Readin', Writin', and Absolute Multitude. Academics 2009.

What's up with that? Don't I mean 'Rithmetic?

Back To School -- Oy!

When it's almost back to school time, along with all the sales in the stores there's the usual stuff for sale too about the value of education. Trouble is, there's about as many ideas of what is an education, not to mention of what is its value, as there are kinds of pens, notebooks and clothes in the stores.

So let's start with the good old liberal arts education. We'll look at 1) How and Where It Started, 2) What the Seven Liberal Arts Actually Are, 3) The Modern University, 4) How It Fell Apart, 5) Where We Are Now, 6) Where We Could Be, and a little concluding note you might enjoy.

I. How and Where It Started.

You don't hear much about it these days, but the ideas of liberal arts education, like democracy, originated in Greek antiquity, in societies where those who were going to participate in democracy, and have such an education as to do that, were not burdened by having to "work"; that was done by a slave class. Leisure, not work, is the basis of culture and society; "liberal" comes from the Latin for free, and a liberal art originally meant not what we think of now but something appropriate to the free class, not the slave class.

"Academy", "academic" and like words come from the school Plato founded in a sacred grove dedicated to Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, called the Akademia. Hekademia originally, actually. It lasted from about 387 BC to 83 BC. Its most famous graduate -- Aristotle.

The Academy was refounded on Platonic philosophy in 410 AD and lasted until closed by the Roman Emporer Justinian I in 529. Well, Eastern Roman Emperor, but the Western Empire was gone having collapsed in 476; Justinian was out to stamp out anything but the state religion, "Christianity", in the Empire, which he pretty much did, the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 saying nothing happens in the church without the emperor. For which reason the 529 closing of the refounded Academy is often called the End of Antiquity.

The scholars sought haven in the Persian Sassanid Empire, and when the Persian and Byzantine empires made peace in 532, some of the scholars removed to Harran in what is now southeast Turkey. After the Sassanids lost to the Arabs, now Islamic, in 651, Harran became the first great centre of Islamic learning as the knowledge of classical antiquity was translated from Greek to Syriac to Arabic, while Europe, where all this stuff came from, was a complete mess. Helluva guy that Justinian, huh. The Eastern Orthodox think he's a saint, which I suppose makes sense for his old state church, but unfortunately so do some of us Lutherans.

Aristotle in turn founded the Lyceum in Athens in 335 BC, right beside the temple of Apollo of Light, Apollo Lykeios, hence the name. The Romans trashed it in 86 BC, and at an unknown point thereafter ceased to be. Its location was rediscovered in 1996, just east of modern downtown Athens. The word survives in modern European languages for roughly what we call high school in the US.

Here's how these ideas passed from the end of the ancient world with the fall of the Western Roman Empire to later times in the West. First was a guy named Martianus Capella, who sometime after Alaric, King of the Visigoths (Germanic types), trashed Rome in 410 wrote a book called De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii et de septem Artibus liberalibus libri novem, which means "On the Wedding of Philology and Mercury, and the Seven Liberal Arts, in Nine Books". The first two books are an allegorical love story about how Mercury, the pursuit of learning, actually learns by way of communicated information, Philology, and the remaining seven are textbooks in each of the seven arts we will detail below. They were largely based on existing ancient works, and the whole thing was pretty much an encyclopaedia of its time, which, when that knowledge began to show itself lacking, the whole thing started to appear lacking, and scholars now routinely diss him, when what is needed then as now is separating the system itself from the content of any given time.

Which is pretty much what the rest of this post is trying to establish.

Second was a guy named Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, who lived shortly thereafter. His best known work is On the Consolation of Philosophy (De consolatione philosophiae), written while awaiting execution by the Arian Western Roman Emperor Theodoric for supposed treason with the catholic Eastern Roman Emperor Justin. Boethius translated a bunch of ancient Greek works into Latin. In his rather free translation of Nicomachus' book on arithmetic he also set out the liberal arts, giving them the trivium and quadrivium names. In his On Music set out the three-fold division of music we shall detail below. His books remained standard authorities in universities for hundreds of years, and the Consolation is one of the most influential books ever written. While not part of the church's general calendar, in some places he is commemorated as a saint, St Severinus, with feast day 23 October.

You might hear that the liberal arts were originally seven, the first three being grammar, rhetoric and logic, also known as dialectic, a three-part way known in Latin and consequently to the West as the Trivium (from which our word trivial comes too, trivial matters being those you learn to get on to the heavy lifting of reality itself), and the last four being arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, the four-part way called the Quadrivium.

Nice to know, but doesn't tell you a damn thing about what this was all about, though it looks like it does, which is most of the problem understanding this stuff.

II. What the Seven Liberal Arts Actually Are.

Here is the structure of the Seven Liberal Arts.

The Three Part Way, the Trivium.
1. Grammar.
2. Rhetoric.
3. Logic (dialectic).

The Four Part Way, the Quadrivium.
4. Arithmetic. (Absolute Multitude)
5. Music. (Related Multitude)
6. Geometry. (Stationary Magnitude)
7. Astronomy. (Mobile Magnitude)

Again nice to know, but again doesn't tell you a damn thing about what this was all about, though again it looks like it does.

The Trivium was not grammar, rhetoric and logic exactly as we mean them now, nor even something learned for its own sake, but rather it was learning the tools by which one learns anything at all, just as a tradesman learns the tools of his trade before learning how to use them in the trade itself. Basically, Grammar was the study of how thought is written down in symbols (language), Rhetoric was the study of how thought is communicated from one person to another, and Logic was the study of how to think to reach supportable conclusions. Thus a person will be able to write down or speak his own thoughts rather than just let them rattle around in his head, evaluate whether the written or spoken thoughts of others are well written down or written to hide or disguise things, and evaluate his and others thoughts as to whether the content is supportable or based on unsupportable assertions and/or hidden assumptions which are deceptive.

Here's what the names of the liberal arts in the Quadrivium mean. Once you learned how to study anything at all, the stuff to be studied was divided into two big categories, things that are what they are as combinations of units, and things that are what they are as units that divide into further units. The former were called Multitudes, and further divided into those that are not applied to anything but abstract, which was called Arithmetic, and those that are applied to something, and that is called Music. The latter were called Magnitudes, and further divided into those that do not move, called Geometry, and those that do, called Astronomy.

Arithmetic then simply meant the study of number in the abstract, not applied to anything, just how numbers can be combined and used -- what is generally called math to-day. Music was using numbers to understand a phenomenon, and was further grouped into three areas: musica mundana, using number to quantify and understand the world outside ourselves, thus including what we generally call to-day physics, chemistry, and the like; musica humana, using number to quantify and understand the world inside ourselves, thus including what we generally call to-day biochenistry, psychology and the like; and finally and at the lowest level, musica instrumentalis, using number to understand the tones and combinations of tones produced by the instruments that produce them, including the human voice, which is what we generally now only mean by music, except, it includes only the understanding part, the actual making of this kind of music being simply a skill and not included for its own sake but left to the uneducated. Ironic: from a skill left to the uneducated, these days, being able to strum a few chords on a guitar and belt out a few words seems to immediately confer that status of prophet, revelator, visionary, and authority on whatever one belts out about.

Education had nothing whatever to do with earning a living. When the idea began, work did not ennoble, it debased, it was done by a class that, precisely because it had to work, could not possibly have time to learn what one needed to know to participate in democracy or high positions. Later, trades, something learned for the purpose of making a living, were learned in guilds, not universities, with the interesting twist that guilds formed first and universities began by borowing their ideas of how to organise from them! So show a little respect to the repairman that shows up next time you need one.

So, it's a system, first for learning how to learn, then for classifying what is to be learned, in order to be educated to fulfill the responsibilites of democracy and high office.

III. The Modern University.

In the original universities, a person who had completed a course of studies in the Seven Liberal Arts, and passed final examinations by his masters (teachers), was awarded the degree Bachelor of Arts.

What does this mean? Not what you would think based on the ordinary current meanings of these words -- the same problem again. "Arts" does not mean painting or sculpture or whatever, but the Seven Liberal Arts. "Bachelor" does not mean an unmarried male, but comes from the Latin baccalaureus, and originally referred to the lowest class of knight, a squire, or apprentice, to a knight, or a knight in the service of another knight. The word itself seems to have come from baccalaris, a man employed on a dairy farm. Bacca was a variant of late Latin vacca, which still survives in Spanish as vaca -- cow. The progress is similar to that of a guild learning a trade.

A Bachelor could then go on to further study, and then participating in and moderating disputations (disputationes). These were highly formalised debates on the truth of specific propositions, usually based on arguments from appropriate authorities (argumentum ad verecundiam), which are inappropiate to syllogistic logic, in which the syllogism is true or false based on its on its correct process and not who does it, but are common in informal logic, where since no-one can be an expert on everything one relies on those who supposedly are experts on this or that thing, and which is the origin of the ad hominum (against the man), which refutes a statement on the basis that the authority cited is no authority at all. On such further study and activity, a person would be awarded the degree Master of Arts, the Arts being the Seven Liberal Arts, and "master" deriving from the Latin magister, which looks like master but actually means teacher; one may now teach the Arts.

Luther's so-called "95 Theses" were an invitation to exactly such a Disputation.

A degree was simply a step, in Latin gradus, to becoming a teacher or master, hence the term "graduate", a progression again similar to the trade guilds and still seen in the apprentice, journeyman and master structure of qualification in the trades. Since the masters were teachers, they were also called doctors, from the Latin for "to teach". Over time, since the three higher fields of study were Law, Medicine and Philosophy, masters who went into these fields earned a a final doctor degree in them, and the doctoral degree in these higher faculties came to be regarded higher than the master teachers/doctors, eventually becoming the present Bachelor, Master, Doctor hierarchy, with later fields coming under the division of philosophy along with philosophy itself.

The story of the modern universities begins with the schools attached to monasteries, generally Benedictine, real monking monks, not just monked over, preserving some light against the darkness of the times, which times are known as the Dark Ages. Karl der Grosse, known to some as Charlemagne, who forged the first more or less unified state in Europe since the Roman Empire, was crowned Imperator Augustus by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day 800 at St Peter's Basilica (the old one; the current one is on the same site) to re-establish a Western entity against the still standing Eastern Roman Empire, and thus is considered the Father of Europe. Among his many accomplishments, he encouraged education. With the reforms of Pope St Gregory (died 12 March 604) for learning to include more than liturgy but also theology and canon law, bishops began to establish schools in their cathedral parishes to teach things beyond the monastery schools. Then, with demand far in excess of supply, plus the original town and gown tensions between students and townspeople, which were not pretty with rape and murder not uncommon and often protected by clerical immunity, schools gravitated to big cities.

The word university comes from the Latin phrase "universitas magistrorum et scholarium" which described and denoted these institutions, associations of students and teachers chartered by civil and/or ecclesiastical powers that be in their cities, with degrees granted by the institution itself, at bachelor, master and doctor levels. rather than licences or certificates from individual teachers as before, which adapted from the trade guilds the advancement stages of apprentice, journeyman and master onto a model drawn from the madrasahs of the Islamic world. (Notice how all this stuff, from Plato's Academy to the modern university, begins with schools attached to houses of worship? Hmm.)

Thus first of the modern degree-granting universities, growing out of existing centres of higher education, was established in Bologna (1088), followed by Paris (1160), Oxford (1167) and Cambridge (1209). The final step was recognition by papal bull of a university's autonomy from the city, the church, and each other, meaning non-interference from the state, the church (the proverbial "academic freedom") and also that a graduate from one could teach anywhere jus ubique docendi, with no further examination.

In Bologna, the students ran things, hiring the teachers; in Paris, the church hired and paid the teachers who ran things, and in Oxford, the crown did. These differences had major consequences. Bologna was not a comfortable place for teachers and fell into decline; Paris became the leading university and really the great granddaddy of the modern university but was abolished in the French Revolution centuries later; government sponsorship of Oxford and the later Cambridge (1209) allowed them to survive the replacement of the church with the state Church of England.

A student entered the university at about age 15, and after a six year curriculum in the Liberal Arts, usually with an emphasis on logic, if they passed graduated a Bachelor of Arts. Courses were not by subject so much as by the authoritative book studied, often from Aristotle, the Bible, or the Thoughts (often called the Sentences, from the Latin title Quattuor libri sententiarum, or Four Books of Thoughts, still reflected in the idea that a "sentence" should express a complete thought) of Peter the Lombard, who taught in the cathedral school at Paris. Having graduated from the Faculty of the (Seven Liberal) Arts one could go into the world, or continue in one of the three other, further, fields of Law, Medicine or Theology, which would take another 12 years or so.

IV. How It Fell Apart.

So what's the point of all this -- I'm into old stuff that isn't the way it is any more and think you should be too? No, and hell no. For as much "old stuff" as I post on this blog, I wouldn't consider any of it worth a ginger snap if it didn't do two things for us now: make where we are a little clearer and more understandable by seeing how we got here, and make where we are a little clearer and more understandable by seeing what was the idea of where we were supposed to be going in the first place.

Here's what happened. New knowledge did not replace invalidated knowledge in the system as it should have, but was confused with the system itself and brought the system down, and thus we have the start of our fragmented knowledge and view of learning to-day. This began when difficulties in reconciling Aristotle with Christian doctrine became more and more apparent, and the bishops of Paris issued a series of formal Condemnations, most notably those of 1277 by bishop Etienne Tempier, which had the effect of allowing scientific investigation to proceed without reference to Aristotle the great authority.

Which was great for science, but also had the effect of making everything previously held now seem possibly wrong or soon to be found out to be wrong.

A new direction in thought arose, best summed up in the maxim of the English Franciscan William of Occam, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, or no more things should be thought to exist than necessary. This was a lex parsimoniae or law of parsimony that brought about a new way of thinking that was skeptical to agnostic, and consciously saw itself as a new way and called itself such, the via moderna or modern way, as opposed to the trivium and quadrivium which became the via antinqua or old way. This turned up in every field, in music (as we use the term now) it was called the Ars nova, a term first used by the theorist Phillippe de Vitry in a book by the same name of in 1322.

Music that was not monophonic chant but polyphonic, with secular themes being placed over a base of a piece of chant, music in duple time rather than triple reflecting the perfection of the Trinity, music written this way for religious purposes -- utterly revolutionary, and part of the shift in the times happening from the arts to theology itself. What a modern irony that some to-day will perform the motets of Machaut, the greatest of ars nova composers, and be thought to be real fuddy duddys, but Machaut himself in his day was thought of as an affront to everything right and proper for worship!

It was into this world turned upside down and inside out that Martin Luther, having graduated from schools that focussed on the trivium, enrolled at 17 in University of Erfurt in the first year of the 16th century, 1501, graduated with a Master degree in 1505, and went on to the Law school following his father's wishes and the usual pattern. He soon dropped out. Questioning everything, positing as little as possible, and so on was all fine, but at what point did it yield reliable results, also known as answers, which is particularly upsetting regarding the claims of Christian doctrine which have some pretty extreme claims of salvation and damnation.

There being no answers, he sought one in what was available, the rigours of the actions of monastic life, to the extent that his superior, Johann von Staupitz, Vicar General of the Augustinian Order in Germany, had him continue an academic career in theology to take his mind off his own salvation, and also spoke to him about the Means of Grace and salvation through the death and resurrection of Christ, which, though Staupitz was no Lutheran and lamented the breaking of visible church unity, got him put on Rome's Index of Forbidden Books!

V. Where We Are Now.

Seems long ago and far away, but it is into exactly this same world turned upside down and inside out than we are born now, just with better means of communication. Each age along the way seems to think it has started a new age, a new way, a modern way, an Age of Aquarius, an Enlightenment, or whatever, simply repeating the confusion of the via moderna with better technology. Likewise our supposedly enlightened modern world, where graduates can't count back change in their minimum wage jobs, or reliably point on the map to where the people came from toward which they have been taught warm inclusive fuzzies, or hear a news report with an ear to whether or not it contains unexamined assumptions from which supposed conclusions are drawn.

Those first universities are still around right now. US News & World Report puts out school rankings annually, one for the US, but one world-wide based in turn on the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings. This would be then a list of the top universities in the world, 400 in all. In the rankings for 2010, published 18 June 2009, the very first university in the modern sense, University of Bologna, founded 1088, is still among the best in the world, coming in at #192. Oxford and Cambridge even better, coming in at #4 and #3 respectively! (BTW, who's #1 and #2? Harvard and Yale, respectively.) The University of Paris, though it was abolished per se by the French Revolution, has a number of institutions with historical links to it, some of them using the locational name Sorbonne, and several of them are ranked.

For that matter, if one wants to look beyond the modern degree-granting university to institutions of higher education generally, arguably the oldest degree-granting institution is one of those madrasahs, now the University of Al-Karaouine, in Morocco, dating from 859, when Europe was a bloody mess barely held to-gether educationally by the grand and glorious hard working and uproarious Benedictines. Along the lines of universities not originally universities in the modern sense, the line goes back much further, to Nanjing University, which is now a modern university but was founded in China in 258, and after a ton of bumps along the way you know what, STILL hangs in ranked #143 in the world!

Recent decades have seen an astounding increase in the ability of thoughts and information to be communicated, starting with mass printing some time ago but exploding first with the coming of radio, then TV, and now the Internet and other forms of digital media; and at the same time have seen an alarming decrease in the apparent ability of people to form, communicate and evaluate thoughts and information. Where the ability to smarten up exists to an unprecedented extent, the fact of dumbing down is seen everywhere.

Amid an unprecedented ability to communicate information, people seem to have less information and less ability to critically evaluate information than ever. And this largely not because people are any more smart or stupid than before, but because educators themselves have nearly totally lost sight of this, that the magnificent increase in the media of communication does not invalidate but in fact makes more needed than ever the basic tools for forming, setting forth, and understanding what is communicated.

This general dumbing down of society is not new, it was noticed decades ago, but it has assumed warp speed as the very means of communication develop at warp speed too. One of the earliest, and still best, more applicable to-day to the means that did not exist when it was written than ever, is an essay called "The Lost Tools of Learning" by Dorothy L Sayers in 1947. She was best known for her detective novels, a genre generally considered "low brow", and that such a magnificent and magnificently educated mind as hers should equally well write best selling detective novels exemplfies what this is all about.

Her essay is online now. You can read it here: http://web.archive.org/web/20040415041359/http://redeemerclassical.org/lost_tools.php

Another, and more recent, modern exposition of these tools of learning is by Sister Miriam Joseph of the Sisters of the Holy Cross at St Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana, called, guess what, "The Trivium". Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2002. Available through Amazon easily.

VI. Conclusion. Where We Could Be.

So, again, the Liberal Arts are a system for first learning how to learn, the Trivium, then for classifying what is to be learned in order to be educated to fulfill the responsibilities of democracy and high office, the Quadrivium. It's not at all about going back to the "Music of the spheres", in which the mathematical ratios in tones and in the orbits of the sun and planets around the earth were though to be the same, reading Aristotle, learning Latin, or anything like that -- though there's good reason to do the last two. What happened was, as some of the knowledge taught within the system was later found to be either incomplete or just false, like what orbits around what, the system itself and more importantly the overall unity of things which it expressed also came into question.

The point of the Lutheran Reformation was not to create a new church or even split the one there was, but to bring back to front and centre the Means of Grace through which salvation is communicated and the message of salvation through the blood of Christ itself -- to paraphrase Luther, making the most clear things about the church what had become the most obscure amid the Roman confusion. The direction in which the later more general Reformation went, which began even in Luther's lifetime, was as opposed by Luther and Lutherans as the errors of Rome.

Perhaps another reformation is needed, not a religious but an educational one, where the tools of learning are actually taught, where a person is then taught how to handle abstact operations, operations applied to things as they add up, how complicated things break down and how that is applied to things. Perhaps that would be education, the basics for participating in our society, open to all now, rather than the latest theories of what is "enlightened" this week, which are handed down as so modern but amount to no more than secular articles of faith handed down "ex cathedra" from an authority which, when it takes itself to be such, violates the very parsimony and science it thinks it passes on, as it neither guarantess a correct conclusion nor prevents a false one and may not even be applicable to a particular field, and if applied to all fields as a universal principle, violates its very definition!

Oh Yeah, an Addendum.

There was this second cousin of Martianus Capella, with a variant spelling of the last name, Antonius Cappella, who wrote thousands of pieces of music, in a wide array of styles but all vocal, that are still performed to this day. You can spot them easily. They are all identified by the way he signed his name, A Cappella.

OK, I'm just jacking around now. A cappella actually means "from the chapel" and was used to designate purely vocal Renaissance polyphony generally for the church from the later Baroque concertato style which featured alternating vocal and instrumental parts in a piece of music. Oddly enough, we now know those "vocal" motets were often doubled on instruments, but the first modern "musicologists" didn't know that, so singing "a cappella" has come to mean pretty much any music that is singing only, no instruments.

Except for a small school of hard cores, in a city named for its big reeds, Acapulco de Juarez in Mexico, who wouldn't use the reeds for instruments, so the style is also called singing Acapulco. OK I'm jacking around there too.

But for real, I'm happy to say my alma mater, the University of Iowa, from which I got my MA and PhD degrees, ranks #219 worldwide, not too shabby for a relative newcomer only organised 25 February 1847 in what had just become a state only 59 days before! And I'm also happy to say that Luther thought the plays of Terence, after whom I was named IRL, were excellent for children's learning.

And what's an "alma mater"? Hoo boy. It's Latin for "nourishing mother". In the Roman Empire it meant the Mother Goddess, Venus, the Roman version of Aphrodite, who was called Venus genetrix, Mother Venus. In the Roman Church this morphed into Mary, Jesus' mother, Mater dei genitrix. As an academic reference it comes from the phrase "alma mater studiorum", which means nourishing mother of studies. In 2000 it was adopted as the motto of, guess who, the oldest modern university, the University of Bologna, right on the heels of the 1999 signing of the Bologna Declaration signed there by the ministers of education of 29 European countries, which while aiming at a greater standardisation of European higher education, seems to do so from the standpoint of corporations and the World Trade Organisation (WTO)-- cutting costs, getting a job. getting competitive -- read, winning against or at least getting your slice of the pie with other players -- etc.

Oy.

(Textual Note: This post is a complete revision of my earlier similarly titled one, also incorporating my immediately prior one plus additional material.)

Where are the universities now?

On 22 April 2009 I posted "Readin', Writin' and Absolute Multitude. Lyceum 2009", about the whole idea of higher education since ancient Greece. So where is it now?

This time of year, a lot of school rankings come out, and I got interested to check them out. A very often used one is published by US News and World Report. There's two actually, one worldwide, and the other for the US. The latter is broken down into various categories, making it hard to just flat out rate them -- of course, flat out rating them is hard too, and some say impossible -- so I'll stick to the worldwide one, dated 18 June 2009, which is in turn based on the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings. This would be then a list of the top universities in the world, 400 in all.

I guess we like top ten lists, so here's the first ten, in order: Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, Oxford, Cal Tech, Imperial College London, University College London, U Chicago, MIT and Columbia.

The highest ranking institution in continental Europe is ETH Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, founded 1854, at #24. However, the highest ranking institution outside of the present or former British Empire or Commonwealth is the University of Tokyo, founded 1877, at #19.

The original universities in the modern sense, mentioned in the earlier post, are still hanging right in there. The oldest university, from which we even get the word university, University of Bologna, founded 1088, is still hanging in there, ranked among the finest in the world at #192. Good show, old girl!

It's a little hard tellin' from there. The University of Paris may be next oldest, founded 1160 or maybe a little before, but then again it doesn't matter as the University effectively ceased to exist with the French Revolution. Some time later it was revived, sort of, now supposedly is an association of thirteen universities, but that only dates from after student strikes in the late 1960s, and is reorganising again, so while several of the current thirteen are ranked, it's not exactly the old University of Paris.

Oxford may be the second oldest anyway, depending on what you take as its founding date. 1167 is often given, but there was teaching before that at least since 1096, however it really took off in 1167 when King Henry II banned English students from going to University of Paris. It's holding up pretty well though, #4 in the world. Cambridge rounds out the list, being founded in 1209, though there was teaching there before that, by Oxford scholars upset that the town actually hung scholars for murder -- "Academic freedom" was supposed to cover that -- and is still hanging in at #3.

So, of the current top ten, two (Oxford and Cambridge) are among the very first six universities, and of those six three still directly survive, and not only survive, two of them (Oxford and Cambridge) are in the top ten now, and the third, the oldest and first (Bologna), is STILL among the ranked, and of the other three, one (University of Paris) has several ranked later institutions with historical links to it, and the other two have historical links to the unranked University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.

Well, what the hell. All these resulted from applying structural elements from the trade guilds to models from Islamic schools anyway, the madrasahs, which like their later Christian counterparts grew out of schools attached to houses of worship. The oldest of those Islamic schools, and arguably then the oldest degree granting institution in the world, is the University of Al-Karaouine, in Morocco, dating from 859, when Europe was a bloody mess barely held to-gether educationally by the grand and glorious hard working and uproarious Benedictines.

The madrasahs did not grant degrees from the institution itself, but rather licences granted by each specific teacher, and if one looks away from the institutional degree that characterises the modern university, the line goes back much further to Nanjing University, now a modern university but founded in China in 258 and after a ton of bumps along the way you know what, STILL hanging in ranked #143 in the world!

I'm happy to say my alma mater, the University of Iowa, from which I got my MA and PhD degrees, ranks #219 worldwide, not too shabby for a relative newcomer only organised in 1847 in what had just become a state only the year before!

St Monica and Vatican II For Lutherans. 27 August 2009.

We Lutherans -- that is, Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, insofar as the name has not been removed or hidden so people don't think we're some kind of frozen chosen, maintenance rather than missional mentality, wannabe Catholics stuck in a Eurocentric liturgical straight-jacket for worship rather than ablaze to bring you to a critical event and get you all on fire with our praise band -- are about to celebrate the Feast of St Monica on 27 August.

Thing is, the Feast of St Monica is 4 May.

Huh? Who cares? What difference does that make? And who is and why bother about this Monica anyway? The last Monica anyone heard about was Lewinsky! Besides, it's all adiaphora, right, why trample on my Christian Freedom with all this dead weight from the past?

Monica was the mother of St Augustine. Geez, whozzat? Well, arguably the most influential Christian theologian ever. We'll leave whether that was for better or worse, as well as biographies, to your searches or Wikipedia. Except for this part: Augustine was quite non-Christian, anti-Christian really, and a celebrated figure in his time, and his conversion was brought about by the example and prayers of his Christian mother, Monica, which is why the church honours her.

When the church sets up a day in honour of someone, the traditional practice is to choose the day on which the person died, if known, since that is the day they were born into eternity. St Augustine's date of death, his heavenly birthday, is 28 August 430, so 28 August is his feast.

St Monica's feast day was not a part of the overall observance of the Western Church for about three-fourths of its elapsed history to date, until about the time of the Council of Trent in the Sixteenth Century. However, it was long observed by the Augustinian Order. Geez, whazzat?

The "Augustinian Order" is a rather motley assortment of religious associations rather than a clear cut single entity -- in this way rather like my guys, the Benedictines -- all of them tracing their origin to St Augustine and his rule of life, or regula in Latin. That's what it literally is to be regular -- you live under a regula, or rule. Readers here may have heard of one such Augustinian. Guy named Martin Luther. Anyway, in the Augustinian Order but not the church as a whole there was, besides the observance of the feast of St Augustine on 28 August, another one whose focus was his conversion to Christianity, which conversion in turn influenced the entire church.

This Augustinian feast, the Feast of the Conversion of St Augustine, was/is celebrated on 5 May. So they celebrated the single biggest human factor in bringing about that conversion, the example and prayers of his mother, St Monica, the day before, 4 May. The Conversion feast never did make it into the overall Roman Calendar, and when St Monica's did, since her date of death is not known, the traditional Augustinian date was retained, 4 May. Simple.

Until the Revolution. Er, Vatican II.

One of the stated aims of the "liturgical reform" at Vatican II was to pare down the historical hodgepodge of stuff into something more straightforward and accessible. So they effectively banned the old stuff and came up with an entirely new order (novus ordo), sporting four "Eucharistic Prayers", several new options for other key parts of the Mass, a new lectionary of readings spread out over three years, and a new calendar -- a new hodgepodge crafted from an even wider spread of historical sources! Oh well, it was the 1960s after all. I guess you gotta make allowances for that.

One small item in this was relocating the Feast of St Monica to 27 August, the day before the feast of her son. There's a logic to that. And as far as the institution of Christ and fidelity to Scripture goes, you can celebrate the Feast of St Monica on 4 May, 27 August, any other day, or not at all.

However, it's not the 1960s any more. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to learn or be taught that we honour St Monica because of her example, particularly her example of the power of persistent prayer, in the conversion of her pagan son, who went on to be one of the church's greatest saints, and we do so on 4 May because in the religious order that looks to her son as their patron saint they had long celebrated it on 4 May, the day before they celebrated the conversion of their patron on 5 May. And to stay connected to and become a part of that ongoing history by leaving it there rather than turning one's back on all that and relocating it.

Sorry, Roman dudes. There already was a liturgical reform. It was to pare down all right, but in view of what contradicts Scripture, not our ideas of what makes something more "accessible", and to zealously guard and defend the worship of the church's existing order, not invent a new one. It's called the Lutheran Reformation. You're a few centuries late to the party. If the Roman hierarchy and associated academics are going to busy themselves with something other than preaching Christ and him crucified, and along the way explain the history of this movement, let them put off the period clothes, get married and raise a family and learn something of real benefit to their fellow man, like heating and air conditioning repair.

Yet, we and other Christian bodies now fall in line with them as if there had been no Reformation! The 1960s Roman novus ordo, with emendations and adaptations, is now the common property of pretty much all other heterodox Christian denominations with liturgical aspirations, rather than the traditional order of the Western Church.

And "our beloved synod" falls into line too, even those parts of it trying to remain true to our Confessions in the Book of Concord. We moan and groan why other parts of our beloved synod seem to be heading off on all sorts of tangents, or rather, variations on the tangent of chasing after the success in attracting numbers of the American suburban "evangelical" megachurches that will drive you with purpose and give you your best life now.

We wonder how our people could be taken in by these false hopes and promises, yet, why should our people not wonder why these are not also valid options when we set before them as confessional "options" modelled after 1960s Rome equally with our common catholic history, this historical mass and that Vatican II For Lutherans mass, this historical lectionary and that Vatican II For Lutherans lectionary, this historical calendar and that Vatican II For Lutherans calendar. Why not listen to Willow Creek and Saddleback and Lakewood too? Why should they not think it's all about options, personal preference, all OK? We let something in through the back door then wonder why it comes knocking at the front!

Even in a small matter like when a saint's day is observed the whole rotten Roman mess in the church is revealed, and its adoption/adaptation by other church bodies!

St Monica gave St Augustine physical birth, but her greatness for which we honour her is not that but in her role in his spiritual birth in this life. Therefore she is better honoured by leaving her day where it is for the reason it is there, or better yet finally inserting the Conversion into the Calendar, rather than moving it from a day which does have inherent reference to her to the day before her son's feast, which does not.

Once again, the calendar, lectionary and ordo of Vatican II all miss the mark, even of its own intended reform, the product not of the Christian church but one denomination headed by an office bearing the marks of Anti-Christ -- regardless of its current occupancy by a nice and learned German guy -- and now the common property of all heterodox liturgical churches in the West, utterly irrelevant to Christ's Church and therefore should be utterly irrelevant to Lutherans.

Right along with Saddleback, Willow Creek and Lakewood, Rome no less than they offers "contemporary worship" whose forms derive from and express a content that is not ours and rejects ours, derived from an agenda that is not ours and rejects ours, and therefore into which our content does not fit nor should we try to make it fit, and abandon that part of our mission which is to zealously guard and defend the mass, for the most part retaining the ceremonies previously in use, when we do.

15 August. The Dormitory of Mary.

Yeah I know, it's the Dormition of Mary, aka the Assumption.

Dormition, dormitory all from the Latin for "to sleep". One of the dormitories where I went to university was called St Mary Hall, formally. It was just "Mary Hall" otherwise. Everyone went there whether they had a room there (I didn't) or friends there (I did) or not. Reason being, St Mary Cafeteria, or Mary Caf -- the culture may include tendencies which may strike those unfamiliar with it as unduly familiar, even slightly irreverent -- which wasn't so much a cafeteria as an on-campus restaurant and gathering place.

Mary Caf was not the regular cafeteria where those with a meal plan, which being a rural campus not in any town was just about everyone, ate. Rather, it was where one ate burgers and stuff like that on their own time, and dime. So why is a restaurant called a cafeteria when it really isn't? Well, the regular cafeteria wasn't called a cafeteria either, but a refectory, so the word was available.

Holy crap, what's a refectory? Comes from the Latin reficere, to restore, which gave rise to the word refectorium, a room where you get restored, ie eat. It's a monk thing, and being a Benedictine institution we were all about that. Now, in a real refectory, according to the Rule (as in Rule of St Benedict for monasteries, geez do I have to explain everything?) meals are eaten in silence, one guy reads from Scripture or the saints (that's lectio divina, or divine reading) and no meat from mammals except if you're sick.

However, in the very heart of the most venerable tradition, Benedictine in particular and Catholic in general, it ain't really like that. As more and more "feasts" came in to the church calendar, the meals got better, and, by the time it took four digits to write the year, the obvious solution was to eat other better food in another room. Not have your cake in one room, eat it in another. Perfect.

And in a student refectory, where the teaching monks ate too, as distinct from the monking refectory of the monkatorium itself, there ain't no lectio divina and ain't much of anything done in silence either.

So it don't get no more Benedictine than to have the refectory and Mary Caf, the official restoring room and the other one on the side. Hey, don't laugh, the Eastern Orthodox, as usual, amp it up even more. In their monkeries the refectory is called the Trapeza, always with at least one icon and sometimes a ruddy church unto itself, altar, iconostasis and all.

And they got this Lifting of the Panagia to end the meal too. What's a Panagia? It's the prosphoron from which you take a chunk in honour of the Theotokos. What the hell izzat? The former is the loaf used in the Eucharist, the latter is Mary. After the service, the refectorian (don't freak, it's the monk who runs the refectory) cuts a triangle out of it, cuts the rest in half, puts it on a tray, the boys go over to the refectory with the tray in the lead, and after the meal there is a ceremony in which the refectorian says "Bless me, holy fathers, and pardon me a sinner", the assembled holy fathers say "May God pardon and have mercy on you" (as if he had not already done so at Calvary, but I digress), then he says echoing the liturgy "Great is the name" and the boys chime in with "of the Holy Trinity", then comes "O all-holy Mother of God help us" and the reply "At her prayers, O God, have mercy and save us" (as if he ..., oh well), then accompanied by a dude with censer offers it, each holy father taking a piece between thumb and forefinger, running it through the incense, and eating it.

Now that's some serious monking. Judas H Priest, we're a bunch of Bavarians, or at least the joint was founded by them: closest we came to anything like that was to make sure you went back for more of the good dark bread before they ran out. Closest I'm gonna come to it now is the lifting of the Panera. They got wi-fi too. I still don't like white bread, though, and will take a wheat or dark bread every time. Every time. Still call a dining room the refectory once in a while too. It's a spiritual thing.

So we had our refectory and our "cafeteria" named for Mary. Later, the food service would open a more night oriented spot, Der Keller, which means the cellar or basement in German, in the cellar of the old main building, though it took a new food service director who was a Baptist from Alabama to come up with the idea. Now that's my kind of Baptist! Also my kind of refectorian. Hell, with the secular and ecclesiastical sides of the 1960s both raging, he was more German and Benedictine at heart than the German Benedictines.

And Mary? Just as Gabriel said, full of grace, the Lord was with her; blessed is she among women and blessed is the fruit of her womb, Jesus. And if you're looking for a little direction, there is no better example than her submission in faith to God -- for which she for all she knew at the time ran the risk of execution as an adulteress, to survive that only to see her son executed as a criminal, if one's cost of discipleship is seeming a little high -- and no better direction than she herself gave to those wanting her to sort things out one time at the wedding in Cana, "Do whatever he tells you".

"Our Father", Our Kaddish.

It may surprise some Christians to know that the "Lord's Prayer" is not a new prayer written by the Lord. The bigger surprise is, once it is understood where the prayer comes from, what the Lord was about in giving us this prayer becomes much richer and fuller.

The Lord's Prayer is given in the New Testament in two places. One is Luke 11:1-4, the other is Matthew 6:9-13. In Luke, the context is, Jesus had finished praying, and a disciple then asks him to teach them how to pray, as John the Baptist had done. In Matthew, the context is rather the Sermon on the Mount, in the course of which Jesus says not to go on and on with repetitions and many words, thinking God impressed with that or Man might be. The prayer then given is not identical in all details.

What does this mean? There really is no Lord's Prayer, or if there is there were two traditions of it, so in any case this is not really something from Jesus but rather from the believing community confessing its faith, or on the other hand it is an original prayer by Jesus and therefore new, different, and above all others?

Neither.

The prayer would have been instantly recognisable to his hearers as a concise Kaddish.

What does this mean? Let's start with what a kaddish is. The word means "sanctification". The prayer began as a doxology. Oh oh, what's a doxology. That word comes from the Greek doxa meaning "glory"; a doxology is a set prayer of praise to God. The kaddish began as a prayer of praise to God after a rabbi had delivered a sermon on the aggadic aspect of Scripture. Yikes, what's an Aggadah? Simple. Discussion of the legal stuff in the Hebrew Bible is called halakhah; discussion of anything else about the Bible is called aggadah.

So, a kaddish is a doxology after an aggadic discussion, or in other words, a prayer of praise to God after a sermon on the non-legal things in the Bible. It began when Aramaic was the everyday language of most Jews -- still the case in the time of Jesus, whose everyday language that was -- and soon became a regular feature in services, and is said in Aramaic to this day in the synagogue. It is always said standing, and facing Jerusalem.

The Kaddish opens based on Ezechiel 38:23, and continues with a congregational response based on Daniel 2:20. Centuries later, variant forms came to be associated with mourners, and to the extent Christians may have heard of a kaddish at all, it is usually in this late context, which was established by the Crusades, not a favourable event to Jews, in the 13th Century.

There are now four main forms of the Kaddish: The Chatzi Kaddish or Half Kaddish; the Kaddish Yatom or Mourner's Kaddish; the Kaddish Shalem or Whole Kaddish; the Kaddish d'Rabbanan or Rabbi's Kaddish. They reflect the original Kaddish, the later one for mourners, a longer Kaddish which ends the synagogue service, and one more for use after rabbinic teaching and study in a service or a class, respectively. The Kaddish, along with the Shema and the Amidah, which we will treat elsewhere, are the three main prayers of Jewish non-Temple public worship.

What is now called the Half Kaddish is the basic one, and is said between the sections of the synagogue service. One such is after the reading of the Torah portion, meaning the particular section of the Books of Moses read that Sabbath from the annual reading through of the Torah. The Torah portion is then followed by the Maftir portion, a reading of a related section, called the haftorah, from the Prophets. This btw is where the Christian practice of reading a Gospel portion and a related Epistle portion at services comes from.

It is an honour to be called up to read these selections. It's called the Aliyah, or ascent, as one comes forth to read, and is exactly what Jesus was doing in Luke 4:16-21 when he was called up to read the haftorah from Isaias, and the basic Kaddish would have been said just before, at the conclusion of the Torah portion.

Just as it would have knocked their socks off -- well, if they were wearing socks, but you get the point -- to hear "To-day this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing", so would his giving, whether as part of an open-air sermon or as an answer to a disciple, not some great new way to pray but his statement of the basic kaddish as how his disciples are to pray! Just as his later transformation of the familiar Passover kiddush (don't freak, that's just Hebrew for a sanctification, a blessing) into "This is my body" and "This is my blood" would too.

What does this mean? That Jesus really said nothing new, the "Lord's Prayer" is really no big deal, he really was just an observant Jew after all, we have nothing here all that remarkable?

Nothing of the sort.

Everything about Jesus is exactly like the prayer he gave, and the prayer he gave is exactly like everything else about him. Jesus was nothing new only and strictly in the sense that he fulfilled what God gave before, namely, the preparation that was the Law toward the fulfillment of his promise of salvation after Man's revolt against him, often called the Fall, in the Gospel. This was not a break but a fulfillment and transformation; one does not break what one fulfills and transforms.

Just as he fulfilled the Law with the Gospel or Good News of his death and resurrection for us, just as in his Divine Service he fulfills the synagogue service with the Service of the Word and the Passover with the Eucharist, just as in his Divine Office he fulfills the daily times of prayer and Temple sacrifice, so here he fulfills the Kaddish in both its public and personal uses.

This is why we pray it exactly as a kaddish, our kaddish in the form he gave us, at mass, at baptisms, in our morning and evening prayers (whether in the Divine Office or simpler formats), at marriages, at meals, at all times from celebration to desperation and everything in between, with the sick and the dying, and yes, as mourners at funerals.

In doing so we are connected both to him, and with him then as with everything about our life in Christ to that to which he is connected, the whole course of the fulfillment of the promise of God his Father now Our Father, to Jew and Gentile alike, which is our full, complete, and free salvation!

Which is why the name of the prayer is traditionally the Our Father, not only from the Hebrew custom of naming a text after its first word or two, but because that custom reflects the gift that is ours in the Kaddish he passed on to us -- not just a god, or even God out there somewhere, but Our Father, Vater unser, Padre nuestro, Pater noster, because of his Son and our Saviour Jesus Christ.

And while we're at it, we might note that when he taught us to pray, he specifically did not do and in fact warned against, any coming up with some new prayer and worship as if that will really put us over with Man or impress God, but instead referred us to what we already have, fulfilled in him.

Robert Barnes, DD, Martyr. 30 July 2009.

I like this guy. There aren't a whole lot of English Lutherans. I'm not one either. However, my ancestors are from Suffolk, and I professed the Lutheran faith, taught in Scripture and correctly stated in the Book of Concord, when I was 46. Close enough. At least to really admire Robert Barnes.

Robert Barnes was born about 1495 in Lynn, formally Kings Lynn, Norfolk, England. Norfolk, Suffolk; the North folk and the South folk of East Anglia, once its own kingdom, named after ourselves, the Angles, named in turn from where we came, Angeln, or Anglia in the international language of the day, Latin, in the modern state of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, way up North damn near, er, just South of Denmark.

Before us, a Brythonic tribe called the Iceni lived in the area. Who are the Brythons? A Celtic tribe whose land it was before we, the Saxons, the Danes, the Vikings and yet more starting piling in. It's from them that we get the word Britain, British, etc. The Romans invaded Britain in 43 BC, called the place Brittania, and as they did in many places left the local stuff pretty much alone so long as they obeyed the Roman governors. Despite revolts here and there, including the great one by the Iceni queen Boudica, they held out until about 400 AD. That's when the Saxons from Germany moved in, uninvited, the bleeders.

We were invited. The Iceni ended up pretty much wiped out, but in 433 the Brythons asked us if we'd like to come over and settle since things were getting a bit sparse, and help against the Picts too. How about that -- in a world history of pretty much conquer and re-conquer everywhere, we were invited to come! We're all like that -- look at the irenic tone that steps back from controversy, the staid measured writing style, for which I am known throughout the Lutheran blogosphere. About 520, the North folk and the South folk united to form the Kingdom of East Anglia, one of seven kingdoms that emerged in what would become the United Kingdom.

East Anglia is called such to this day as a region of England, generally also including Cambridgeshire to the West and often Essex to the South too. Anglia is the root of the words England and English for the whole thing and its language, East Anglian or not.

Lynn, in Norfolk, shows its Celtic origins in that the name simply means "lake" in Celtic. Robert Barnes was born there, and went to Cambridge for the university there, where he was associated with the Augustinian friars, same as Luther. Seems that in 1209, some Oxford scholars upset at the hanging of two Oxford scholars for murder went to the school there and turned it into a university, the second oldest in the English speaking world. Ah, the pure pursuit of learning, when academic freedom also included no prosecution for murdering and raping locals. Call it academic immunity. Well, at least there actually is a bridge over a river Cam.

Anyway, Barnes also hung out at the White Horse Tavern, aka White Horse Inn, in Cambridge where starting about 1521 groups met to discuss Luther and his thought, including Thomas Cranmer, Miles Coverdale, William Tyndale, and others. In 1523 he graduated Doctor of Divinity, or Divinitatis doctor, from Cambridge. At Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve 1525, Barnes preached an openly Lutheran sermon, at St Edward's church in Cambridge. He was brought up on charges, examined by Thomas Cardinal Wolsey -- a Suffolk boy, from Ipswich -- Lord Chancellor to the King, Henry VIII, and ended up being sent to jail in 1526.

He escaped two years later, made his way to Antwerp and then Wittenberg, where he met Luther and was a house guest in his home. I'm guessing they spoke Latin to each other. Maybe he learned German, like me, hanging around with the fellas. While there, as Luther noted in his work to be mentioned below, he used neither his title nor his name, enrolling simply as Antonius Anglus (there's the Angle thing again).

In 1536 he was able to return to England, working as a liason between the English government and Lutheran rulers and churchmen in Germany. In 1535 they sent him back to Germany, to get Lutheran support for Henry's efforts to get a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and Henry's vision of reformation in England. He didn't get it, and Henry never forgot it. Later, he was asked to help in the annulment of Henry's marriage to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, really Anna von Juelich-Kleve-Berg, (that's near Duesseldorf) daughter of the Duke there, John II, and promised at age 12 to be the wife of Francis I, Duke of Lorraine, but Cromwell thought she'd make a hell of a wife for Henry, Barnes was involved in helping with that, and it happened.

Henry was not all that into the idea, hoped Cromwell could find a way out, but there was too much at stake in alliances with the Germans for that, so they were married 6 January 1540 by bleeding Cranmer himself, but there was no consummation of the marriage and by Summer Henry wanted out, and an annulment was granted on the basis of the contract with Francis and there having been no consummation, which, in more contemporary language, means no sex. She fared pretty well in contrast to Henry's other wives, and for going along with annulment she lived out her life relatively well.

But those involved with setting the marriage up didn't fare so well. Henry already had refused to accept Lutheran theology, the Six Articles of 1539 effectively renounced Lutheranism and affirmed Roman practices considered abuses by Lutherans, and the annulment in 1540 worked against Barnes. He preached against Bishop Stephen Gardiner (another Suffolk boy), active in the enforcement of Catholic doctrine, in the Spring, was forced to recant, then recanted his recant and professed the Lutheran faith, for which he and two others were burnt alive for heresy under the Six Articles, along with three others for treason for denying royal supremacy over the church, on 30 July, 1540.

In Germany, Lutherans and Catholics alike were shocked and outraged. Luther took Barnes' final confession of faith, translated or had it translated into German, wrote a preface to it himself, and published it later that year (1540) as Bekenntnis des Glaubens.

Cromwell was executed 28 July 1540, two days before, by beheading in the Tower of London. Thomas Cranmer, who would become the first non-Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, who believed in the right of the king to determine the faith of the nation and all its people, which makes it hard when you go back and forth between Catholic and "Anglican" monarchs, recanted his recantation of his recantation, whatever, and was burnt at the stake 21 March 1556 under the Catholic Queen Mary. The Six Articles, btw, affirmed 1) transubstantiation, 2) communion in host only, 3) clerical celibacy, 4) vows of chastity, 5) private masses, 6) auricular confession, private confession of sins to a priest.

Henry VII, in 1521 published Assertio septem sacramentorum, A Defence of the Seven Sacraments, which he had shown to Wolsey and then expanded as an attack on Luther's De captivitate babylonica of 1520 -- a key influence on me -- dedicated it to Pope Leo X, who in turn named Henry Fidei defensor, Defender of the Faith, on 17 October 1521, but after Henry decided he was head of the church in England in 1530 Pope Paul III revoked the title and Henry was excommunicated, but the English Parliament restored it as the monarch to this day remains Supreme Governor of the Church of England, formally above the "Archbishop" of Canterbury. Prince Charles said in 1994 he wants it changed to Defender of Faith, not the Faith.

Well, rock on Church of England/Anglican Communion. We needed Barnes then, and we need him now. Happily we no longer live under the idea that rulers are agents of God with the right to choose the religion of their people. Barnes himself struggled to find his way between the political reality of this idea in his time and spreading the Gospel in reforming Christ's church. In England, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of England, with which the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod is in fellowship in the International Lutheran Council, is the heir of Barnes' work in England.

Yet, in this freedom now, Christianity and the church in general veers between the same two poles it did in those times, on the one hand the attractive exterior in which the errors of Rome and the Orthodox are couched, and on the other, the different but no less attractive exterior in which the errors of Calvinism and the Reformed are couched, most recently in American "evangelicalism".

Our beloved synod is greatly beset by this. May the works and example of Robert Barnes help us steer our course so as not to crash on the rocks under the influence of either of these siren songs, which unlike those of Greek mythology, are quite real.

From the last words of Robert Barnes, DD, martyr, on 30 July 1540:

Lord if Thou straightly mark our iniquity, who is able to abide Thy judgement? Wherefore I trust in no work that I ever did, but only in the death of Jesus Christ. I do not doubt, but through Him to inherit the kingdom of heaven.

(Quoted from "The Reformation Essays of Dr Robert Barnes", Neelak S Tjernagel editor. Eugene OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1963. Republished 19 October 2007.)

Popular Pages

It's interesting what the two statistics applications I run on this blog show about what is getting read on this blog.

The great majority of visitors come to the blog itself and not any particular post.

However, of those who do land on a particular post, it's interesting that it isn't the annual cycle this blog runs -- called the blogoral calendar, spoofing terms from the church year like sanctoral calendar -- but posts I have done on specific things apart from all that.

The top posts from specific searches: one I ran in May 2008 when Issues Etc. made it back into existence; another from March 2009 on some stuff about the town I grew up in, Rochester MN; one from December 2007 on my experience that Vista Home Premium really doesn't run well on 1GB of RAM like they said but has been just fine since I popped another GB of RAM in my laptop; one from November 2007 on that great Nebraska delicacy, apparently well-known to Concordia-Seward grads, the Runza; one I ran in January 2009 on a quick line of Clint's in Gran Torino, when he says Everybody blames the Lutherans, to a Hmong neighbour in reference to Hmong refugee resettlement in the US.

Only two were really addressed at theological topics -- the one on St Nicholas (as in the RO saint the Tsar, not Santa Claus) and one on a phrase that is gaining some currency, liturgical pietism, but, both of those were this month (July 2009) so that may just be recency effect, so to speak.

But, a reader is a reader, and I'm glad you're here! Speaking of which, welcome to my Australian and Canadian and English readers, consistently the most frequent from outside the US. In fact, Toronto has been the city with the most readers therefrom for several days now, regardless of in or out of the US, which is pretty good considering that readers of this blog are between 2/3 to 3/4 from the US somewhere, and Australia typically comes in second.

Anyway, wherever you're from and whatever you read here, thank you, and you are all welcome here.

A Different St Nicholas, 2009.

17 July 2009 is the 91st anniversary of the murder of Nicholas II, Emperor of all the Russias, with his wife (who began life as Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine, a Lutheran) and children in 1918.

The brutality of these murders would in time to come be visited upon millions of Russians, as the regime which ordered and carried them out blossomed into a world power. While we hear much about the six million victims of one group specifically targeted by Nazi Germany, that was only roughly half of the total number of the victims of that regime. And if relatively little is said about the other half, even less is said about the even greater number murdered under our ally against Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia under Stalin.

By the most conservative estimates, this would be 4 million from direct repression and 6 million from the results of enforced economic theory, namely, collectivisation, for a total of 10 million, and roughly equal to total estimates of Nazi victims. However more recently available material generally indicates a total of around 20 million, nearly twice by our ally of what our enemy managed to attain in toto, and over three times the 6 million of their specifically targeted group.

The course of the Soviet regime itself passed into history on 26 December 1991. On 17 July 1998, the 80th anniversary of their murders, the bodies of Tsar Nicholas and Tsaritsa Alexandra and three of the children (not all were then found) were buried with state honours in the Cathedral of Sts Peter and Paul in St Petersburg -- a city founded 27 May 1703 by Tsar Peter the Great and named by him after his patron saint St Peter, the capitol of Russia until the Communist revolution, known as Leningrad under the Soviet regime, the name restored in 1991. All Russian Emperors since Peter the Great are now buried there.

The President of post Communist Russia, Boris Yeltsin at the time, attended along with members of the House of Romanov, the Russian royal family. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia had declared them saints and martyrs in 1981, and on 14 August 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church itself declared them saints and what are called Passion Bearers, people who were killed but not specifically for their faith, and who met their deaths with Christian humility and dignity. This is not a judgement on his rule, rather universally regarded as weak and incompetent at best, but rather on the why and manner of his death. On 16 June 2003 Russian bishops consecrated the "Church on the Blood", built on the site of the house where the royal family was murdered.

There is still a Russian Orthodox Church, there is still a House of Romanov, and there is still a Russia -- The Russian Federation.

Nicholas' feast day, following ancient custom, is 17 July.

My "DOB"; "Liturgical Pietism".

Martin Luther once commented that a person should know his date of baptism as well as he knows his date of birth, because one was as truly born on the one as on the other, but in different senses.

My DOB, date of baptism, is 7 July 1950. That was at Holy Name Cathedral, in Chicago where I was born. If that sounds Roman Catholic, that's because it is. I professed the Christian faith, as taught in Scripture and correctly set forth in the Book of Concord, especially the Little Catechism, on 15 December 1996. I was not a convert from Catholicism. I had left that, and Christianity in general, in the Fall of 1973, just over 23 years earlier, and had no affiliation.

When I professed that faith, I was not baptised "again". I already was baptised. The profession was a further working out of the grace of the Holy Spirit begun that day. To amplify Walther a bit, one can no more come to faith by his own efforts than he can wake himself from the dead, and that is equally true as a newborn or at age 46.

In the course of time, as I learned more about the details of Lutheran history, I changed from the synod in which I made that profession, WELS, to LCMS, on 27 August 2006, because LCMS, or at least parts of it, seemed to reflect the correct confession of the Book of Concord more faithfully.

Among the many things I was to discover was that the revisionism I thought I had left behind with the RCC had now become the common property of pretty much all your so-called mainline denominations. I had a hint of that in 1984, when I wrote programme notes for a Lutheran choral group directed by one who would become prominent in what would become the ELCA. He gave me a copy of the Lutheran Book of Worship as a point of familiarity, but my reaction was, I can write the notes just fine, but as to something I'd look into for myself, if this is what Lutheran worship is, I'll stick with the 1960s Roman originals rather than this derivative drivel.

Which brings us to what some call "liturgical Pietism". This is not actually Pietism, but a reference to the practice of some to depart from the traditions and forms of Lutheran worship as found in our Synod materials and add additional traditions and forms not common or familiar in our circles generally and sometimes of non-Lutheran origin.

Actually that happens two ways, one in the direction of adopting and adapting things common in the worship of American "evangelicals", a different sort of services to express their non-Lutheran faith, and the other in adopting and adapting things of Roman Catholic, and sometimes Eastern Orthodox or Anglican, origin. The latter, which is a reaction to the former, is what is called "liturgical pietism" by some.

And they have a point. An excess in one direction is not corrected by an excess in another, excess itself being the problem. However, something is being ignored just leaving it there.

And that something is, that our recent synod approved materials already contain this excess, already depart from the traditions and forms previously found in our synod material and already add additional traditions and forms not previously common or familiar in our synod, and that because they did not exist prior to the non-Lutheran, Roman Catholic novus ordo coming out of Vatican II in the 1960s from which they are derived. A novus ordo which in its original Roman context effectively replaced the tradition which our Reformers sought to zealously guard and defend through reform.

Thus do our recent synod worship materials themselves contain revisions in harmony with our traditions and forms on an equal basis with revisions of non-Lutheran content not yet 50 years old. The calendar in evolving use for a millennium and a half, and a revision of Rome's new one, a lectionary in evolving use for a millenium and a hald, and a revision of Rome's new one. "Liturgical Pietism" between two synod-approved covers.

You say DS 3, I say DS 1. You say "historic" lectionary, I say three-year. You say "historic" calendar, I say three-year. You say Trinity 4, I say Pentecost 5. You say potayto, I say potahto. You say tomayto, I say tomahto. With that already in place, why would it not occur to some to say well why not say tater then too, or even (apologies to the Gershwins!) let's call the whole thing off.

The problem is not in the excesses of the two extremes, it is in the excess from which both are running, our recent materials. We need to start acting like Lutherans again, and if that means quit running after Willow Creek etc. and secular marketing style campaigns, it also means quit acting like Vatican II was in St Louis and running after what is now the common worship of all heterodox churches with a liturgical tradition.

The Augsburg Confession, 479 Years On, 25 June 2009.

I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.

So we say every Sunday. Well, a lot of us Lutherans mean to say that, but we say "Christian" instead of "catholic", though the word in the original, and we're supposed to be so big on what's in the original, is katholike, which means whole, complete, entire, universal. So does the cognate word in English, catholic. But, there's this very large and well-known church that uses the word in its name, and we wouldn't want to seem to be saying we believe in IT, now would we? Of course, some of us say it on Saturday late afternoon as if we did mean IT, following their new custom since Vatican II of Saturday Sunday services, so hey.

Much is said these days about Lutheran church bodies abandoning classic Lutheran doctrine, and doctrine in motion, otherwise known as liturgy, for things that supposedly will bring greater numbers and we can add Lutheran content. Why one would seek to infuse a form that evolved as it did to omit the content one seeks to put back in, or think that any numbers gained thereby represent a gain for the Gospel rightly preached and the Sacraments rightly administered, cannot be explained by anything but giving up mission for marketing. But little if anything is said about how we have let in the back door what we try to keep out the front, and the unintended influence of the former on the latter, being two ways of doing the same thing, goes largely unrecognised. And the damage continues from Vatican II For Lutherans and Willow Creek For Lutherans alike.

On the face of it one might indeed wonder whether there is not much a Lutheran can appreciate about the changes in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church since Vatican II. For example, using an Old Testament passage along with the Epistle and Gospel, praying the Canon out loud so the Verba are heard by the congregation, using the local language rather than Latin, for restoring intercessions and petitionary prayer of the people and not in a fixed form but one that can be adapted to what is going on. Are those things so bad? Do they not return to an older and better tradition than what was set in the Tridentine Rite? While there is much that may be questionable about Vatican II liturgical reform, must we then ignore it altogether or not find in it good things we can use too?

It may, at first, seem so from a Lutheran standpoint. I don't, now, have any problem with the "blessings" mentioned. But a Catholic, which I once was, ought to have tons of pixels of reasons why those "blessings" are a few of the things that are neither necessary nor even desirable, and obscure other things that are necessary. But Catholics don't anymore. They taught me something, then started teaching something else; I still believed what they taught me before, so I left thinking the whole thing must be screwed up before and after.

That's then, and is a lot of the "you think this is Catholic but it isn't" stuff I post mostly elsewhere re our Tiber swimmers. It isn't now. When I first read the BOC along with Adult Information Class, I would see in my mind the implementation of what is said there in contrast to the implementation that I saw before me during and after Vatican II. WOW. Throw in Babylonian Captivity, and I'm on board!

So here's the deal -- WE didn't get those blessings just listed from Vatican II, THEY did! So what is that to us? With the exception of the OT reading, which kind of jacks with Jerome's model of Torah/Haftorah from the synagogue lectionary to Gospel/Epistle, but adds on without destroying it so no problem, WE ALREADY HAD THEM, four hundred and some years before they started playing catch-up! And they sure as hell didn't produce the ESV.

My problem is: when we DON'T use our version of the pre-V2, and pre-Trent for that matter, historic liturgy, and instead start to worship after their new ones; when we DON'T add an OT reading to the historic lectionary going back to Jerome but instead use their new one which was a conscious intended break with that tradition and the preaching associated with it; when we rehash their stuff no different than others of us rehash American "evangelicalism" and Willow Creek or stuff like that.

So let 'em play catch-up. Hell, Benedict keeps reading Luther and who knows? Good for them. For them, not us. We don't need to start playing catch-up to their catch-up!

In short, the things from Vatican II which we cheer, we already have and a Catholic should deplore, and if they are now cheering them and doing them, something changed.

OK, well then that's a good thing, right? Well, again, from our point of view, yes. So, with all this good stuff happening, maybe we can even look at getting back to-gether, going "home to Rome", huh?

Just a second though. Something doesn't quite add up. If Rome has this divinely instituted guarantee in the bishops in succession from the Apostles in communion with the successor to St Peter, the Pope, where the church will always conserve the true faith of Christ, and we don't, we deny it and live outside it, we aren't even church in the strict sense of the word, how is it that we do all this stuff 400 some years before without this guarantee, and if it's such a good idea, what held things up with the guys with the guarantee for 400 some years? Seems like it oughta be the other way around; it's the guys without the guarantee and all who oughta be catching up, so if there were changes here lately with them, they must have been a different sort of change than the sort of change we did centuries ago.

And indeed it was. Which is our whole point here.

What was our intent? Whether we achieved it or not is another matter; what was our intent? Our Book of Concord makes it clear again and again our intent was not to come up with anything new, but quite the opposite, to preserve what was already there.

This is meant across the board; here, since the matters mentioned above are liturgical, let's look at how this works out liturgically. Just as we aim to teach no new doctrine, but the constant doctrine of the church pruned of later accretions, so also we seek no new order of worship, but the same order, corrected of abuses.

From the Augsburg Confession: in the Mass, nearly all the usual ceremonies are preserved, the only thing new being throwing in some German hymns among the sung Latin (ACXXIV) and we stick to the example of the church, taken from Scripture and the Fathers, which is especially clear in that we retain the public ceremonies for the most part similar to those previously in use, only differing in the number of masses (ACXXIV), and even though the observance of holy days, fasting days and the like has been the basis of outrageous distortions of forgiveness of sins by Christ's merit, nonetheless the value of good order in the church, when accompanied by proper teaching, leads us to retain the traditional order of readings in the church and the major holy days (ACXXVI).

What is the intent here, what sort of change and by what means is confessed here -- to make our worship more authentic by remodelling it closer to that of the early church, to make our worship more authentic by remodelling it taking into account other rites of earlier origin, to make our worship more authentic by coming up with a new set of readings to offer more Scripture especially more moral teaching and less miracle stories, to make our worship more authentic by offering options throughout the same rite, to make our worship more authentic by regarding abuses and distortions along the way as invalidating the way itself and the rite developed along the way, then, part stepping back in history, part stepping across in other rites, and part creating new things alogether, to step forward with a new order of mass, new lectionary, new calendar, to show we have gone beyond the abuses and distortions of the past and are now ready to address the future?

Nothing of the sort! In fact, the opposite of the sort!

We ought remember too, that when the Augsburg Confession was presented in 1530, the Tridentine Rite, as it is called now, was 40 years in the future, and when the Book of Concord was complete in 1580, it was only 10 years old. The "Tridentine Rite" was precisely Rome's effort to both address the legitimate concerns of the Reformation and at the same time guard against its doctrinal errors, establishing one norm to effect both aims for the Western Church as a whole, allowing other rites observed locally or by religious orders only if they were no less than two hundred years old (which is to say, before 1370, the Tridentine Rite being promulgated in 1570) and therefore untainted by the Reformation.

The 1570 typical edition would have four revisions: 1604 by Pope Clement VIII, who had also revised Jerome's Vulgate (Latin) Bible and the two needed harmonising; 1634 by Pope Urban VIII; 1884 by Pope Leo XIII; 1920 by Pope Benedict XV, mostly making official the work of the late Pius X; 1962 by Pope John XXIII, mostly making official the work of the late Pius XII.

Revised typical editions don't just happen out of the blue. They codify and formalise specific papally mandated changes made in the years before. For example, when I was an altar boy, the 1920 typical edition was in force, but Pius XII had made extensive revisions to the Holy Week liturgy binding in 1955, which were controversial then -- I remember older people grousing about this new stuff that changed what Holy Week was even like -- and remain so now, in the larger context that some advocates of the Tridentine Rite do not accept the 1962 edition which incorporated them, and/or John XXIII's later revisions to the edition, but none advocate the original 1570 edition as some sort of purity, and Rome insists upon the 1962 edition where the Tridentine Rite is allowed.

The point is, when we speak of how we've "always worshipped", nobody, absolutely nobody, takes that to mean that nothing ever changed, any where, any time, and never will -- it has, it does, and it will, change not being the question, but rather what kind of change and change into what.

The Tridentine Rite was replaced entirely by the novus ordo missae, the New Order of Mass, promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1969 and coming out in 1970. It too did not just happen, bam, but was a codification, a finalising and formalising, of things introduced prior to it, this time during and after the Second Vatican Council. The new rite was a NEW rite, with a new calendar, a new series of readings over three years replacing the one that stood and grew for about 1500 years, and unlike anything before it in the same rite, different options for doing one thing such as confession and absolution, not to mention four different eucharistic prayers for the heart of the mass itself.

The old rite was not declared invalid, but replaced, with certain exceptions granted for its use. The motu proprio of 2007, summorum pontificum, did not change that at all, but rather made simpler the conditions for exceptions. And then went one better -- while the novus ordo remains the lex orandi, the rule of prayer, for the church, now, in addition to the new multiform lex orandi, the 1962 edition of the Tridentine Rite will be considered an other-than-ordinary (the word extraordinary meant literally) expression of that same lex orandi! All the same thing, of course -- implying too, one must recognise the novus ordo as the normal use of the Roman Rite to use the Tridentine Rite as its extraordinary use, which does not in the least address the entire reason why some from the get-go continued with the Tridentine Rite, namely, that the new order was false to prior orders.

Thus, for those to whom the new mass was a great step forward, and to whom continued steps forward consist in being faithful to the new mass rather than endless departures from it in its supposed "spirit", this is at best an unneeded step and at worst a step backward from that reform, and for those to whom the new mass was the step backward, indeed a step away, from the true mass, this requires an acceptance of the invalid as valid.

So, change everywhere. Indeed. But again, change is not the issue. The issue is, what kind of change and change into what.

The fact is, the liturgical reforms of Vatican II proceed from a basis completely different than, and completely foreign to, the liturgical reforms of the Lutheran Reformation. Yes, there are points of similarity, certainly. There are large areas of similarity across the board. But the totality, and the underlying agenda, is an entirely different effort than ours, and in fact utterly hostile to the very thing our reform set out to reform and pass on.

The late Neuhaus, in his writings about his conversion to the post-conciliar RCC, expresses better than anything I have read in some time the utter disgust and rejection of the Catholic Church, all politely expressed and quite unrecognised by Neuhaus himself, of the sham fantasy illusion put in its place at Vatican II. An entirely new church, containing nothing of anything before it, which it clearly despises. The violent caricature that mindset offers of anything before the Council -- borrowing from yet another who constructed, like Newman, his partly Protestant partly pagan "Catholic Church" to address his own needs, Maritain -- is as much the church before the Vatican II as the "spirit" of Vatican II is Vatican II, and utterly obscene in its gross falseness (again, unintended and unrecognised) and in its disconnect (and again, unintended and unrecognised) more radical than anything in the entire range of the "Reformation" from the Catholic Church.

Just as there is a "spirit" of Vatican II and Vatican II itself, there was a "spirit" of Trent and Trent itself too. Then, as now, this confusion of the two is seen in primarily two places, one being popular piety, where things are done thinking they are based in the real thing whereas they are based in the grossest of misundertood caricatures of it, the other being the actions of priests and bishops who do essentially the same thing but with far greater implications due to their position.

How utterly ironic, as the post-conciliar RCC attempts to address the confusion of Vatican II with the "spirit" thereof by some sort of "reform of the reform", the real Vatican II itself is based on a confusion of Trent with the "spirit" thereof.

The things which, as a Lutheran now thank God, I am happy to see seem to indicate the RCC is in the early stages of catching up with where the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church has been for some cernturies now, are largely the same things which, as a Catholic, indicate the RCC is in the final stages of becoming a Protestant church but with the pope at the top, as my dad, a 1941 RCC convert, used to put it.

Newman, Bouyer, Maritain, on and on, Protestants all, constructed a "Catholic Church" intellectually that allowed them to remain essentially Protestant but with the external validity supplied by the institutional RCC church, which at Vatican II was crystallised and codified and made official by the institutional RCC church itself. These theologians were collectively called the Nouvelle Theologie, the New Theology, and in the decades leading up to Vatican II were repeatedly warned against by popes up to and including the last pre-conciliar pope, Pius XII.

de Lubac in 1946 was forbidden to publish by the Catholic Church; de Lubac was a peritus at the Council and was made a cardinal by JPII. Chenu's book Le Saulchoir was put on the Index of Forbidden Books by Pius XII; Chenu was a peritus at the Council. Urs von Balthasar in 1950 was banned from teaching by the Catholic Church; JPII named him a cardinal. Congar was banned from teaching or publishing by the Catholic Church; after the Council, JPII, greatly influenced by him, made him a cardinal.

All of them, along with Rahner, Kueng, Schillebeeckx, Bouyer, Gilson, and Danielou, were the Nouvelle Theologie, warned against not by name but by description by Pius XII in Humani generis. Chenu and Congar, along with Rahner, Schillebeeckx and Kueng, were part of the founding of the journal Concilium, begun in 1965 during the Council as a scholarly journal of the thought behind the reform. Urs von Balthasar and de Lubac, along with Bouyer, Walter Kasper and Joseph Ratzinger, were part of the founding of the journal Communio, founded after the Council in 1972 thinking Concilium though on the right direction had gone too far.

The direction was not the issue; it is the same for both, the question being only how far it goes. The more conservative answer is Vatican II Catholicism as officially taught by the hierarchy collectively and the post-conciliar popes, the more liberal answer being the "spirit" of Vatican II, the "excesses" etc, from which the conservatives think a "reform of the reform" will deliver that church.

The point being, all of that is dissent, and was recognised as such by the Catholic Church prior to Vatican II. That has one kind of consequences within the Roman Catholic Church, which amount to this: what is now normative Catholicism was prior to Vatican II dissent from Catholicism. A more conservative version of that dissent won, and now maintains supremacy over the more liberal version of the same dissent.

Conclusion.

What is important for us Lutherans about that is this: both Trent and Vatican II resulted in new Roman missals, but neither effort sought what our reforms seek and therefore neither are the models to which we turn and neither produce a lex orandi consistent with our lex credendi. In the novus ordo, while on the surface it may seem to move closer to our reforms, we see an order of service that resulted from entirely different ideas and objectives than our reforms, ideas and objectives which in fact are contradictory to ours and reject their entire basis, ours seeking to retain the usual ceremonies except where contraindicated by the Gospel, theirs seeking to replace the usual ceremonies with new ones based on the concepts of Nouvelle Theologie. The fruit of their effort has nothing to contribute to ours, and, in seeking to "Lutheranise" this manner of worship we are no less attempting to make Lutheran a kind of worship based on a kind of belief that is not ours, attempting to make a lex orandi from something based on a lex credendi that is not ours, than those who go to Willow Creek et al seek to "Lutheranise" a content and a lex orandi also derived from a belief and a lex credendi that is not ours. If the latter has become popular and in many eyes not only permissible but desirable, why should that surprise us when we have done the same thing in the former?

Concilium, Communio, Nowayio!

Textual Note: This is a revision of my post "On being catholic, on being Catholic" from 18 March 2009. Understanding the nature of the two seemed more urgent than ever on this anniversary of the presentation of our most fundamental confession.

The Summer of '69. And '84 and '09.

Summer 2009 marks the 40th and 25th anniversaries of probably the two most pivotal Summers of my life.

It has nothing to with six strings, Bryan Adams or rock music, none of which is particularly appealing to me. In the Summer of 1969, two big events happened in my life. About a month at the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies, and about two months in Europe.

No, I was not a scientist at the level of ORINS; my dad was, and mom and I tagged along. It was an eye-opener indeed to see you could be elsewhere in the United States and yet be in a rather different kind of place that I knew growing up in Minnesota. It was my first extended time in a culture different than, and at least at that time to some extent foreign to, a culture and environment I knew.

But way more than that, it was the exposure to the level of scientific thought going on there. The absolute high point of that was a lecture by the director of ORINS, William Grosvenor Pollard, a physicist who was also an Episcopal priest (which did not call to mind then quite what it does now).

It seemed to me the lecture was about nothing. Literally. Not a lecture that had no particular topic or point or content, a lecture about nothing, that in looking at the coming into being of the universe we don't really get that nothing is not something that is empty, it is nothing.

We think of nothing as emptiness, or more formally the Empty Set, the set with no members in it, but that too is something. If something, even something that is empty, is not eternal but began, then what came "before" it and may "exist" outside of it is literally nothing, not emptiness, nothing, out of which nothing in the usual sense of an empty something comes to be. And since it is outside any frame of reference we have, being part of the something that has come to be, being members of a set that is not empty, we have no terms to describe it, can therefore barely grasp it and usually confuse it with emptiness.

And yet, Christian faith speaks of an existence outside of the universe. Distinct from the totality of the universe, not identified with any part of the universe. The gods of the world identify god with one or another or all, either collectively or as a whole, of the forces and powers in the universe, but the Bible speaks of a god apart from any and all of that, on top of which calls and wills all of that into existence. A Creator. The universe is then a creation, and the being outside of it creates even the nothing from which the something we experience and are a part of is created.

This takes the mind around the block. But once outside the confines of the terms of the existence we experience, the slight glimpse afforded into the God beyond it is overwhelming. The revelation of Genesis stood out in absolute distinction from human mythology -- no theogony here, no evolution of the gods or God, no primal chaos, but God himself, so fundamental a fact that it is not proven because proof no less than mythology falls short of that which simply is, and is revealed to us.

God is not the universe or anything in it or anything in the heart and mind of that aspect of the universe that is us, Man. All that is overthrown by the revelation of God, whose overwhelming greatness we yet barely grasp at the frontiers of human knowledge. Genesis reveals:

1) a God who is the Creator of the universe, which universe then as a whole and in its parts is not god but a creation of God, who having no dawn will have no twilight either;
2) that Man is the goal of the universe, which universe is not simply then a process without meaning except that with which we invest it, and Man as that goal of Creation shares an image of the God who created everything;
3) that Creation is fundamentally good, a goodness which is from and of God, so much so that when Man ruins it by turning from God to his own will, God promises a deliverance from that state;
4) that the Sabbath is not simply a day off but a demarcation of work from the essence of Man, which is to rest in the Creator who is the source of all, a breaking forth into this life and time of the eternal Sabbath which is the company of God and now of his creation too.

Next to this stunning revelation of God, dragging it back into the confines of the thought of fallen Man by such things as whether "day" means a set of 24 earth hours or not is the real anthropomorphism. Dr Pollard's lecture was indeed a "journey through a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind", "between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge", but the signpost up ahead was not that our next stop was a twilight zone but the God who began to reveal himself in Genesis, and who after in the past speaking to us in various times and ways through the prophets has now spoken to us in His Son, drawing all men and all creation unto himself toward the great Omega point of convergence in the Sabbath rest of God, the Alpha and the Omega, an expression of totality, who created an Alpha Point so that there would be an Omega Point to include us and all creation in the joy of fellowship with God. A love unfolding.

Following that was my experience of other parts of that Creation, namely, Ireland, England, Holland, Germany (West Germany at the time), Austria, Italy, France and Spain. At the time I had no idea that my ancestors came from England, and I was grateful too that growing up in Minnesota and being in the process of being educated by a bunch of German descended Benedictines I was able to enjoy this time and these places on their terms rather than force it into mine. A turn of mind that has stayed with me, though these days my "travels" are via the Internet.

Fifteen years later another pivotal event would happen. That was when, having come to Nebraska, a place about which I previously "knew" only three things, that it had a one-house or unicameral legislature, that there was a club in Lincoln called The Zoo which often features Blues, and that there appeared to be so little else that they actually went on about college football after Saturday, I found it actually a rather nice place to be, and when I became the then newest victim of university politics, decided to stay and seek a new life and career in this new place.

Twenty five years later I am still doing that, in a series of situations absolutely unknown and unthought by me at the time. And in the course of that, this God who not only broke into our existence but created it in the first place broke into mine with the Gospel, the word rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered and the grace to believe it and I became what is called a "Lutheran".

And I experienced a miracle -- no, not becoming part of Husker Nation though that happened at the Homecoming game in 1983, but that into this shaken reed blown and tossed by every wind, the Holy Spirit could breathe and create a faith that would not be shaken even by being thrown into widowerhood and single parenthood. Gott sei dank!

A Survivor To Remember, Titanic Update.

A little over a month ago, this blog posted a couple of times about Millvina Dean, the last living survivor of the Titanic, who was facing a financial crisis about nursing home costs and selling her remaining memorabilia from the sinking to cover it.

Like so many others, her retirement and health care expense problems are over now, but not this side of the grave.

In April 2009, in response to her plight, three Titanic societies, the Belfast, British and International, set up The Millvina Fund to help with her expenses. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, the leading stars of the movie Titanic, James Cameron its director, and Celine Dion who sang its hit theme song, each donated $10K, in response to a challenge from Irish author Don Mullan who had sold an edition of special photography of her for the Fund.

At Mullan's suggestion, remaining funds will be donated 80% to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, which operates lifeboat and lifeguard stations on the coasts of the British isles with an average of 22 people saved every day, and 20% for care of the graves of the victims of the sinking.

Millvina Dean passed away 0800 on 31 May 2009.

The hull of the Titanic was launched 31 May 1911.

Pentecost / Shavuot / Pfingstfest 2009

So why does the "birthday of the church" have the Greek prefix for fifty in it?

Because Pentecost wasn't originally the birthday of the church, but an observance commanded by God in the Law of Moses which is to be held fifty days after the second day of Passover, with each day formally counted.

The counting is called the Counting of the Omer. What's an omer? Omer are the sheaves of a harvested crop. During the days of the physical Temple, the priests would offer newly harvested barley on the second day of Passover, which represents the start of the seven week harvest season. Which is why Pentecost is also called the Feast of Weeks. In the Law, Shavuot is called Hag ha-Katzir, the Holiday of Harvest's End.

Ah, so we have a harvest festival, taking its place among the various harvest festivals in world culture and religion. Well, yes and no. Yes, it's another harvest festival, another instance of a human cause for celebrating a human milestone, the end of the harvest, particularly in a pre-industrial society. But there's something a little different about this one.

The Talmud (what's a Talmud? -- ancient rabbinical writings; for more, look it up, Wikipedia is linked to the right of the page) says it was on the 6th of Sivan (a month in the Jewish lunar calendar), which is the first night of Shavuot, that God gave the Ten Words, better known among Gentiles as the Ten Commandments. Consequently, a popular observance has been an all night Bible study at home or in the synagogue, breaking for morning service, called shakharit, the ancestor of our, well, morning service. This all nighter is called tikkun.

Traditionally only dairy foods are eaten on Shavuot, and while no-one knows why for sure, the thinking is that on the first Shavuot they had slaughtered all these animals for food but after the Law was given it turned out they were not kosher so they only ate dairy foods.

In the liturgy of the synagogue, the readings for the service for the first day of Shavuot are: Torah portion Exodus 19:1 - 20:23 and Numbers 28:26-31; haftorah Ezechiel 1:1-28 and 3:12. In case you're a little rusty, this is the Exodus account (actually the first of two Exodus accounts, the other being Chapter 34, and there's another in Deuteronomy) of the giving of the Law, specifically the Ten Words, and Ezechiel's account of the chariot of fire -- you know, the flying saucer.

This is the feast that Acts 2:1 (in the Epistle for Pentecost, which even the Vatican II three year lectionary couldn't overturn) refers to when it speaks of Pentecost arriving, and why there were men from all over everywhere in Jerusalem for it. It's to celebrate the giving of the Law, the whole reason why there was a Passover and a deliverance, the most important event in Judaism. And like Passover just had been, it was about to be transformed!

For God himself had become Man in Jesus Christ, suffered the condemnation for our sins in his death, and then rose again. Now, if this were all to the story, why didn't he just stick around, proof positive that he had risen? If the whole point were "All you need is Jesus", "I am saved because Jesus died for my sins and rose again", "Jesus first, as long as you believe that the rest isn't that important", then what would make that point better, what would make that point more irrefutable, than if he had stayed right here, so you could see him, talk to him face to face, hear him teach, and say to those who don't believe "Look, there he is right there, go ask him yourself".

But it didn't happen that way, because that is not the whole point and not all to the story. Just as the Passover and exodus from bondage in Egypt had been not for its own sake but in order to gather with God so he could give his people his Law, so the Passover of the full paschal lamb Jesus had been not for its own sake but in order to gather with God so he could give his people his Spirit! Just as God had commanded the counting of the Omer, the fifty days connecting Pesach, Pascha, and Shavuoth, Pentecost, so now God himself counts the Omer from the Pascha of the Lamb he provided, his Son, to the Shavouth or Pentecost so that on the very day where his people once celebrated only the giving of the Law, they still celebrate that and added to it is the giving of the Spirit!

And what happened as a result of that? His Apostles, men who knew all you need is Jesus, men who knew for a physical fact that Jesus had died and risen again, men who knew Jesus is first, men who had all that and like any men on that basis alone were scared and afraid and huddled around each other in the comfort of others who had all that, tending to their prayers and the internal matters of their little band, did something utterly amazing on this day of celebrating the giving of the Law -- they gave the Law, and the Gospel. Not only that, each one there heard it in his own language, addressed directly to him!

And what did the people do? Same as the Apostles had done when the women told them the tomb was empty and he had risen. They didn't believe them. Some thought this is just a foolish wishful story, others sought to figure out what this means, others thought they're just crazy, probably drunk, out of their minds. That's what happened first. Pretty much what still happens when people hear the mighty works of God told to them -- when WE hear the mighty works of God told to US. It's a really nice story stemming from our deepest wishes; let's talk about this and dialogue as to what it all means; those guys are crazy. That's what happened first. The rest didn't happen until something else happened.

Peter then stood with his brothers in the Office of Holy Ministry and laid it right out for them, clean and clear. This is what Joel and David had spoken about, Jesus delivered by the plan of God to us whom we in our sinfulness abandoned the Law and in turn delivered him to the power and law of the world to be killed, Jesus delivered by the power of God from the power of death and our sinfulness which inflicted that on him, Jesus risen again and now placed on the throne of David at the right hand of God, Jesus having been given the promise of the Spirit so that now you see and hear this: Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ.

That's the Law. And when they heard the Law, given now for the first time in its fulfillment on this day of celebrating the giving of the Law long ago, they were cut to the heart. People by nature want a religion of works, stuff they can do to make it all right, stuff they can do to feel OK with God, with each other, and within themselves. And the world offers all sorts of versions of that. Some of them go by the name Christianity. And the feelings and purpose they impart are utterly false.

God himself has shown us in the Law exactly the stuff he wants us to do, and we showed ourselves absolutely incapable of it by our own reason and strength, even in a scenario where there are but two people and one commandment, even when a people is called and set apart to do the full Mosaic Law and be an example to the nations, to the extent that we handed his prophets and finally the One he sent over to the power of our own ideas and law to be killed, and still reject their message to this day.

So much for a religion of works. We can't do it even when God himself shows us exactly how, no matter how hard we try in purpose driven living or to attain our best life now. What's worse, just like those on this Pentecost, we don't get it even when the mighty works of God are directly addressed to us even with wondrous signs, preferring instead to think it over or think they're just nuts!

Pentecost came to-gether not in the signs and wonders, which can still leave us in unbelief, but when Peter and his brothers in the Office of Holy Ministry laid it out clean and clear. It still does. It was then, when Peter had given the Law in its horrible consequences, that they, we, thought not about what it all means, not let's think this over, not maybe there's some good ideas here, not maybe these guys are nuts, but instead were cut to the heart by the fruitlessness of their, our, own reason and strength, and asked Peter and his brothers, Men and brethren, what shall we do? It was then and only then that they could tell them the Good News, the Gospel.

Repent, and be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.

What happened then? Same thing that happens now. They that gladly received his word were baptised, and they continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.

Guess what! There's an emerging church all right. Not just lately, not out of some marketing scheme supposedly crafted to the taste of the times, but ever since the outpouring of the Spirit on that Pentecost whose historical happening we celebrate every feast of Pentecost.

We may not be in Jerusalem, the Temple is not physically there to go to in one accord, and Peter and the other Apostles are not personally our preachers. And it makes not the slightest difference. The taste of our or any time has no taste for the Gospel and it is worthless to pander to it thinking that will produce a taste for the Gospel. That will produce only what it always produces -- a religion of works, stuff to do to catch the God buzz in a quest after one's own feeling better, on the surface all about Jesus or God but really all about me, or, a lot of discussion about what it all means, or, a rejection of it as wishful thinking at best and lunacy at worst.

What produces a taste for the Gospel is the Law. That's why the Spirit was given to proclaim the Gospel on the feast celebrating the giving of the Law! And we have the reality of Pentecost before us no less than they. The Temple is in ruins and Peter and the Apostles are gone. So how's that, how is Pentecost not just another thing you read in a book that supposedly comes from God, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.

Because the true Temple Jesus has been raised again on the third day, and has taken his place with the Father, and has sent his Spirit as he promised. And that Spirit speaks the same message to us as it did that day in unbroken continuity and succession, not that Peter and the Apostles are still physically here, not that other men are still here in a succession of corporate hierarchy, not in those who produce signs and wonders or miracles of church growth and attendance in his name, but that the clean and clear laying out of Law and Gospel as was heard that Pentecost continues to be heard in the faithful preaching of those in the Office of Holy Ministry unto the ends of the earth despite sin, the world and the gates of hell itself.

And when this happens, the same thing follows as did then. Those who receive this proclamation of Law and Gospel are baptised, they continue steadfastly in the Apostles' teaching handed on in the church, especially in those books upon which the church has said you can absolutely rely as the inspired word of God without error, the Bible, and in preaching by those called to do so of that Word, they continue steadfastly in fellowship and community and gathering with each other, they continue steadfastly in the breaking of the bread, the mass, the church's liturgy, wherein Jesus was only fully discerned for who and what he is even when he was bodily here for forty days after he rose, and they continue steadfastly in prayer.

That is the gift of the Holy Ghost, and every bit of it is as available here and now as it was on that day we read about in Acts, in the Epistle or Christian haftorah for Pentecost, every bit of what was pointed to in Ezechiel's chariot of fire we read about in the original Pentecost haftorah. Pentecost comes to-gether, despite all our vain and sinful efforts to make it happen in some other way more to our liking, the same now as then as ever. Accept no substitute! There is no substitute, even if it claims his name or produces signs and wonders and warm feelings in his name, as true and false teachers and even Satan himself alike can do!

Pentecost is about the one thing they cannot produce and only the true Sprit of God can. As the Little Catechism explains:

I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy Christian church; the communion of Saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting.

Amen.

What does this mean? I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him; but the Holy Ghost has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith; even as He calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth, and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one true faith; in which Christian church He daily and richly forgives all sins to me and all believers, and will at the Last Day raise up me and all the dead, and give unto me and all believers in Christ eternal life.

This is most certainly true.

"Alternate Resources", Past Elder style. Amen!

This is Gospel music, not CCM btw. NO CCM junk here, a-men.
No a-historic Vatican II wannabe junk here either, a-double-men!