Author: D. G. Hart

Does Christian Marriage Depend on the State?

Published on by D. G. Hart18 Comments

This story got me wondering about all of the grief Christians are displaying over the institution of marriage (some of which I share). It is about the government of Israel not recognizing the marriages of some evangelical Protestants.

Hundreds of Israeli evangelical couples have traveled out of the country in order to get married because the Jewish government does not officially recognize their faith. Church leaders are escalating efforts to change that.

The Council of Evangelical Churches in Israel (CECI), which includes 51 churches and organizations such as Campus Crusade and the Bible Society, formally requested in August 2011 that Israel recognize four denominations on behalf of nearly 5,000 followers. More than a year later, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who must approve the request—has yet to respond, says Michael Decker, chief counsel for the Jerusalem Institute of Justice (JIJ).

The reporter goes on to supply a quote from a from Mr. Decker: “”We’re dealing with a basic civil right. . . . It really is degrading for large groups of people that have a religion and want to get married according to their religion.”

From one angle, it is useful to recognize that once the state is the one responsible for legitimizing marriage, some groups may be excluded, such as gays in the U.S. and evangelicals in Israel.

But from another angle the notion of Christian marriage or being married “according to [your] religion” as a basic human right is odd. The first Christians (I’m supposing) didn’t enjoy a state that sanctioned their marriages. And the New Testament (the whole Bible for that matter) is remarkably silent on which institution — state, family, or church — is responsible for allowing access to marriage.

For instance, here’s the best the OPC could do in its proof texts for the Confession of Faith’s chapter on marriage:

a. Gen. 2:24. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. Matt. 19:4–6. And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. Rom. 7:3. So then if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man. Prov. 2:17. … which forsaketh the guide of her youth, and forgetteth the covenant of her God.

b. Gen. 2:18. And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. Eph. 5:28. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. 1 Pet. 3:7. Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered.

c. Gen. 1:28. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. Gen. 9:1. And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. Mal. 2:15. And did not he make one? Yet had he the residue of the spirit. And wherefore one? That he might seek a godly seed. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth.

d. 1 Cor. 7:2, 9. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.… But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.

e. Heb. 13:4. Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.

The proof texts go on, but the point is that none of the biblical material supporting a Christian view of marriage say anything about whether the state has a role in recognizing or granting marriages, or that believers should seek the state’s approval of their religious convictions about marriage. That contemporary Christians view biblical teaching on marriage through the lens of politics is a further indication of how Christian political activism skews the reception of Scripture and the practice of Christianity.

By the way, of the major Reformed confessions, the Standards are the only one to devote an entire chapter to marriage.

And yet, Protestants continue to look to the state to baptize their marriages when the early church knew no such blessing or use Christian norms for marriage as leverage for spiritualizing political debates. This does not mean that Christians in the United States should not think about the civil institution of marriage or voice objections to proposed changes in marriage laws. But it does mean that Christian marriage has endured a variety of political and legal conventions. The Bible may teach what form marriage should take but it says practically nothing about the legal and political arrangements.

Why Not Simply Cite God's Law?

Published on by D. G. Hart12 Comments

Our Virginia correspondent sent word of a reminder from the deities of the NFL to churches about legal and illegal Super Bowl festivities:

(1) Churches may only show the game on equipment that they regularly use for worship. They may not bring in additional rented audio-visual equipment.
(2) Churches may not charge admission. They are, however, allowed to take donations to defray party expenses.
(3) Churches may not record or further retransmit the broadcast of the game.

Apparently the separation of church and state does not extend to football and church.

If the NFL had simply reminded Christians of the need to keep the Lord’s Day holy, they could have cut through the fine print. But this way, the footballers get the best of both kingdoms (which is not a good thing if you are certain church in Laodicia).

My Week with Lucy

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The start of the semester brought a tsunami of lectures by visiting faculty and other activities, aside from the full-time teaching load, that made watching any movie or television production impossible this week. But while reading a review of Richard Burton’s diaries in The New Republic, I had an idea for a screenplay that could rival My Week with Marilyn, which was a terrific movie in its own right, not simply because it is a behind-the-scenes production but also because we get to see Kenneth Brannaugh play Sir Laurence Oliviet Olivier.

It turns out that in 1970 Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor appeared as guest stars on “Here’s Lucy,” one of those sit-coms of whose appeal I could never really understand.

Here is what Burton wrote of the dreadful week with Lucille Ball:

Those who had told us that Lucille Ball was ‘very wearing’ were not exaggerating. She is a monster of staggering charmlessness and monumental lack of humour. She is not ‘wearing’ to us because I suppose we refuse to be worn. I am coldly sarcastic with her to the point of outright contempt but she hears only what she wants to hear. She is a tired old woman [Ball was fifty-eight at the time] and lives entirely on that weekly show which she has been doing and successfully doing for 19 years. Nineteen solid years of double-takes and pratfalls and desperate up-staging and cutting out other people’s laughs if she can, nervously watching the ‘ratings’ as she does so. A machine of enormous energy, which driven by a stupid driver who has forgotten that a machine runs on oil as well as gasoline and who has neglected the former, is creaking badly towards a final convulsive seize-up. I loathed her the first day. I loathed her the second day and the third. I loathe her today but I also pity her.

If we can have a movie about the making of Psycho, we need a movie about Burton and Liz Taylor encountering Lucy. To see the interaction of the egos involved, to consider the gulf between an actor doing Hamlet and getting laughs on a jejune American show — the possibilities are endless. It is a movie that would be worth the price of two admissions.

Who is Responsible for Secularization?

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One of the Communing Callers came by yesterday and blamed Protestants for secularization. “Protestantism paved the way for secularism which is a battle the Catholic Church continues to fight. To ignore this truth is to ignore history.”

This is a curious point of view for those who claim to be standing in continuity with Christian history — especially that history BEFORE the Reformation. As the wonderful current three-volume study by Francis Oakley of medieval political theology is showing, secularization was hard wired into Christianity from the beginning:

The conception of the Kingdom of God, then, that Lies at the heart of the teaching of the Gospels on matters political is one that differs radically from that associated with the messianic views dominant in Jesus’s own lifetime. To that fact attests the evident bewilderment both of his own followers, at least one of whom appears to have been a Zealot (Luke 6:15), and of his Jewish opponents, who certainly were not but who at the end sough to convince Pontius Pilate that Jesus had at least to be something of a Zealot fellow-traveler. But Jesus’s negativity in matters political, his frequent disparagement of the kings and governments of this world and of their coercive methods, had little in common with Zealot attitudes. The less so, indeed, in that it was directed against all the governmental structures with which he had come into contact. Jewish no less than Roman. Nor should we miss the fact that that negativity was balanced, somewhat, by at least some measure of approval extended to governmental authority. Admittedly limited in scope, that approval finds practical expression in Jesus’s own obedience to the laws of the land and formal expression in his celebrated statement on the tribute money (“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”). If that statement evaded the trap being set for him by the Pharisees and Sadducees, it must certainly have scandalized the Zealots. For if the Things that were God’s had to be rendered unto God, the Tribute money, nevertheless, was identifies as Caesar’s, and Jesus indicated that it had to be rendered unto Caesar. That position was wholly in keeping with his insistence that the Kingdom whose advent he was preaching was “not of this world.” And both positions imply (in modern terms) an altogether novel separation of “religious” from “political” loyalties that stands out, in the broader context of the history of political thought . . . “Empty Bottles of Gentilism” (58)

Oakley goes on to quote approvingly Fustel de Coulanges (don’t worry, I didn’t know him either — a late nineteenth-century French historian):

Christianity completes the overthrow of local worship; it extinguishes the prytanea [sacred fire], and completely destroys the city-protecting divinities. It does more: it refuses to assume the empire which these worships had exercised over civil society. It professes that between the state and itself there is nothing in common. It separates what antiquity had confounded. We may remark, moreover, that during three centuries the new religion lived entirely beyond the action of the state; it knew how to dispense with state protection, and even to struggle against it. These three centuries established an abyss between the domain of government and the domain of religion; and, as the recollection of the period could not be effaced, it followed that this distinction became a plain and incontestable truth, which the efforts of even a part of the clergy could not efface. (59)

Oakley goes on to suggest that medieval churchmen played a substantial role in effacing the distinction that de Coulanges observed (and that Augustine elaborated in The City of God and was undone by the claims of a magisterial papacy):

. . . the Augustine whom one characteristically encounters in the Middle Ages is the Augustine of The City of God only insofar as that work was read or reinterpreted in light of what he had to say in his tracts against the Donatists. Medieval churchmen, after all, did not fully share his somber doctrine of grace; they rejected his sternly predestinarian division between the reprobate and the elect; they saw instead in every member of the visible Church Militant a person already touched by grace and potentially capable of citizenship in the civitas dei. More familiar with the anti-Donatist writings, in which Augustine had ascribed to the Christian emperor a distinctive role in the vindication of orthodoxy, than with the sober, limited and essential secular conception of rulership conveyed in his City of God, those churchmen were also apt, it may be, to assimilate the historical vision embedded in the latter to the optimistic Christian progressivism that Orosius had made (influentially) his own. They were led, accordingly, even while invoking Augustine’s authority, to depart from his mature and controlling political vision. That is to say, they broke down the firm distinction between the city of God and the Christian societies of this world that we have seen him draw so firmly in all but a handful of texts in The City of God itself. Instead, and what he actually had had to say about justice and the commonwealth to the contrary, they understood him to have asserted that it is the glorious destiny of Christian society — church, empire, Christian commonwealth, call it what you will — to labor to inaugurate the Kingdom of God and the reign of true justice in this world. (140-41)

This is why the CTC assessment of two-kingdom theology needs to go back to the drawing board and do a little historical investigation. Oakley’s interpretation of Christ and Augustine does sheds some light on CTC’s reading of the church fathers. They have precedent for seeing what they want to see.

Postscript: Orosius was an early fifth-century Spanish theologian who set out to do “nothing less than demonstrate “in every respect that the empire of Augustus had been prepared for the advent of Christ.” (Oakley, 116)

What A Difference a Council Makes

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Over the weekend I was looking around the Catholic Encyclopedia to see what the old definitions of heresy, schism, and modernism were, and to check what they writers said about Protestantism. It was eye opening. Roman Catholics don’t talk that way anymore about Protestants.

For instance, here’s the part of the article on justification:

This principle bears upon conduct, unlike free judgment, which bears on faith. It is not subject to the same limitations, for its practical application requires less mental capacity; its working cannot be tested by anyone; it is strictly personal and internal, thus escaping such violent conflicts with community or state as would lead to repression. On the other hand, as it evades coercion, lends itself to practical application at every step in man’s life, and favours man’s inclination to evil by rendering a so-called “conversion” ludicrously easy, its baneful influence on morals is manifest. Add to justification by faith alone the doctrines of predestination to heaven or hell regardless of man’s actions, and the slavery of the human will, and it seems inconceivable that any good action at all could result from such beliefs. As a matter of history, public morality did at once deteriorate to an appalling degree wherever Protestantism was introduced. Not to mention the robberies of Church goods, brutal treatment meted out to the clergy, secular and regular, who remained faithful, and the horrors of so many wars of religion, we have Luther’s own testimony as to the evil results of his teaching.

Then this on church-state relations (i.e. Caesaro-papism):

A similar picture of religious and moral degradation may easily be drawn from contemporary Protestant writers for all countries after the first introduction of Protestantism. It could not be otherwise. The immense fermentation caused by the introduction of subversive principles into the life of a people naturally brings to the surface and shows in its utmost ugliness all that is brutal in human nature. But only for a time. The ferment exhausts itself, the fermentation subsides, and order reappears, possibly under new forms. The new form of social and religious order, which is the residue of the great Protestant upheaval in Europe, is territorial or State Religion — an order based on the religious supremacy of the temporal ruler, in contradistinction to the old order in which the temporal ruler took an oath of obedience to the Church. For the right understanding of Protestantism it is necessary to describe the genesis of this far-reaching change.

. . . From this time forward the progress of Protestantism is on political rather than on religious lines; the people are not clamouring for innovations, but the rulers find their advantage in being supreme bishops, and by force, or cunning, or both impose the yoke of the new Gospel on their subjects. Denmark, Sweden, Norway, England, and all the small principalities and imperial towns in Germany are examples in point. The supreme heads and governors were well aware that the principles which had brought down the authority of Rome would equally bring down their own; hence the penal laws everywhere enacted against dissenters from the state religion decreed by the temporal ruler. England under Henry VIII, Elizabeth, and the Puritans elaborated the most ferocious of all penal codes against Catholics and others unwilling to conform to the established religion.

But the faculty at Catholic University of America produced a New Catholic Encyclopedia just after the Second Vatican Council. It takes a decidedly different tone. In fact, its authors offer little comment. This is a Roman Catholic version of an Encyclopedia Britannica, an effort to cover a comprehensive range of topics and provide useful and reliable information. Here is an excerpt from the NCE’s article on Luther (it does not even have one on Protestantism):

Evaluation. It is an exaggeration to identify the Reformation with the person of Luther and to equate all of Protestantism with his doctrines. Nevertheless, one must admit the enormous influence that he exercised upon the movement. The survival of Luther’s own brand of evangelicalism was greatly aided by the rise of numerous reformers elsewhere in Northern Europe, that is, by the rise of figures like Zwingli, Bucer, Calvin, and a host of others. Lutheranism’s success as a protest against the Church’s dominant teachings concerning salvation, and its later growth as a church independent of Rome, is also in part attributable to Luther’s long and productive life. He continued to exert his stamp upon the evangelical cause for a quarter century after the movements birth. And upon his death in 1546, he had trained large numbers of pastors and theologians who were prepared to carry on his legacy.

That’s it. No condemnation, not even a warning. In fact, the article even suggests that some bishops were glad to have Luther’s protest:

It is one of the strange turns of history that Luther was never officially prosecuted in his own country, although excommunication, by labeling him a heretic, made him liable to the death penalty in the Empire. A number of circumstances combined to render the ecclesiastical and civil penalties ineffective. In the first place there was strong public reaction that rebelled at the prospect of condemning a man who had become the outright spokesman for their own grievances against corruption in the Church. The conviction that until a council had actually pronounced against him, he and his followers were not definitely cut off from the Catholic Church was widespread. Finally, the majority of the German bishops, still influenced by conciliarism, were hardly inclined to stand in the way of a man whose attacks on papal claims to ecclesiastical supremacy expressed their own opposition to Romanism.

It is curious that the papal bull itself against Luther was not sufficient to condemn him (it would have likely had not the Turks been creating distractions for the emperor, Charles V). Could it be that the editors of the New Catholic Encyclopedia were welcoming a renewal of conciliarism? Odd then and ironic that Protestants convert to Rome because of conservative popes at a time when Roman Catholicism has wiggled out of papal supremacy and returned oversight to bishops and superiors, thus rendering the Church as diverse and unruly as Protestantism itself.

Tough Weekend for Charm City

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Yes, I hear the Ravens are going to the Super Bowl (do I need to use a trademark with that?) but they played on the first day of the week, the Lord’s Day even, not one of the days that conclude our weeks.

On Thursday came news that the actor who played Prop Joe in The Wire died:

Robert F. Chew, an actor best known for his roles in gritty HBO dramas like “The Corner” and “The Wire,” died on Thursday at his home in Baltimore. He was 52. The cause was a heart attack, said his sister, Clarice Chew.

Mr. Chew was a well-regarded stage actor when he began appearing in television shows created by or based on the work of David Simon and Edward Burns. He played a shoe salesman on “The Corner” and the drug supplier Wilkie Collins on the NBC drama “Homicide: Life on the Street.”

As Proposition Joe Stewart, the portly, deeply connected and relatively civil drug kingpin on “The Wire,” he preferred to broker deals between rival drug factions rather than resort to violence.

Then we lost Earl Weaver, the man who managed the Orioles in their glory days:

Weaver piloted the Orioles from 1968 to 1982, and again in 1985-86, earning nicknames like “the little genius” and “the Earl of Baltimore.” His teams won 1,480 games and lost 1,060, and his lifetime winning percentage (.583) ranks seventh all-time and fifth among managers in the modern era who managed 10 years or more. Five times, the Orioles won at least 100 games for Weaver, who was 5-feet-7 but stood taller in his players’ eyes.

“Earl was one of a kind,” said Hank Peters, the Orioles’ president and general manager from 1975 to 1987. “He was little, but he produced mighty results. He had the ability to get so much out of his players. He was the master at giving them the opportunity to do their best. His record attests that he made the right moves.”

One of the game’s great strategists, Weaver was also a visionary and a genius at maximizing a 25-man roster’s potential. In his pocket, he carried index cards with “the minutiae of the American League on them.” He loved players who got on base and hit home runs. He abhorred small-ball strategies that wasted outs. And he trumpeted these theories long before they were brought into Hollywood vogue.

I’m not sure an AFC championship can make up for the loss.

Spirituality of the Church and the Physicality of the Body

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For all of those who think that two-kingdoms theology overly spiritualizes the Christian life, Martin Luther to the rescue:

Commenting on Mark 7:33 (“And he took him aside from the multitude, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue.”)

He singles out these two organs, ear and tongue, because the kingdom of Christ is founded upon the Word, which cannot be perceived and comprehended except with these two organs: ears and tongue. The kingdom reigns in the human heart by faith alone. The ears comprehend the Word and the heart believes it. Therefore if tongue and ears are taken away, there remains no marked difference between the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of the world.

For in the outward life a Christian goes about like an unbelieving man: he builds, tills the ground, and ploughs like other men. He does not undertake any special tasks, neither as regards eating, drinking, sleeping, working, nor anything else. These two organs alone make a difference between Christians and non-Christians: that a Christian speaks and hears in a different manner and has a tongue which praises God’s grace and preaches Christ, declaring that He alone can make men blessed. The world does not do that. It speaks of avarice and other vices, and preaches and praises its own pomp. (Sermon from 1534 reprinted in Day By Day We Magnify Thee)

We get true spirituality in ensouled bodies. And those bodies and their activities are no different from the bodies and activities of non-believers, except when it comes to sacred affairs like prayer as opposed to plumbing.

A Secular Faith

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I wish I had read more Bernard Lewis before I wrote a certain book:

Secularism in the modern political meaning – the idea that religion and political authority, church and state are different, and can or should be separated – is, in a profound sense, Christian. Its origins may be traced in the teaching of Christ, confirmed by the experience of the first Christians; its later development was shaped and, in a sense, imposed by the subsequent history of Christendom. The persecutions endured by the early church made it clear that a separation between the two was possible; the persecutions inflicted by later churches persuaded many Christians that such a separation was necessary.

The older religions of mankind were all related to – were in a sense a part of – authority, whether of the tribe, the city, or the king. The cult provided a visible symbol of group identity and loyalty; the faith provided sanction for the ruler and his laws. Something of this pre-Christian function of religion survives, or reappears, in Christendom, where from time to time priests exercised temporal power, and kings claimed divine right even over the church. But these were aberrations from Christian norms, seen and reciprocally denounced as such by royal and clerical spokesmen. The authoritative Christian text on these matters is the famous passage in Matthew 22:21, in which Christ is quoted as saying, “render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” Commentators have differed as to the precise meaning and intention of this phrase, but for most of Christian history it has been understood as authorizing the separate coexistence of two authorities, the one charged with matters of religion, the other with what we would nowadays call politics.

In this, the practice of Christianity was in marked contrast with both its precursors and its competitors. In imperial Rome Caesar was God, reasserting a doctrine that goes back to the god-kings of remote antiquity. Among the Jews, for whose beliefs Josephus coined the term “theocracy,” God was Caesar. For the Muslims, too, God was the supreme sovereign, and the caliph was his vice-gerent, “his shadow on earth.” Only in Christendom did God and Caesar coexist in the state, albeit with considerable development, variety, and sometimes conflict in the relations between them. (What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, 2002, 96-97)

Could it be that resistance to two-kingdom theology is simply the congenital human propensity to identify the sacred in the temporal, or to conflate cult and culture? Is it also a failure to grasp how novel Christ’s own claims are from the perspective of human history?

Whose Virtue, Which Ethicist

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Apparently, my reaction to Brad Gregory’s chapter on ethics went the way of Facebook updates. So let me return to the subject of Roman Catholicism and Aristotle.

Out of curiosity, I went over to Called to Communion to see what the folks there have to say about Aristotle. I ran across this from Mr. Cross himself:

That is why Aristotle is so important. Aristotle shows how from what we already know through our common human experience of the world, we can understand virtue and vice, and their epistemic grounding in philosophical truths about human nature and the human person. Our shared human nature provides the shared rational framework and criteria by which to adjudicate between various hypotheses, and so reason together. It is only by this mutual participation in rationality that Hitchens and Wilson can criticize each other’s positions, in something more than a solipsistic way. What both are missing, is Aristotle. And that is why watching them debate is like watching the skeptic Sextus Empiricus debate Nicolas of Autrecourt, whose fideism was condemned by the Catholic Church in the fourteenth century. So when I reflect on ten years of teaching Aristotle, in light of my position twenty years ago, I see the way in which Aristotle provides an important philosophical understanding of nature, the very nature that grace perfects and upon which grace builds.

This comes in the context of the debates between Christopher Hitchens and Doug Wilson, where Bryan Cross’ veneration of philosophical certainty leads him to conclude that “there is no common rational ground by which to adjudicate between the positions of Wilson and Hitchens. That is why Hitchens is exactly right when he says, “There is no bridge that can suffice.” (6:39) . . . . If one’s whole epistemic edifice is built upon a mere leap-in-the-dark assumption, as Wilson’s is, then since nothing can be any more certain than that upon which it rests, one still does not get any certainty.”

Well, where exactly is the common ground between Aristotle and Paul (or Jesus for that matter, or the Magnificat while I’m at it) when it comes to good works? Christians believe (or are supposed to) that sinners can’t be good apart from grace. But Aristotle is all about virtue apart from grace. How could he be otherwise, since he knew nothing about grace? This doesn’t mean we need to throw Athens overboard in good Tertullian fashion. We do happen, this side of glory, to live with a lot of people who do not have grace. So finding ways that they can be good apart from grace is useful at least for proximate ends of communities and neighborhoods. Still, at the end of the day what Aristotle and Thomas meant by virtue is a long way apart thanks to the advent of Christ.

And by the way, curious is the charge that Protestants are wrong to appeal to Paul apart from papal approval but Roman Catholic teachers of virtue may appeal to a pagan without the slightest criticism.

I also ran across a defense of transubstantiation at Called to Communion that made an interesting point about historical development. To the charge that Rome’s teaching on transubstantiation depends on Aristotelian metaphysics, the blogger appealed to Jaroslav Pelikan:

. . . the application of the term “substance” to the discussion of the Eucharistic presence antedates the rediscovery of Aristotle. In the ninth century, Ratramnus spoke of “substances visible but invisible,” and his opponent Radbertus declared that “out of the substance of bread and wine the same body and blood of Christ is mystically consecrated.” Even “transubstantiation” was used during the twelfth century in a nontechnical sense. Such evidence lends credence to the argument that the doctrine of transubstantiation, as codified by the decrees of the Fourth Lateran and Tridentine councils, did not canonize Aristotelian philosophy as indispensable to Christian doctrine.

So, Called to Communion recognizes that Aristotelian metaphysics may be a problem. But Aristotelian ethics are okay?

This was not the historical point, though. Since Roman Catholicism of the Protestant era was heavily dependent on Aristotelian ethics (see Gregory and Alasdair MacIntyre), and since the West did not really appropriate Aristotle until the medieval renaissance associated with Aquinas and the rise of universities, just how ancient is the ethical framework that rejected Luther and Calvin’s constructions? For all the talk about the ancient church and the early church fathers, do the Called to Communion folks believe that Ireneaus and Polycarp were thinking about the Christian life in Aristotelian categories?

I ask partly because I don’t know, partly because the way some put the past together looks remarkably arbitrary.

Breaking Implausibly Bad

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The missus and I continue to persevere with the series but after last night’s two episodes (we are now late in Season Three) any comparison between Breaking Bad and The Wire is baffling. After what happens to Hank, for instance, in the parking lot with the slasher hit-men, do you think the writers would be pleased to know that my wife laughed when Netflix flipped (as it does) to the synopsis of the next episode and revealed that Hank survives? But that reaction is what the writers deserve since they seem to keep writing right up to the edge of having to conclude the series — a character’s death, discovery by the law, abandonment in the dessert — and then find a way to keep the characters in play and the production of meth active. It feels like a Warner Bros. cartoon where Wyle E. Coyote keeps falling off the cliff or blowing himself up, only to survive. What might have been really clever would have been to extend the chemistry theme throughout the story line so that Walt can (like Superman) disentangle himself from almost any dire situation by concocting some chemical combination. If he can do that by creating a battery to start the RV, why not also by creating some mist that will, while he and Jesse are hiding from Hank inside the RV, put Hank to sleep and allow them to escape and destroy the vehicle?

As it is, Breaking Bad does not reveal much about the layers of crystal meth production or even the characters themselves. In Traffic, for instance, what was happening on the Tijuanna border had reverberations in Mexico and in Washington D.C. And of course, what happened in The Wire with Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell wound up unwinding through the layers of Baltimore politics and society. And though some have faulted The Wire for not really developing its characters, Breaking Bad’s Walt and Schuyler seem to be persons who are whom they are mainly to fit what the cartoonish plot demands. Apologies to those who love the series. The wife and I will continue just to see what the writers concoct next. We are hooked in that sense and are glad to know something about the buzz the show has created. But a production akin to The Wire? Not!

Speaking of television series comparisons, over the holidays we watched the BBC production, The Hour (which features the star of The Wire, Dominic West). Some have compared it to Mad Men. It is so much better that it the comparison is actually damning. The Hour is a combination of Good Night and Good Luck and Broadcast News with a measure of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy thrown in. It makes Mad Men look like all style and no substance.

And while I’m in the mood of making recommendations, over the holidays we visited the theaters to see Anna Karenina, Hyde Park on Hudson, and Hitchcock. The latest was arguably the best of the lot, at least if you like behind the scenes portrayals of Hollywood. Performances by Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren sure help. Hyde Park on the Hudson is worth seeing if only because of Bill Murray’s performance (which is good). But it’s also depressing to see (in a theme echoed in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) the formerly great British Empire having to depend on its political and cultural wayward son. Anna Karenina has its moments and anyone who enjoys the work of Tom Stoppard (I do, particularly his play, The Invention of Love) should see how his screenplay comes to life on the big screen. But the story itself, a case of marital and sexual infidelity, looks like just one more account of romantic love gone illegitimate — the Russian equivalent of Madame Bovary or An American Tragedy. Maybe Tolstoy deserves credit for writing about this theme before Dreiser (but after Flaubert). But on this side of 2012, Tolstoy’s narrative, even as rendered by Stoppard and company, does little to separate itself from the adulterous pack.