Frank Wilson has a couple posts on writers ranting against bloggers as if the two were separate species. You know, when I think I’d like to be a critic, I usually slap myself.
American Pietist
It’s been an interesting week. Special thanks to everyone who commented (and so civilly) on my post about divorce. I learned some things I hadn’t known, which I’d like to list and examine, as an exercise in humility.
On the basis of my upbringing, and everything I’d heard in my own contacts within my church body, I’d gotten the impression that our official position is “No remarriage after divorce, for any reason.”
I should have known better. First of all, we’re (organizationally) a congregational church body. We try to keep our central mandates to an absolute minimum. Every congregation has the right to make its own decisions on such matters as whom they will marry, and this issue is no different. Some of our churches (and pastors) will marry divorced people, some won’t.
I also hadn’t known (though I think Dale told me before, and I should have) that the Lutheran tradition has held almost universally that remarriage is permitted for innocent parties. The tradition where I grew up, which held a view closer to the Catholic one, is not mainstream but fringe.
I looked some things up, and talked to a couple knowledgeable people, and nobody seems to know where the tradition I’m familiar with first entered the Lutheran stream. I suspect that it may have come with Pietism, which in its purest form insists that any matter that might possibly be considered sin is indeed sin, and must be rejected. That’s why we Pietists have our famous rules against drinking and dancing, rules not actually found in Scripture.
On the other hand, somebody told me he thought the Missouri Synod also had an anti-remarriage tradition, and the Missourians are far from being Pietists. Maybe someone who knows more about that can give me more information.
But the Pietist thing is thorny. I consider myself a Pietist, and I’m proud of it. It’s easy for us, today, to look down on the Pietists and condemn them as loveless rule-jockeys. And there’s plenty of justification for that.
But if you know history, there are reasons for what they did. My own people, the Norwegians, had a reputation you wouldn’t recognize when they first arrived on U.S. shores. They were considered drunken, brawling reprobates, and they deserved it.
I wrote about my great-grandfather John B. Johnson a while back. He was a colorful character, but he was also a genuine monster. When he was drunk, which was often, he was capable of anything. He came home one night (so the story goes), with a friend in tow. He loudly announced he had “sold” his daughter (my grandmother, then a little girl) to his friend for the night. My great-grandmother took a broom to the both of them, fortunately, and nothing came of that.
But are you surprised if she wanted to join the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and wipe out saloons?
In the Pietist revivals, hundreds, even thousands, knelt at the altar and received salvation, and then were expected to live a Pietist life. No drinking. No gambling. No dancing (which was likely to put you in situations where you’d be pressured to drink and gamble). Living like that tends to concentrate you, and it also saves money. It greatly assists your upward mobility. Is it any wonder that Pietist immigrant groups tended to assimilate faster and do better in America than other groups? As Wesley is supposed to have said about his converts, “I just can’t keep them poor!”
And yet, as Joe Carter notes in this post at Evangelical Oupost, it’s unquestionably hubristic to try to be “more ethical than Jesus.”
I’ve long felt that the proper rule is, “I will determine in my heart, relying on Scripture and good counsel, how I believe God wants me to live. But I will not try to impose on anyone else any rule not plainly taught in Scripture.”
Which makes me a wishy-washy Pietist, I guess.
Now I wonder if I should start asking out divorced women. I could open myself up to whole new worlds of rejection.
Ah, well. I’m too poor to date right now anyway.
Syttende Mai, 2007
You may not be aware of this, reserved as I’ve been on the subject, but most of my ancestral roots are Norwegian.
And on this day of days, May 17, I’m bound to write something about Norway. America is my mother, but Norway is my grandmother. And grandmothers are special.
Today’s not Norwegian Independence Day, as many suppose. It’s Constitution Day. The Norwegians drafted their constitution in 1814, when the European powers, flush with victory over Napoleon, wrested Norway from Bonaparte’s ally, Denmark, and awarded it to Sweden. The Norwegians thought this would be a good time to declare independence, and they wrote the constitution as a first step. The king of Sweden responded by marching in troops and killing a few people, then graciously allowed the Norwegians to keep their constitution, but under the Swedish crown.
For the next 90 years, the Norwegians celebrated their Constitution Day annually, as part of a calculated effort to press for independence. At last, in 1905, they got it. But Constitution Day was such a beloved tradition by then that it remains the most revered national holiday, beating Independence Day (June 7) like an egg. There are large parades all over the country on May 17. An important part of the celebrations is children’s parades, with hundreds of small children (where they can assemble hundreds; not easy nowadays in Norway) marching and waving blue, white and red flags, many wearing miniature versions of the national costumes.
Here’s a picture from Norway.
This is the Borgund stave church, a national treasure that’s about 1200 years old. The first stave churches were built in Viking times, but all of those rotted eventually, since the supporting pillars were set in earth. Later they learned to set the pillars in stone sills, and the churches (coated in pitch) became almost immortal, barring lightning strikes, candle accidents and arson. At one time there were hundreds around the country. Today there are a couple dozen. What really did them in was a well-meaning law requiring all parishes to have church buildings capable of holding a minimum number of worshipers. Most congregations had to build new churches, and many of them stopped maintaining the old ones, or even dismantled them. The Borgund church, here, is considered the jewel of the survivors, the best preserved of them all.
I took the picture in 2003, during my first lecture cruise. It was a perfect picture-taking day, as they were having a drought in Norway that year.
I shall close with the traditional Ole joke.
Mrs. Ole called the newspaper. “I vant yoo ta print an announcement for me,” she said. “Print, ‘Ole died.’”
“That’s it?” the newspaper man asked. “Just ‘Ole died’?”
“Ja. Dat’s all anybody needs ta know.”
“But you know, our newspaper gives you five words free for an announcement. Do you want to waste three words? Surely there’s something more you want to say about your late husband.”
Mrs. Ole thought for a moment.
“Print, ‘Ole died. Boat for sale,’” she said.
Athol Dickson Had a Blog, E-I-E-I-O
That’s probably one of the worst titles I’ve written, but regardless, Athol Dickson is blogging solo now, as Mark notes here. I’ll add it to our sidebar soon.
Who Said This?
The potential for manipulating mass opinions and feelings initially discovered by commercial advertisers is now being even more aggressively exploited by a new generation of media Machiavellis. The combination of ever more sophisticated public opinion sampling techniques and the increasing use of powerful computers to parse and subdivide the American people according to “psychographic” categories that identify their susceptibility to individually tailored appeals has further magnified the power of propagandistic electronic messaging that has created a harsh new reality for the functioning of our democracy.
As a result, our democracy is in danger of being hollowed out. In order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum. We must create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future. We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public’s ability to discern the truth. Americans in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the rule of reason.
It’s from a newly released book by a popular figure. Answer.
This one ought to bring in some comments
Took another half day off work today, to welcome another air conditioner tech into the bosom of my home. He looked my late, lamented unit over for the household warranty company, called in his findings (he concurred with the previous diagnosis) and told me the company would get back to me. I’m now waiting for that call.
The possibilities are two. One is that they’ll just replace the dead condenser. This will be good in the sense of saving me money just now, when money’s tight. Less good long-range. The other possibility is that they’ll offer some kind of deal on replacement of the whole shebang, which will raise the problem of how much that may cost, and how I’ll cover it.
Actually there’s a third possibility. They may just deny coverage, which the tech casually remarked they did on the last unit he inspected for them.
A number of decisions about what I’ll be doing this summer await that final verdict.
Learned something new from Vol. III of The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis today.
It had always seemed a little… squishy to me, the way Lewis maintained (as he does in a couple letters in this volume) that there can be no Christian remarriage after divorce, right up until the time he fell in love with a divorced woman and wanted to marry her. (The original BBC version of Shadowlands deals with this dilemma, by the way, while the later theatrical version ignores it.) One understands the power of love, of course, not to mention his heroic willingness to take on married life (and step-fatherhood) with a woman he expected to die very soon. But it seemed a little self-serving, in view of his previously expressed views.
But Hooper notes here, between letters written in March, 1957:
About the time Joy was admitted to hospital with cancer, Lewis discovered that William Gresham had been legally married before his marriage to Joy, and that his first wife had been alive at the time of this second marriage. Lewis took the view of the Catholic Church that his second marriage was therefore invalid, leaving Joy free to marry again.
I’m aware that the No Remarriage rule doesn’t have many Protestant (probably not even many Catholic) adherents these days, but that passage comforted me.
And when I say that, I want to make it very, very clear that I don’t want to start a debate on the subject. My own church body holds to the old, hard rule, and I personally agree with it, which is one of many reasons I’m still single (Let’s face it—the best single women in my age group are almost always divorced).
You should see the angry e-mails I got a few years back, when I took out an ad on a Christian singles website and tried to explain—really, really gently—that I couldn’t consider marriage to a divorced woman. A couple writers accused me of saying “everybody who’s divorced is going to Hell.”
What I say is, let everyone be convinced in their own consciences, and I’m happy to leave the judgment to God.
(By the way, I went through a self-serving period myself, when I lived in Florida. I attended an excellent singles group down there, and it included a number of admirable and very attractive divorced women. I found myself unaccountably persuaded, for a while, that remarriage was permissible. But I never got a date anyway.)
Now let the flaming begin.
The Church Triumphant
“There are more Presbyterians in Ghana than in Scotland.” Praise the Lord.
Last Night’s Debate
Care to talk about the candidate debate last night? I wish some of these guys would step down. There are too many of them. In short, we need a conservative leader, not another Reagan so much as a skilled leader who will cut back government’s reach and defend our country at home and abroad.
Karen Kingsbury on Reader Desires
“The world needs story.” Click through to the Christianity Today article for the full interview.
When Scourby last with his great voice boom’d
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night — O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d — O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless — O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.
In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle — and from this bush in the dooryard,
With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig with its flower I break.
That’s from the poem “When Lilacs Last In the Dooryard Bloom’d,” by Walt Whitman. I thought of it tonight during my evening walk, a little late, which is typical for me. The lilacs are disappearing now. Too bad. Lilacs have always meant a lot to me. We had some big lilac bushes in the front yard on the farm where I grew up (I understand my Uncle Orvis, who reads this blog, planted them originally). They looked pretty, and they smelled good, and they weren’t any trouble to take care of. And if you pulled the little flower out of its stem (my brothers and I learned) and sucked on its narrow base, there was a tiny little drop of sweetness you could taste.
It also brings memories of a reading of Whitman by the actor Alexander Scourby (famous for his Bible recordings) which I heard in college. I was working as a library assistant, and the librarian was in charge of booking cultural events for the school. When I heard that Scourby was coming I went ape (well, actually I allowed some emotion to cross my face. Pretty excessive for me) because I’d grown up listening to a record my folks had bought for educational purposes, featuring Scourby’s voice reading poetry. It was from Scourby I learned “Gunga Din.”
Shortly before the date of the event, the librarian asked me if I’d like to be one of the students having dinner with Scourby before the reading. Naturally I said, yes, please.
But as the day approached, the librarian said no more about it.
A reasonable person would have asked a question. I’m not a reasonable person, of course. In the environment where I grew up, asking about something a second time was a guaranteed way to make sure you’d be turned down. Just to teach you not to bother people.
So I said nothing, and waited for information to be given. None came. I never got the chance to meet Scourby, and never mentioned it to the librarian again. The reading was wonderful, and I remember that Scourby wore the most beautiful gray suit I’d ever seen.
The librarian did give me a publicity photo of the man, which I think I still have somewhere. And I remember each spring, when I smell the lilacs.