Religion as imitation

Affordable Care Act

The unholiness of the holy

The plain fact is that men's minds are built, as has been often said, in water-tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they yet have many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and associations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so commonly charged to religion's account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to religion's wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theoretic system. The ecclesiastical spirit in general is the sum of these two spirits of dominion; and I beseech you never to confound the phenomena of mere tribal or corporate psychology which it presents with those manifestations of the purely interior life which are the exclusive object of our study. The baiting of Jews, the hunting of Albigenses and Waldenses, the stoning of Quakers and ducking of Methodists, the murdering of Mormons and the massacring of Armenians, express much rather that aboriginal human neophobia, that pugnacity of which we all share the vestiges, and that inborn hatred of the alien and of eccentric and non-conforming men as aliens, than they express the positive piety of the various perpetrators. Piety is the mask, the inner force is tribal instinct. You believe as little as I do, in spite of the Christian unction with which the German emperor addressed his troops upon their way to China, that the conduct which he suggested, and in which other Christian armies went beyond them, had anything whatever to do with the interior religious life of those concerned in the performance.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures XIV and XV: The Value of Saintliness

The Beginning of Religion

Pascal's Wager and Tolstoy's Dragon

Thirst for justice

Heaven on earth

Bill Maher, common sense, and human rights

Bourgeois Christianity

A world without Christians

Clarity & Charity

The Round Table, Episode 5: True Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism and Politics

A History of a Hatred: Anti-Hebraism, Anti-Judaism, and Antisemitism

The hatred of the Jews as a people and of their religion, culture, and, later, even their blood, has been a nearly ubiquitous force throughout the history of Western Civilization. This paper will trace the evolution of this hatred from its beginning in the first contacts between the Greeks and the Jews in the fourth century BCE through to the modern day, attempting to both follow its developments and discover its roots. Although this hatred of the Jews is often described as “Antisemitism” regardless of which historical period is being referred to, this paper will attempt to use more precise terminology. The application of a term like “Antisemitism,” which refers to the hatred of those who fall in the Semitic racial category, to earlier cultures which carried no such notions is at best a misleading anachronism. In the interest of avoiding such inaccuracies, this paper will instead refer to three separate but related phenomena: anti-Hebraism, anti-Judaism, and, following these, Antisemitism.

6th Century BCE through 1st Century CE: Anti-Hebraism

Similarly to the misapplication of the word “Antisemitism” to earlier periods than those in which such a term is meaningful, it is tempting to see the beginning of Anti-Hebraism at a much earlier date than its actual first appearance. The Babylonians and other ancient peoples who warred with or, as the Babylonians did, conquered the people of Israel are often presented as case studies in the early hatred of the Jews. This approach, however, is one that does a disservice to the historical record. While the Babylonians of the sixth century BCE and the other ancient peoples with whom the Israelites fought may have had some “hatred” of their Hebrew or Jewish enemies, the important point here is that this hatred was not a special and unique dislike for a certain people. Neither the Babylonians nor any other ancient enemy of the Jews seems to have regarded the Jews as an exceptional people; they regarded and treated, and this of course means that they hated, the Jews just as they did any other nation against whom they battled.

The view which the Jews held of themselves from a very early date as “a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the earth” who had been “chosen” by God “to be a people for Himself” must be distinguished from the indifference with which their early enemies treated this claim.¹ Because they viewed themselves as a chosen people, the Jews tended to see everything that happened to or around them in these terms and as a result of this special place, and this Jewish view of themselves has colored the way that some historians view the actions of other ancient peoples.

The Book of Daniel is one outstanding example in this regard. The stories in Daniel take place during the Babylonian Captivity in the sixth century BCE, but the book itself was probably written in the second century BCE, as many as 400 years later. As a result, Daniel, the Jewish hero of the story, is treated as an exceptional figure by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar and Jewish religious practices and taboos are treated as having a special significance even by non-Jews. These stories, however, record far less about the actual Babylonian view of the Jews than they do about the Jewish view of themselves in relation to the nations who became their captors. The Book of Daniel is also reflective of and an important historical account of Jewish feelings during the time period in which it was written, namely, the reign of the Greek Seleucid Empire over the Jews.

The real beginning of Anti-Hebraism is probably best placed in the fourth century BCE. It is at this time, with the conquest of Judea by Alexander the Great and the imposition of Greek rule on the Jews, that the Jews can be definitively said to have been viewed as an exceptional people by their non-Jewish rulers and neighbors. The Jews, with their unique ritual and social practices such as circumcision and their insistence upon religious exclusiveness, were viewed with a great measure of suspicion and skepticism by their Greek conquerors and overlords in the fourth through second centuries BCE. While most were willing to tolerate and even protect the Jews as an exceptional people, some rulers, such as Antiochus IV Epiphanes, attempted, however unsuccessfully, to force the Jews to Hellenize and renounce their unique religious practices and beliefs.²

The Greek distrust and dislike of the Jews was continued among the Romans, who conquered both the Greeks and the Jews in the second and first centuries BCE. While the Romans were willing to accept and make exceptions for unique Jewish beliefs and practices and large numbers of Jews emigrated throughout the Roman Empire, Jews were consistently mocked and looked down upon by Romans, who saw practices like circumcision as barbaric and the exclusive Jewish monotheism as potentially seditious.³ According to Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller, “from the Roman point of view, the Jews proved themselves congenitally incapable of either cooperating with the Roman provincial authorities … or coexisting peaceably with the Greeks.”⁴ The defining feature of this period, which can be most accurately referred to as Anti-Hebraic, was an opposition to and a dislike of the numerous unique aspects of Jewish culture. This negative view of Judaism continued, and was even strengthened in many ways, when the Roman Empire gradually became Christianized beginning in the fourth century CE.


1st Century CE through 18th Century CE - Anti-Judaism

Christianity emerged from a particularly unpleasant split with Judaism in the first century CE. Christians were viewed by the Jews as treacherous and heretical and, as a result, often suffered persecution and expulsion from the synagogues. This hostility on the part of mainstream Jews toward the Christians in their midst precipitated a final split between Judaism and Christianity. It also led to a great deal of vociferously hostile words making their way into the mainstreams of both Jewish and Christian literature and thought about the other. As Calvin J. Roetzel points out, for example, “Matthew's Gospel … interprets the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. as punishment for the rejection of Jesus by some Jews.”⁵

When Christians began to assume power in the Roman Empire several centuries later, these ideas about the Jews combined with the popular Roman prejudices to strengthen Roman anti-Hebraic attitudes into what would most appropriately be called Anti-Judaism.⁶ These anti-Jewish attitudes, a combination of the Greco-Roman prejudices and Christian theological and historical disagreements, became the predominant view of Judaism throughout Europe for many centuries.

Medieval Christians came to see the Jews as “graceless, blaspheming rebels who had long ago closed their eyes to the light of the Gospel, deicides and 'Christ-killers' … whose very survival testified either to the Wandering Jew's well-deserved homelessness or to the Christian charity of those who tolerated them in their midst.”⁷ Because of their rejection of Jesus as the Messiah, a point which seemed patently obvious to Christian interpreters of the Old Testament who juxtaposed its prophecies with the life of Christ, the Jews were seen as being blind to apparent truth and possibly even in active rebellion against it. Just as in earlier times under the pagan Greeks and Romans, the Jews, due to their rejection of what others saw as the obvious as well as the insular nature of their communities, were often viewed as dangerous and as potential sources of insurrection.

Early apparitions of this way of viewing the Jews by Christians seem rather more like commonsense than the bigotry they are often portrayed as by some modern historians. As Angelos Chaniotis points out, for example, “if the early Christian fathers, like John Chrysostom and Ephraim the Syrian, never tired of warning their Christian flock not to attend the synagogue, it is because many Christians did.”⁸ Although the split between the Church and the synagogue had been a messy one with hard feelings on both sides, many Christians, especially the very large group who converted from Judaism, maintained close contacts with Judaism and Jews. At the time, about 400 CE, when John Chrysostom delivered his vociferous sermons against the Judaizers, a group of people who tried to practice both Judaism and Christianity, one could find a small but not insignificant group who attended both the Paschal Feast in the local Christian church and the Passover at the local synagogue. The warnings of such early Christian leaders as John Chrysostom and Ephraim the Syrian were warnings against a very real threat to the Christian Church.

Later manifestations of Christian Anti-Judaism, however, often crossed the line into the absurd and bizarre. In 1144, in France, for instance, the accusation was leveled that Jews kidnapped Christian infants and used their blood in the matzoh they consumed as part of the celebration of Passover.⁹ This strange rumor continued to circulate throughout the Middle Ages and continues to have currency in some places in the Muslim world to this day. Interestingly, this accusation made by Christians against Jews in the High Middle Ages is nearly the same rumor which had spread among pagan Romans regarding early Christians in the first through third centuries. In their writings, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen, and many other early Christian authors of that period address the charge made against them by Romans that they kidnapped Roman babies and used their flesh and blood as the “flesh” and “blood” consumed in the Eucharist.

It is notable in all of this that none of these prejudices or disagreements revolve around Judaism or Jews as a race or ethnicity, but as a specific religious group which one can join and leave by changing belief and custom. This began to change, however, in the early modern period. One element of the Reconquista in Spain was the forced conversion or expulsion of the Jewish population.¹⁰ When given the option of converting to Christianity or leaving, many Spanish Jews chose to convert. These conversos, as they were called, came to be viewed with a great deal of envy and suspicion by their Christian neighbors. Many suspected that, because they had converted under duress, their conversion had only been affected for appearances and that they secretly continued to practice Judaism. In addition, many whose families had been Christians for centuries viewed with envy the children and grandchildren of conversos who were able to attain important places in both secular government and in the the Church, including places as governors, mayors, and bishops. As a result, the name of converso came to be applied, however improperly, even to those whose grandparents had converted to Christianity and the stigma of sedition attributed to the Jews continued to be attached to these conversos even after generations as Christians. What had been a difference in religion was coming to be viewed as a difference in race.

18th Century CE through Today – Antisemitism

With the era of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, Europeans came to focus more attention and importance on science than on religion. Whereas the emphasis of the Middle Ages had been a primarily religious emphasis, which the denizens of the Enlightenment saw as superstitious, the emphasis of the Enlightenment was one of science and rationality. Rather than actually shucking superstition, however, many instead simply adopted a new set of superstitions or rephrased old superstitions in the new, more acceptable terminology. This can be seen especially in the rise of Antisemitism from Anti-Judaism, as constructed by people like Wilhelm Marr. According to Karl A. Schleunes, Marr was among the first of those who “assigned to Jews the attributes of a race” and was the first, in 1873, to use the term “anti-Semitism” to describe this position.¹¹ While an intellectual living in the wake of the Enlightenment could not take religious differences seriously, or, at least, as seriously as they had been taken previously, he could take supposedly scientific ideas like race seriously; Judaism, then, became no longer a religion, but a race, and all of the same superstitions and conspiracies which had formerly surrounded the Jewish religion were transferred to the new Jewish race. This view became extremely popular in spite of the obvious historical difficulty: many Jews were the descendents of people who converted to Judaism in the ancient and Medieval world and many non-Jews were the descendents of Jews who had converted to Christianity or Islam.

The culmination and most extreme outburst of modern Antisemitism was the Holocaust under the Nazi Party in Germany in 1933-1945. One of the greatest ironies of the Nazi obsession with race is that they, while taking up this “scientific” view on Judaism as a race, re-translated it into religious terms. For the Nazis, race became a religious concept. As one Nazi ideologist, Arthur Rosenberg, wrote in his The Myth of the 20th Century: “A new faith is awakening today: The faith that blood will defend the divine essence of man; the faith, supported by pure science, that Nordic blood embodies the new mystery which will supplant the outworn sacrament.”¹² The Greek incredulity at what they saw as the bizarre customs of the Jews, the Roman suspicions toward Jewish exclusivity, and the Christian theological and historical differences with Judaism, all of which had been matters of cultural and religious opposition, became, for the Nazis, attributed to an insidiousness inherent in Jewish blood. This was contrasted with the inherent superiority and goodness of pure Aryan blood, as difficult as such a thing might be to find. The Nazis took up a heritage of Anti-Judaism and a pseudoscience of race to create their own unique racial religiosity which lay at the heart of their entire philosophy and practice.

Conclusion

As different as the phenomena discussed in this paper have been, there has been, throughout the history of the hatred of the Jews, whether in its Anti-Hebraic, Anti-Judaic, or Antisemitic forms, a single thread that binds this “ghoulishly fascinating” story together.¹³ Thomas Cahill accurately and succinctly summarizes this common thread that runs throughout the history of the hatred of the Jews:

The people being excoriated are presumed to exhibit the unyielding qualities of God himself—the same God whom Christians claimed to worship and whose sacred scriptures they revered. … The hatred of Christians for Jews may have its ultimate source in the hatred of God, a hatred that the hater must carefully keep himself from knowing about.¹⁴

Although Cahill is here referring specifically to Christian Anti-Judaism, his words apply equally as well to the pre-Christian Anti-Hebraic Greeks and Romans as well as the later Antisemitic Christians, atheists, and others. What seems to be at the center of all manifestations of hatred toward the Jews is really a hatred of their God – the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – and of his imposing ethical demands on human beings.

Cahill's moving description of the commandments of this God as given in the Torah presents us with a powerful summary of these ethical demands; according to Cahill, “the constant bias is in favor not of the powerful and their possessions but of the powerless and their poverty; and there is even a frequent enjoinder to sympathy. … This bias toward the underdog is unique not only in ancient law but in the whole history of law.”¹⁵ In stark contrast to this description of the demands of the Jewish God stand the words of Adolph Hitler, which might accurately summarize the position, whether implicit or explicit, of all those who have hated and persecuted the Jews simply for being Jews: “Close your hearts to pity! Act brutally! … The stronger man is right. … Be harsh and remorseless! Be steeled against all signs of compassion! … Whoever has pondered over this world order knows that its meaning lies in the success of the best by means of force.”¹⁶

In his closing address before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany, on 26 July 1946, Justice Robert H. Jackson, prosecuting attorney for the Americans, eloquently encapsulated the psychological and philosophical motivation for and effects of the Nazi's rabid Antisemitism when he said that they had tried to “renounce the Hebraic heritage in the civilization of which Germany was once a part” and in so doing, they had “repudiated the Hellenic influence as well.”¹⁷ In their fanatical hatred of all things Jewish, a hatred of the Jewish God and of his demands which led them to a hatred of his people, they had attempted to strip Christianity of all of its Jewish heritage, they had decimated the Christian churches, and they had murdered as many as 13 million people, including six million Jews. In so doing, the Germans had renounced not only the Hebrew legacy of faith and the idea of God which makes up such a great part of Western Civilization but the Greek legacy of reason which consists of the other half. As Donald Kagan has eloquently put it, “if both religion and reason are removed, all that remains is will and power, where the only law is the law of tooth and claw.”¹⁸ In the end, their Antisemitism had led them to renounce and attempt to destroy Western Civilization entirely.

Notes 

¹ Deuteronomy 7:8, New King James Version.

² Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilization (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 49.

³ Ibid., 278-9.

⁴ Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 170.

⁵ Calvin J. Roetzel, The World That Shaped the New Testament: Revised Edition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 36.

⁶ Goodman, 551.

⁷ Gabriel Sivan, The Bible and Civilization (New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1973), 46.

⁸ Angelos Chaniotis, “Godfearers in the City of Love,” Biblical Archeology Review, Vol. 36, No. 3 (May/June 2010): 32-44.

⁹ S. Zeitlin, "The Blood Accusation," Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 50, No. 2 (1996): 117-124.

¹⁰ David M. Gitlitz, Conversos and the Spanish Inquisition, ed. David Rabinovitch, PBS.org, accessed 19 May 2012, http://www.pbs.org/inquisition/pdf/ConversosandtheSpanishInquisition.pdf.

¹¹ Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-1939 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 24-5. 

¹² Arthur Rosenberg, Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1931), 114. Quoted in Schleuenes, 52.

¹³ Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), 152.

¹⁴ Ibid., 152-3.

¹⁵ Ibid., 154-5.

¹⁶ Adolph Hitler, speech to Nazi leadership in 1939. Quoted in William L. Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 532.

¹⁷ Robert H. Jackson, Closing Statement at the International Military Tribunal in Case No. 1, The United States of America, the French Republic, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics v. Hermann Wilhelm Göring, et al. 

¹⁸ Donald Kagan, “Introduction to Ancient Greek History: Lecture 1 Transcript,” Open Yale Courses. (6 September 2007) http://oyc.yale.edu/classics/introduction-to-ancient-greek-history/content/transcripts/transcript1-introduction (Accessed 20 May 2012).
 

Bibliography 

Cahill, Thomas. The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. New York: Anchor Books, 1999.

Chaniotis, Angelos. “Godfearers in the City of Love.” Biblical Archeology Review. Vol. 36, No. 3 (May/June 2010): 32-44.


Garnsey, Peter and Richard Saller. The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.


Gitlitz, David M. Conversos and the Spanish Inquisition. Ed. David Rabinovitch. PBS.org. Accessed 14 April 2012. http://www.pbs.org/inquisition/pdf/ConversosandtheSpanishInquisition.pdf.


Goodman, Martin. Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilization. New York: Vintage Books, 2007.


Jackson, Robert H. Closing Statement at the International Military Tribunal in Case No. 1, The United States of America, the French Republic, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics v. Hermann Wilhelm Göring, et al.


Kagan, Donald. “Introduction to Ancient Greek History: Lecture 1 Transcript.” Open Yale Courses. (6 September 2007) http://oyc.yale.edu/classics/introduction-to-ancient-greek-history/content/transcripts/transcript1-introduction (Accessed 20 May 2012).


Roetzel, Calvin J. The World That Shaped the New Testament: Revised Edition. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002.


Rosenberg, Arthur. Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts. Munich, 1931.


Schleunes, Karl A. The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-1939. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990.


Shirer, William L. Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.


Sivan, Gabriel. The Bible and Civilization. New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1973.


Zeitlin, S. "The Blood Accusation." Vigiliae Christianae. Vol. 50, No. 2 (1996): 117-124

Review: Ten Theories Of Human Nature

Ten Theories Of Human Nature by Leslie Forster Stevenson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This is an excellent introduction to ten fascinating and influential ways of answering the question "what does it mean to be human?" The authors present fair and insightful explanations of the approach offered within each system, giving us a description of the thought of that system, including some very good background information, their diagnosis of the human condition and prescription for it, as well as an analysis and critique of the system. In all of this, the book also serves very well as an introduction in a more general way to each of the philosophies it covers. For that reason, I do wish that the authors would add more chapters to the next edition; specifically, I would like to see Buddhism covered, Islam covered (rather than simply alluded to in the chapter on the Biblical conception of man), and the chapter on the Biblical conception of man divided into two and Judaism and Christianity treated separately (in order to treat each more fully). I would also like to see feminism treated in a chapter of its own rather than inserted throughout (and therefore permeating) the entire book; feminism stands as a philosophy (or, rather, several philosophies) in its own right and I see no need nor justice in allowing its presuppositions to color the treatment that the rest of the philosophies in the book receive. All in all, very much worth the read for anyone interested in being human!



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Review: The Shaping of Christianity: The History and Literature of Its Formative Centuries

The Shaping of Christianity: The History and Literature of Its Formative Centuries by Gerard Vallee

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



This book epitomizes the phrase "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." The author himself is clearly out of his depth and lacks the requisite knowledge and experience to adequately discuss the topic which he has taken up and provides the reader with just enough to confuse and mislead him (or her).

Vallee seems to rely excessively upon secondary sources, and not very good ones at that. His use of primary sources is sparse at best and most of those few citations he does provide for us seem to have been lifted directly from the secondary sources he uses rather than taken up by himself from a personal, firsthand reading of the actual primary sources. As a result, Vallee's treatment is generally shallow and distorted and overly reliant on a single position on certain contentious issues.

Happily, his treatments of most subjects and individuals he covers are so brief that he can't do much damage to the mind of the uninformed reader. Most of the book reads like a badly-written, ill-informed encyclopedia entry; the rest reads like a badly-written, ill-informed undergraduate term paper. The entire book is badly-written and ill-informed.

In short, if you are looking for an introduction to the formative/Patristic period of Christianity, this is not the book you're looking for.



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Pope, Pontifex Maximus, and Persecution

Christianity & religious freedom

Roots of the Inquisition

The biblical understanding of human nature

Probably the most crucial point in the biblical understanding of human nature is the notion of freedom, conceived of as the choice between obedience to God's will, faith in Him, and love for Him -- or disobedience, faithlessness, and pride. The necessity for choice between obedience and disobedience, good and evil, is presented early, in Genesis 2:16-17. Greek thought puts great store on the intellect, on our ability to attain rational knowledge of theoretical and moral truth; the highest fulfillment of human life was thought by Plato and Aristotle to be attainable only by those who are able to gain such knowledge. The Judeo-Christian tradition, in contrast, puts the emphasis on human goodness, and this is something that is open to all, and independent of intellectual power. There is thus a democratic impetus, an ideal of the equality of all finite human beings before God, implicit in the Bible -- though it may be questioned just how well Jewish and Christian practice has lived up to this. The concern with human goodness is not just with right action: it is at least as much with the foundation in human character and personality from which such life will flow. And in a crucial way, it goes beyond the sophisticated conceptions of human virtue offered by Plato and Aristotle, for the biblical writers see the only firm foundation for human goodness as faith in the transcendent yet personal God.

Leslie Stevenson, Ten Theories of Human Nature, pp. 75-6

Born this way

Review: The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy

The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy by Paul F. Bradshaw

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



While Bradshaw offers very few definite answers for anything at all, he does offer us a very thorough introduction to the history of Christian worship. One does, I think, feel a bit overwhelmed reading this book as Bradshaw presents one viable theory only to counter it with another mutually contradictory but equally viable theory that displaces the previous again and again. Perhaps what he demonstrates, and what it may be his purpose to demonstrate, in doing this is that there is very little that can be definitely said about the specifics of the development of the liturgies of the Christian Church in their earliest forms.

Unfortunately, Bradshaw disregards his own advice at several points. Perhaps the most obvious example is in his expression of support for the theory that multiplicity becomes unity against the prior presupposition of the reverse. Bradshaw criticizes the prejudice of earlier scholars who, he says, relied upon the evolutionary theories of Darwin and others and saw complexity emerging from simplicity and multiplicity from unity. He then goes on to posit instead the very opposite: that we always begin with complexity and multiplicity which then becomes unity. He ignores, however, that this too has its philosophical origins, this time in Hegel and Marx rather than Darwin, and that to adopt such a theory also, in spite of his protests, attempts to force the historical datum into an ideological framework.

In spite of that and other minor quibbles I might raise, however, this book is, overall, a great introduction to the origins of early Christian worship and especially to the scholarship which has attempted to discover these origins over the last century and beyond. Bradshaw also does an excellent job of introducing the reader to the primary source material and giving a good overview of how these primary sources have been and are being handled by scholars. I recommend and endorse this book for anyone who is interested in the history of Christian liturgical practices.



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Freedom of conscience

The importance of dogma

Why does God hide himself so well?

Recent reading

Updates and news and stuff

When the soul meets Christ

What does it mean that the soul meets Christ? The great Revelation of God turns into God's transaction with me. History becomes my history. "It was done for me." "Given for you, shed for you." The most important event of my life will be Jesus Christ. At the same time the individual is brought into the history of Revelation. God's creation is continued in him. That which takes place in the petty history of a man's soul receives a new significance, it becomes God's way of dealing with his child. The drama of the world takes hold of the individual soul. He finds that his own history means a choice between God and the Devil. Shall God create or shall the Devil destroy in him? God's struggle against evil, lethargy, and death is manifested throughout history. Every human being must take part in that grand and perilous fight between Life and Death, between God's revealing miracle and darkness.

Nathan Söderblom, "Continued Revelation"

People of Faith & Reason

Another's stupidity is not my bigotry

Fr. Seraphim the Infallible

An Orthodox approach to evolution

Short book review: Night by Elie Wiesel

 In Wiesel's account of his internment in Auschwitz, one can feel his sense of loss -- the loss of every member of his immediate family, the loss of dignity and of humanity itself, and -- the loss above all losses and the source of all other losses -- the loss of God. The theme of the loss of God -- or, to use Nietzsche's terminology, which Wiesel invokes as well, the death of God -- runs throughout this book. This is a story -- THE story -- of the dark night of the human soul that modern man has taken upon itself. God is dead -- but, as the author of the introduction eloquently tells us: there is a Resurrection.