2010-09-27 2230: It was a splendid weekend for the Episcopal Diocese of Kentucky, and my parish, Christ Church Cathedral: Saturday, Bishop Terry Allen White was consecrated as the eighth bishop of the diocese, and yesterday, he was seated at the cathedral.
The consecration ceremony was held in a large hotel ballroom downtown, with hundreds of people in attendance, from the 34 parishes in the diocese (which have about 9500 total members). The opening procession began with church members from all 34 parishes entering with their church banners, each a colorful evocation of the parish that made it (one parish, St. Andrews I believe, had a large fish on it). They were followed by the clergy and vestry members of the parishes, and finally by the platform party, which included half a dozen bishops including the Presiding Bishop, the Most Reverend Kathryn Jefferts-Schori. Celebratory music with brass and percussion accompanied the procession, and when everyone was assembled, the congregation sang the suitably glorious hymn, "Crown Him With Many Crowns." The liturgy proceeded with the Presentation of the bishop-elect, where members of the diocese and the bishops present affirmed that the bishop-elect was elected in accordance with the ordinances of the church; after the Liturgy of the Word, the bishop-elect was examined (he answered a series of questions to affirm he would fulfill his duties as bishop). After the congregation renewed their baptismal vows (Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?—I will with God's help…), the Consecration itself began with the Taizé chant Veni Sancte Spiritus (Come Holy Spirit). This was the most emotional part of the liturgy for me; the chant is very simple but beautiful (it has two chords: A major and B minor seventh), and I could sense the feeling of expectation in the congregation. The Presiding Bishop prayed the prayers of Consecration as she and her fellow bishops laid hands upon the bishop-elect. After these prayers, the now-bishop received several gifts, including his mitre and crozier. The remainder of the liturgy was the Holy Eucharist, which began as usual with the exchange of the Peace (where everyone hugs or shakes hands with their neighbors). The music throughout the liturgy was marvelous, including choral anthems and familiar hymns (the closing hymn was another of my favorites, "Ye Watchers and Ye Chosen Ones"). There were four stations to receive communion, and by chance, I had the honor to receive communion from the Presiding Bishop herself.
Sunday, there was another wonderful liturgy, this time at Christ Church Cathedral, which began with a charming ritual common to Episcopal churches: the seating of the Bishop. The Bishop waited outside of the front doors of the cathedral as the bells in the bell tower were rung. When the bells were finished, he knocked three times loudly on the heavy wooden door with his crozier and when the doors were opened, he asked permission to enter. He was led to the front of the sanctuary, where he could take his seat in the Cathedra, a wooden chair with an elaborately carved canopy above it. Later, the Bishop began his sermon with a fine bit of humor—he asked the congregation what was new in their lives. But he gave a serious sermon on the day's lectionary readings, which included the passage from Luke about Lazarus and the rich man; he described our obligation to help the poor, hungry and vulnerable. Robert Bozeman, our diocesan musician and director of our choir, did an outstanding job with the music yesterday's liturgy as well as for the liturgy on Saturday.
Yesterday, I was glad to participate in one more special event: the Louisville AIDS Walk. I walked with a group from the Diocese of Kentucky which included members from three or four Episcopal parishes, ten or twelve of us who walked with 5,000 people to raise money to help local AIDS charities. Before we began our walk, we were blessed by our new Bishop. The weather was nice and we enjoyed the exercise as well as the fellowship.
2010-09-26 0830: Paul Krugman, in his New York Times blog, supplies us with his favorite quote about Ayn Rand (from a blog called "Kung Fu Monkey"): There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
2010-09-06 2200: I've been reading more religion books. One of these is The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith, by Peter Hitchens, brother of well-known new-Atheist Christopher Hitchens. He describes himself as coming from the same background as his brother; they shared the same leftist politics and disdain for religion. But as a journalist in Russia, he became convinced that the destruction of religion in that country led to the horrific crimes of the Soviet regime as well as the breakdown in public morality and ethics in that society, and he is convinced that liberals in the West (the UK in particular) are determined to pull down Christianity in public life, and will thereby weaken the West fatally. Some if this is curmudgeonly if not completely unpleasant: he believes gay marriage is part of a systematic effort to dismantle Christianity. But some of his book is extremely interesting, as he details the civil religion in England and how it contributed to the diminishing of Christianity in a country that is still nominally Christian. He believes the primary reason England is no longer Christian is that Christianity was identified with the Great War and World War Two, and the horrors of these wars and their aftermaths were deeply demoralizing to the English. He also believes that we have liberty and a humane government and culture only because we are still in the "afterglow" of Christianity; once socialism is firmly entrenched in the West, government control and expediency will supplant these humane values.
Another book I've read is a little "blook" (a blog turned into a book) by Robert D. Marks, Can We Trust the Gospels? I obtained this book because one review claimed he was not defending the inerrancy of the Gospels; I wanted a mainstream rebuttal, informed by sound scholarship, of writers such as Bart Ehrman (who describe the Gospels as not containing first or second hand information about Jesus, and as reflecting theological and political debates of different first-century Christian communities).
But the book was disappointing; it seemed to me that Marks does take the position that the Gospels are word-for-word reliable, and the arguments he gives for this position are thin and sketchy. For example, it's not particularly interesting that many early (second or third century) manuscripts of the Gospels are extant, while no early manuscripts of non-Christian writers survive, because the Church would have protected copies of the Gospels. (Marks also devotes a lot of attention to the Da Vinci Code—a waste of time for me because I am aware that the novel is dishonest in its treatment of the origin of Christianity. But the book was written in 2006, when the novel was popular.)
Marks fails to address some real problems with the Gospels. One particular glaring problem he glosses over is the two nativity stories (found in Matthew and Luke). These are quite dissimilar and read like fiction (they appear to be contrivances designed to solve the problem as to how Jesus, who was from Nazareth, could have been born in Bethlehem as predicted of the Messiah in the Old Testament). But the real problem with these stories is that St. Paul nowhere mentions the doctrine of the virgin birth—a strange omission considering how detailed Paul's theological discussions are of other key doctrines, especially the resurrection. All Marks says about the two nativity stories is that they are not incompatible (they do not directly contradict each other).
Apparently, while it appears that the doctrine of the resurrection appeared early—immediately after the death of Jesus—it took several decades for the doctrine of the virgin birth to emerge. This is why I cannot take the doctrine of the virgin birth literally, but I can take the resurrection at face value: not because I believe that God is not capable of engineering a parthenogenetic birth, but instead because the scriptures themselves indicate the difficulty with that doctrine. More generally, while I expect many of the stories in the Gospels to be true (to reflect actual memories of the immediate followers of Jesus of events in his life), I can't expect all of them to be true. I hoped that Marks would give me some good insight into understanding when or how the Gospels are reliable, but again, I was disappointed.
Now I've begun reading another book on religion: Christianity: the First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch. This promises to be a long, leisurely read: it's more than 1000 pages long. It sounded interesting; he covers many topics I am not familiar with, such as how Christianity came to Korea. So far, it is interesting, and it is well-written. He begins, not with ancient Israel, but with the ancient Greeks, whose culture and philosophy are of critical importance to the foundation of Christianity. He offers colorful details, such as the story of Diogenes, a philosopher who taught we are rational animals, and who acted out his teachings with pointedly outrageous behavior. This included masturbation in public, but the Athenian Assembly appreciated him enough to vote to replace the large wine jar he slept in after a teenaged vandal broke it. Diogenes and his followers were known as Cynics, which MacCulloch explains means "those like dogs." It should be mentioned that MacCulloch, a professor of church history at Oxford, describes himself as a "friend" of Christianity rather than a believer. So far, he appears to treat his subject with deep respect, although more theologically-conservative readers might find his matter-of-fact treatment of the origins of the Old Testament (from a secular point of view) somewhat challenging.