The Bible Plus: The Four Books of Mormonism

If you know very little about Mormonism, read this. If you think you know Mormonism, read this. | From The Christian Century http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2012-08/bible-plus

It's essays like this that keep me reading The Christian Century from cover to cover every other week.

For one other excellent conversation, see http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2012/may/talkingmormons.html

Summary of Lutheran Theology (in of all places the New York Times)

German Austerity’s Lutheran Core

By STEVEN OZMENT

IF there’s one nationality the rest of the world thinks it readily and totally understands, it is the Germans. Combine their deep involvement with Nazism and anti-Semitism and, voilà! — 2,000 years of gripping, complex history vanishes.

Since the beginning of the euro crisis, this reductionism, which can be found inside Germany as much as outside it, has come in the form of sifting through the fatal legacy of the Weimar era, the years of promising democracy that began in the defeat and humiliation of World War I and ended with the Nazi takeover in 1933.

On the one hand, we’re told, the 1920s legacy of destabilizing inflation explains Germany’s staunch aversion to expansionary monetary and fiscal policies today; on the other hand, the Nazi taint on the interwar years seems to prove for some that, even in 2012, the intentions of democratic Germany can’t be trusted when it comes to Europe’s well-being.

But rather than scour tarnished Weimar, we should read much deeper into Germany’s incomparably rich history, and in particular the indelible mark left by Martin Luther and the “mighty fortress” he built with his strain of Protestantism. Even today Germany, though religiously diverse and politically secular, defines itself and its mission through the writings and actions of the 16th century reformer, who left a succinct definition of Lutheran society in his treatise “The Freedom of a Christian,” which he summarized in two sentences: “A Christian is a perfectly free Lord of all, subject to none, and a Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all.”

Consider Luther’s view on charity and the poor. He made the care of the poor an organized, civic obligation by proposing that a common chest be put in every German town; rather than skimp along with the traditional practice of almsgiving to the needy and deserving native poor, Luther proposed that they receive grants, or loans, from the chest. Each recipient would pledge to repay the borrowed amount after a timely recovery and return to self-sufficiency, thereby taking responsibility for both his neighbors and himself. This was love of one’s neighbor through shared civic responsibility, what the Lutherans still call “faith begetting charity.”

How little has changed in 500 years. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, a born-and-baptized daughter of an East German Lutheran pastor, clearly believes the age-old moral virtues and remedies are the best medicine for the euro crisis. She has no desire to press a secular ideology, let alone an institutional religious faith, on her country, but her politics draws unmistakably from an austere and self-sacrificing, yet charitable and fair, Protestantism.

If Ms. Merkel refuses to support so-called euro bonds, it is not because it would be like giving free money to the undeserving poor but because it would not help the redeemed poor take responsibility for their own houses and grow strong for both themselves and their needy neighbors. He who receives, recovers and profits from society in a time of need has a moral responsibility to pay society back by acting in turn as a strong citizen who can help fill the common chests and sacrifice for his now needy neighbors, who had once helped him. Such is the sacrificial Lutheran society.

For this point of view Ms. Merkel has been derided as the “austerity queen,” and worse. But she is undeterred. She admits that austerity is the toughest road home but hastens to add that it is also the surest and quickest way to recover the economy and gain full emancipation from the crisis. Luther would agree.

According to polls, so do Ms. Merkel’s fellow Germans. They hold tight to their belief, born of staunch Lutheran teachings, that human life cannot thrive in deadbeat towns and profligate lands. They know that money is a scarce commodity that has to be systematically processed, recorded and safeguarded before being put out to new borrowers and petitioners.

And they take comfort in the fact that, unlike what they consider the disenchanted, spendthrift countries of Greece and Italy, those living in model German lands have obeyed the chancellor’s austerity laws and other survival programs designed for a fair, shared recovery.

But if their Lutheran heritage of sacrificing for their neighbors makes Germans choose austerity, it also leads them to social engagement. In classic Lutheran teaching, the salvation of the believer “by faith alone” does not curtail the need for constant charitable good works, as ill-informed critics allege. Faith, rather, empowers the believer to act in the world by taking the worry out of his present and future religious life.

It is true that Lutheranism, as a faith, has declined in Germany in recent decades, as the forces of multiculturalism and secularism have washed over the country. And yet witness the warmth with which Germans of all backgrounds embraced their new president, Joachim Gauck, a former Lutheran pastor.

And it is true that Lutheranism is hardly the only social force alive in Germany today. Yet it is of a piece with the country’s two millenniums of history, filled as it is with redemptive self-sacrifice and bootstrapping. In the fourth century A.D., German warriors controlled virtually every senior military post in the Roman army. Later, Germans turned the wilds of northern Central Europe into a bountiful breadbasket — and, most recently, an industrial machine.

What’s more, Lutheranism survived both right-wing Nazism and left-wing Communism, both of which tried to replace its values with their own. If anything, its resilience comes to the fore when challenged by change.

With the steady advance of Islam into Europe over the last two decades and in the face of unrelenting economic pressure from their neighbors, it is no surprise that Germans of all backgrounds have now again quietly found “a mighty fortress” for themselves in their own Judeo-Christian heritage.

Steven Ozment is a professor of history at Harvard and the author of “The Serpent and the Lamb: Cranach, Luther, and the Making of the Reformation.” This article reprinted from the New York Times web site.

Republicans and Democrats

Supposedly in our country there are only two ways to be political. You are either Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal. We are "bipartisan" and so split along party lines.

And never the twain shall meet.

Yes, the parties periodically shift focus and morph. Yes, there are smaller political movements with which a minority identify (Green, Tea, indie, progressive).

But for the most part bipartisan politics appears to be our reified and painfully narrow options.

Perhaps these are two ways of thinking about or viewing the world, basic philosophical commitments we make--or hold--that then enter into dialogue and conversation one with another, kind of like points on a sliding scale.

But still points on a scale. Like this:

----+-------------------------------------+--------

Democrats                              Republicans

However, I have become increasingly suspicious that this is not the way it work. That in fact, the two "parties" now reside in different parallel universes. It is as if we are seeing the same thing, but from completely different and incommensurable perspectives.

And because we don't simply differ in our opinions, but actually reside in different universes, the conversation we hope for between the two sides is now no impossible. There is no possible fusion-of-horizons (horizontverschmelzung), because you can't fuse parallel universes. They are by definition different universes.

If this is the case, and I think it is the case, our task is now how to survive in a meta-political science fictional universe.

Consider one simple example. The Democrat solution to many of our current economic concerns is the exact opposite of the Republican (Keynes vs. Draco), and both sides are convinced the alternative side's proposal will destroy us economically (and may, additionally, be immoral). We hear someone from the other side describe the current intractability, and we think to ourselves, "What universe does this person live in?"

Exactly.

I don't have a solution. But it does help me in various conversations to realize that when I get into a talk with someone from the "other side," it might actually be that we are not simply lining out our position on a sliding spectrum of political options, but we are in fact trying to scream across universes to each other. Just so each of our conversations is grounded in a completely different epistemological, phenomenological, and perhaps even ontological, situation, one from the other.

This makes me sad. I lament it. But I think it is true. And I wonder if there is anything to be done about it, anything at all.

Lord, help us.

--
p.s. The novel that best develops this thematic, a novel I wish everyone would read, is China Miéville's The City and the City.

Putting the "Is" back in "Is"

So I'll try to invite a conversation (if only this topic could attract as many readers as a post on Chick-fil-a). Earlier today I posted this status update on Facebook, 

The Spirit is being-as-possibility in its non-subsistent isomorphic ipseity. Precisely in this way is the Father freed to be the Father, the Son to be the Son, and all three themselves in their mutually coinhering circulation around the neighborhood.

Typically in Western theology, the Spirit ends up being the shared love of the Father and the Son. So the Father and the Son are "subsistent" beings, clearly identifiable as persons because of their antecedent narratives, where as the Spirit is the love between them. 

This is helpful as far as it goes, but it risks leaving little "there" there for who the Spirit actually is as a full person in the life of the Trinity.

The question is, "Where does the Spirit 'stand' to be him or herself over against the Father and the Son?" One of the best, but in my estimation, still insufficient responses, is that the Spirit is God's own liberative future.

In the East, on the other hand, the Spirit is really more independent as a person (no filioque, for example), but then all the processional and monarchical language of that tradition ends up making all three members of the Trinity more static even than in the West, since the Spirit is in a sense less free to set the other two members of the Trinity free in their particularity because the ontology in the east is more being as persistence rather than being as possibility.

Theologians wrestling with this have thus tried to find a way to speak of the Spirit as God's divine future, thus grounding the Spirit not in a developmental past but an anticipated future. And the "isomorphic" aspect of the Spirit is that it puts the "is" back in "is."

How do you in your own reflections wrestle with this?