Patton

Since I first saw the film Patton when I was in Jr. High, I have always liked it.  But I recently saw it on DVD, and was reminded that Francis Ford Coppola mostly wrote the screenplay (with Edmund North), hardly someone I would associate with such a film.  Francis wound up giving the commentary on the DVD.

He explained how he wrote the screenplay early in his career, and tried to bring out the real Patton's mystical side after reading several biographies about him - so he could make the film appeal to both a conservative military audience, as well as a youthful anti-war audience.  He says this midway approach got him fired as the screenwriter (as well as his opening with Patton in full dress in front of a huge American flag).  Other screenwriters were hired, but they turned out unsatisfactory.  Finally, someone remembered that "the kid" had written a screenplay.  They found it mostly satisfactory, and sent it to Edmund North to clean it up, though he mostly kept a large portion of what Coppola had originally written.

Since Francis is a director, but not on this film, he describes how he didn't know how the filming of the film actually occurred.  However, what is better, he describes what he was thinking as the various scenes in the film pass by (except for those he didn't write).  He obviously found the real person of Patton deeply fascinating, and this comes across in the film.

Anyway, I highly recommend watching the film on DVD and hearing his commentary.

The Confession - Book XIII

St. Augustine - Tiffany Window - Lightner Museum

It's taken me over 7 months to both read and finally write this post on Book XIII.  It's the most prayerful and praising book in the entire Confessions, so sometimes it is hard to focus on the line of argument.  However, for Augustine, prayer and praise is part and parcel of a confession.  So he begins Book I this way, and ends Book XIII, the last book, this way.

And yet, in the midst of all this prayer and praise, Augustine addresses some of the most important doctrines in Christianity in Book XIII.  For example, he addresses The Trinity; the utter dependency of all mankind, both individually and corporately, upon God, including faith (and any inclination toward faith); the importance and sacredness of the Sabbath.  He reviews the opening chapters of Genesis which deal with the creation, and allows for a broad range of interpretation from its language (showing the influence of Ambrose upon him), so that he uses much of the language as a metaphor for the sinfulness of man as well as a metaphor for the Church.

Augustine also briefly reviews the story of his own conversion (told elsewhere in The Confessions in more detail) in order to emphasize his point of man's tendency to turn away from God, but also of how God can draw even the most perverse person to himself - so that even while the weight of inappropriate sexual desire can can keep a soul down in material things, God can transform it into love which, like a flame, reaches upwards closer to God.

I will list here all (with links) of my postings on the Books within The Confessions:

• Introduction
• Book I
• Book II
• Book III
• Book IV
• Book V
• Book VI
• Book VII
• Book VIII
• Book IX
• Book X
• Book XI
• Book XII

I hope you have enjoyed my summary of Augustine's Confessions.

To Kill A Mockingbird

I finished reading To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) by Nelle Harper Lee (better known as Harper Lee), though I watched the film several times.  (I almost always find it better to read a book after I watched a film adapted from it.  When I read a book first, I am usually disappointed by the film adaptation.)

I most enjoyed the outstanding writing this book displays.  Harper Lee constructed every line, every paragraph, every chapter very carefully.  She not only renders wonderful descriptions, she carefully structures a story that keeps you entertained, attentive, and eager to learn the lessons the story offers through its characters.

By using the perspective of the children, and especially Scout (Jean Louise Finch), the main character, it reminds you of your childhood.  However, Lee tempers this perspective because Scout narrates the story as an adult woman, reflecting back on her childhood.

(Nelle) Harper Lee

Harper Lee never wrote another book, and this became her only book.  Her one book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961.  It still remains a bestseller, with 30 million copies in print.  In 1999, a poll conducted by the Library Journal voted it "Best Novel of the Century."  For this one book, President George W. Bush awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007.

Harper Lee got to write the book because friends she knew gave her a Christmas present in 1956 of a full year's wages along with a note, "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas."  It shows the power of believing in someone you recognize has talent and supporting them.

Presidential Medal of Freedom

The story reflects many aspects of Harper Lee's childhood growing up in the South in the 1930s, including the racial prejudice of that time in that place.  However, a major theme Lee promotes in the story involves the moral education of Scout, and her brother, Jem, by their father, Atticus.  Atticus teaches not only by telling his children - he shows what he teaches by what he does - by providing an example by how he lives his life.


Atticus tells Scout, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.  He later demonstrates this by not reacting when someone spits in his face and calls him terrible names, daring him to fight.  He later explains to Jem, troubled by his father's lack of reaction, that he understood this man was frustrated and had to take it out on someone - and that he would rather have him take it out on himself rather than that man take it out on his own children.  Later in the story, Scout learns to look at the world from the perspective of Boo Radley, someone she was scared of earlier in the story.


If you have not read this book before, I encourage you to do so.  If you have not read it in awhile (many read it as a school assignment), I suggest you reread it.  You may find you have a different perspective on it now.

Handel's Messiah

I recently re-listened to Handel's work of genius, Messiah (some call it The Messiah, but the title is simply Messiah).  George Frederick Handel composed this superb work in 1741 in a mere 24 days.  However, he worked from a scriptural text compiled by Charles Jenning, whom he had worked together on a previous composition.

Messiah tells the story of Christ in uplifting music.  Handel organized it in 3 parts - Part 1: The Nativity; Part 2: The Resurrection and the Spread of the Gospel; and Part 3: Eternal Life.  The Jenning's text is all from the King James Bible (a beautiful poetic translation), and passages are repeated often in song, so the effect is like a lectio devina (a traditional Catholic practice of scriptural reading, meditation and prayer intended to promote communion with God and to increase the knowledge of God's Word).  So listening to it can be a meditative and spiritual experience.

However, Messiah is an oratoria, which is similar to an opera.  For many modern hearers unused to this, it can be hard to understand the words being sung.  So this time, I used Messiah: The Wordbook for the Oratorio, which has all the words carefully laid out in equisite font, as well as beautiful illustrative paintings by Barry Moser.  I highly recommend getting this book (your local library probably carries it) if you listen to Messiah, as it will immensely help you in understanding it.


Messiah transcends Christians, its music enjoyed by all. Though Handel wrote it for Lent, it is most often performed at Christmas.  We usually do not hear the original, more simple, composition, since many composers modified it over time, including Mozart.  Still, the basic composition touches the spirit and the heart in ways that few compositions can.  I hope you will take the time to enjoy this work soon if you never have, or to listen to it again.

Evangelicals & Catholics Together

The late Chuck Colson and the late John Richard Neuhaus were very good friends.  Chuck Colson had been President's Nixon's attorney in the midst of Watergate, and went to prison because of some of his activities.  Around that time, he converted to Christianity (described in his book, Born Again), and later became a leading evangelical through his efforts in Prison Fellowship.

John Richard Neuhaus was a leading Lutheran minister who wrote a prominent book, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (1984). On September 8, 1990, John Richard Neuhaus was received into the Catholic Church, and a year later he was ordained a priest.  His decision threw his friend into perplexion. For a time, I confess, I was vexed over his decision. It took months for me to realize that he was the same man who was a brother to me as a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor. In fact, in some ways I learned to admire him all the more, because he had the courage to do something he believed in deeply, though it might cost him dearly in terms of support and relationships.  http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/januaryweb-only/103-51.0.html?start=2

In an article Colson wrote in 2009, he gave the lion's share of credit to the formation of the project, which became known as Evangelicals and Catholics Together, to Fr. John Richard Neuhaus, who had just passed away. By 1994, they, and other leading Evangelical and Catholic scholars, had not only formed this project, they issued its first statement, Evangelicals & Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.

This statement built upon some of the earlier discussions between Pope John Paul II and Billy Graham.  The statement emphasized a unity between Catholics and Evangelicls, which, though imperfect, centered upon many essential agreed upon truths - and yet did not deny at the same time (in truth) some important disagreements between Evangelicals and Catholics. Still, it asserted, not all differences are authentic disagreements, nor need all disagreements divide. Differences and disagreements must be tested in disciplined and sustained conversation. Thus began an ongoing series of "disciplined and sustained conversation" that resulted in several statements by the ECT project, which I plan to review in this blog. (I have a Facebook Group dedicated to this purpose, http://www.facebook.com/groups/206783002679350/; If you want to join that Group, let me know.)

On a personal note, this effort is very important to me, because I was raised a Catholic, left that faith tradition in my early teens, and became a born-again Evangelical in my late teens.  I have lately been reconnecting with my Catholicism while retaining my Evangelicalism.  The efforts by Evangelicals and Catholics Together speaks to me on a deeply personal level.

Robert's Reasoning on Obamacare

Chief Justice John Roberts

Many still ask today, How did Chief Justice Roberts (plus 4) find the Obamacare mandate was actually a tax (and not a penalty)? Roberts cities Justices Story and Holmes - if a statute has two different interpretations, the Court must adopt the one that avoids unconstitutionality. He notes that the only consequence of not obeying the mandate is making an additional payment to the IRS when paying taxes. So in effect, the mandate is a tax hike on those not carrying health insurance. Robert says the law is not concerned whether this is a natural reading of the statute, only a "fairly possible" one.  It's a fair possible reading because:

• It looks like a tax because it is only imposed on those who make enough to be required to file taxes.

• The amount to be paid is determined by factors such as taxable income, number of dependents, and joint filing status - basically tax factors.

• The mandate is in the Internal Revenue Code.

• It's enforced by the IRS, which must assess and collect it "in the same manner as taxes."

• It generates revenues for the government.
(These were arguments previously made to say it was a tax when it was considered.) 

Roberts acknowledges Congress labelled this a penalty, and not a tax. He notes the Court has not always followed the label Congress gives an Act. So it did not consider the "Child Labor Tax" to fall with the Taxing Power. He cites a series of Supreme Court cases where Congressional Acts were treated as a tax, though they were variously called a license, a surcharge, and even a penalty. They all used a "functional approach" rather than following the label.

Roberts notes additional factors that indicates a tax, not a penalty:

• By statute, the amount due can never be more than the price of insurance.
• The mandate does not require intent questions like a penalty usually does.
• Though its IRS enforced, it does not allow criminal enforcement like a penalty usually does.
• If someone chooses to pay the penalty rather than comply, they have completely complied with the law, quite unlike a penalty.
  
  (I only summarized part of the full opinion - link below -  from Section III B - starting on page 31.)

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/Sections/NEWS/scotus_opinion_on_ACA_from_msnbc.com.pdf

Simply Jesus

I finished reading Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters by N.T. Wright.  In Simply Jesus, Wright presents Jesus not so simply.  Wright, a scholar, loves to present Jesus in the historical context he came into.  So he details for us the history of Israel up to that moment as well as the history of Rome in Palestine. He combines this with the desire of God, as expressed by Jesus, to bring his Kingdom, the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven, down to earth, to "thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."  He uses the analogy of the perfect storm to describe what happened when Jesus appeared in the midst of all this.  He writes his aim is to answer the question put to Jesus in  Jesus Christ Superstar, in the song, Superstar, "who are you - what did you sacrifice?"

N.T. Wright (Tom Wright)

N.T. Wright (often called Tom Wright) fills both roles as a theologian and as a pastor, somewhat rare, so his writing feels approachable.  An Anglican, he served as the Bishop of Durham from 2003 to 2010.  As an Anglican, he richly draws from church tradition.  A prolific writer, he has a wide audience, including a large following of evangelicals because he represents more conservative views than other scholars.  He is associated with Open Evangelicals, a school of thought in England which combines a traditional evangelical emphasis with a more inclusive approach towards culture and other theological points of view than taken by other evangelicals.

However, many evangelicals view him as highly controversial, mainly because of his association a group of scholars known as the "New Perspective on Paul," which includes E.P. Sanders and James D.G. Dunn (though in 2003, Wright put some distance between himself and them). Basically, these scholars want to reinterpret the way we understand Paul's writings.  In the most controversial aspect, they challenge the Reformation understanding of the doctrine of justification by faith, central to Protestant and Evangelical thought.  In 2009, Christianity Today ran a table to help understand the difference between Wright's view on justification and a more traditional evangelical view. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/special/justification_june09.pdf  I need to study this issue more myself before reaching any conclusions about it.  However, it does not make me feel completely at ease in reading Wright's writings.  I tend to approach it cautiously, even while I try to keep an open mind.

So I enjoyed most of Simply Jesus, though I felt somewhat like I was on watch duty.  He spoke of a "high-pressure system of conservative Christianity," which simply focuses on the salvation Jesus brings and tend to ignore what it means to bring the Kingdom of God on the earth.  While I have seen some conservative Christians with this focus, I have also read many other conservative orthodox Christians write about both salvation and the bringing forth of the Kingdom of God - who talk about the need to bring ethics and justice into everyday life.  To be fair, he also criticized the modernist view which tends to deny the miraculous.  However, as much as I appreciated many points in the book, I didn't feel it presented a new vision - something I hadn't seen in other writings, though Wright's manner of presentation and style of writing is compelling (even if he perhaps overused his analogy of the perfect storm).  Overall, it's an important book by an important author, written in a compelling manner, so I would recommend reading it.

The Confessions - Book XII

In Book XII, Augustine shifts focus from time to the creation itself. He carefully reviews the opening chapters of Genesis, and the many interpretations of it. For the most part, Augustine keeps an open mind to the many possibilities that many commentators derive from interpreting the verses describing the creation. He repeats one interpretation after another, and usually finds that each interpretation is possible. Augustine dismisses those who remain fixated upon one interpretation of the creation verses, when many are possible, though he finds a few are incompatible with Scripture.

He rejects that the Scripture teaches that God did not create everything. He equally rejects that God did not create everything out of nothing (in other words, out of pre-existing matter or energy) - that God created everything out of something that already existed. Augustine fully embraces creation ex-nihilio (Latin for out of nothing).

However, what really fascinates Augustine, is what follows in verse 2, which the King James Version translates from the Hebrew as the earth was without form, and void. For Augustine, this was the basic stuff God initially made, and which he then made everything else from - so that everything in the rest of the Genesis account is derived from this stuff.

Unfortunately, Augustine here spends a lot of time on the phrase "the heaven of heavens," which appears in some older translations in some passages in the Old Testament. However, the phrase is not an accurate translation of the original Hebrew phrase, and should not be accorded great weight. Augustine views this as a sort of perfection similar to the perfection Plato spoke about in forms. Most of Historic Christianity has not followed his thoughts on this, though it has followed him on other aspects of Genesis.

The main thought in Historic Christianity, which followed much of Augustinian thought about the Genesis account, though not all its nuances, is that God created everything out of nothing. However, Augustine wrote this part of his Confessions around A.D. 398. At this stage, he limited his discussion of Genesis to rejecting certain views he held before he became a Christian, and to consider several valid interpretations. Later in life, Augustine returned to more fully consider Genesis in a commentary he wrote on the 1st three chapters of Genesis, The Literal Meaning of Genesis (literal meaning the intent of the author), which he wrote between 401 and 415, comprised of 12 books (usually published today in 2 volumes). I don't have the time to summarize his extensive treatment here. However, clearly Augustine considered the creation account in Genesis critically important, briefly deals with it in his Confessions, and returns to deal with much more extensively later in his life.

On to Book XIII

Back to Book XI

Love Wins

I finished reading Love Wins (March 15, 2011) by Rob Bell. Until September of 2011, Rob Bell served as the pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church, a church he founded in Grandville, Michigan, just outside of Grand Rapids, which had grown to a 10,000 member church. He wrote several books before Love Wins, the first named Velvet Elvis in 2005. Time Magazine recently named him in their 2011 100 list as among the most influential persons in the world.

Though I think this book is important, and should be read, I didn't like it. For one thing,

I

don't like it

when people

write

like this.

Bell employs this device throughout this book to emphasize his points. It may seem trite, but it annoys me, and I think there are better ways to emphasize a point.

Another reason I didn't like it is throughout the book, and especially in the first chapter, he likes to pose many questions, one right after another in a series, sometimes 7 or more in a row. Now I like questions. But these are gotcha-like questions, and the author is clearly not interested in an answer (even if he could hear you), nor is he interested in carefully providing a careful consideration of the question, with possible answers, as it seems to me a writer should. Instead, the purpose seems to be to make you feel dumb for whatever position you might have held.

Many Christians are upset with the book, because they say he supports universalism (the belief that all will be saved). In an interview with Martin Bashir, Rob Bell said he doesn't, though he didn't make that clear in the book where he addresses the subject many times. It seems to me that if an author addresses a subject in a book as a major topic, and he disavows a position, he should state it clearly in that book, and not leave others guessing.

Mark Galli, the Senior Editor of Christianity Today, in his lengthy review of this book states, After reading the book, it's hard for me to believe that Bell doesn't espouse universalism, but to be fair, he never formally affirms such belief. I agree.

Bell fairly points out that universalism finds a tradition within Christianity. What he fails to state is that it is a tiny minority position - most traditions in Christianity reject it, and many have outright condemned it. It might be interesting if his book undertook a serious study of this position in church history. Instead, he doesn't seriously engage in the arguments against universalism, and glibly asserts that if all are not saved, that means God doesn't get his way, an assertion those opposed to universalism do not agree with, and have answered on numerous occasion before. However, the book raises an important issue within Christianity. At least Rob Bell is trying to discuss it in a relevant manner for our generation. I just wish Rob Bell had done a better job of addressing it, and I hope someone else will address this issue in a manner that is relevant to our generation.