Parallels Between Calvinism and Islam

I’ve been reflecting recently on the deep influence Islam had on the Renaissance. Much of the West’s recovery of classical texts, it’s numbering system, and a significant portion of what became the scientific method flowed into the Renaissance from Islamic sources and influences. And as I reflected on those influences, it struck me that medieval Islam had a significant impact on the Protestant reformation and that influence is most evident in Calvinism.

Hopefully my point won’t be misunderstood. I’m well aware of John Calvin’s publicly expressed opinion on Islam. (At one point, I believe he called it one of the two horns of the antichrist with the other being the Roman Catholic Church.) I don’t mean direct, conscious influence. Rather, Islam had for centuries helped shape the culture within which Calvin was born and lived and which formed the lens through which he perceived the world, but it was not an overt influence.  Culture tends to operate below the conscious level and the forces which shape culture are many and varied. But when I look at the church Calvin founded, I see a number of strands influenced by Islam.

First, the Reformers in general and Calvin specifically, made “the book” the foundation and core of their faith in a way that had never been true in Christianity. Christians never traditionally saw themselves as people of the book. That’s actually a phrase from within Islam describing Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Rather Christians had always been the people of the living Lord, the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth. The Holy Scriptures, and the Gospels in particular, were always important in Christianity, but they were never at the center of our faith in the way Torah is in Judaism or the Qur’an in Islam.

And then I’m struck by Calvin’s fierce iconoclasm. Iconoclasm had risen within the Roman Empire in the eighth century and its rise at that point in time within Christianity is almost certainly connected to the influence of Islam on the emperor and other leading figures of the state. That led to a period of intense persecution that was ultimately ended only by the seventh ecumenical council condemning iconoclasm as heresy. That event is still celebrated today in the feast of the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” on the first Sunday of Great Lent and the matter was largely settled within Christianity until Calvin revived it. Again, as in the eighth century, the influence of Islam, even on a cultural or subconscious level, can be seen.

However, the most telling influence to me lies in the sort of God Calvin ultimately described. John Calvin emphasized the sovereign nature of God over creation. His belief in predestination accords more closely with the Islamic concept of preordainment than anything found within mainstream Christian tradition. For Calvin, as for Muslims, everything that happens has been preordained by God. And that everything is truly all-encompassing, covering good and evil alike. If an army pillages a town, that was ordained by God. If a drought leaves a country in famine, that was ordained by God. A hurricane striking a city inflicting death, loss, and pain was ordained by God. We can see Calvin’s influence today when Christians point to something horrible and describe it as an act of God. And that aspect of his theology shares much more in common with Islam than Christianity.

Of course, Calvinism is also different from Islam on many levels. My point is not that it’s simply some form of Christianized Islam. Rather, I see threads connecting elements within Calvinism (and spreading from there to a wide swath of Protestant Christianity) to the cultural influence medieval Islam had on the European culture that formed and shaped John Calvin. None of us ever stand in a vacuum free from outside influence and most of the time it’s even hard to see those forces that have shaped and formed us. And Calvinism along with the other Christian strands it in turn influenced, seems to have been shaped in part by Islam.

Health Care in the US

As a rule, I don’t tend to post on political issues, mostly because I don’t tend to write about or otherwise wrestle with such matters at any significant level. I do stay generally informed, and I also find that much of what passes for political discourse in our country is pretty abysmal.

Health care, however, is one issue which does concern me a great deal, especially since at least two of my children have inherited celiac disease from me. Personally, my wife and I are somewhat insulated and secure from the worst of what has happened to health care in the US over the past decades. I’m a federal employee and as such we are covered under the FEHB. Twenty years ago, the FEHB offered pretty average employer insurance plan with low to average benefits and costs. Over the past couple of decades, I have watched our health care coverage become better and less expensive than that of almost everyone else I know.

And my health care plan has not significantly changed.

Let me say that again. Over the past twenty years, I’ve seen my health care plan go from, at best, a middle of the road plan, to one that seems to be better than that of most of the people I know without changing. I have watched the overall level of health care access and coverage dramatically decline for almost everyone else around me.

That’s not to say they aren’t constantly tweaking and adjusting my health care plan each year. Some years we pay a bit more in deductibles and other copayments. Some years we pay a bit less. Premium costs have pretty much risen every year, but at a less dramatic pace than that of many people I know. They did add a PPO network in the nineties, and reduced coverage for care received by non-participating medical practitioners and facilities. But the plan’s PPO network is so large, that’s been a non-issue. I don’t think there’s ever been a doctor or facility we wanted to use that was not a preferred provider on our plan.

As a result, my wife and I have been somewhat insulated from the abuses in health care coverage in this country and it’s less likely to ever be a critical issue for us personally. However, at least two of our children inherited celiac disease from me — that is they’ve been tested and positively diagnosed with active celiac disease. Thus, they already have one strike for a pre-existing condition and it’s a condition which can manifest in a huge variety of ways. They also have a family history for a variety of other conditions they could develop over the course of their lives. So from a personal perspective, the issue of health care does strike close to home.

However, that statement is true for every single one of us. The odds that we or someone we love will face some sort of serious, life-threatening, and individually unaffordable (unless you happen to be a Bill Gates or Warren Buffet) health crisis at some point in our lives approach certainty. And within the context of the privatized, for-profit system we allowed to balloon over the course of the past two decades, the odds were unacceptably high that during that almost inevitable health crisis, we would not have access to the level of care we might expect and our family would be crippled by debt for the care we did manage to receive. This is clearly the sort of problem that can only be mitigated by sharing the risk, responsibility, and cost as a society. It’s for reasons like this that we group together as a society and a country. There are many things we can do together that we simply can’t do alone.

Of course, it’s a scientifically demonstrated fact that the way our minds function leaves us remarkably poor at evaluating and acting on those sorts of risks. Even when we know the odds, we tend to have irrational optimism that we can beat the odds in some situations. (That’s one reason why, in every flood here, there are usually people who get in trouble and even die from driving around barriers and into flooded low water crossings.) Conversely, we tend to inflate threats that seem riskier, but which actually have a comparatively lower and often even minimal chance of impacting us. The biggest risk many of us personally encounter on any given day is the risk of simply driving to work, school, or the grocery store. But if you ask people to list or rank risky activities, that rarely makes the list at all.

In this instance, managing health care at the societal level in some way is the common sense thing to do from a self-oriented, pragmatic perspective. Ironically, it’s also the only thing you can do if you claim to love your neighbor. In this country, we have organized ourselves as a form of representative democracy. One of the things that means is that we all share in the responsibility of ruling our country. As Christians, that has particular implications. It means we face, though perhaps on a more distributed scale, exactly the same sort of dilemmas that Christian emperors and other rulers have faced throughout history. We are the powers and authorities who will be held accountable by Jesus for the way we have exercised that power. We cannot escape that responsibility and we cannot abdicate it. There are no easy answers to the proper use of that power. There never have been.

Unfortunately, there is no easy button.

So what are our options? I’ve studied what other countries do to some extent and it seems to me that most employ variations of one of three different general approaches. (Yes, I know there are a lot of ideas out there, but most countries seem to actually end up doing one of three things.) It also seems to me that part of our problem is that we are trying to use them all in a disorganized and hodge-podge manner rather than selecting one approach for everyone in our country. If we are going to truly share the risk, responsibility, and cost, it doesn’t seem effective to me to take that approach, especially if, as you’ll see, we segregate pools of those with higher risks and costs from those with lower risks and costs.

So what are these options?

1. Government run health care. In this system, the government owns the hospitals. Most doctors and other health care practitioners work for the government in those institutions. And basically, health care is delivered directly by the government. England is one example of a system like this. There are many variations and permutations.
2. Single payer health care. In this system, the doctors and other practitioners largely do not work for the government, nor does the government own or directly operate most of the hospitals and other facilities. Instead, the government is the single payer for health care services. They negotiate payments and they usually distribute the costs to some degree across the populations based on your ability to pay. Canada is one example of a system like this. Again, there are a lot of different ways to do it, but they do share the same common characteristics.
3. Government regulated health care insurance exchange. Here, the government does not directly pay most health care costs. Instead, it establishes and regulates an insurance exchange and mandates the participation of all citizens in order to spread the risk across the population. Such a system typically must include subsidies for groups like the poor. Switzerland’s system is generally the model for a system like this.

Those are the basic, widely used options. And here’s where the arguments of those who seem to oppose almost anything that is proposed turn irrational. Why? Because we employ all of the above approaches in our country and have for a very long time. Yes, I know there has been widespread demagoguery over government taking over health care or socialized medicine, but though it has been noisy, it’s had no basis in reality. I don’t personally have any strong preference for one system over another. But my life has been such that I prefer to maintain some connection to the world as it actually is rather than my fantasy about it.

Let’s start at the top of my list. Because we are so large as a country, we actually have a government run health care system that rivals that of some smaller countries. It’s called the Veteran’s Administration. While the VA operates many programs on behalf of veterans, one of the largest is certainly the network of doctors, hospitals, and clinics it runs. We hear about it in the news when there is a problem with a VA hospital, but they mostly do pretty amazing work — especially when you consider that we usually choose to underfund them. If a government-run health care system is good enough for those who have served us in our military, tell me again why it wouldn’t be good enough for all of us? Be careful how you answer that question. Though I’m not eligible for care through the VA, I am a veteran.

Or let’s move to the next item on my list. Our government-operated single payer system is the largest single health care system in our country and is much larger, I believe, than Canada’s entire health care system. Our single payer system, of course, is called Medicare. In the debates over health care, both Republicans and Democrats publicly defended Medicare. I remember some of my older relatives, especially the ones with serious illnesses and inadequate coverage, anxiously waiting to reach the Medicare enrollment age. It has problems, of course, because of the way we’ve chosen to structure and fund it over the years, but as a system it works well enough that threats to take it away seems to raise the ire of those who have it.

Finally, even before the recent Act, we had government-regulated insurance exchange option available. It’s the one that has covered my family and me for most of my life, the Federal Employee Health Benefit (FEHB) program. OPM has regulated the program pretty well over the years and overall it’s worked pretty effectively.

The recently passed health care reform act requires that similar exchanges be established at the state level (or the state can opt into a national exchange), but the only population of those exchanges will be those who do not have health care coverage through their employer and who do not participate in any of the above health care systems. (And yes, I know I left Medicaid off my list, but it’s similar to Medicare in the way it functions.) That’s certainly an improvement over our current situation, but it means the pool will be a lot smaller which isn’t very good for sharing the cost and risk across the population.

Personally, I believe we need to move toward some single system. As I said, I don’t have any strong feelings about any particular system. Since I’ve participated in the FEHB for twenty-five years, I probably have a slight preference for expanding it to be the single exchange for all United States citizens. That’s not necessarily easy. In order to fund it and make it affordable, we would probably have to mandate that large businesses pay at least the same portion of the premium for their employees that the Federal Government does for its employees. And then we would need to develop appropriate subsidies for individuals and people in various categories such as the poor and the elderly. And it would obviously require a larger regulatory body than OPM currently has in place. But it could work if we had the will to make it work. Switzerland has proven that it’s possible.

In the interim, the health care act has some excellent features. The changes to prohibit denial of coverage of preexisting conditions and the end of the evil practice of rescission alone are very worthwhile. The extension of coverage under parental plans until the age of twenty-six means I will be able to keep my younger two children (both with celiac disease) on my insurance for as long as should be necessary. The insurance reform requiring that a minimum of 85% of premiums be used to cover medical loss is a great first step. I still remember when the typical medical loss by our mostly non-profit insurance companies was 95%, so I’m not impressed by the 85% number. Still, it’s better than the current 70%-80% medical loss. 85% is at least less egregious than the current situation. There are others, but those were the ones that I found particularly relevant.

Nevertheless, it’s a patchwork law that really doesn’t do enough. That doesn’t upset me terribly. That’s how things usually work with us. The health care reform act was a good start. Now we just have to keep making it better while trying not to take any steps backwards.

Original Sin 26 – So how did this idea come to dominate in the West?

The question of how the idea of original sin as inherited guilt (along with other distinct differences) rose to dominance in the Western Christian world is actually a pretty interesting historical question. In order to begin to understand it, one has to step back into the ancient world within which Christianity formed and took root. For good reason, we tend to associate Christianity with the rise of Western civilization. The two are often so deeply intertwined in our minds, that we tend to unconsciously assume that Christianity is a Western religion.

But it’s not. And the world of those first centuries was a very different one. In that world, what we call the West was the frontier of the Roman Empire. Within the context of Christianity, only one Apostolic See was established — the one in Rome. In the East, by way of contrast, there were four Apostolic sees or patriarchates: Jerusalem (the oldest), Antioch, Alexandria, and Constantinople. (According to tradition it’s said that the Apostle Andrew founded the church that eventually became the See of Constantinople, but the actual elevation of Constantinople to the level of the other Sees probably stems from the same reason that Rome itself was originally included. They were both capitol cities of the Empire. And as the status of Rome declined, that of Constantinople rose. If the realities of political and geographic realities had not played a part in the status and importance of some of the Apostolic Sees, then one would expect to see Ephesus, for example, among them.)

By the time of St. Augustine, the division of language between the Latin West and the Greek East had become more pronounced than it had ever been before. The days of a sole emperor were largely gone and the Empire itself was more strongly divided into a Western Empire under Rome and an Eastern Empire under Constantinople than it had generally been before. The East had Persia as its biggest rival; the threat that Islam became did not yet exist. While Christianity and trade still tied East and West together, those bonds were growing weaker.

In that context, we have to add the fact that St. Augustine stood head and shoulders intellectually above anyone in the Latin West while the East retained many equal voices. Moreover St. Augustine did not write in Greek nor did he like to read Greek. Thus he did not interact with the Eastern Fathers theologically and it doesn’t seem that any of those in the East ever read St. Augustine’s theological works. It doesn’t appear that they were even translated into Greek until many centuries later. St. John Cassian (who I believe is the only Western saint with writings included, for example, in the Philokalia) did try to mediate some of the places where St. Augustine went too far, but his efforts were less appreciated in the West.

As a result, St. Augustine became the dominant interpretive voice in the West in a way that no single person ever became in the East. His interpretations eventually became the normative base for all Western theology. Protestantism rejected some of the late medieval practices and theology of the Roman Catholic Church, but they remained rooted in an Augustinian perspective of reality. If anything, they went further along the path of that perspective than St. Augustine himself ever did. Thus we get ideas like ‘total depravity’ that certainly go beyond anything St. Augustine taught.

At any rate, those seem to be the primary factors in the tapestry of divergence to my eyes. Anyone think I’m missing or overlooking anything?

For the Life of the World 24

The series now moves to section 3 of the fifth chapter of For the Life of the World. Here is the link to Deacon Michael Hyatt’s  second podcast on chapter five.

• For the Life of the World: Part Twelve

We now can return to the sacrament of matrimony. We can now understand that its true meaning is not that it merely gives a religious “sanction” to marriage and family life, reinforces with supernatural grace the natural family virtues. Its meaning is that by taking the “natural” marriage into “the great mystery of Christ and the Church,” the sacrament of matrimony gives marriage a new meaning; it transforms, in fact, not only marriage as such but all human love.

Dn. Hyatt draws some observations about recent weddings he’s attended in this podcast and in the prior one. They are good illustrations. At their best, the symbolism in most of our modern marriages make marriage into something that is essentially between the individual man and woman before God. Basically, we are doing exactly what Fr. Schmemann points out above. We are adding a religious blessing to a natural marriage so God is somehow included. But there is no sense that we are speaking about Christ and the Church. The Church is not really even involved or engaged in any way. In some ways, I think that omission helps feed the rampant idolization of “family” in the circles in which I have moved these past fifteen years.

Fr. Schmemann also comments that as a separate rite or ceremony developed for marriage and as the Church gained the civil authority to perform legal marriages, marriage was gradually divorced from the Eucharist — the very thing which had formerly marked and transformed a marriage into a mystery of Christ and the Church. I find it significant that as forgiveness flows from baptism, and thus confession is linked to baptism, so marriage — or love — flows from the Eucharist. Fr. Schmemann weaves connections I had never considered before, but which seem obvious once he points them out.

From that history, the Orthodox rite of matrimony developed into two distinct services. The first service, the betrothal, is not performed inside the Church, but in the vestibule instead. This is where rings are blessed and exchanged. It’s the Christian version of the “natural” or “civil” marriage.

For the Christian, natural does not mean either self-sufficient — a “nice little family” — or merely insufficient, and to be, therefore, strengthened and completed by the addition of the “supernatural.” The natural man thirsts and hungers for fulfillment and redemption. This thirst and hunger is the vestibule of the Kingdom: both beginning and exile.

The “natural” marriage unites the couple, but they are not united in the Kingdom. They stand outside it, in the vestibule. The imagery is powerful if you stop and try to inhabit it.

Then, having blessed the natural marriage, the priest takes the bridal pair in a solemn procession into the church. This is the true form of the sacrament, for it does not merely symbolize, but indeed is the entrance of marriage into the Church, which is the entrance of the world into the “world to come,” the procession of the people of God — in Christ — into the Kingdom. The rite of crowning is but a later — although a beautiful and beautifully meaningful — expression of the reality of this entrance.

I’ve heard of the Orthodox rite of crowning before. The couple do not exchange vows in this wedding. They make no promises to each other or to God. Instead they stand together and are blessed and crowned as king and queen of creation. For that is what were created to be and we cannot escape our reality. We can abuse it. We can turn the world we touch into a little hell. But we were created to reflect God into creation.

Each family is indeed a kingdom, a little church, and therefore a sacrament of and a way to the Kingdom. Somewhere, even if it is only in a single room, every man at some point in his life has his own small kingdom. It may be hell, and a place of betrayal, or it may not. … This is what the marriage crowns express: that here is the beginning of a small kingdom which can be something like the true Kingdom. The chance will be lost, perhaps even in one night; but at this moment it is still an open possibility. Yet even when it has been lost, and lost again a thousand times, still if two people stay together, they are in a real sense king and queen to each other.

As we’ll explore shortly, marriage is not easy. If it were easy, it would not change us, and we desperately need to be changed. But I like the image above. However often you lose it, together you can keep fighting back toward the reality of Christ and the Church.

Fr. Schmemann then points out that in our culture the “icon” of marriage is typically a young couple. But then he tells a story to illustrate the fallacy of that perspective.

But once, in the light and warmth of an autumn afternoon, this writer saw on the bench of a public square, in a poor Parisian suburb, an old and poor couple. They were sitting hand in hand, in silence, enjoying the pale light, the last warmth of the season. In silence: all words had been said, all passion exhausted, all storms at peace. The whole life was behind — yet all of it was now present, in this silence, in this light, in this warmth, in this silent unity of hands. Present — and ready for eternity, ripe for joy. This to me remains the vision of marriage, of its heavenly beauty.

This year will mark our twentieth wedding anniversary. It is my hope and goal to one day reach a place not unlike the one Fr. Schmemann describes above.

Then secondly, the glory and honor is that of the martyr’s crown. For the way to the Kingdom is the martyria — bearing witness to Christ. And this means crucifixion and suffering. A marriage which does not constantly crucify its own selfishness and self-sufficiency, which does not “die to itself” that it may point beyond itself, is not a Christian marriage. The real sin of marriage today is not adultery or lack of “adjustment” or “mental cruelty.” It is the idolization of the family itself, the refusal to understand marriage as directed toward the Kingdom of God. This is expressed in the sentiment that one would “do anything” for his family, even steal. The family has here ceased to be for the glory of God; it has ceased to be a sacramental entrance into His presence. It is not the lack of respect for the family, it is the idolization of the family that breaks the modern family so easily, making divorce its almost natural shadow. It is the identification of marriage with happiness and the refusal to accept the cross in it. In a Christian marriage, in fact, three are married; and the united loyalty of the two toward the third, who is God, keeps the two in an active unity with each other as well as with God. Yet it is the presence of God which is the death of the marriage as something only “natural.” It is the cross of Christ that brings the self-sufficiency of nature to its end. But “by the cross joy [and not “happiness!”] entered the whole world.” Its presence is thus the real joy of marriage. It is the joyful certitude that the marriage vow, in the perspective of the eternal Kingdom, is not taken “until death parts,” but until death unites us completely.

Wow. Read that a time or three. I confess that I could conceive of “doing anything” for my family. Lie (even in formal settings)? Steal? Kill? Curse Christ and offer incense to the emperor cult? I have no confidence that, if truly pressed, there’s a point beyond which I would not step. I may not be a particularly good husband or father, but I can’t recall any other serious or deeply held ambition I’ve ever had for my life. It’s not exactly the sort of Christian idolization that Fr. Schmemann describes and which I’ve certainly encountered, for it’s been my deepest desire even when I was as “anti-Christian” as they come. If the above does not trouble you, at least a bit, then you’re a better person than I’m ever likely to be.

The third meaning of the crowns in the Orthodox rite is that they are crowns of the Kingdom. Interestingly, as the priest removes the crowns from their heads, he says, “Receive their crowns in Thy Kingdom.” God alone is the end and fullness of perfected love.

The common cup given to the couple after the crowning is explained today as a symbol of “common life,” and nothing shows better the “desacramentalization” of marriage, its reduction to a “natural happiness.” In the past this was communion, the partaking of the Eucharist, the ultimate seal of the fulfillment of marriage in Christ. Christ is to be the very essence of life together. He is the wine of the new life of the children of God, and communion in it will proclaim how, by getting older and older in this world, we are growing younger and younger in the life which has no evening.

Even the Orthodox rite, apparently has been divorced from the context of the couple taking the Eucharist in communion with the gathered people of God. I know in the Roman Catholic Church, it remains an option (though often not taken) for the marriage to take place within the context of a full mass, including the Eucharist. I wonder if it remains an Orthodox option or not.

Marriage is one of the things that Scripture expressly and literally calls a mysterion or sacramentum. It seems like that would give the more “literal-minded,” “bible-believing,” anti-sacramental sorts of Christian pause. For some reason, though, it doesn’t. I’ve never quite understood why that is so.

My Church History Perspective 2 – So Now You’re A Christian

I was around 30 years old when my lifelong spiritual journey, which included many legitimate intersections with Christianity (both positive and negative) finally culminated in an identity that began to be shaped by, in, and through Jesus of Nazareth. I call it a pivotal point in a very long and extended process of conversion to “Christianity”, but that process included many legitimate encounters and decisions along the way, including baptism. So you can call it whatever you like. I’ve reached the point where I have no interest in trying to conform my personal narrative into anything others feel ought to be a conversion narrative. My life and story is what it has been and I’m content to simply let it be without distortion.

However, my experience as I revolved in narrowing circles around Jesus the Christ has been … interesting. My past excursions into history served me well at times. For instead, I knew something about Corinth as a Roman outpost. And when Lydia was described as a seller of purple, I grasped the implications of that immediately. I also understood how unusual, though certainly not unprecedented, it was that she appeared to be the head of her wealthy household. However, the fact that she was Jewish (Paul sought out the Jews first and that’s clearly what he was doing in Corinth as well) as well as a seller of purple and that Paul himself was a Roman citizen meant I clearly didn’t know enough about the interaction between the Jewish nation and people and Rome. (Actually, I knew next to nothing. I had always been more interested in the interactions of Rome further to the west.) I was also struck by the fact that even as the emperor cult grew in the first century, Jews were for some reason not expected or required to offer even a token sacrifice of incense. (I’m not sure if many modern Christians notice that fact or its oddity.)

Obviously I had a lot to learn.

I was not unfamiliar with Judaism, having had some interaction with its modern expression over the course of my childhood and early adult life. I did not, however, know anything about the interaction between Rome and ancient Israel. Also, as I had always done, as I became engaged spiritually, I wanted to know the history of this faith. Christianity is rooted in Judaism, so you cannot understand the history and origin of one without understanding the other. Obviously they diverged sharply early on, but I think many Christians fail to recognize how very Jewish our faith really is. Part of that, of course, is that many modern expressions look very little like anything connected to historical Christianity, but we’ll get to that later in this series.

I don’t know how to adopt or engage a spirituality or religion without delving into the culture and history that produced it. It’s not that I did something new when it came to Christianity. To one extent or another, this is what I had always done from early childhood into my adult life. Every form of spiritual perspective (even the materialistic perspectives that reject everything beyond the sensible or material realm) is interwoven with the culture and history that gave it birth. However, Christianity is a specifically historical faith. That is, it is rooted in an actual person, Jesus of Nazareth, and the historical events surrounding him.

It’s clear to me that many people engage Christian faith with relatively little regard or consideration of its history and formative culture. But I don’t understand how they do that. In some ways, it’s probably a blessing for them. At least, it eliminates some hard questions. But that’s not me. I became Christian, but that didn’t change the way I approached spirituality and faith. My exploration of Church history that will follow this post, however I meander, is rooted in that facet of who I am. I can’t be somebody else. At least not for very long.