess a lot of us have trouble with "impulse control."

And, of course, who pays the price for Steven Levitt wanting to treat the world like we are all his daughter? Mexico is collapsing on its northern border, and the violence is spilling into America, because of the demand for drugs in America, and the fact that they are illegal. Drug usage has not diminished, and the costs of the "war on drugs" continue to rise, with no end to the battle in sight, and absolutely no declaration of victory, however minor, in the offing. We in America blithely ignore our part in what is happening. A pipeline has two ends, and that stuff isn't being pushed north, it's being sucked here.

The law, as I said, considers carefully the difficulties involved in commonly encountered situations, and seeks a way to resolve them that is as fair and just to as many as possible. The law doesn't say: "Well, I don't like it, so you can't do it." When it does say that (as it has with current U.S. drug policy, which is a creature of the Legislature, not the common law), it creates far more problems than it solves, and even creates criminal empires where none need exist. It is not a question of impulse control, nor of what I don't want my daughter to do. It is not even reducible to a simple phrase or a simple test.

The idea that public policy should be based on how I can understand its effect on me, personally, is the nadir of the "Me Generation." It isn't, as Douthat avers, a "touch of Kantianism." There isn't even a whiff of Kant about it. It's simply stupid and mindless. But maybe that's the magical thinking that turns apples into oranges.

And in the news today an event which prompts me to publish this post: the Supreme Court has decided that the First Amendment protects minors having access to violence and gore, but not to sex. Why? Because we've always done it that way:

California’s argument would fare better if there were a longstanding tradition in this country of specially restricting children’s access to depictions of violence, but there is none. Certainly the books we give children to read—or read to them when they are younger—contain no shortage of gore. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim in-deed. As her just deserts for trying to poison Snow White, the wicked queen is made to dance in red hot slippers “till she fell dead on the floor, a sad example of envy and jealousy.” The Complete Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales 198 (2006 ed.). Cinderella’s evil stepsisters have their eyes pecked out by doves. Id., at 95. And Hansel and Gretel (children!) kill their captor by baking her in an oven. Id., at 54.

High-school reading lists are full of similar fare. Homer’s Odysseus blinds Polyphemus the Cyclops by grinding out his eye with a heated stake. The Odyssey of Homer, Book IX, p. 125 (S. Butcher & A. Lang transls.1909) (“Even so did we seize the fiery-pointed brand and whirled it round in his eye, and the blood flowed about the heated bar. And the breath of the flame singed his eyelids and brows all about, as the ball of the eye burnt away, and the roots thereof crackled in the flame”). In the Inferno, Dante and Virgil watch corrupt politicians struggle to stay submerged beneath a lake of boiling pitch, lest they beskewered by devils above the surface. Canto XXI, pp.187–189 (A. Mandelbaum transl. Bantam Classic ed.1982). And Golding’s Lord of the Flies recounts how a schoolboy called Piggy is savagely murdered by other
children while marooned on an island. W. Golding, Lord of the Flies 208–209 (1997 ed.).
That will undoubtedly be the money quote (or part of it) from this opinion, but this line should not be overlooked:

JUSTICE ALITO recounts all these disgusting video games in order to disgust us—but disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression.
Unless, of course, you find sex disgusting. Which is a longstanding American tradition, so it's okay to use disgust in that situation.

All of this, of course, could violate Levitt's "daughter" test. My daughter went through a phase where she watched violent movies, the kind of thing that would literally make me sick. It was kind of odd, since she saw a video about animal butchery that put her off meat for a little while; and she faints at the sight of blood, or even when she gets an injection. But she enjoyed violent films. Should I support the ban of violence in books, movies, and video games?

I dunno. I find the whole conversation disgusting. Maybe I should support a law banning it, so my daughter never has to hear about it.

How to Approach the Covenant

Mark Harris has penned a thoughtful reflection on the state of the Anglican Covenant, in particular in light of the finally released opinion of the Standing Commission on Constitution and Canons. (All such committees and commissions are very conscious of the fact that only the General Convention can speak with final authority on the meaning of its own documents; which may in part have been behind the, shall we say, shyness about the release of this report. No harm done, and it is good to see their thoughts, even though they are not the last word.)

One of the long-term concerns about approaching the Covenant is the awareness that its genesis was in part in response to actions of the Episcopal Church (and the Anglican Church of Canada), and given our unwillingness to refrain (after a season of restraint) from acting on our best determinations, some have said that we cannot in good conscience sign the Covenant.

This seems to me to lay too much emphasis on the genesis and not enough on the deuteronomy -- that is, on what the Covenant actually says.

As I see it, the way to "not cross our fingers" is to reject Lambeth 1.10 and the Windsor Report as authoritative from the start, and to reaffirm that the "mind of the communion" is not settled on the matters on which some seem to think it is. And to reaffirm our belief that the "objectionable" actions of TEC are in fact in accord with Scripture, Tradition, and Reason, even to the extent and in the manner described in the Covenant. And then move forward from there, whether we adopt or refuse or commit for further study. In other words, to take a stand and allow our response to the Covenant to be informed by that stand.

This approach is possible because, unlike the Jerusalem Declaration, the Covenant does not address specific issues, specifically not the specific issues that brought us to this place. (Hence its rejection by some who wanted a specific checklist on the hot topics, much in the manner of the classic confessions). It is up to us to make our case, or re-make it, if need be, and then have the courage, if the case cannot be accepted, to say, then fare well -- we have no wish to be part of a Communion which imposes doctrinal conditions that cannot be proven from Scripture, itself a violation of a timeworn Anglican touchstone. (Obviously there is disagreement across the communion, and no true consensus on the sexuality issues: a result of this very lack of convincing proof of the moral wrongness of same-sex marriage or the ordination of men or women who happen to live in such covenanted relationships.)

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Cornerstone of Civilization

New York State has joined a literal handful of other US judicatories and about the same number of international jurisdictions in approving marriage equality, to take effect in about a month.

The response has been elation on one side (my own) and the expected warnings of doom on the other, led locally by the Roman Catholic bishops of New York, who question the state's interference in what they call "the cornerstone of civilization." That this comes from a group of celibate men, who none-the-less appear by all standards to be relatively civilized, does not appear to have dawned upon them.

When it comes to cornerstones, civilization has more than marriage to rest upon. Most social scientists and historians credit agriculture and animal husbandry (quiet in the back!) as more central to the establishment of civilization than marriage — and in fact, most marriage law may more likely be seen as an outgrowth of civilization than its cause.

It is also evident, from the historical record (including the biblical one) that "one man / one woman marriage" has not been the only "civilizing" form even of marriage down through the years. As a reminder, allow me to share once again, my "Biblical Wedding Cake Toppers Bookmark" — suitable for keeping one's place in the tangles of the Torah or the Pauline Epistles.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

I'm not sure what it means....


I have a burning desire to introduce Stephen Metcalf to Reinhold Niebuhr:

Another way to put it—and here lies the legacy of Keynes—is that a free society is an interplay between a more-or-less permanent framework of social commitments, and the oasis of economic liberty that lies within it. The nontrivial question is: What risks (to health, loss of employment, etc.) must be removed from the oasis and placed in the framework (in the form of universal health care, employment insurance, etc.) in order to keep liberty a substantive reality, and not a vacuous formality? When Hayek insists welfare is the road is to serfdom, when Nozick insists that progressive taxation is coercion, they take liberty hostage in order to prevent a reasoned discussion about public goods from ever taking place. "According to them, any intervention of the state in economic life," a prominent conservative economist once observed of the early neoliberals, "would be likely to lead, and even lead inevitably to a completely collectivist Society, Gestapo and gas chamber included." Thus we are hectored into silence, and by the very people who purport to leave us most alone.
Never mind the implicit invocation of Godwin's Law there (which always brings an end to every argument, or at least is meant to); Digby tells me this article is heating up the intertubes. I wouldn't know; my internet neighborhood is so far out in the sticks it's off the map. But it's an interesting article, if a bit facile (then again, it's Slate, not a philosopher's forum). And I have to admit I'm not familiar with Robert Nozick's work (a book-length response to Rawl's Theory of Justice? *Yawn!*) There are a universe of responses to any position, but I would simply respond to Nozick's position with this:
John Adams in his warnings to Thomas Jefferson would seem to have had a premonition of this kind of politics. "Power," he wrote, "always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party." Adams's understanding of the power of the self's passions and ambitions to corrupt the self's reason is a simple recognition of the facts of life which refute all theories, whether liberal or Marxist, about the possibility of a completely disinterested self. Adams, as every Christian understanding of man has done, nicely anticipated the Marxist theory of an "ideological taint" in reason when men reason about each other's affairs and arrive at conclusions about each other's virtues, interests and motives. The crowning irony of the Marxist theory of ideology is that it foolishly and self-righteously confined the source of this taint to economic interest and to a particular class. It was, therefore, incapable of recognizing all the corruptions of ambition and power which would creep inevitably into its paradise of innocency.
The Irony of American History, by Reinhold Niebuhr. Charles Scribners' Sons, New York, 1952.

"Every thinking person," writes Metcalfe, "is to some degree a libertarian." Yes, but in Christianity, we call that original sin, not an original insight. The problem with libertarianism is not that it leads to false conclusions of the type even Nozick finally rejected, but that it makes a virtue of selfishness. Niebuhr (a much better choice for examining this problem than Kant, I'd say) recognizes this limitation, and also recognizes we must act to overcome it, or at least to keep it in check. The evil of losing my personal liberty is not outweighed by the evil of keeping my liberty as unchecked as possible: both ends employ the same means to reach the false conclusion of perfection (or, at least, of perfectability). In a passage that might well have been written in response to Nozick (and to Metcalfe), Niebuhr writes:

The liberal world which opposes this monstrous evil is filled ironically with milder forms of the same pretension. Fortunately they have not resulted in the same evils, partly because they are not as consistently held; and partly because we have not invested our ostensible "innocents" with inordinate power. Though a tremendous amount of illusion about human nature expresses itself in American culture, our political institutions contain many of the safeguards against the selfish abuse of power which our Calvinist fathers insisted upon. According to the accepted theory, our democracy owes everything to the believers in the innocency and perfectibility of man and little to the reservations about human nature which emanated from the Christianity of New England. But fortunately there are quite a few accents in our constitution which spell out the warning of John Cotton: "Let all the world give mortall man no greater power than they are content they shall use, for use it they will. . . . And they that have the liberty to speak great things you will find that they will speak: great blasphemies."
And Niebuhr neither limited, nor excused, the Church or the religious believers from this error:

In any event we have to deal with a vast religious-political movement which generates more extravagant forms of political injustice and cruelty out of the pretensions of innocency than we have ever known in human history.
I should note, again, he wrote those words in 1952. 59 years later, they still describe the situation America finds itself in. Good to know there's been some progress.....

Just consider that quote from Adams, against Nozick's idea of "liberty:"

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party.
Nozick is, of course, asking for power; the power to preserve his liberty against all perceived challenges. And isn't that standard precisely the one that convinces us we are doing God's service when we are actually violating all of God's laws? Or at least tearing up precisely what we mean to preserve, if you prefer non-religious language? According to Metcalf, Nozick finally repudiated this position.

"The libertarian position I once propounded," Nozick wrote in an essay published in the late '80s, "now seems to me seriously inadequate." In Anarchy democracy was nowhere to be found; Nozick now believed that democratic institutions "express and symbolize … our equal human dignity, our autonomy and powers of self-direction." In Anarchy, the best government was the least government, a value-neutral enforcer of contracts; now, Nozick concluded, "There are some things we choose to do together through government in solemn marking of our human solidarity, served by the fact that we do them together in this official fashion ..."
(which, ironically, is not a great deal stronger, more persuasive, or all that different, from John Rawl's theory of justice.)

In other words, he came back to the conclusions of Adams and Jefferson. My only question is: what took him so long?

Oh....I think I know. And I dare to say religion had something to do with it; the absence, in this case; but clearly the presence, in Adams' case. Which is not to say this is a Christian nation after all; but the determined efforts to expunge all religious influence from all public discourse, efforts that began with the Enlightenment and reached their peak in 19th century Europe, especially in Anglo-American philosophy, is failing still to bear the fruit it promised.

Which is, more and more, very interesting....

Evolution Versus The Fall - A Postscript

In the conclusion to my series "Did Adam and Eve Exist?", I included this observation:
We are, in Chesterton's magnificent language, "kings in exile". How can that be, under an evolutionary scenario? The very idea of "the Fall" implies a reverse kind of evolution -- the opposite of progress. We (our precursors) were at some point in a more evolved state, and then we fell to a worse one, due to our precursors' own grievous fault. That is the point of the story in Genesis chapters 2-3, and there is no reconciling of that point with a purely evolutionary theory -- according to which "progress" is in only one direction, i.e., forward, to ever more advanced states of existence.
In this post, I want to elaborate on that observation. For it seems to me that in weighing the central Christian and Judaic concept of Adam's Fall against the scheme promoted by evolutionary science, we see why they must inevitably clash.

In 1996, the philosopher and zoologist Michael Ruse wrote Monad to Man - the Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology. Covering the gamut of evolutionary philosophy from Aristotle to E.O. Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould, Ruse showed how an underlying notion of "Progress" (which he capitalizes) in evolution (i.e., from "monad to man") directed both its own progress and the scope of its investigations. While not taking a position on the creation vs. evolution debate, Ruse showed how strongly the concept of evolution as a progressive process, from the simple to the more complex, is bound up with the study of evolution itself.

As I showed in my series on Genesis, the concept of Adam's Fall is at the very heart of Christianity -- with that fall came what western theologians (after Augustine) call "original sin", and what the eastern orthodox fathers call man's "fallen nature." It is this fallen nature which is the cause of man's tendency to sin, and which eventually resulted in Christ's sacrifice on the cross to save us from our sins. That is the essence -- and the beauty -- of Christianity. Take it away, and you no longer have any need for Christ's sacrifice or for his subsequent resurrection, as the means for conquering sin and death.

But as pointed out in the quote above, this concept of The Fall is at odds with the notion of evolution as a form of Progress from one lower form to a higher. In commingling the genes of their offspring with those of Homo sapiens after being driven out of the Garden, Adam and Eve were forced to take a backward step in their evolution -- one that, from their standpoint, represented an incalculable loss from the state they had enjoyed in Eden. (The account in Genesis drives home this point, by speaking of the "curses" under which they will have to now live for the rest of their mortal lives, and their descendants after them.)

The reason evolutionary theory is so at odds with core Christianity, I believe, lies in this understanding of how evolution itself is contrary to the idea embodied in The Fall. For Adam and Eve to have "evolved" to their higher state, and then slipped back again in some way, does not fit the evolutionary paradigm. And it leads to all of the problems with the timing of their appearance as "representatives" of their species which I discussed in the second part of the series. It is nothing for God to make two individuals as fully formed adults with the skills of language and the use of tools; but it is a huge saltation for natural evolution to have produced two (or even a few more) such individuals out of our hominid ancestors.

Five years after completing From Monad to Man, Professor Ruse published Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? In this book, he made a laudable attempt to bridge the gaps in the ongoing differences between evolution and Christianity. But he made his bias clear at the outset, in the book's preface:
Let me be open. I think that evolution is a fact and that Darwinism rules triumphant. Natural selection is not simply an important mechanism. It is the only significant cause of permanent organic change.
And that bias permeates his subsequent investigation into the conflicts, particularly when it comes to considering monogenism, the idea that current humans are the descendants of a single set of original parents. Citing the work of evolutionary biologist and Dominican priest Francisco Ayala*, Ruse writes (pp. 75-76; bold emphasis added):
Francisco Ayala (1967), a distinguished evolutionary geneticist (and at the time of this writing, a Dominican priest), points out that an essential component of Christian theology, confirmed by Pius XII in his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), is that humans are descended from a unique pair (monogenism). That part of the Adam and Eve story cannot be interpreted symbolically. Moreover, there are strong theological pressures to go along with this conservative reading, otherwise one has removed a major support of the doctrine of original sin . . .

As Ayala points out, the trouble is that [monogenism] goes completely against our thinking about the nature of the evolutionary process. Successful species like humans do not pass through single-pair bottlenecks . . . "There is no known mechanism by which the human species might have arisen by a single step in one or two individuals only, from whom the rest of mankind would have descended" (Ayala 1967, 15). More recently, "the genetic evidence indicates that human populations never consisted of fewer than several thousand individuals" (Ayala 1998, 36). . .
_____________
*Ayala, F. J. 1967. Man in evolution: a scientific statement and some theological and ethical implications. The Thomist 31(1): 1-20; and 1998. Human nature: one evolutionist's view. In Brown, W.S., N. Murphy, and H.N. Malony, eds., Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature (31-48). Minneapolis: Fortress Press.


Ruse then goes on to concede that a miracle (direct intervention by God) could be posited -- but even in conceiving of such a miracle, Ruse remains bound by our homocentric view that Homo sapiens is all there was for God to work with (ibid.; bold again added):
Of course, theologically you can insist that some pair did uniquely get immortal souls (miraculously), and there is an end to it. By fiat you can introduce all of the intelligence you like into these souls. All else is contingent irrelevance. There were members of Homo sapiens before this pair and around this pair, but these others were not humans in a theological sense: that is, beings with immortal souls. But this stipulation is not without its difficulties, tensions certainly. Darwinian biology suggests that intelligence (and, as we shall see, related freedom and moral awareness) would be possessed by the parent generation and the contemporary generation and those of the next generations not descended from the pair. So on what basis can we declare them not to have been made in God's image?
Here Ruse simply assumes that Adam and Eve had natural parents, and that they were singled out at some point by God to receive souls and superior intelligence -- and then somehow betrayed God's trust in them -- but how? By reverting to their previous level? Ruse thus makes the point I made at the outset above: evolutionary biology, by itself, is incompatible with The Fall. And later (p. 77), he admits as much (bold emphasis mine):
We seem to have reached an impasse. And perhaps this was only to be expected. "Reductionism" is the philosophy or methodology where the aim is to explain away everything in terms of molecules and the like and to deny reality to all higher-level entities like minds and souls and so forth. Darwinism, the apotheosis of materialistic theory, is bound to be thoroughly reductionistic. Virtually by definition, therefore, a religion making souls central is bound to clash with a theory like Darwinism . . .
This does not stop Ruse from going on to develop a "Darwinian concept of the soul," which of course evolved along with everything else, even possibly as a "God-backed process" (p. 82), whatever that might mean. The emphasis is still on Progress with a capital "P" (bold added):
So I do stress that we have tensions rather than absolute and ineradicable contradictions. But, having bought into Darwinism thus far, the inclination is to think that there has been a gradual upward development from organisms with less sophisticated principles of ordering and thinking. The miracles are not one-of-a-kind events, but part of everyday life.
There can be, of course, no such thing as an "everyday" miracle, unless we want to define the concept out of existence, and rob it of its extraordinary character. In the same way, by making The Fall an incomprehensible event, we rob Christianity of its moral purpose. If there was no Fall, there was no need for Jesus Christ. Period.

The scenario I posited in the previous post keeps the core concepts of Christianity at the core, by explaining how there could have been, indeed, an original Adam and Eve pair -- but God-created, not gradually evolved or "God-selected" from among the naturally evolved. The Fall consists precisely in the loss of that pair's moral innocence, and in their subsequently having to join their gifts and skills (and their immortal souls) to the genes and bodies of then-evolving Homo sapiens. By conferring souls on their descendants, they raised the human race from another species of animal to one made in God's own image, with the concomitant responsibility to be morally accountable before God.

Thus while it is possible to be both a Darwinian and a Christian, Christians cannot let the Darwinians simply take over, and reduce man with his soul to just a collection of complex molecules. If the phrase "made in God's image" is to have any meaning, it has to refer to an immortal soul, not an "evolved" one. For man to acquire such a gift required direct intervention by God -- a miracle -- through His original formation of Adam and Eve. There is no point in having an immortal soul without there being a God; there is no meaning in God's gift of His Son without our being capable of being saved; and there is no point in being saved if there is no immortal life. All of Christian salvation theology is so closely intertwined as to make the miraculous creation of the first pair with souls a certainty for believing Christians.

But note that evolution is a key part of God's scheme, as well. If there had been no humans around when Adam and Eve were first driven from the Garden, we would have to conclude that their children (whom we would also have to suppose included one or more daughters) could not have been able to have children, except through an act of incest (which is an abominable way to have to start a race of beings "made in God's image"). Thus, evolution and The Fall are just as intimately bound together as are Adam and Christ. They each need the other to be fully explicable as a whole.


[Note: This is the final post in a multipart series. The Introduction is at this link, Part I is at this link, Part II is at this link, Part III is at this link, and Part IV is at this link.]

James Weldon Johnson

Eternal God, we give thanks for the gifts that you gave your servant James Weldon Johnson: a heart and voice to praise your Name in verse. As he gave us powerful words to glorify you, may we also speak with joy and boldness to banish hatred from your creation, in the Name of Jesus Christ; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

A great poet, of many inspired works including "The Creation" and "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing."

ikon by Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Did Adam and Eve Exist? (Part IV: Conclusion)

[Note: This is the fifth post in a multipart series. The Introduction is at this link, Part I is at this link, Part II is at this link, and Part III is at this link.]

We have come full circle in our investigation into the historicity of Adam and Eve. We have seen how the biblical account was taken as factual by persons in Christian history as important as St. Paul. And indeed, it is probably true to say that all Christians until the nineteenth century, with the possible exception of a few enlightenment theists, such as Voltaire and Jefferson, believed in the historicity of the original pair.

Therefore, in questioning whether such a belief is still rational, in light of what science now tells us, I am raising the issue: what has science disclosed since 1800 that would make a Christian have to question whether Adam and Eve actually existed?

I have gone through the science and the theology in the previous posts. I will not summarize those here, in order to save space -- I simply ask of anyone who wants to challenge this post to do me the courtesy of reading the previous installments, linked in the first lines above. For I expect, given that in this post I am going to lay out a scenario for the historical Adam and Eve, there will be a fair number of challenges to my thesis -- which is fine, because that is how it will be tested against what others believe to be the case.

The scenario has been tested somewhat already -- as I will show below, I believe it squarely meets the four criteria for a theologically acceptable Genesis scenario laid out by Prof. C. John Collins in this article cited earlier (at pp. 159-60) and restated in his recent book on Adam and Eve (pp. 120-21):
1. To begin with, we should see that the origin of the human race goes beyond a merely natural process. This follows from how hard it is to get a human being, or, more theologically, how distinctive the image of God is.

2. We should see Adam and Eve at the headwaters of the human race. This follows from the unified experience of humankind, as discussed earlier (pp. 155–8). How else could all human beings come to bear God’s image?

3. The Fall, in whatever form it took, was both historical (it happened) and moral (it involved disobeying God), and occurred at the beginning of the human race. The universal sense of loss described earlier (pp. 155–8) makes no sense without this. Where else could this universality have come from?

. . .

4. If someone should decide that there were, in fact, more human beings than just Adam and Eve at the beginning of humankind, then, in order to maintain good sense, he or she should envision these humans as a single tribe. Adam would then be the chieftain of this tribe (preferably produced before the others), and Eve would be his wife. This tribe “fell” under the leadership of Adam and Eve. This follows from the notion of solidarity in a representative. Some may call this a form of “polygenesis,” but this is quite distinct from the more conventional, and unacceptable, kind.
Let us now proceed to see how this could be so.

Begin with this very astute observation centuries ago by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal (quoted also in Dr. Collins' article [text at n. 58], which should be read from start to finish), in his deservedly famous Pensées (see n. 58 in Collins for the full references):
Man’s greatness is so obvious that it can even be deduced from his wretchedness, for what is nature in animals we call wretchedness in man, thus recognizing that, if his nature is today like that of the animals, he must have fallen from some better state which was once his own.
Precisely -- what we call "sin" in man is regarded as natural in animals. This insight is key to the understanding of Genesis' account of the Fall. For it leads to the natural question which all pure evolutionists should have to answer: At what precise point in your scenario of hominid evolution resulting in Homo sapiens did the lights go on? When did hominids become aware of their own moral culpability, and why, and how?

There will be as many answers to that question as there are pure evolutionists, and that is just the problem -- from a purely evolutionary standpoint, it is impossible to say. There will be speculation about brain size, the evolution of consciousness, and so forth, but without a written diary or record (and writing came long afterward), the "evolution" of Moral Man will be forever enshrouded in the prehistoric mists.

The scenario I wish to propose, however, gives a precise answer to that question -- that is, precise in the sense of we may know what happened and why; the details of just when and where are less clear. We begin by satisfying Dr. Collins' very first criterion, and posit that God created two unique individuals whom the Bible calls Adam and Eve, and placed them in an earthly paradise where all their needs could readily be met without effort. (The physical location of the "Garden in Eden" [Gen. 2:8] is not as important as is the fact that, as Creator, God could create any kind of earthly paradise He wanted, at any location, and at any time. Having created it, He could just as easily have removed all earthly traces of it, although there are some who think they know just where it was.)

Adam and Eve thus did not evolve from any primeval ancestor in the Darwinian sense; they were unique and one-time special creations of the Creator -- let us call them Homo praecipuus (from the Latin for "extraordinary, distinguished"). (They nonetheless shared enough of the Homo sapiens DNA to be able to interbreed with them, as we shall see.) Without any evolutionary experience or ancestry, and brought into the world as fully formed adults (as one wit remarked, "they were the only humans without tummy buttons"), they were unaware of sin at first -- and probably, as Genesis describes them, incapable of discerning right from wrong, or good from evil (which is why they were such easy targets for Satan, who in the Genesis version approached them as a talking serpent).

God's plan for them is not laid out in Genesis, but we can conceive that He may eventually have wanted them to grow to full maturity and then, with their offspring, take dominion over the earth. They would not suffer death as long as they could continue their connection with God and the Garden of Eden. However, the fact that Satan could also enter the Garden, and tempt the first pair as he did, implies that God must have foreseen that His creations would thus fall short of His plans for them, due to their gift of a free will to choose as they chose. Try viewing salvation in that light, whereby -- if God knew that Adam and Eve would succumb to Satan's temptations, He had determined ultimately to send His own Son to redeem their fallen state.

Note that Adam and Eve, again as portrayed in Genesis, were given from the outset the gift of language and speech, so that they could communicate with each other and with their Maker. (Soon after leaving Eden, they quickly acquired other skills: husbandry, farming and the manufacture and use of tools -- another fact which indicates the degree to which their genes were more advanced than that of other humans at the time.) But their Maker endowed them also with a gift far more precious than mere language -- as Genesis 2:7 relates, he breathed life into them, and they each became a "living soul." With the Catholics and the Orthodox, then, I posit that Adam and Eve were the first creatures on earth to have souls -- and further, that their ability to procreate would result in any of their lineage having souls, as well. It is the human soul, in my view, which gives meaning to the phrase "made them in His own image", and which gave them their capacity to become morally responsible individuals.

It is useless for evolutionists to ask the question: "What part of the human genome codes for souls?" Not being physical or corporeal, souls are not subject to the biochemistry of DNA, and not a subject for scientific investigation. But the irreducible fact for Christians is that we do have souls, and that they constitute most of what we mean when we say we are made in God's image. The consequence is that Christians do not have to be concerned that their core faith might be undermined by some future advance in evolutionary science.

When did the Fall take place? At this date, we cannot be precise, but we know something of what was going on elsewhere in the world. Genesis chapter 1 tells us that God created all the plants and animals before he created the first human pair, and even evolutionists agree with that timeline. (Genesis also says that God created all of the plants and animals, "each according to its own kind". I do not take a position here on the accuracy of the Darwinian hypothesis which goes by the name of "macroevolution"; it may be so, or it may not; either possibility fits into the scheme. God equally well could have created the genetic forerunners of each species [or family, or phylum] and then allowed evolution by natural selection to do its work. Until more evidence of macroevolution accumulates, it is not necessary to decide that point.)

In another of his books on Genesis (pp. 121-29), Dr. Collins shows us how the timeline of Genesis 1 may be fit together with the events narrated in Genesis 2-4, and I will not go over that here. Suffice it to say that, when Adam and Eve were first created, the earth was already teeming with plants and animals -- including the first "anthropologically modern humans" (who were not, however [and by design], inhabitants of Eden). Unlike Adam and Eve, those specimens of early humans had not yet acquired the capabilities of higher language -- and they did not, I posit, have "souls" as Christians understand that term.

The scenarios that I discussed in this earlier post, as well as still others described by Dr. Collins in discussing his four criteria, all have in common that they try to account for the acquisition of these defining human characteristics by the species Homo sapiens through some sort of evolutionary means. And that is where they break down logically, it seems to me. An earlier comment on this series cogently argues the problems with such scenarios:
Now, I'm not sure what you're going to argue here exactly: let's say that somehow 10,000 early humans "evolved". (Logically, you've got the problem of where those 10,000 came from, exactly -- why start there, after all? Did 20,000 almost Homo sapiens suddenly reach the same evolutionary point at the same time and mate to produce 10,000 Homo sapiens? Shouldn't there be an easier explanation?)

But leaving that aside, let's say two of those 10,000 named Adam and Eve ate the apple and created Original Sin. What of the [9,998] who didn't? Why didn't they convoke some prelapsarian version of an ecumenical council (especially since they were still perfect and unfallen) and correct Adam and Eve? Or are you arguing that 5,000 of that group were Adam and 5,000 Eve, and 5,000 serpents chatted them up, and they had an apple-ducking contest all at once? That seems less credible than Genesis, frankly.
These difficulties stem from getting the logic backward, in my opinion. We modern humans cannot see ourselves as like Adam and Eve, who are so remote from our world; we identify our origins instead with Cro-Magnon man, the cave painters, and all the early humans whom we resemble. So when we ask how and at what point sin and death came into the world, we tend to start from our own viewpoint, which is the wrong starting point.

It was Adam and Eve who were originally without any awareness of sin, and who had the ability to live as long as they wished without suffering death. Although sin as we term it was not yet in the world when Adam and Eve were created, the animal behaviors which -- in morally responsible humans -- we regard as sin (see the quote from Pascal above) were certainly in the world, as was suffering and death. So we do not have to account for the "entry" of sin and death into the world outside of Eden -- they were already there. It is just that there were not yet any morally responsible humans with souls in God's image, who could be held accountable for sinning.

God, in this scenario, created just two such humans -- and he gave them (in the Genesis account) simple instructions, which at some point they proceeded on their own (with the serpent's [Satan's] prodding) to disobey. Once they disobeyed God, they acquired moral culpability for their acts -- they knew they had done wrong, and they tried to hide from God in the Garden.

"For on the day you eat of that fruit, you shall surely die" -- not die on the spot, but become certain to die at some future point, just like any other mortal creature. The punishment for eating the forbidden fruit, and thereby acquiring moral culpability, was Adam and Eve's banishment from the paradise of Eden, where they could have remained free of death (and all moral responsibility). And so this scenario satisfies the third of Dr. Collins' criteria quoted above -- under it the Fall literally happened, due to Adam and Eve's disobedience of God's command.

And not only does this scenario satisfy Dr. Collins' third criterion, but it also furnishes a natural basis for the universal longing that man still experiences for a state in the distant past which is now "lost", or "fallen". As well expressed by G. K. Chesterton (again, quoted in the excellent article by Professor Collins [text at n. 60, which see for source]):
The Fall is a view of life. It is not only the only enlightening, but the only encouraging view of life. It holds, as against the only real alternative philosophies, those of the Buddhist or the Pessimist or the Promethean, that we have misused a good world, and not merely been entrapped into a bad one. It refers evil back to the wrong use of the will, and thus declares that it can eventually be righted by the right use of the will. Every other creed except that one is some form of surrender to fate.
A man who holds this view of life will find it giving light on a thousand things; on which mere evolutionary ethics have not a word to say. For instance, on the colossal contrast between the completeness of man’s machines and the continued corruption of his motives; on the fact that no social progress really seems to leave self behind; … on that proverb that says “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” which is only what the theologians say of every other virtue, and is itself only a way of stating the truth of original sin; on those extremes of good and evil by which man exceeds all the animals by the measure of heaven and hell; on that sublime sense of loss that is in the very sound of all great poetry, and nowhere more than in the poetry of pagans and sceptics: “We look before and after, and pine for what is not”; which cries against all prigs and progressives out of the very depths and abysses of the broken heart of man, that happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory; and that we are all kings in exile.
We are, in Chesterton's magnificent language, "kings in exile". How can that be, under an evolutionary scenario? The very idea of "the Fall" implies a reverse kind of evolution -- the opposite of progress. We (our precursors) were at some point in a more evolved state, and then we fell to a worse one, due to our precursors' own grievous fault. That is the point of the story in Genesis chapters 2-3, and there is no reconciling of that point with a purely evolutionary theory -- according to which "progress" is in only one direction, i.e., forward, to ever more advanced states of existence. Therein (in that insight, in other words) lies the key to resolving the apparent conflict between purely evolutionary and Christian "fundamentalist" viewpoints -- if, by the latter term, we describe a belief that Adam and Eve were actual humans, as described in Genesis.

Thus we now come to the hinge-point on which this scenario depends: Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden, and forever prevented from returning (Gen. 3:24). Where could they go?

Precisely -- into the world outside of Eden, with its population of plants and animals -- and a small (3,000 or so) group of anatomically modern humans, according to the genetic evidence discussed in this earlier post. Adam and Eve gave birth to Cain and Abel. Their sons grew up, and being morally culpable (with souls of their own), they became subject to sin, like their parents. As God warned Cain, in Genesis 4:6-7:
“Why are you so angry?” the Lord asked Cain. “Why do you look so dejected? You will be accepted if you do what is right. But if you refuse to do what is right, then watch out! Sin is crouching at the door, eager to control you. But you must subdue it and be its master.”
Cain was unable to do so, and slew his brother Abel out of jealousy. He had to leave Adam and Eve, and go into the world with a mark of some kind to keep him from being killed -- by other early humans, who as yet, we posit, had little in the way of speech, language, or moral conscience. But Cain took a wife, also from among these other early humans (no, he did not marry his sister and have to begin the human race with an act of incest) -- and then we are told he went and began to build an entire city -- of other early humans, again (Gen. 4:17). Being able to found and build a city is a further indication of the skills with tools which distinguished Homo praecipuus from ordinary members of Homo sapiens at that time.

Cain himself had the Homo praecipuus genes of his mother and father. But once he married an early Homo sapiens, his genes recombined with that species in all his offspring, and passed on to their descendants. Cain would have taught his wife and family the rudiments of speech and communication, husbandry, and the manufacture and use of tools -- which they in turn passed on to others in the city he started. Cain's branch of the family may have been responsible for all the people of Africa -- if so, the group which Cain joined after leaving his parents was the small pool of 7,000 or so individuals which, according to the latest data from population genetics, made up the strain which originated in Africa. (Or it may have been one of the descendants of Adam through Noah who did so -- see below.)

Cain's children -- but not his wife (!) -- would also have been born with immortal souls. (Perhaps God's grace intervened even then -- at least, we may hope so.) As each of those in turn married still others, the number of descendants with souls would have multiplied geometrically. (Speaking from an evolutionary standpoint, Cain's tool and language skills, passed on to his descendants, would have given them each a selective advantage over other early humans, meaning that natural selection would eventually take care of the phasing out of any Homo sapiens without souls. It would be mischievous to ask whether there may be any such specimens still around. N.B.: It appears after all that we may hope there are not.)

Back with Adam and Eve, matters progressed similarly, but with a smaller starting population. Adam and Eve had Seth, and perhaps still others, all of whom would have spread the Homo praecipuus genes among the Homo sapiens population, and conferred thereby an evolutionary advantage on their descendants. In this way, the scenario satisfies the second and the fourth of Dr. Collins' criteria.

With the onset of the Flood, Genesis says that all other strains of human and animal life with the exception of Noah, his family and the animals saved on the ark were destroyed. (And if so, that event alone would account for the extinction of humans without souls, apart from the inexorable mechanism of natural selection.) The scenario sketched above does not have to go that far to make the point that all the current humans on earth stem from a "tribe" originally begun by Adam and Eve and their children. From the third generation of that tribe onward, the genes of Homo sapiens recombined again and again with those of Homo praecipuus, with the result that the latter became dispersed throughout the gene pool of the group, and are now lost to scientific study as such.

When the logic is viewed from Adam's perspective, then, and not from our own, he was responsible for the introduction of sin and death into his world -- which then necessarily became ours, as the generations after Adam increased. He and his progeny all had souls, which in turn gave them moral capability. From the first commingled generation onward (the generation after Adam and Eve's children), humans became aware, for the first time, of the fact that their animal instincts and origins (from the non-Adam side), when combined with a soul and a conscience (the heritage from Adam and his children), made them subject to sin --i.e., to "miss the mark" set for them by God (and later, by the laws He gave them). Thus the human dilemma of the Fall: man is made in God's image (he has an immortal soul, and knows right from wrong), but he has an innate tendency ("corrupted nature") to fall constantly short of the standard which being made in God's image sets for him.

We thus come to the conclusion of the scenario, but not to the end of the story. For man is still, many thousands of years later, trying to be Godlike in himself, while at the same time denying any need for God. The beliefs that there is no God at all, or that everything alive on earth today resulted solely from random mutations and natural selection over many billions of years, are just a few current-day examples of such long-standing, and apparently ingrown, attempts to do without God. Isn't it ironic, in consequence, that one could accurately define "man" as "that species which, made in God's image, spends nearly all of his time and effort trying to deny it"?

In summary:

1. Adam and Eve, far from being two "specially selected Neolithic farmers", were a one-time and unique creation of their Maker, Homo praecipuus, who made them body and soul, breathed life into them, and gave them dominion over an earthly paradise in the Garden of Eden.

2. But they disobeyed God's simple command, became through that disobedience morally culpable and aware, and were banished from their paradise to the world outside -- this was what Christians mean by "the Fall." "Original sin" thus refers solely to the act which caused God to expel Adam and Eve from paradise -- it does not, in the Augustinian sense, refer to Adam and Eve's conduct as having made all subsequent humans accountable for their sin (and so is fully reconcilable, as best as I am able to determine, with the concept of "original sin" as understood by the Orthodox Church).

3. Once outside, Adam and Eve gave birth to their children, who in turn had no alternative when it came time to procreate but to interbreed with the existing small pool of Homo sapiens into which they had come from Eden. Over time, the evolutionary advantages conferred by the Homo praecipuus genes made their descendants -- each of whom had souls -- dominant, until today there is not a single human whose genetic origin cannot be traced back to the original tribe headed by Adam and Eve (or perhaps the larger, African one joined either by Cain, or by one or more of Noah's descendants).

4. The instinct to "sin" has always been in the genetic makeup of Homo sapiens, inherited from their evolutionary ancestors in the animal kingdom. But until individuals were born with souls, and thus made in God's image, they were not capable of moral awareness of their sins, any more than animals are. The birth of humans with souls was the unique inheritance bestowed upon the human race by their equally unique ancestors -- Adam and Eve.

5. Our inbuilt genetic longing for the world as it was before the Fall -- i.e., in the Garden -- is an inherent remnant expression of the Homo praecipuus genes which our ancestors, Adam and Eve, bequeathed to us through Cain, Seth, and their other descendants.

The version of the Genesis story presented here has been inspired by the firm belief that God's revelation to us in the Bible is not in vain -- that God, all-powerful as He is, has the full capability to convey to us mortals that which we need for our salvation. "Salvation" is a Christian term for -- there is no avoiding it, if one is truly a Christian -- deliverance from Hell. Because we are all fallen humans, by reason of the events narrated in Genesis as explained above, we require the salvation of Christ, if we are not to be left to our own devices. Our "own devices" promise us nothing beyond eternal darkness or worse, because mankind is not divine, and has no power over death. Only Christianity promises us life eternal with our Savior, with our Creator, and with the Holy Spirit -- one God in three persons, for ever and ever, world without end.



A Beautiful Church Threatened by Unprecedented Floods

Minot, the fourth largest city in North Dakota, sits just 116 miles south of the Canadian border, and is in the Souris River valley -- indeed the Souris cuts right through the heart of downtown. Unfortunately for the inhabitants of Minot, the reservoirs and dams north of them, in the path of the river (including many dams built by the Army Corps of Engineers pursuant to Congressional authorization in 1944), are near to the point of overflowing, because of heavy spring rains added to winter melt from an above-normal snowfall.

Minot has experienced devastating floods in the past, but nothing like what is expected to hit it starting late Thursday or early Friday. Between a quarter and a third of its twelve thousand residents have been ordered to evacuate by Wednesday evening, June 22. The Souris River, currently at an elevation of 1,555 feet above sea level, is expected to rise eight feet higher, to 1,563 feet, by this weekend. If this happens, it will exceed the previous flood stage record of 1,558 feet last measured in 1881.

The Corps of Engineers has built levees sufficient to withstand a flow in the Souris of up to 11,000 cubic feet per second. But with the releases from reservoirs in both Saskatchewan and North Dakota upstream, as their own dams threaten to be breached, the flow hitting Minot by late Thursday or early Friday is expected to be from 17,000 to as high as 20,000 cubic feet per second. These catastrophic flow rates, coupled with the unprecedented height of the flood stage itself, threaten to overwhelm the levees, and thereby dramatically worsen the extent of the flooding.

One of the landmarks of Minot is its Scandinavian Heritage Park, a cultural mecca for both tourists, and for all of the area's many descendants from Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland. This Park is situated south of the center of downtown, west of the intersection of 2nd Street SW (the continuation of Broadway) and 11th Avenue SE, in an area which fortunately is on slightly higher ground, and is thus not included in the latest evacuation plan. But as always with Mother Nature, things could change, dramatically and unexpectedly, at the last moment. A call to the Park's headquarters resulted in a recorded message stating that, due to the flood emergency, the offices would be closed from today forward, and that the traditional "Midsummer Night Festival" scheduled in the Park for Friday evening, June 24, had been canceled.

One of the centerpieces of the Scandanavian Heritage Park is this beautiful, full-size replica, built in 1999-2000, of the Gol Stave Church in Oslo, Norway, which was originally built in about 1250 A.D., in Gol, Hallingdal, and then moved to Bygdoy Park in Oslo about 100 years ago:





(Click on the image to enlarge and see the amazing detail. The original image, in even higher resolution, may be viewed by enlarging the picture at this link.)

Although the building in Minot is used as a museum, and not as a functioning church, its elements are all connected with the Nordic religion which gave the original structure its reasons to be built, as explained in this piece. Consider the remarkable structure as the Scandinavian equivalent, fashioned out of wood staves, of a medieval Gothic stone cathedral -- and let us pray for its safe escape from the impending floodwaters.


Let Them Have It

The NY State Senate is still tied up with a resolution that would finally permit same-sex marriage in the state. The tie up is largely due to “concerns” from some religious leaders (by no means all — several Episcopal bishops including Sisk and Singh to name but two have spoken out in support of the resolution). These other concerned religious leaders, perhaps best represented by the one with most to fret about, Archbishop Dolan, wish to have the act amended to provide greater “protections” to various of their members and agencies.

Of course, as we all know (don’t we?) no church can be forced to perform a marriage against its doctrine. Roman Catholics can turn legally divorced persons away without blinking an eye; no rabbi can be forced to officiate at a marriage of non-Jews; nor could an Episcopal priest be required to solemnize a marriage in which both of the parties are unbaptized. There is, in short, no civil right to marriage that trumps a religious right to refuse to solemnize those deemed outside the relevant religious tradition. There is no right to a rite.

So the “concerns” are more removed from the actual issue of marriage itself, at least in the ritual or religious sense. A church that rents its hall for parties may want to refuse to rent it for a gay couple's wedding reception. A church-related agency for adoption or foster-care may want to refuse to place a child with a married lesbian couple.

And my opinion is, let them have it. Let them discriminate on these grounds. There are other halls to rent, and adoption and foster care agencies to place children. (I do feel for the children who may not find or be delayed in finding a loving couple to care for them; but the responsibility for this will lie with the religious leaders who place a premium on their own concept of righteousness at the expense of the little ones.)

This view is not, by the way, meant to accommodate the individual person of strong religious views, but only institutionally related facilities. The homophobic baker should not have the right to refuse to bake a cake for gay couples — though, at the same time, there are other bakers who will be glad to oblige. But we do get into sticky areas of fondant and marzipan when personal beliefs, however deeply held, are granted special privilege to operate apart from some institution committed to that peculiar view, and for specifically doctrinal reasons.

I say this because I believe the arc of history is on our side. Even the baker will soon find herself with fewer customers, were this provision even to be extended so far — which as I say I do not advise. If the Roman Catholic Church wishes to take what it thinks is the high road — let them do it. History — and the Almighty — will be their judge, as history and God are mine.

But I can read history as well as anyone, and conservative churches wed to the bigotries of the past soon are wearing unbecoming widows' weeds. They do not have a particularly good track record in this regard, whether the matter be the treatment of spiritual movements, of slavery, or even of cosmology.

What the Almighty will say when all is said and done... well, that will depend upon who is acting with greater consistency with the Gospel.

Update and clarification: I neglected to mention the issue of church-related agencies that receive state financial support. I by no means want to suggest that, for example, a church-affiliated adoption agency should continue to receive public financial support if it chooses to limit its services on the grounds of religious beliefs. To continue to offer financial support would be precisely to favor a particular religious aspect of their general work. They cannot have it both ways: if they are claiming an exemption from respecting the civil rights of others on religious grounds, then the civil society has every responsibility to withhold its support of what is, by their own admission, an action based on religion.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG