Common Sense Methodists?!?!

Convinced as I have been--and, it must be admitted, remain--that the Methodist church's adoption of sacramental grape juice in place of wine was a grievous error, thanks to Jennifer Woodruff Tait's fine new book, The Poisoned Chalice, I promise never again to consider it a nonsensical or untheological one.

This is a good history of the movement that resulted in the substitution of grape juice for wine in the churches that were to become The United Methodist Church, giving due credit to people whom it is easier to caricaturize, especially for those of us that disagree with them. Woodruff Tait debunks the myth (common among us sacramental oenophiles) that the movement was driven largely by relatively shallow social and cultural concerns rather than substantive moral, theological, or symbological ones.

That is not to say that the moral and mystagogical theology expressed by the grape juice devotees is persuasive or impressive in any way. But Woodruff Tait manages the historian's delicate job of portraying the occasionally ridiculous comprehensibly, at times sympathetically, and without overt mockery. (One sometimes catches a playful smile barely hidden behind the hand, but it is never a smirk.)

More importantly, Woodruff Tait isolates and draws out the many interwoven threads that manifested themselves in the movement towards sacramental grape juice--the interaction between theology and science, rationality and sobriety, hygiene and social utility. The confluence of concerns is rich and sometimes surprising, and Woodruff Tait's deft handling of the material makes it somewhat less incomprehensible than it might otherwise be.

She relates this cultural constructs accessibly and engagingly, and the book would be easily and profitably read by anyone interested in any one of the many concerns it engages.

If one had to name a complaint (and one has to, in order to have one's reviews taken seriously), it might be that there seem a relatively few primary texts being worked with here. Each chapter covers a different facet of the same few texts, intelligibly and persuasively, but one occasionally wonders whether a broader selection of writings from the period would tell the same story. (Surely if one broadened the sample a bit, one would find those nonsensical and untheological voices arguing from sheer stupidity--Fred Phelps is but the most modern incarnation of an old phenomenon.) Still, a scholar does have to work within limits in order to learn or to say anything meaningful, and this hardly seems a complaint worth making.

As I read, I could not help but think of companion readings (not to supply the book's deficits, but because good reading always invites company). Those who are primarily interested in the history of the period should read this alongside Christine Rosen's Preaching Eugenics (especially if the author's references to the eugenic concerns of theologians and pastors seem too fantastical). Intellectual historians might profitably follow this with Amy Laura Hall's Conceiving Parenthood, for the sequel to American Protestantism's love affair with scientific hygiene and purity.

Theologians and ethicists might read this with Thomas, with whom a comparison is never unprofitable (indeed--those familiar with the Summa might have recognized the concern for the effects of alcohol on reason as one of Thomas’s concerns and, perhaps, chuckled at the picture of rabidly Protestant ministers unknowingly propagating Thomistic moral theology) or, for contemporary issues with perhaps a similar constellation of concerns (scientific orthodoxy, social justice and the common good, purity, the effects of technological innovation), Rayna Rapp’s Testing Women, Testing the Fetus or Maura Ryan’s Ethics and Economics of Assisted Reproduction.

Biblical Preaching Can Get You Killed

Despite manifold witnesses to the contrary, just war theorists--that is, people who believe that war can be justifiable, whether by the classic Just War Theory criteria or otherwise--continually insist that pacifism--that is, the refusal to kill even in defense of justice--is an abdication from political responsibility.

Consider this excerpt from the penultimate sermon preached by Archbishop Oscar Romero:

Brothers, you come from our own people. You are killing your own brother peasants when any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God which says ‘Thou shalt not kill’. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you recovered your consciences and obeyed your consciences rather than a sinful order. The church, the defender of the rights of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot remain silent before such an abomination. We want the government to face the fact that reforms are valueless if they are to be carried out at the cost of so much blood. In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.

Does his call to lay down arms sound like an abdication from politics to you?

No, it didn't sound like it to the ones who depended on those arms to perpetuate their political power, either.

That's why they killed him. The very next day.

Consider joining with the Salvadoran poor in commemorating the life of Oscar Romero.

And if you're a church in search of a pastor, consider exactly what you mean by "biblical preaching."

Anorexia and Autonomy

Rudolph Bell's book Holy Anorexia is an important example of the fruitfulness of cross-disciplinary study in religion.

His study probes the theological, historical, and psychological meaning of extreme fasting behaviors in medieval women whose asceticism was usually seen as evidence of holiness. Avoiding the facile ascription of mental illness to these women ("Oh, they must've been, like, anorexic or something!"), he nonetheless takes his cue from current psychiatric evaluations and treatments of (modern) anorexia nervosa.

Anorectic behavior comes about in response to an intricate yet convoluted web of signals a modern girl (anorexia generally arises in females and during adolescence) receives in regard to her appearance. Thinness (and physical beauty more broadly) is one of a few traits consistently approved and rewarded in young females, yet the steps that a girl might take to achieve those rewards may prompt correction, disapproval, or intervention from parents or such other authorities as educators or medical caregivers. The twin incentives of societal approval and parental opposition feed the anorexic girl’s choice to control her own body through self-starvation—all the more so as her successes in weight loss and self-assertion mount.

Analogously, a medieval woman had fewer avenues of expressing or embodying holiness than were available to men, and the ascetic practices which might identify a woman as holy could just as easily have been viewed as evidence of heresy or demon possession as of beatitude. The “holy anorexic” is confirmed in her path of self-starvation both by the ascription of holiness conferred on account of her suffering and by the suspicion aroused by her extreme practices of asceticism, especially where that suspicion is allayed or countered through divine intervention.

The struggle for autonomy looms large in Bell’s renarration of these saints’ vitae. While his efforts to offer a psychoanalytic reading of these women are unimpressive—particularly in the absence of any serious or consistent engagement with the problem of collaborative authorship present in virtually all of these texts—his identification of the persistence of themes of self-assertion in the face of parental, religious, or social conflict is helpful.

When one is obliged to suffer the removal of one’s autonomy—whether in the form of a forced marriage, opposition to taking religious orders, or physical or sexual abuse—choosing another form of suffering—starvation, disfigurement, isolation—functions as a reassertion of one’s autonomy. The relationship between suffering and consent is inverted, transforming utterly the meaning and experience of them both. In the first case, the injury is all but identical with the removal of choice; in the second, the retrieval of autonomy is identical with the (chosen) injury. That the chosen suffering is further rewarded by its association with otherworldliness, whether of the divine or demonic sort, only amplifies the sense of transformation.

Despite his misstep in attempting to psychoanalyze historical figures with fragmentary, consciously scripted, and/or heavily edited literary works as his only evidence, Bell's work is enormously important for his having probed this intersection of autonomy and suffering. Many modern discussions of suffering (and its relief) are dependent on inchoate assumptions about exactly this relationship, and any work that prompts a more intentional examination of the topic is worth a read.

Books in Review

Hector Avalos, in Health Care and the Rise of Christianity, makes the case that a study of the health care milieu in which Christianity arose is necessary for understanding the attraction that Christianity might have had for, particularly, the chronically ill in the Greco-Roman world.

Avalos helpfully surveys Jewish and pagan sources for indications of the values and practices surrounding sick members of those societies, particularly with respect to chronic illness. The survey of pagan culture is particularly helpful (at least for this non-Classicist) in that it enumerates the different health care options available to inhabitants of the Roman world, as well as the likely cross-pollination between Jewish monotheism and Roman paganism.

I am not conversant enough with Classical sources to know whether his presentation of health and sickness in the Roman world is accurate, but I was disappointed with his survey of Judaism. He dealt almost exclusively with the canonical texts, and seemed to weigh the New Testament critiques of Pharisaism rather more heavily than may be warranted. He did not seem to make use of more modern (and more charitable) studies of Jewish culture in the Second Temple period.

Additionally, his reading of the canonical texts was deeply problematic. He seems to have found in the texts a deep concern for protecting the state (meaning, especially, the levitical priestly hierarchy) from the burden of the chronically ill and underproductive. He takes the strict regulations concerning purity and contamination to be less interested in regulating the spread of contagious illnesses than in isolating and stigmatizing those with chronic illnesses which left them unable to be economically productive. His evidence for this interest is scant--he makes the point that the gradated requirements for thanksgiving offerings after healing (as in Leviticus 14) acknowledge the possibility that chronic illness may render a person economically unproductive, but he implies that levitical regulations are intended to marginalize those persons who have become poor.

He seems to have missed the deep concern for the poor and economically unproductive evident throughout, especially, the priestly code. The passage in question, for example, could be read as a particular effort to include those who have become poor through chronic illness and to mitigate the effects of their disadvantaged position. Economic disadvantage and unproductivity, in other words, is not an impediment to participation in the liturgical life of the community. Chronic illness is, to be sure, but there is little to no evidence that the Jewish community isolated and stigmatized the economically unproductive on a regular basis. Contagion and purity concerns are a much more convincing read of the levitical regulations regarding blood and bodily fluids.

That said, his more basic point is quite sound: whether or not such was the intention of the levitical code, and whether or not the Second Temple Jewish community practiced the levitical code exactly as written, the effect of the canonical regulations concerning chronic illnesses was to create a sub-group of people who would be particularly interested in the healing ministries of Christian missionaries, as well as the theological commitment to non-isolation of "sinners" and lepers.

Both Judaism and paganism, by Avalos's read, created a demographic group of disaffected members of society that would be attracted to Christianity precisely because it rejected (at least in its canonical texts) the very practices that had isolated them from their own societies. This partly explains, Avalos contends, the tremendous growth in the first decades after the death of Christ.