Another interesting link from Dr. Cooper. Surf on over to the Stanford Magazine to read Kara Platoni's article The Sex Scholar. Platoni's article is about the research of Clelia Mosher (1863-1940). Mosher was famous in her day for proving that women breathe from the diaphragm just as men do. More, the reason it was believed that women breathed differently from men (from the chest rather than the diaphragm) was due to the corsets and constrictive clothing Victorian-era women had to wear! Mosher also did pioneering work on menstruation and was one of the first to advocate core body strength training to help women cope with menstrual pain and cramping.

But today Mosher is particularly famous for conducting one of the very first scientific investigations into female sexuality. Platoni describes the origin of Mosher's research:

Mosher started it in 1892 as a 28-year-old biology undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin; she had been asked to address a local Mother's Club on "the marital relation" and as a single, childless woman seems to have used data collection to fill gaps in her knowledge. Afterward, Mosher continued conducting surveys until 1920, using variations on the same form and amassing 45 profiles in all. Yet Mosher never published or drew more than cursory observations from her data. She died in 1940, and the survey was entirely forgotten when [Carl] Degler unearthed it [in 1973].

What is so fascinating about Mosher's interviews is how they completely overturn the stereotypes of Victorian-era female repression and sexual prudery:

Slightly more than half of these educated women claimed to have known nothing of sex prior to marriage; the better informed said they'd gotten their information from books, talks with older women and natural observations like "watching farm animals." Yet no matter how sheltered they'd initially been, these women had—and enjoyed—sex. Of the 45 women, 35 said they desired sex; 34 said they had experienced orgasms; 24 felt that pleasure for both sexes was a reason for intercourse; and about three-quarters of them engaged in it at least once a week.

...Their responses were often mixed. Some enjoyed sex but worried that they shouldn't. One slept apart from her husband "to avoid temptation of too frequent intercourse." Some didn't enjoy sex but faulted their partner. Mosher writes: [She] "Thinks men have not been properly trained."

Their responses reflected the cultural shifts of the late 19th century, as marriage became viewed as a romantic union, not just an economic one, and as people began to dissociate sex from procreation... One woman, born in 1867, wrote that before marriage she believed sex to be only for reproduction, but later changed her mind: "In my experience the habitual bodily expression of love has a deep psychological effect in making possible complete mental sympathy & perfecting the spiritual union that must be the lasting 'marriage' after the passion of love has passed away with the years." Wrote another, born in 1863, "It seems to me to be a natural and physical sign of a spiritual union, a renewal of the marriage vows."

Cory, who always keeps me up to speed with mind/body research links, passes along this report--Study Narrows Gap Between Mind And Brain--by Jon Hamilton.

In the article Hamilton reports on a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In that study researchers found that applying a magnetic pulse to the brain affects how participants made moral judgments. The conclusion of the report:

The fact that scientists can adjust morality with a magnet may be disconcerting to people who view morality as a lofty and immutable human trait, says Joshua Greene, psychologist at Harvard University. But that view isn't accurate, he says.

"Moral judgment is just a brain process," he says. "That's precisely why it's possible for these researchers to influence it using electromagnetic pulses on the surface of the brain."

The new study is really part of a much larger effort by scientists to explain how the brain creates moral judgments, Greene says. The scientists are trying to take concepts such as morality, which philosophers once attributed to the human soul, and "break it down in mechanical terms."

If something as complex as morality has a mechanical explanation, Green says, it will be hard to argue that people have, or need, a soul.

I've wrestled a lot with these implications on this blog. Many of those posts can be found here.

An interesting article sent to me by George: Theodore Dalrymple on Self-Esteem vs. Self-Respect.

In the essay Dalrymple criticizes the modern fetish with "self-esteem" which Dalrymple considers to be a form of egotism. His opening:

With the coyness of someone revealing a bizarre sexual taste, my patients would often say to me, "Doctor, I think I'm suffering from low self-esteem." This, they believed, was at the root of their problem, whatever it was, for there is hardly any undesirable behavior or experience that has not been attributed, in the press and on the air, in books and in private conversations, to low self-esteem, from eating too much to mass murder.

Self-esteem is, of course, a term in the modern lexicon of psychobabble, and psychobabble is itself the verbal expression of self-absorption without self-examination. The former is a pleasurable vice, the latter a painful discipline. An accomplished psychobabbler can talk for hours about himself without revealing anything.

In place of self-esteem Dalrymple calls for self-respect which, in his mind, is inherently social and other-focused:

Self-respect is another quality entirely. Where self-esteem is entirely egotistical, requiring that the world should pay court to oneself whatever oneself happens to be like or do, and demands nothing of the person who wants it, self-respect is a social virtue, a discipline, that requires an awareness of and sensitivity to the feelings of others. It requires an ability and willingness to put oneself in someone else's place; it requires dignity and fortitude, and not always taking the line of least resistance.

To illustrate this, Dalrymple considers how we might pay more attention to how we dress:

The small matter of cleaning one's shoes, for example, is not one of vanity alone, though of course it can be carried on to the point of vanity and even obsession and fetish. It is, rather, a discipline and a small sign that one is prepared to go to some trouble for the good opinion and satisfaction of others. It is a recognition that one lives in a social world. That is why total informality of dress is a sign of advancing egotism.

Early in college my life was dominated by doctrine, what people believed or didn't believe about God, church and religion generally. But in college two things happened. First, I began working through the implications of the various doctrinal positions I held. Mainly I struggled with the problem of evil in light of classic doctrines regarding the nature of hell. The conclusion I reached was that, if the various doctrines of my childhood were true, God was mean, petty, callous and irascible.

This view of God clashed sharply with the second important theological experience of my college years: A prolonged engagement with the gospels. In college I began to read the gospels over and over again. I'd start with Matthew and read through to the end of John. I'd read Matthew-Mark-Luke-John, Matthew-Mark-Luke-John, over and over and over. And as I read I just couldn't square the God of my doctrine with the person of Jesus I encountered in the gospels.

My encounter with George MacDonald around this time gave me the courage to jettison the God of my doctrine and to embrace the God of Jesus Christ I found in the gospels. Basically, MacDonald got me to the point where I said, "Screw it, God is like Jesus. End of story."

In one sense, that conclusion is completely bland and banal. Of course God is like Jesus.

But on the other hand, if you've really internalized this truth, you know just how revolutionary and seismic that claim truly is.

Practically, what this meant was that when I faced two rival interpretations of God I'd always go with the interpretation that revealed God to be more loving, more merciful, more fair, more "for us." Basically, I'd side with the interpretation where God looked more like Jesus. If a view of God moved in the other direction--God as petty, mean, cold, unjust, grumpy, vindictive--then I'd reject this god. In short, MacDonald convinced me that I couldn't think too highly of God. I became free to imagine the most noble, kind, generous, loving and self-sacrificing person who ever lived and know, with ironclad certainty, that God was way, way, way better than that. Humans can't be more loving than God. In fact, the most loving humans who have ever lived--think Gandhi, a loving grandparent, St. Francis, or Mother Teresa--are but pale shadows of God's own love and justice.

God is, simply, better than you can imagine.

Not that God is some kind of sweet, cotton candy pushover. Just that even God's wrath and judgment, in its steely harshness, is always noble, generous, merciful and, ultimately, "for us."

Here are some of the passages in Unspoken Sermons that gave me the courage to risk thinking the very best about God. From the sermon The Higher Faith:

...the dull disciple [says]--"God has said nothing about that in his word, therefore we have no right to believe anything about it. It is better not to speculate on such matters. However desirable it may seem to us, we have nothing to do with it. It is not revealed." ...For [the dull disciple] all revelation has ceased with and been buried in the Bible, to be with difficulty exhumed, and, with much questioning of the decayed form, re-united into a rigid skeleton of metaphysical and legal contrivance for letting the love of God have its way unchecked by the other perfections of his being.

Sad, indeed, would the whole matter be, if the Bible had hold us everything God meant for us to believe. But herein is the Bible itself greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus...The one use of the Bible is to make us look at Jesus, that through him we might know his Father and our Father, his God and our God. Till we thus know Him, let us hold the Bible dear as the moon of our darkness, by which we travel towards the east; not dear as the sun whence her light cometh, and toward which we haste, that, walking in the sun himself, we may no more need the mirror that reflected his absent brightness.

"But is not this dangerous doctrine? Will not a man be taught thus to believe the things he likes best, even to pray for that which he likes best? And will be not grow arrogant in his confidence?"

If it be true that the Spirit strives with our spirit; if it be true that God teaches men, we may safely leave those dreaded results to him. If the man is of the Lord's company, he is safer with him than with those who would secure their safety by hanging on the outskirts and daring nothing. If he is not taught of God in that which he hopes for, God will let him know it. He will receive something else than he prays for. If he can pray to God for anything not good, the answer will come in the flames of the consuming fire. These will soon bring him to some of his spiritual senses. But it will be far better for him to be thus sharply tutored, than to go on a snail's pace in the journey of the spiritual life. And for arrogance, I have seen nothing breed it faster or in more offensive forms than the worship of the letter.

[God] is not afraid of your presumptuous approach to him. It is you who are afraid to come near him. He is not watching over his dignity...

From the sermon It Shall Not Be Forgiven:

To accept as the will of our Lord which to us is inconsistent with what we have learned to worship in him already, is to introduce discord into that harmony whose end is to unite our hearts, and make them whole.

"Is it for us," says the objector who, by some sleight of will, believes in the word apart from the meaning for which it stands, "to judge the character of our Lord?" I answer, "This very thing he requires of us." He requires of us that we should do him no injustice. He would come and dwell with us, if we would but open our chambers to receive him. How shall we receive him if, avoiding judgment, we hold this or that daub of authority or tradition hanging upon our wall to be the real likeness of our Lord?...

...To mistake the meaning of the Son of man may well fill a man with sadness. But to care so little for him as to receive as his what the noblest part of our nature rejects as low and poor, or selfish and wrong, that surely is more like the sin against the Holy Ghost that can never be forgiven; for it is a sin against the truth itself, not the embodiment of him.

This notion ("But to care so little for him as to receive as his what the noblest part of our nature rejects as low and poor, or selfish and wrong") is what finally set me free. I could no longer accept a vision of God that was low, poor, selfish and wrong. A view of God that violated the noblest part of my character, and not just my character, the noblest part of humanity.

Am I, then, in danger of pride, of making God into human likeness? Yes, and MacDonald well admits this as you saw above. But his response is clear. You cannot help but make God into your image. So you have a choice. Will you imagine the most noble, merciful, and loving person alive (Jesus, for example) and posit that God is like that? And more than that?

Or will you believe that humans are more forgiving, more loving, and more just than God himself? That humans are better than God? That while I might forgive the wrongs against me (as Jesus forgave those who crucified him) God cannot? That while I recoil at the thought of torturing my child God will torture his children for all eternity?

No, the answer has to be no. God is better than me. Better than you. Better than we can possibly imagine.

I got this e-mail from my friend Mel at church:

I believe the Google search auto complete function is a Rorschach test of the internet. There is a blog called autocompleteme.com that has cataloged numerous examples.

For example, if you type in "bacon is a", one of Google's responses is "bacon is a little hug from god".

Other examples "this looks like a" returns "this looks like a job for emergency pants".

Some responses are oddly philosophical (the bacon example) while some are just nonsensical ("my wife left town with a banana").

Now excuse me, I need some bacon.

see more

Gallop posts data on global wellbeing, ranking nations on a scale from "suffering" to "struggling" to "thriving."


(H/T Yglesias)

I've never been there, but now you can take a virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel. Pretty amazing.

Science Daily has an article up about a recent paper now out in the March/April 2010 issue of Child Development. In the study the researchers investigated when, exactly, kids become rebellious. They discovered that 4-7 year old children make distinctions between the kinds of rules parents make. Some rules go to moral issues, while other infringe upon the freedom of the child (e.g., friend or clothing choice). In the study kids appeared to be more willing to go along with the former and more likely to disobey the latter. From Science Daily:

The researchers looked at the beliefs of 60 4- to 7-year-olds about how child characters in role-playing situations would act and feel when a parent forbids them from engaging in a desired activity. At times, the parent's rule intruded on the child's personal domain (as in, you shouldn't play with a particular friend, take part in a certain activity, or wear certain clothes), while in others, the parent's rule fell within the moral domain (as in, you shouldn't hit or steal).

From ages 4 to 7, children's predictions that the characters would comply with moral rules (such as prohibitions against stealing) and feel good about doing so rose significantly, suggesting that between these ages, children become increasingly aware of the limits to legitimate disobedience. In stark contrast, children of all ages predicted that the characters would frequently break parents' rules when those rules intruded on the personal domain and that this disobedience would feel good, particularly when the desired activities were described as essential to the character's sense of identity.

Sometime ago I wrote, in my series on Freud, about the relationship between human civilization, morality, neurosis, and clothing. From that essay:

Clothing is so ubiquitous we often fail to notice how odd this behavior is, ethologically speaking. True, clothing norms have varied widely across space and time. Many tribes and cultures have gone virtually naked. But even so, most of these tribes haven't gone totally naked. Generally speaking, humans like to wear pants.

Why? Well, the Bible tells us. Clothing is, interestingly, the very first behavioral symptom of the Fall of Humankind. It's not murder. That comes later. No, the first symptom of the Fall is putting on some pants:

"You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

Let's note three interesting things about the Dawn of Pants. Specifically, these three events are intimately connected:

1. The Knowledge of Good and Evil
2. The Onset of Shame
3. The Dawn of Pants

What is the meaning of these connections? Well, as noted above, let's take the onset of clothing as the beginning of the separation between Man and Animal. Clothing is the beginning of civilization. To this day we consider nakedness to be a regression to an animal-like existence.

If so, then the rise of civilization was intimately related to the onset of our moral sense, the "knowledge of good and evil." And morality creates shame. And shame leads to pants.

When did humans start wearing pants? Well, apparently lice genetics help us approach an answer. In an article over in Slate Brian Palmer discusses some of the research about the Dawn of Pants:

The Siberian early human lived during the Pleistocene ice age, so researchers assume that he or she would have worn clothes for insulation. When did humans start dressing up? At least 100,000 years ago. Human raiment is not typically preserved in the fossil record, so researchers have turned to lice genetics for hints. Body lice diverged genetically from other louse species about 100,000 years ago. Because body lice live primarily in our clothing, scientists use that moment of differentiation as the likely era when humans started dressing themselves.

It's possible, however, that humans started wearing clothes even earlier. We know that pubic lice jumped over to humans from gorillas—our genetically distinct head lice migrated from chimpanzees—about 2 million years ago. And since pubic and head lice probably couldn't have coexisted on the same body if there was a hairy highway connecting their favorite anatomical spaces (one would have beaten out the other for all the available resources), it's likely that we had lost our body hair by then. Some claim that humans donned clothing shortly after that, but others argue that there's no reason our ancestors would have needed clothing in steamy Africa.

You likely know about the continuing child abuse scandals plaguing the Catholic church in light of new allegations from Ireland and Germany. Some are wondering just how widespread the problem was and is. Andrew Sullivan, a gay Catholic, writes yesterday about the Catholic church tradition of seeing child abuse perpetrated by priests as a sin rather than a crime.

The interesting part of Sullivan's essay is his description of how homosexuality can produce later child abuse because it is denied a proper outlet with loving, consenting and committed partners. Now, Sullivan is no unbiased observer. As a gay member of his church he is a fierce advocate for gay rights. Regardless, his description of the experience of growing up gay within a religious community is worth thinking about:

[I]magine you are a young gay Catholic teen coming into his sexuality and utterly convinced that it's vile and evil. What do you do? I can tell you from my own experience. You bury it. But of course, you can't bury it. So you objectify sex; and masturbate. You cannot have sexual or even emotional contact with a teenage girl, because it is simply impossible, and you certainly cannot have sex with another teenage boy or you will burn in hell for ever ... so you have sex with images in your own head. Your sex life becomes completely solitary. It can be empowered by pornography or simply teenage imagination. Some shard of beauty, some aspect of sensuality, some vision of desire will keep you sexually energized for days.

Now suppose your powers of suppression and attachment to religious authority are also strong - perhaps stronger because you feel so adrift you need something solid to cling onto in your psyche. And you know you cannot marry a woman. But you want to have status and cover as a single man. If this is the 1950s and 1960s, it's into the Church you go. You think it will cure you. In fact, it only makes you sicker because your denial is buttressed by their collective denial. And the whole thing becomes one big and deepening spiral of lies and corruption.

Many of these tormented men have arrested sexual and emotional development. They have never had a sexual or intimate relationship with any other human being. Sex for them is an abstraction, a sin, not an interaction with an equal. And their sexuality has been frozen at the first real moment of internal terror: their early teens. So they tend to be attracted still to those who are in their own stage of development: teenage boys. And in their new positions, they are given total access to these kids who revere them for their power.

So they use these children to express themselves sexually. They barely see these children as young and vulnerable human beings, incapable of true consent. Because they have never had a real sexual relationship, have never had to deal with the core issue of human equality and dignity in sex, they don't see the children as victims. Like the tortured gay man, Michael Jackson, they see them as friends. They are even gifted at interacting with them in non-sexual ways. One theme you find in many of these stories is that until these screwed up priests' abuse and molestation is revealed, they often have a great reputation as pastors. As emotionally developed as your average fourteen year old wanting to be loved, they sublimate a lot of their lives into clerical service. But they also act out sexually all the time.

In college I struggled with my faith. One particular struggle was the view of God that sat behind the religion of my childhood. Essentially, I was taught a bifurcated God, a God of love and justice. These traits seems to compete for supremacy within the personality of God. God loved you, but God would also send you to hell for all eternity. Oddly, it seemed that justice was God's defining characteristic because his justice appeared to trump his mercy in the end. Justice had the final say, it was the last word. God might want to forgive you but, for some reason, his justice compelled him to send you to hell.

I couldn't make heads or tails of this.

First, what view is this that keeps God's justice and love in tension? Does God want to save me or not? And if he wants to save me why can't mercy trump justice?

Second, this "love" and "justice" of God is unrecognizable. True, God's ways are above our ways and God's thoughts are above our thoughts, but the God of my childhood was bizarre. What parent looks at her child and says, "I want to forgive you, but I can't." Human parents punish and embrace justice because they love their children. Love and justice are not in tension, they are the same thing.

Third, I was told that God's commitment to his justice was a product of God's holiness. Sin cannot be tolerated by a Holy God. But this is crazy talk. God is selfish and self-absorbed? God is going to protect his holiness over love for his children? How does this view of God remotely jive with the Incarnation, that Christ died for sinners, forgave those who crucified him, ate with tax collectors and prostitutes, and forgave sins on the street. If Jesus is the Image of God then God doesn't seem overly concerned with his "holiness." God, if Jesus is to be believed, is holy because he loves us. That is what makes God so different, so "set apart." God loves in a way humans cannot. Selflessly.

So what I needed in college was a view of God that overcame the bifurcated god of love and justice from my childhood. A God whose love was justice and whose justice was loving. A God whose punishment of sin was the most gracious form of mercy. In short, I wanted a unified God, a God whose defining characteristic was love.

George MacDonald gave me that unified vision. What I love more than anything else about George MacDonald is how he unifies God's love and justice, his punishment of sin and his forgiveness of sin. Forgiveness and punishment are not bifurcated, an either/or choice. God punishes because he forgives. He forgives so that he can punish. Is that nonsensical? No. Ask any parent. This is the way love works. You can't "forgive" a child without consequences/punishment. Such a forgiveness just lets the child remain stuck and mired in selfishness and meanness. No, true forgiveness requires, often harsh, consequences for sin. Further, you can't lovingly punish a child unless you've forgiven him. Otherwise you punish out of anger or spite. We have a name for such punishment: Child abuse. To punish one must first forgive. You need both. They are the same thing.

Unspoken Sermons has three parts or "series." The second sermon in Part 1 is called The Consuming Fire and it has had an enormous impact on me, for the reasons I note above. The text for the sermon is Hebrews 12.29:

Our God is a consuming fire.

Obviously, in my childhood the notion of God as a "consuming fire" would have been tied up in notions of wrath, hell, damnation, and the judgment of sin. The nasty side of the bifurcated god. But in the sermon MacDonald refuses to let the image of the "consuming fire" become decoupled from God's love. That is, if God's fire consumes us it must be the most loving and merciful thing we can imagine. Why? Because God's fire is trying to kill the sin in us. The fire of God purifies us. Here are the opening moves of the sermon:

Nothing is inexorable but love...

For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection...There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the universe, imperishable, divine.

Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not love's kind, must be destroyed.

And our God is a consuming fire.

MacDonald goes on to declare that we have a "divine fear" of this Fire:

[L]et us have grace to serve the Consuming Fire, our God, with divine fear; not with the fear that cringes and craves, but with the bowing down of all thoughts, all delights, all loves before him who is the life of them all, and will have them all pure...

It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it destroys all that is not pure as fire, which demands like purity in our worship. He will have purity. It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; but that the fire will burn us until we worship thus, ye, will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to its force, no longer with pain and consuming, but as the highest consciousness of life, the presence of God. When evil, which alone is consumable, shall have passed away in his fire from the dwellers in the immovable kingdom, the nature of man shall look the nature of God in the face, and his fear shall then be pure...Yea, the fear of God will cause a man to flee, not from him, but from himself; not from him, but to him, the Father himself...

Notice how, in one of MacDonald's breathtaking moves, our fear of the wrath of God doesn't move us away from God. Fear makes us move toward God. In a recent post I made the claim that I wanted to go to hell. You can see how this notion springs from the MacDonaldian inversion: Hell is the purifying love of God. Why wouldn't I want to go to hell and face the Consuming Fire? To flee hell is to cling to your sins; to avoid the consequences of sin so that that sin can stay lodged deep in your heart. No, the fear of God and hell cause me to flee myself, not God. As MacDonald goes on to say:

[W]hen the fire of eternal life has possessed a man, then the destructible is gone utterly, and he is pure. Many a man's work must be burned, that by that very burning he may be saved--"so as by fire"...If still he clings to that which can be burned, the burning goes on deeper and deeper into his bosom, till it reaches the roots of falsehood that enslaves him...

The man who loves God, and is not yet pure, courts the burning of God. Nor is it always torture. The fire shows itself sometimes only as light--still it will be fire of purifying...

The man whose deeds are evil, fears the burning. But the burning will not come the less that he fears it or denies it. Escape is hopeless. For love is inexorable. Our God is a consuming fire.

Okay, so what if a person resists the Fire unto death? What happens then? Well, the Fire intensifies:

If the man resists the burning of God, the consuming fire of Love, a terrible doom awaits him, and its day will come. He shall be cast into the outer darkness who hates the fire of God. What sick dismay shall then seize upon him! For let a man think and care ever so little about God, he does not therefore exit without God. God is here with him, upholding, warming, delighting, teaching him--making life a good thing to him. God gives him himself, though he knows it not. But when God withdraws from a man as far as that can be without the man's ceasing to be; when the man feels himself abandoned, hanging in a ceaseless vertigo of existence upon the verge of the guilt of his being, without support, without refuge, without aim, without end--for the soul has no weapons wherewith to destroy herself--with no inbreathing of joy, with nothing to make life good;--then will he listen in agony for the faintest sound of life from the closed door; then, if the moan of suffering humanity ever reaches the ear of the outcast of darkness, he will be ready to rush into the very heart of the Consuming Fire to know life once more, to change this terror of sick negation, of unspeakable death, for that region of painful hope...

[T]hat outer darkness is but the most dreadful form of the consuming fire--the fire without light--the darkness visible, the black flame. God has withdrawn himself, but not lost his hold. His face is turned away, but his hand is laid upon him still. His heart has ceased to beat into the man's heart, but he keeps him alive by his fire. And that fire will go searching and burning on in him, as in the highest saint who is not yet pure as he is pure.

And, then, at the very end, even Death will be consumed in the Fire:

But at length, O God, wilt thou not cast Death and Hell into the lake of Fire--even into thine own consuming self? Death shall then die everlastingly...Then indeed wilt Thou be all in all. For then our poor brothers and sisters, every one--O God, we trust in thee, the Consuming Fire--shall have been burnt clean and brought home.

That is the vision that saved my faith:

When all have been burnt clean and have come back home...

TED Talk by Sam Harris on the fact/value split and the notion that science can produce moral judgments:

This morning, after my morning prayers, I read a little Wendell Berry poetry (thanks to Brad for getting me hooked). Berry writes a lot of his poetry reflecting on the beautiful place he lives in and farms. He writes a lot about the river he frequents on his Sabbaths.

As I read another poem about that beautiful river I looked around my own backyard in the middle of a West Texas city. The beautiful, pastoral, and idyllic world of the poem and my own world seemed so far apart.

Or were they? I wrote the following poem to find out.

Wendell Berry Has a River by yours truly

Wendell Berry has a river.
I have this backyard, almost square,
enclosed with fence, an alley
behind with trash cans.
The birds are not exotic,
grackles mainly, Quiscalus quiscula,
but I hear them now as I sit
watching my dog who is lounging
in the sun. It will rain
this afternoon. I see the clouds far out
and hear the noise of the city
the cars, the train now
thundering through downtown.
And here's my dog again
chasing a squirrel who chatters
from up in a tree. A standoff
neither knows how to finish.
And there's a flower, yellow, really a weed,
But it's the first spring color
reminding me I need to buy
a new lawnmower at WalMart.
A bee floats lazily by on the breeze.

I don't know much about economics. I do love reading the old narrative economists like Adam Smith or Karl Marx. But I don't know anything about modern finance.

Which troubled me because, wanting to be an informed US citizen, I felt out of the loop about the mechanics of the 2007 banking collapse and the subsequent government bailout. What happened? And how could we prevent this from happening again?

So I've been reading a lot of books about the banking crisis, trying to get a clue. To be honest, still the most helpful thing I've found about the mechanics of the crisis is this video I posted a few years ago:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Based upon all this reading here's my simplified summary about what led to the banking crisis.

A great deal of modern economic theory is based upon equilibrium models. The notion is, if you allow free exchange the markets will tend toward stable optima. This is known as the "efficient markets hypothesis." Otherwise known as "markets know best."

The great scourge of equilibrium models are feedback loops, where the system doesn't settle down into stability but, rather, becomes a runaway train. Think of the feedback loop when a microphone and a speaker get synchronized, where the sound from the microphone is amplified by the speaker which is picked up by the microphone and is fed, now louder, back into the speaker creating a loop of increasing amplification until we get that crazy loud scream of noise.

Feedback loops also plague financial markets. A common positive feedback loop is a bubble, where buyers cause a price to soar because, well, people are buying it. This is the famous "irrational exuberance" of markets. Another common feedback loop is a bank run. People start taking their money out of a bank which causes other people to worry about the bank's stability causing them to take their money out of the bank further destabilizing the bank. A feedback loop similar to a bank run is dumping stock causing the price to drop which triggers other people to sell as well causing the price to drop even further.

The trouble with all this is that free market theory (and the Reagan-era policies informed by the theory) is based almost solely upon equilibrium models. The notion is, if you just leave markets alone they will stabilize and remain steady. But financial markets are full of instabilities and they often don't settle down into an equilibrium. This is just an empirical fact. Just look at what happened in 2007.

In short, capitalism, as a physical system, is full of instability. Markets cannot stabilize themselves because of these feedback loops. Worse, the economic models, which are based on equilibria, now dominant in finance and on Capital Hill share little resemblance with real world markets (with their nasty feedback loops).

To deal with one of these feedback loops--banking runs--the Federal Reserve was created after the Great Depression to protect banks from collapsing during financial panics. The result has been relative stability in the banking system.

However, during the '70s and '80s free market theory led to a massive deregulation of the banking and lending markets. According to free market theory, this deregulation makes sense. Markets know best. Thus, less regulation would allow greater competition and this competition, per Adam Smith, would allow markets to find those stable equilibria.

But that's not what happened. When banks become deregulated they start to compete against each other. And what do banks do to compete? They invest and lend. And to get an edge on their competition those investing and lending practices become more and more speculative and risky. This feedback loop produced the Savings and Loan crisis in the 1980s and the 2007 banking crisis. In short, when banks compete all you get is increasing risk and a very, very unstable financial system. This positive feedback look (a credit bubble) then triggers a catastrophic feedback loop. In 2007, once the risk inherent in the bubble became apparent, bank runs happened leading to widespread damage and failure.

One take home point, for me at least, is that capitalism, despite all its wonders, isn't inherently stable. Markets don't always know best. Because free market ideology doesn't recognize feedback loops it ignores the fact that deregulation can cause instability, as it did in the '80s and in 2007. This conclusion was admitted by Alan Greenspan, that Champion of Free Markets and Apostle of Ayn Rand, when he was before Congress trying to make sense of the 2007 crisis. Rep. Henry Waxman pointedly asked about Greenspan's free market ideology: "Were you wrong?" Greenspan, not willing to concede too much ground, answered that he was "partially wrong" for cheerleading deregulation. But Greenspan did admit that he "found a flaw" in his free market economic philosophy and that this flaw has "distressed" him. I bet it did. So what was the flaw? It was the foundation of modern fiance--the efficient markets hypothesis--the notion that "markets know best" and that unfettered self-interest tends toward economic stability:

"I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms."

Fun (and interesting if you are a psychologist) stuff from yesterday's signing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. After Joe Biden introduced the President he took a moment to whisper in Obama's ear. The live mic (just barely) caught what he said to the President:

"This is a big f**king deal."

And the media went all abuzz about it.

As you may or may not know, I have an interest in the psychology and spirituality of profanity. In fact, in the current issue of The Journal of Psychology and Theology I have a paper on profanity and "The Seven Words You Cannot Say on Television."

In many ways, Joe Biden's swearing is expected. We often curse when we feel emotional. For example, my friend Mel recently reminded of a study (which I posted about last year) that showed an association between swearing and pain tolerance. Specifically, if you swear after you hit your thumb with a hammer it might actually help deal with the pain. In short, swearing seems to be intimately involved with our Limbic System where pain, pleasure and other emotions originate in the brain. So when we feel really, really emotional, like slamming a finger in the car door or signing historic health care reform, sometimes that old Limbic System just blurts things out. And, if you are Joe Biden, you don't have a lot of verbal restraint going for you in the first place.

Regarding politics and swearing, Slate has up an interesting historical essay--WTF Did Biden Just Say? by John Dickerson--on the topic. According to Dickerson, there is quite a Presidential history with swearing as "Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Bush and Clinton all used rough language." Even Jimmy Carter. Ronald Regan, apparently, kept it clean, even going as far as spelling "hell" as "h--l" in his personal diary. Now that is restraint. Too bad we couldn't get his take on yesterday's historic events. He just might have let a f-bomb slip...

I often get asked by people familiar with my religious tradition--the Churches of Christ--how I became the person I am, theologically speaking. The answer is simple: In college I stumbled upon the works of George MacDonald.

I'm currently rereading MacDonald's Unspoken Sermons. Given that I'd like to post quotes from Unspoken Sermons in the coming weeks I thought I would introduce MacDonald to those of you who might be unfamiliar with his work.

I came to MacDonald the way many people come to him: Through C.S. Lewis. I had read a lot of Lewis' work, fiction and non-fiction, in college. Lewis was, essentially, the first time I was exposed to theology. A fond memory from college was being a sophomore invited to a C.S. Lewis reading group hosted by my favorite philosophy professor. Having read most of Lewis' work in that group I asked my professor about similar writers and thinkers. He gave me G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, still one of my favorite books. Later, having read most of Chesterton's work (including Father Brown) I asked for more. He pointed me to George MacDonald.

Due to my familiarity with C.S. Lewis I was vaguely aware of MacDonald. In the book The Great Divorce George MacDonald is the heavenly guide for the narrator of the story. Further, if you know anything about C.S. Lewis' spiritual biography you know that his encounter with MacDonald's faerie story Phantastes was a critical moment in his life. It was the moment when Lewis claimed that his imagination, at the age of sixteen, became "baptized." Lewis would come to consider George MacDonald to be his spiritual "master." In fact, Lewis edited and published an anthology of MacDonald's work.

George MacDonald (1824-1905) was a Scottish writer and minister. During his time MacDonald was mostly known for his Gothic novels. MacDonald was a good friend and mentor to Lewis Carroll. MacDonald's children so loved Carroll's Alice stories it gave Carroll the confidence to get the work published. MacDonald was also friends with many other literary luminaries, American and British, from Walt Whitman to John Ruskin to Mark Twain to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. There is a photo of the "great writers of the day" that includes George MacDonald along with Tennyson, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Trollope, Ruskin, Lewes, and Thackeray. In short, MacDonald was very well known in literary circles and the general public during his day.

Unfortunately, MacDonald's fiction works have not held up over time. Of the writers included in that photograph MacDonald is likely the least well known amongst contemporary English majors. There are a couple of different reasons for this. One of MacDonald's specialties was the faerie story, Phantastes (of C.S. Lewis fame), Lilith, The Princess and the Goblin and At the Back of the North Wind are considered to be his best work in this genre. But these faerie stories haven't held up with modern readers as well as, let's say, the novels of Charles Dickens. Plus, I tried to read Phantastes and, honestly, I couldn't see what in the world C.S. Lewis saw in the book. It's a pretty bizarre story. I also couldn't make heads or tails of Lilith. That said, however, At the Back of the North Wind was one of the most profound books I have ever read. All my work in relation to death and Christian faith traces back to At the Back of the North Wind (more on that, I hope, in a future post).

Having failed to make sense of Phantastes I was intent on finding something else MacDonald had written. Something that wasn't a faerie story. Right around this time Bethany House was republishing many of MacDonald's Gothic novels. These were edited by Michael R. Phillips. To "help" the modern reader Phillips condensed the novels and translated the Scottish dialect of many of the characters (which, in the original, is pretty impenetrable). This series is now out of print but you can still buy them used at Amazon.

These novels are, to be honest, not the greatest as lasting literature. Which is the other reason MacDonald hasn't lasting literary fame. But I read novel after novel. Despite the odd plots, I was riveted. And it was a life changing experience.

Why did these novels from the dustbin of literary history so affect me? Two reasons. First was MacDonald's view of sin and grace and the refining and inescapable love of God. Many of MacDonald's protagonists make horrible mistakes. And their salvation is this slow journey though the purifying love of God. Sin is "forgiven" in MacDonald's novels when the character embraces the harsh consequences of sin and moves through that painful fire. Salvation isn't a simple "forgiveness," avoiding God's consequences for sin. In fact, the worst thing possible, the real hell, is NOT suffering the consequences sin. Salvation, in short, is about character formation. And this formation must, absolutely must, involve removing sin from our hearts and minds. God, I learned from MacDonald, wants us to be clean. Not pseudo-clean, not bait and switch clean, not imputed righteousness clean, not "God sees Jesus and not me" clean, but really, truly clean. You and I, finally, coming into the love of God and becoming the people we were created to be. And you have to go through the purifying fires of hell to get there. God wants to save us from sin. Not the consequences of sin.

The second thing that affected me about MacDonald's novels were his protagonists. Despite MacDonald's religious slant his protagonists were, conspicuously, devoid of religiosity. And yet, these characters were rooted in faith. What shows through most clearly is their virtue, not their piety. Most of the time the characters are lower class, but the way they carry themselves is almost regal. There is something inside them that just glows from the inside out. Moral integrity is their defining feature. And kindness. And courage. And a simple, easy unpretentiousness, feeling at home in one's skin and with anyone in the world, king or tramp. And that's how I define Christ-likeness to this day: Moral integrity, kindness, courage, lack of overt religiosity, simple manners, unpretentiousness, at ease with rich and poor. In short, I saw a vision of Christ in MacDonald's characters. The plot lines were goofy, but I loved the Christ-likeness of the characters. They showed me ways to be like Jesus in my day to day interactions with others. I wanted to be like the characters in the stories.

A bit of theology creeps into MacDonald's novels. But you might read a whole novel and only get this one little gem, a few lines about God's love. Eventually, I found out that MacDonald published some straight theological work, his Unspoken Sermons being the most important. These sermons give you the theological worldview that informs MacDonald's novels and fantasy work. Unspoken Sermons changed my life. Completely turned me upside down. In Sermons a view of God opened up before me and I've never let it go. Sermons guides every theological impulse I have. All in all, everything you hear me say about God on this blog is really just my take on George MacDonald. Like C.S. Lewis, I consider him my "master." But for me the conversion wasn't with Phantastes. That's one odd book. No, for me it was Unspoken Sermons. And I'll be posting quotes from the sermons in the weeks to come.

Saw this great photo essay over at Time about the Selma to Montgomery voting rights march.

Rep. John Lewis played a pivotal role in those marches. Yesterday on Capital Hill Lewis was called a "nigger" and spit on.

Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon) and Linda LaScola of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University have just released a study entitled Preachers Who Are Not Believers (PDF) (h/t Peter B).

In the study, Dennett and LaSchola, both atheists, interviewed five preachers who no longer believe in God or whose beliefs regarding the nature of God were extremely different from the beliefs of their parishioners.

Although the details regarding the identity of the preachers were changed for the purposes of anonymity one of them, "Adam," appears to be a Church of Christ minister, my own religious tradition. Adam talks about a "hunger for learning" that led him into graduate school to prepare for life as a preacher and minister:

“I hungered to continue learning; I felt like it was very applicable; I felt like it would prepare me more to minister. And I was very focused on the practical ministry side. I wasn’t so much into deep theology or --- world missions, or ---- philosophy of religion. …I mean, there were theology classes and philosophy
classes and all that. And I had to have one year of Hebrew, two years of Greek.”

During Adam's time at school he was aware of some of the issues academic training was raising about faith but he was too busy thinking about the practical aspects of his life in ministry:

“OK, here’s what Biblical scholars are saying, and there’s some questions over here, but I just trust God, and know he’s guiding me, and I’m learning this so I can be a minister and help people. When I was working with people, it was a lot more practically focused on, ‘OK, here’s what the Bible says, how do we live it out? How do we encourage other people? What’s the whole evangelistic side of Christianity? How can we win more people into Christ.’ I mean you’re sincere; that’s what your goal is. You don’t want anybody to miss out and to go to hell.”

“I don’t remember stressing a lot over doubts that were raised by the study, undergraduate or graduate. At the graduate level, I was challenged a little bit more by the theology and the philosophy - like suffering in the world. Which in the last year was probably one of my major wake-up calls. Like, how can there be a living God with the world in the shape that it’s in? But looking back at it, I learned what I learned to get through so I could focus on things. My intentions were the greatest and the purest.”

“During the time when I was introduced --- even in undergraduate to textual criticism --- looking at how we got the scriptures that we have, and the textual variances. I just kind of learned what I needed to learn to pass the test, and didn’t really --- I mean, I thought, ‘Well, how do we know what was the right variant that was chosen that we now have as the scripture? But I really didn’t --- I had way too much going: I was too busy working full-time and going to school, and a family, and small children.”

But now, well into ministry, Adam considers himself an "atheistic agnostic." So how does he do his job?

“Here’s how I’m handling my job on Sunday mornings: I see it as play acting. I kind of see myself as taking on a role of a believer in a worship service, and performing. Because I know what to say. I know how to pray publicly. I can lead singing. I love singing. I don’t believe what I’m saying anymore in some of these
songs. But I see it as taking on the role and performing. Maybe that’s what it
takes for me to get myself through this, but that’s what I’m doing.”

Why doesn't Adam leave the church? Two reasons. First, his wife and teenage children are very religious and Adam's departure from the faith might hurt them. The second reason is economic:

“I’m where I am because I need the job still. If I had an alternative, a comfortable paying job, something I was interested in doing, and a move that wouldn’t destroy my family, that’s where I’d go."

Dennett and LaSchola end the essay about these five preachers this way:

These are brave individuals who are still trying to figure out how to live with the decisions they made many years ago, when they decided, full of devotion and hope, to give their lives to a God they no longer find by their sides. We hope that by telling their stories we will help them and others find more wholehearted ways of doing the good they set out to do. Perhaps the best thing their congregations can do to help them is to respect their unspoken vows of secrecy, and allow them to carry on unchallenged; or perhaps this is a short-sighted response, ultimately just perpetuating the tightly interlocking system that maintains the gulf of systematic hypocrisy between clergy and laity.

I think many of you would also enjoy Matt's comments about all this over at Theoprudence.

In my recent post How Facebook Killed the Church I made the argument that the Millennial Generation is less interested in church attendance because the social affiliation aspects of church have been dramatically replaced with mobile social computing (e.g., texting, Tweeting, Facebook). Not needing the church for social affiliation or networking Millennials are positioned to pose some hard questions to the church: Beyond social affiliation, what is your purpose? And do you live up to that purpose? These questions are hard because if a church claims to create "Christ followers" the Millennials will want to see concrete evidence that the lifestyle and attitudes of these "Christ followers" are qualitatively different from those in the surrounding culture. And more often than not, the Millennials just don't see that difference.

This argument of mine gets some support from a recent article--Generation Next--in Time by Nancy Gibbs (H/T Mike Cope). Here are some quotes from the article. On the role of mobile social computing in this generation:

Today's kids aren't taking up arms against their parents; they're too busy texting them. The members of the millennial generation, ages 18 to 29, are so close to their parents that college students typically check in about 10 times a week, and they are all Facebook friends. Kids and parents dress alike, listen to the same music and fight less than previous generations, and millennials assert that older people's moral values are generally superior to their own.

Yet even more young people perceive a gap. According to a recently released Pew Research Center report, 79% of millennials say there is a major difference in the point of view of younger and older people today. Young Americans are now more educated, more diverse, more optimistic and less likely to have a job than previous generations. But it is in their use of technology that millennials see the greatest difference, starting perhaps with the fact that 83% of them sleep with their cell phones. Change now comes so strong and fast that it pulls apart even those who wish to hang together--and the future belongs to the strong of thumb.

But we miss the point, warns social historian Neil Howe, if we weigh only how technology shapes a generation and not the other way around. The millennials were raised in a cocoon, their anxious parents afraid to let them go out in the park to play. So should we be surprised that they learned to leverage technology to build community, tweeting and texting and friending while their elders were still dialing long-distance? They are the most likely of any generation to think technology unites people rather than isolates them, that it is primarily a means of connection, not competition.

Importantly for my argument, the Millennials aren't radically against church as such. As research suggests, in many ways the Millennials are fairly conservative in their values. As Gibbs notes:

...in some respects the millennials emerge as radically conventional. Asked about their life goals, 52% say being a good parent is most important to them, followed by having a successful marriage; 59% think that the trend of more single women having children is bad for society. While more tolerant than older generations, they are still more likely to disapprove of than support the trend of unmarried couples living together.

Further, Millennials appear to be less cynical than Boomers and Gen X:

In any age, young folk tend to be more cheerful than old folk, but the hope gap has never been greater than it is now. Despite two wars and a nasty recession that has hit young people hardest, the Pew survey found that 41% of millennials are satisfied with how things are going, compared with 26% of older people. Less than a third of those with jobs earn enough to lead the kind of life they want--but 88% are confident that they will one day.

And yet, despite their optimism, conventional outlook, and robust interest in faith the Millennials are moving away from church:

[Millennials] are, for example, the least officially religious of any modern generation, and fully 1 in 4 has no religious affiliation at all. On the other hand, they are just as spiritual, just as likely to believe in miracles and hell and angels as earlier generations were. They pray about as much as their elders did when they were young--all of which suggests that they have not lost faith in God, only in the institutions that claim to speak for him.

How do you explain these trends? If Millennials are optimistic, conservative and religious why would they leave the church? It can't be due their liberalism, cynicism, or irreligiosity. So what is it? My argument hits on what Gibbs notes as the defining characteristic of this generation: mobile social computing. One of the key attractions of the church in past generations--social connection--has been effectively replaced.

Again, Facebook killed the church.

No other character in the bible raises as many questions about free will, foreknowledge, and prophecy as Judas Iscariot. Sometimes in the gospel accounts it appears that Judas is just a cog in a machine, a critical but bit player to get the wheels of sacrifice moving forward. Jesus needs a betrayer. And Judas plays his part.

And this raises questions about Jesus' complicity in Judas' sin. Knowing he needs a betrayer Jesus consciously adds Judas to the Twelve. This choice effectively seals Judas' fate, a cursed fate. Jesus' knowing selection of Judas begins a chain of events, a chain Jesus apparently knew about, that leads to Judas' damnation and suicide. Thus, is Jesus wholly innocent here? Is Judas wholly to blame? The gospels give us a mixed message about all this.

The Prophecies Related to Judas: Did Judas Have Free Will?
Regarding prophecy, the gospel accounts point to multiple explicit prophecies regarding Judas' betrayal, death and subsequent replacement amongst the Twelve. The first prophecy (in the chronology of Judas' story) is found in John 13.18. Jesus is sharing the Last Supper with the Twelve and declares:

"I am not referring to all of you; I know those I have chosen. But this is to fulfill the scripture: 'He who shares my bread has lifted up his heel against me.'

The scripture Jesus refers to is Psalm 41.9:

Even my close friend, whom I trusted,
he who shared my bread,
has lifted up his heel against me.

The second reference to "fulfilled" scripture involves the events surrounding Judas' death in Matthew 27.5-9:

So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself.

The chief priests picked up the coins and said, "It is against the law to put this into the treasury, since it is blood money." So they decided to use the money to buy the potter's field as a burial place for foreigners. That is why it has been called the Field of Blood to this day. Then what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled: "They took the thirty silver coins, the price set on him by the people of Israel, and they used them to buy the potter's field, as the Lord commanded me."

The author of Matthew makes a mistake here as the attribution to Jeremiah isn't accurate. The prophetic allusion actually comes from Zechariah 11:13:

And the LORD said to me, "Throw it to the potter"-the handsome price at which they priced me! So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them into the house of the LORD to the potter.

Some ancient scribes corrected this error and penciled in "Zechariah" for "Jeremiah." But the oldest manuscripts of Matthew contain the error. The misattribution in the text is likely due to multiple biblical allusions to a location outside of Jerusalem that represents a place of curse and desolation. This was the Valley of Hinnom, often called "Gehenna" or "hell." The Valley of Hinnom was an ancient place of child sacrifice, an evil and wicked location. And we see in Jeremiah 7.30-34 that God curses this "Valley of Slaughter" and promises to destroy those who inhabit it:

The people of Judah have done evil in my eyes, declares the LORD. They have set up their detestable idols in the house that bears my Name and have defiled it. They have built the high places of Topheth in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to burn their sons and daughters in the fire—something I did not command, nor did it enter my mind. So beware, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when people will no longer call it Topheth or the Valley of Ben Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter, for they will bury the dead in Topheth until there is no more room. Then the carcasses of this people will become food for the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, and there will be no one to frighten them away. I will bring an end to the sounds of joy and gladness and to the voices of bride and bridegroom in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem, for the land will become desolate.

The misattribution in Matthew is likely due to the fact that the location of Judas' death in the "Field of Blood" echoes back to this cursed "Valley of Slaughter" in Jeremiah (cf. Acts 1.19).

The final references to Judas and fulfilled prophecy come from Acts 1.15-22 when the Eleven apostles discuss the loss of Judas and, to fulfill prophecy, seek his replacement:

In those days Peter stood up among the believers (a group numbering about a hundred and twenty) and said, "Brothers, the Scripture had to be fulfilled which the Holy Spirit spoke long ago through the mouth of David concerning Judas, who served as guide for those who arrested Jesus—he was one of our number and shared in this ministry."

(With the reward he got for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out. Everyone in Jerusalem heard about this, so they called that field in their language Akeldama, that is, Field of Blood.)

"For," said Peter, "it is written in the book of Psalms, 'May his place be deserted;
let there be no one to dwell in it,' and, 'May another take his place of leadership.'

Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from John's baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection."

Peter is referring to Psalm 69:25 and Psalm 109:8.

The events in Acts 1 are instructive because they push against any simplistic notions of prophecy. That is, we see in Acts 1 the Eleven consciously reading prophecy and trying to move toward its fulfillment. Prophecy, in this sense, isn't creating automatons. Rather, the Word of God is functioning like a guide, path or rule. We choose to fulfill prophecy. In this sense prophecy is fully compatible with human agency.

But does this view apply to Judas? Did Judas make his decisions in a conscious attempt to "fulfill scripture"? It doesn't seem so. But this view of prophecy could apply to another character in the story:

Jesus.

Was Jesus Complicit in Judas' Betrayal and Death?
If Judas wasn't consciously following prophecy could we claim that Jesus was? Here is what we see in the gospel accounts:

First, Jesus appears to pick Judas as one of the Twelve knowing that Judas will betray him:

John 6.68-71
Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God."

Then Jesus replied, "Have I not chosen you, the Twelve? Yet one of you is a devil!" (He meant Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, who, though one of the Twelve, was later to betray him.)

Second, on the night of his betrayal Jesus orchestrates the events of the betrayal. He gives Judas his instructions and then goes to meet him at the appointed place:

John 13.26-30; 18.1-4
Jesus answered, "It is the one to whom I will give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish." Then, dipping the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, son of Simon. As soon as Judas took the bread, Satan entered into him.

"What you are about to do, do quickly," Jesus told him, but no one at the meal understood why Jesus said this to him. Since Judas had charge of the money, some thought Jesus was telling him to buy what was needed for the Feast, or to give something to the poor. As soon as Judas had taken the bread, he went out. And it was night...

When he had finished praying, Jesus left with his disciples and crossed the Kidron Valley. On the other side there was an olive grove, and he and his disciples went into it.

Now Judas, who betrayed him, knew the place, because Jesus had often met there with his disciples. So Judas came to the grove, guiding a detachment of soldiers and some officials from the chief priests and Pharisees. They were carrying torches, lanterns and weapons.

Jesus, knowing all that was going to happen to him, went out and asked them, "Who is it you want?"

It appears, from John's account, that Jesus did know what was going to happen long before it happened. Jesus picks Judas knowing he has selected his betrayer. And, on the evening of the betrayal, Jesus cues Judas ("Go and do what you must do.") and then meets Judas at the appointed spot. Judas seems clueless about what is going on. Jesus, however, "knows all that was going to happen to him."

Some Uncomfortable Questions
At no point in the gospel narratives is Judas given any sympathy for his actions. Despite all the prophecy and Jesus' orchestration Judas is roundly condemned and cursed. However, I expect modern readers are disturbed by Judas' story. The ancients tended to believe in fate, even tragic fate. "Free will" and "moral responsibility" weren't things the ancients worried about or recognized. Judas' life followed the path of his cursed fate, tragically so. But was Judas "free to do otherwise"? If not, can he be held morally accountable for his actions? These questions simply bounce off the gospel accounts.

And what about Jesus? Of all the characters involved Jesus seems to control his own fate. More, he seems to control the fates of others, Judas' in particular. So it makes one wonder, should Jesus have picked Judas to be one of the Twelve? Should Jesus have saved Judas from his fate? Could Jesus have figured out an alternative plan to meet the soldiers in the garden that night that didn't involve the fall of one of his inner circle?

I don't have answers to any of these questions. But what I do know is this. Of all the stories in the bible that run up against modern prejudices regarding freedom and moral responsibility the story of Judas Iscariot takes pride of place.

If God were in charge of a nation's fiscal policy, what kind of policies would he create? It is an interesting question for a nation founded on "Christian values" because, in fact, God did play economist for a time in the Old Testament when the nation of Israel was forging its social, political, religious, legal and economic life after its liberation from Egyptian slavery.

A critical feature of God's economic policy was the year of Jubilee. God's commandments regarding the year of Jubilee are found in Leviticus 25.8-54. This is a long text, so I won't give it in full here (click on the link if you want to read the whole passage). I would, though, like to walk through some of the economic mechanisms and the logic of the Jubilee.

The Economic Mechanisms of the Jubilee
First, regarding timing, the Jubilee was to be celebrated every 50 years, roughly the span of a generation (v. 10 "Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants"). I think this is a key feature. Whatever the Jubilee is doing it is hitting an economic reset button every generation. The Jubilee seems to be trying to prevent economic problems from cascading down through the generations where inequities would build up more and more systemic inertia.

Beyond timing, the celebration of the Jubilee involved a couple of different interlocking economic features. First, the Jubilee functioned as a price control on the buying and selling of land. The price of land was to go down the closer you got to the Jubilee. This price control feature prevented price gouging when the Jubilee was imminent. That is, if the Jubilee was five years away the seller might inflate the price to try to get as much out of the sale over the short five year contract. This pressure to price gouge would be less acute if the Jubilee were, say, 40 years away. In short, the Jubilee was to override the Invisible Hand of the market in setting prices:

If you sell land to one of your countrymen or buy any from him, do not take advantage of each other. You are to buy from your countryman on the basis of the number of years since the Jubilee. And he is to sell to you on the basis of the number of years left for harvesting crops. When the years are many, you are to increase the price, and when the years are few, you are to decrease the price, because what he is really selling you is the number of crops. Do not take advantage of each other, but fear your God. I am the LORD your God. (v. 14-17)

The most dramatic aspect of the Jubilee, economically speaking, was its wealth redistribution feature. During any given 50 years land would be bought and sold, fortunes would rise or fall. Some would have grown richer. Others poorer. Some would have increased their land holdings. Others would have lost their land. Regardless, every 50 years the wealth would be redistributed with previously purchased land given back to those who sold or lost it:

If one of your countrymen becomes poor and sells some of his property, his nearest relative is to come and redeem what his countryman has sold. If, however, a man has no one to redeem it for him but he himself prospers and acquires sufficient means to redeem it, he is to determine the value for the years since he sold it and refund the balance to the man to whom he sold it; he can then go back to his own property. 28 But if he does not acquire the means to repay him, what he sold will remain in the possession of the buyer until the Year of Jubilee. It will be returned in the Jubilee, and he can then go back to his property. (v. 25-28)

It is important to note that if the individual could pay for the land they should do so. The landowner, if at all possible, should be compensated for losing the land during the Jubilee. However, if the individual is destitute and cannot pay for the land it should be given back nonetheless.

In between the Jubilees many people would have fallen into poverty. God commands that these people be given interest-free loans and that they should be able to make food purchases at the cost price.

If one of your countrymen becomes poor and is unable to support himself among you, help him as you would an alien or a temporary resident, so he can continue to live among you. Do not take interest of any kind from him, but fear your God, so that your countryman may continue to live among you. You must not lend him money at interest or sell him food at a profit. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt to give you the land of Canaan and to be your God. (v. 35-38)

Finally, if the individual becomes so poor that they have to "sell" their labor in debt bondage he is to be freed from the debt and bondage on the Jubilee:

If one of your countrymen becomes poor among you and sells himself to you, do not make him work as a slave. He is to be treated as a hired worker or a temporary resident among you; he is to work for you until the Year of Jubilee. Then he and his children are to be released, and he will go back to his own clan and to the property of his forefathers. Because the Israelites are my servants, whom I brought out of Egypt, they must not be sold as slaves. Do not rule over them ruthlessly, but fear your God. (v. 38-43)

Summarizing all this, we see in the Jubilee God creating economic mechanisms that prevent drastic disparities of wealth from accumulating over time. This is mainly accomplished through four economic mechanisms:

1. Wealth redistribution
2. Debt forgiveness
3. Bank/lending regulation
4. Price controls

The Economic Logic of the Jubilee
Obviously, these economic mechanisms are pretty dramatic and disruptive. However, we should pause to note that the Jubilee isn't commanding wholesale wealth redistribution. Specifically, although the land is to be redistributed every 50 years the Jubilee allows individuals to keep any capital gains (other than land) they have made over the 50 years. That is, cattle, precious goods or other forms of wealth are not liquidized and redistributed at the Jubilee. Outside of land other forms of capital wealth can be retained. Total equality isn't the goal.

Regardless, the Jubilee was a pretty drastic form of wealth redistribution as land, in that agricultural era, was the main engine of wealth.

So it begs the question: Why does God command wealth redistribution in the life of Israel? I think there are two answers to this question.

First, there are two reasons why inequalities of wealth might occur:

1. Intrinsic Factors: Examples include hard work, discipline, business acumen, and frugality.
2. Extrinsic Factors: Examples include the variability of nature/markets, the un/reliability of business partners, and geopolitical factors (e.g., war and peace).

Let's first consider how extrinsic factors affect wealth distribution. Consider two Israelites who, upon arrival to the Promised Land, are given their family plot from within the larger tribal allotment. Immediately, two things become apparent:

1. Not all land is equally fertile.
2. Weather is variable.

Consequently, we expect, from harvest to harvest, that family fortunes would being to diverge for extrinsic factors alone. And this doesn't take into consideration things like natural fires, the death of a husband, the failure to give birth to sons to work the land, theft, or damage during war. In short, perfectly hardworking and virtuous people can fall into poverty through no fault of their own.

It appears, then, that the Jubilee recognizes these eventualities. That is, wealth and poverty are often the product of fortune and luck. The Jubilee redistributes wealth because wealth isn't wholly earned. There are people who work just as hard as you or I do who can lose it all. Just ask the low-level employees of Enron who lost their jobs, investments, and retirement packages. You, in short, cannot take full credit (or blame) for your position in life. Good or ill. You are mix of both work and blessing. Recognizing this, the Jubilee seeks to spread that blessing around. Jubilee takes the good fortune that has fallen on the few and redistributes it across the community. This is only fair as "hard work" isn't the issue. The issue is ensuring some protection--a communally maintained safety net--from the damaging winds of fortune.

But, it might be countered, what about those intrinsic factors? Some people are poor because they are lazy or spend their money on wine or "loose living." Should these people be rewarded by the Jubilee?

The Jubilee takes these intrinsic factors into account by working on the generational scale. That is, the economic sins of the fathers are not to be visited upon the children. The generations are to be liberated from the cycles of chronic poverty. A child is not to suffer the economic consequences of a father would wasted his life and lost the family homestead. Thus, the goal of Jubilee isn't to extend charity to the lazy. The goal is to break generational cycles of poverty.

The Economic and Political Implications of the Jubilee
The question we are left with is this: How should the Jubilee affect how we, as Christians, approach contemporary political and economic policy issues?

First, I don't think the Jubilee can be, in any straightforward way, applied to contemporary America. I say this on purely pragmatic grounds. The nation of Israel began their common economic life in the Promised Land in a state of approximate equality (every family with its own plot of land). This primordial place of equity is needed for the Jubilee to work. The Jubilee is a "reset" button and we need to specify the initial setting for the mechanism to work. Obviously, in America today we have no initial setting of primordial equity. Some people began their lives in America as landed aristocracy. Some were slaves. There was no primordial equality in America. We began this national experiment with dramatic and tragic wealth disparities.

Given our lack of a primordial state of equality can the Jubilee have anything to say about our current economic policies? I believe so. First, the Jubilee does inform us about God the Economist, about how God thinks about issues such as wealth redistribution, price, banking practices, and debt. More specifically, we see how God wants economic policy to be shaped to address some Divine concerns about ensuring the common good. Specifically:

1. Wealth redistribution, banking, debt and price control practices to create a communally maintained safety net to protect people from the whims of fortune.
2. Wealth redistribution, banking, debt and price control practices that crack cycles of chronic poverty.

The hard part in all of this is translating the economic practices of Jubilee into a situation that began in wealth disparity and already has generations of chronic poverty. How do we apply Jubilee to an economic situation that is already this far down the road? Obviously, there will be a great deal of argument about all this. The take home point, in my mind, is that any Christian approach to economic policy will not have any knee jerk or ideological objection to wealth redistribution or top-down economic controls involved in banking, debt forgiveness or price controls. No doubt there will be many pragmatic objections. But the year of Jubilee and its economic recommendations should shape the economic sensibilities of voting Christians. The Jubilee was, after all, the economic policy when God was the federal government.