Calvin, Ambrose and Williams on Lawrence and the church’s wealth

In the preface to Calvin’s Institutes, he writes to King Francis to answer his Roman critics. They accused Calvin of being opposed to the early Church Fathers. In particular, by simplifying the liturgy, he had opposed the ancient Church, its liturgy and traditions. (See it in context.) Calvin writes:

It is a calumny to represent us as opposed to the Fathers (I mean the ancient writers of a purer age), as if the Fathers were supporters of their impiety.

…

Among the Fathers there were two, the one of whom said, “Our God neither eats nor drinks, and therefore has no need of chalices and salvers;” and the other,<!–
initNote(“fnf_ii.viii-p37.1″);
//–> “Sacred rites do not require gold, and things which are not bought with gold, please not by gold.” They step beyond the boundary, therefore, when in sacred matters they are so much delighted with gold, driver, ivory, marble, gems, and silks, that unless everything is overlaid with costly show, or rather insane luxury, they think God is not duly worshipped.

He appeals to Ambrose of Milan, On the Duties of the Clergy ii.28 (De officiis clericorum). Here Ambrose defends himself for his selling church gold and silver vessels to redeem captives. He, in turn, appeals to the Scriptures and the ancient legend of St. Lawrence (see it in context):

It is a very great incentive to mercy to share in others’ misfortunes, to help the needs of others as far as our means allow, and sometimes even beyond them. For it is better for mercy’s sake to take up a case, or to suffer odium rather than to show hard feeling. So I once brought odium on myself because I broke up the sacred vessels to redeem captives—a fact that could displease the Arians. Not that it displeased them as an act, but as being a thing in which they could take hold of something for which to blame me. Who can be so hard, cruel, iron-hearted, as to be displeased because a man is redeemed from death, or a woman from barbarian impurities, things that are worse than death, or boys and girls and infants from the pollution of idols, whereby through fear of death they were defiled?

…

These, then, I preferred to hand over to you as free men, rather than to store up the gold. This crowd of captives, this company surely is more glorious than the sight of cups. The gold of the Redeemer ought to contribute to this work so as to redeem those in danger. I recognize the fact that the blood of Christ not only glows in cups of gold, but also by the office of redemption has impressed upon them the power of the divine operation.

Such gold the holy martyr Lawrence preserved for the Lord. For when the treasures of the Church were demanded from him, he promised that he would show them. On the following day he brought the poor together. When asked where the treasures were which he had promised, he pointed to the poor, saying: “These are the treasures of the Church.” And truly they were treasures, in whom Christ lives, in whom there is faith in Him. So, too, the Apostle says: “We have this treasure in earthen vessels.” What greater treasures has Christ than those in whom He says He Himself lives? For thus it is written: “I was hungry and ye gave Me to eat, I was thirsty and ye gave Me to drink, I was a stranger and ye took Me in.”<!–
initNote(“fnf_iv.i.iii.xxviii-p9.2″);
//–> And again: “What thou didst to one of these, thou didst it unto Me.” What better treasures has Jesus than those in which He loves to be seen?

These treasures Lawrence pointed out, and prevailed, for the persecutors could not take them away.

The Archbishop of Canterbury just made similar appeal to the Lawrence story in his New Year Message:

A little before Christmas I visited a new academy in Scunthorpe named after St. Lawrence. Lawrence was a Christian minister in Rome in the days when you could be arrested and executed for being a Christian, nineteen hundred years ago or so.

When he was arrested, he was told to collect all the treasures of the Church to be given up to the courts. He got together all the homeless, the orphans and the hungry that the Church looked after in the city, and presented them to his judges, saying, ‘These are the Church’s treasures.’

Like any really good school, St. Lawrence’s treats its children as treasures. In the last few months we’ve had to think a lot about wealth and security and about where our ‘treasure’ is.

But it set me thinking – what would our life be like if we really believed that our wealth, our treasure, was our fellow-human beings? Religious faith points to a God who takes most seriously and values most extravagantly the people who often look least productive or successful- as if none of us could really be said to be doing well unless these people were secure.

…

So what about a New Year in which we try and ask consistently about our own personal decisions and about public polices, national and international, ‘Does this feel like something that looks after our real treasure, something that keeps our real wealth safe – the lives and welfare of the youngest and most vulnerable?’

$978,000 allocated in death penalty case

The Union Leader article citing the amount spent to date on Addison’s death penalty case. Note that the amount was under $1 million, but could double or triple by the end of the case. The appeals process will certainly cost more over many years. By hearsay, this cost to persue the death penalty will be far greater than the cost of life in prison without parole.

Read it here. Full text below as nothing lives forever on the Union Leader site:

By KATHRYN MARCHOCKI
New Hampshire Union Leader Staff
Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2008

MANCHESTER – Nearly $978,000 has been allocated to date for the capital murder case against Michael K. “Stix” Addison and requests for more money likely will be made before Addison stands trial in September for allegedly killing a Manchester police officer, attorneys involved in the case said.

Addison, 27, pleaded innocent to shooting bicycle patrol officer Michael L. Briggs, 35, once in the head Oct. 16, 2006. Briggs died the next day. If convicted, Addison could face the death penalty.

The New Hampshire Public Defender Office, which represents Addison, will have spent about $530,000 in attorney salaries, investigators and office costs alone by the end of the fiscal year on June 30, the office’s executive director Christopher Keating said.

In addition, the court so far has approved another $27,935 for experts, forensic analysis and other special services for Addison’s defense, New Hampshire Judicial Council executive director Nina Gardner said.

Keating estimates this figure “could double or even triple” by the time Addison’s trial ends.

Meanwhile, the Attorney General’s Office has hired two attorneys, a paralegal and a part-time secretary and purchased computer software with the $420,000 a legislative fiscal committee gave it in October 2006 to cover the extra cost of prosecuting a capital murder case, Attorney General Kelly A. Ayotte said.

Her office so far has spent $270,714 from this fund and expects to ask the committee for more money before the case goes to trial, she said.

This does not include the cost of the multiple, salaried state prosecutors who have been preparing the case for trial and litigating numerous pre-trial issues, many related to defense challenges to the constitutionality of the state’s death penalty statute, Ayotte said. Many of these attorneys work on other cases and it’s difficult to track time spent exclusively on the capital murder case, she said.

“Certainly, this is an intense case,” Ayotte said. She estimated about eight lawyers work on the case at any one time.

“We pool our collective knowledge and experience on it,’” she explained.

The newly-hired attorneys are doing work that frees up more experienced homicide prosecutors to work full-time or devote most of their time to the Briggs’ case, she said.

In addition to state prosecutors, Hillsborough County attorneys have won two convictions against Addison in a shooting and armed robbery that occurred within days of Briggs’ murder. Addison will face trial in another armed hold up Feb. 19.

The county cases are directly related to the capital murder case because the state alleges they are aggravating factors that support its decision to seek the death penalty, Ayotte said.

Addison’s defense costs are being paid through the New Hampshire Judicial Fund, a state agency that handles all indigent defense costs and gets it funding from the state’s general fund, Gardner said. The agency funds the public defender office. It also funds all court-approved requests for other services, she said.

GQ article on Bishop Gene Robinson

This month’s issue of GQ includes an excellent piece on Bishop Gene Robinson. It tells his life story in a nutshell: childhood, first marriage, partnership, election and consecration. Read it all here.

From the article:

“You know, Jesus was always in trouble. And I think it’s an indictment of us as Christians that I wear this around my neck”—his cross—“and police don’t follow me wherever I go. I tell my clergy that if they’re not in trouble, they’re not preaching the Gospel.”

A new meaning for High Church

Via BoingBoing:

Frankincense lowers anxiety in lab mice and is considered to be psychoactive. From ThinkGene:

Religious leaders have contended for millennia that burning incense is good for the soul. Now, biologists have learned that it is good for our brains too. In a new study appearing online in The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org), an international team of scientists, including researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, describe how burning frankincense (resin from the Boswellia plant) activates poorly understood ion channels in the brain to alleviate anxiety or depression. This suggests that an entirely new class of depression and anxiety drugs might be right under our noses.

Also from Science Blogs from the Hippie perspective.

Pope Benedict XVI postpones speech at Sapienza University

(Update: The Wall Street Journal picked this story up as well, and Touchstone Magazine has a blog entry on it.)

Earlier this week, protests from students and faculty at Sapienza University convinced the Vatican to reschedule a visit and speech from Pope Benedict XVI. They protested in reaction to a 1990 speech that he (then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) gave in which he, the view of some students and faculty, endorsed the actions of the Church against Galileo in 1633.

There’s plenty of news coverage of the event. Even the January 15 episode of Off the Wall began with Emmanuel Goldstein’s rant on the same topic. Conversely, the La Sapienza website reports it with significantly less hysteria (in English).

(Note that Sapienza University was founded in 1303 by Pope Boniface VIII, who is not generally considered a nice guy. In Dante’s Inferno, he appears in hell for simony. However, he was committed enough to the study of the natural world, science and wisdom (Italian: sapienza, Latin: sapientia) to create a new university to support it.)

Read the sources for yourself: Here is the 1990 speech that the University is protesting. Here is the speech that Pope Benedict indented to give.

His original 1990 talk doesn’t seem as hysterical as the 2008 reaction to it. He does bring up some historical perspective in saying, “This episode, which was little considered in the 18th century, was elevated to a myth of the Enlightenment in the century that followed.” The Galileo case is often turned into a “myth of the Enlightenment” with him as the scientific proto-martyr, but other interpretations of history tell a different story.

Diogenes Allen’s Christian Belief in a Postmodern World brings other historical evidence into play. The Church doesn’t come off terribly well, but it hardly comes off as the cruel oppressor of free thought.

Giorgio Israel, a Jewish mathematician and professor at Sapienza, was quoted as saying:

[This attitude] is particularly surprising since Italian universities are supposed to be places open to any kind of position, and it makes no sense that only the Pope is denied access,” he said. “[It] has been explained by Marcello Cini – one of the intellectuals opposing the Pope’s visit – in his letter to the University’s Dean. What Cini regards as ‘dangerous,’ is the fact that the Pope may try to open a dialogue between faith and reason, to reestablish a connection between the Judeo-Christian and the Greek tradition, and that science and faith may not be separated by an impenetrable wall.

Israel’s remarks are very much in line with what Benedict’s proposed speech had to say:

The university could, indeed had to be born within the Christian world and the Christian faith. We must take another step. Man wants to know; he wants the truth. Truth pertains first and foremost to seeing and understanding theoria as it is called in the Greek tradition. But truth is not only theoretic.

And later,

If however reason, concerned about its supposed purity, fails to hear the great message that comes from the Christian faith and the understanding it brings, it will dry up like a tree with roots cut off from the water that gives it life. It will lose the courage needed to find the truth and thus become small rather than great.

And, in its closing,

And so let me go back to the initial point. What does the Pope have to do or say in a university? He certainly should not try to impose in an authoritarian manner his faith on others, which can only be freely offered. Beyond his ministry as Pastor of the Church and on the basis of the intrinsic nature of this pastoral ministry, it is his task to keep alive man’s responsiveness to the truth.

Similarly he must again and always invite reason to seek out truth, goodness and God, and on this path urge it to see the useful lights that emerged during the history of the Christian faith and perceive Jesus Christ as the light that illuminates history and helps find the way towards the future.

The fruitful relation of Christianity to science is echoed in today’s Office of Readings selection from Athanasius who wrote in the fourth century on the orderliness of nature:

This (Jesus Christ) is the Word that created this whole world and enlightens it by his loving wisdom (Latin: sapientia). He who is the good Word of the good Father produced the order in all creation, joining opposites together, and forming them into one harmonious sound. He is God, one and only-begotten, who proceeds in goodness from the Father as from the fountain of goodness, and gives order, direction and unity to creation.

VeggieTales creator on Christian fantasy and culture

Via Think Christian, this interview with Phil Vischer, the creator of VeggieTales, fits right in with my previous post on Christians following general culture.

Perhaps his best moment was in this analysis of the difference between successful Christian stories (Narnia, Lord of the Rings, Passion) and unsuccessful ones (Evan Almighty, Nativity Story):

Vischer: Some Christian films have failed flat-out because their plot was their message when it should’ve been a subtext or a comment that a side character makes in passing. However, if your main character turns to the camera and delivers the truth of Jesus, you’ve probably lost nine-tenths of your audience in five words. It’s hard to accept that when you are a filmmaker who has decided God wants you to use filmmaking to share the gospel.

The Passion was such an anomaly, you really can’t use it to learn much of anything about the nature of film. You had the most popular film actor in the world making a deeply personal work of art about a religious story. What are the odds of that happening again?

The Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings are also tough test cases. How many Narnias are there? How easy is it to come up with another Lord of the Rings? It’s not. There’s Tolkien and Lewis and then everybody else. Besides, you couldn’t write Narnia today and have it accepted by the evangelical world because [of the magic] and because in its metaphor, it effectively has a non-Christian worldview.

Now, if we go to another fantasy world, we need to find Jesus there—literally. That is why the Harry Potter books are viewed to be straight from the pit. Even if Rowling says she’s enjoying Christian themes, forget it. How do you write a Christian fantasy today? I have no idea. I don’t know that you can. I think we’ve killed it. I think we are so concerned with how oppressed our worldview is and so defensive that we’ve painted ourselves into a corner. And thus, we can’t tell the kind of stories that Lewis or Chesterton would have told to share the gospel. It’s kind of depressing, frankly.

Emphasis is mine. Part of the problem is in trying to make the Christ overly explicit, which results in, say, a “Christian Harry Potter,” “Christian Linux,” or “Christian Green Day.” Take the cultural X and make it the “Christian X.”

Early on, Vischer went straight to this tendency, with X = Disney, but seems to have reconsidered:

Vischer: Well, I was hoping Jonah would save my company and keep me on a path to build the Christian Disney. That’s a pretty high expectation to put on one story. This film, honestly, I just hope people will be engaged by the story and get a glimmer of the Christian life because it’s in there if you look for it. That’s it.

For more, read this interview with Vischer: What Makes a Movie “Christian?”

The Church and technological progress

From Dr. Iain Torrance at Princeton Theological Seminary’s 2007 graduation:

Very many of you, our new graduates, will enter some form of service to the church. That service may be teaching, pastoral, or something beyond the church’s visible structures, but a ministry nonetheless.

Nobody knows how much the church will develop or the specific forms its obedience to God will take under the direction of the Holy Spirit. To our new graduates, I’d say, if we fill your minds with too much specification, we train you for obsolescence. For a moment, let’s think about progress. An April issue of The Economist had a special report on the coming wireless revolution. I want to quote a little. “The computing revolution was about information–digitizing documents, photographs, and records so that they could more easily be manipulated. The wireless-communications revolution is about making digital information about anything available anywhere at almost no cost.” (My emphasis.) It continues: “It is hard for anyone–politicians most of all–to picture how wireless will be used, just as it was with electric motors and microprocessors…. Wireless technology will become part of objects in the next fifty years rather as electric motors appeared in everything from eggbeaters to elevators in the first half of the 20th century and computers colonized all kinds of machinery…in the second half.”

New technology will stimulate new language and concepts. It will ahve to, and you would expect that. HEnce we have “ubiquitous computing,” “embedded networking,” and the “pervasive internet.” Progress always has hurdles to surmount. The Economist goes on to note: “As is usual in the early days of a new industry, all kinds of propriety systems abound.”

Progress, when it comes, will always be unexpected. “Wireless technology is akin to the electrical grid, which was originally intended for a particular use, the lightbulb, but whose ‘killer application’ turned out to be the power socket that allowed a multitude of new and unforeseen devices to draw energy from it. In time, the new wireless technologies will likewise reshape society in unpredictable ways.” (Author’s emphasis.)

How will the church develop and change? It is the sheer unpredictability I draw to your attention. It is not knight’s move. That’s predictable. Progress comes through recognizing innovation and serving it humbly.

Torrance, Iain R. “The Unexpected Future.” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin 28.2 (2007): 119-122.

Read it all.