An ex-Lutheran still can't stomach a Mass as either a Lutheran by heritage or a secularist

I recently attended a Catholic high school graduation. It wasn’t out of personal choice, but rather I was on the newspaper clock. One of the two communities I cover as editor of two newspapers has a Catholic as well as a public high school, and yes, it’s rare for a Catholic high school to be attached to a single parish and in a small town unless it’s VERY Catholic.

Some regular readers here know my background as a Lutheran-turned-secularist, who started that turning halfway through seminary, and comes from a dyed-in-the-wool Lutheran family, including ministers and teachers.

And, that’s the setting for the rest of the story.

The graduation ceremony was at the local church, and was part of not just a worship service, but a regular Mass.

And … my skin almost crawled.

I still can't, don’t, and won’t accept the "re-sacrifice" of the Mass itself from a Lutheran perspective, let alone a secularist one. My Lutheran background understands why Luther himself, and other Protestant Reformers both Lutheran and Calvinist, recoiled at this.

If Jesus were the once and for all sacrifice, being fully divine as well as fully human, on a vicarious atonement theory of his death, then he was sacrificed once. Period. That’s the whole thrust of John’s version of the Passion, setting Passover a day later than the Synoptics and having Jesus as the perfect replacement for the Passover lambs.

I’ve attended a couple of Masses before, but they were for comparative religion classes or other things, and all Saturday night quickies (the priest wasn’t even vested in a couple of cases, just wearing his "dog collar" [as an ex-Lutheran, not ex-Baptist, I can say that]) and I got out. And wasn’t reflective on what was really happening at ones I had to attend for class reasons. (Ditto on some of the more interesting non-Lutheran Protestant churches I attended.)

There were other offsetting things that I heard.

One was the reference to the "sacrifice" by believers before the Eucharist itself. It makes me understand more clearly the Catholic emphasis on giving something up for Lent, which most Protestants, let alone the Faitheist groupies of Original Faitheist Chris Stedman just don’t get. If they did, they wouldn’t dive into their own version of giving stuff up. (Faitheist the book and the cult of Chris Stedman are so shoddy I blogged about it the book, him and it the cult not once but twice, the first time in fair detail, the second time massively so.)

Per James Carroll's new longform in The Atlantic, well worth a read, primarily about clericalism in Catholicism, the whole guilt-laden background is what seems to drive the focus on ongoing sacrifice. And, as a good ex-Lutheran, I know that guilt-laden background weighed quite heavily on Martin Luther.

I also found it interesting that the Mass — the actual Mass, not the larger service — edits the biblical language. The priest began the consecration and transubstantiation (have to add that word) like this:

"On the same night he was betrayed when he willingly entered his sacrifice ..." The Bible says no such thing at the time, of course, about his willingness. And, Paul wrote 1 Corinthians before any of the Gospels, let alone the Jesus of piety of Luke.

AND, I've said before, that παραδίδωμι in Paul's Greek can have a middle/intransitive as well as a passive meaning. In which case, in English, Paul says:

"On the same night he was arrested, he took bread ..." There was no betrayal, contra later Christian peshers mining Psalm 119 and other spots for a dark betrayal by Judas (which has its flip side in Gnostic thought with Judas Thomas, and Thomas being the Aramaic of Didymus, which is just "twin" in English. Here, Jesus and Judas are part of a cosmic Gnostic-Jungian play.) I have also blogged about THAT not just once but twice, both times in the context of larger issues of biblical criticism and in re Jesus mythicism as well.

Next?

"The new and eternal covenant."

It’s certainly not called that, either. That said, Christians believe it is.

THAT said, if you believe that, you’ve undermined your own idea of the Mass as a re-sacrifice, haven’t you? You've also raised questions of the intertwining of god's foreknowledge, predestination, omnipotence, etc., as in ... to be snarky ... "Couldn't got get that covenant right the first time?"

On the bit more cynical side, or knee-jerk crude humor side, Pavlovian thoughts popped into my head when I heard that bell. Maybe there's a serious angle to that, too.

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I will say, and I don't know if it was more the particular priest (raised Baptist himself) or more percolation years for post-Vatican II emphasis on preaching in Catholic worship, but the father wasn't bad on his graduation homily.

Was Thomas Kuhn all he cracked himself up to be?

Maybe, and maybe not.

I do like that Kuhn's paradigms and paradigm shifts note that science has always had its deductive as well as inductive sides. Good philosophers of science may note that good science has them work in tandem.

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris was a graduate student of Kuhn's for a year. He decades later wrote five New York Times Opinionator columns about the experience (here's the first) and eventually turned them into a book.

His central charge? Kuhn was a relativist rejecting the idea of objective truth.

New Atlantis hated what Morris wrote, in large part because it had the usual Errol Morris style. At the same time, it admitted that Kuhn himself snarled up some of his arguments about science and history.

Steven Poole in The Guardian flat-out claimed Morris got Kuhn wrong.

John Horgan, while saying he thought Morris overdid his killing of Kuhn, said that from personal experience, he found Kuhn "almost comically self-contradictory."

Horgan and Poole also disagree on Morris' interpretation of, and use of, Saul Kripke. Poole thinks Morris understands Kripke as poorly as he does Kuhn, while Horgan says he found Morris' interpretation enlightening.

Horgan finally does a twist on Morris by wondering if he wasn't actually a secret admirer of Kuhn.

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This Venn diagram reflects about how much I think Kuhn
actually had to say about problems in science in general, and
even more, or less, what he had to say or not about scientism.

Beyond Morris, and with Horgan, my take is that Kuhn did bring new insights to philosophy of science, but that he was, from what I read, self-contradictory. That then said, per this commenter on Morris, perhaps the self-contradictory issue reflects science's messiness.

Plus, he own theory can easily be self-judoed.

And, for people who think he has crushed scientism? First, not in the mind of scientism aficionados, he hasn't. Second, to the degree he can be self-judoed, he hasn't in general. Because ... the next paradigm shift may be around the corner.

Per that and per Kuhn's Wiki page, I think the charge of relativism has some merit. Kuhn himself said "I am not a Kuhnian," but that sounds like the defensiveness behind his allegedly throwing an ashtray at Morris. His paradigm shift does raise questions of how much rational thought is involved with shifting to a new paradigm — or not.

Also, what both Kuhn and Morris (and Popper fans) seem to miss is that it ties back to the old Problem of Induction. Even more, given Kuhn basing his charges about problems with commensurability, or the incommensurability lack thereof, being based on issues with modal logic, Kripke and related, Kuhn connects to Nelson Goodman's New Riddle of Induction. Indeed, Goodman's original ideas later influenced Kripke.

A related issue is that Kuhn probably oversold the whole idea of paradigm shifts. New ways of thinking in science usually aren't as starkly incompatible as, say, classical and quantum mechanics.

Take Charles Darwin. Ideas of evolution had been floating in the biology world for decades. Darwin just thought of a specific mechanism — or two, counting sexual selection.

Per what I said about physics, I'm not sure there's been a revolutionary paradigm shift since quantum mechanics and general relativity. Dark matter and energy have been accepted without much fight, and string theory has yet to be proven, so neither qualifies.

Biology arguably has had paradigm shifts since Darwin. The acceptance of prions as semi-alive. The acceptance of the reality of epigenetics. These are both at least semi-major shifts, and contra dark matter, both have been fought-over.

Chemistry? Maybe high-temp superconductivity. I'm not sure.

In short?

Kuhnians shouldn't put him on a pedestal, because the paradigm beneath that will shift away. And, beyond that, there's arguably greater shifts in issues in philosophy directly or indirectly tied to philosophy of science than to science itself.

I once thought Kuhn was genius-like myself. Now, I think he should have viewed himself more skeptically.

More thoughts on no "Levite Exodus" and Egyptian origins for Judaism

This is a continuation of thoughts from my first post about Richard Elliott Friedman's ideas about a "Levite Exodus" from Egypt.

Many conservative Christians who know their bibles know Israel was conquered by Assyria and Judah by Babylon. But, other than "knowing" there was an exodus from Egypt, they don't know the reality of relations with Egypt.

At the time the people who later became known as Israel emerged from previous culture in Canaan, that was around the height of Egypt's influence over Canaan. Setting aside old kingdoms, like old Babylon, Akkad, etc., the eastern and northern Fertile Crescent simply had nothing comparable, other than the Hittite power intruding from Asia Minor not too long before the Sea Peoples. And, before the rise of the neo-Assyrian Empire, for a few hundred years, there was simply nothing to compare to Egypt in the eastern Fertile Crescent, even with Egypt in a period of faded glories.

So, if you were some newly emerging statelet in today's Palestine and writing an origin myth, tying yourself to Egypt was the deal. Egyptian religious cult names, a putative revolt leader with a Pharaonic knock-off name? Check and check. Coronation ritual for a king stolen from Egypt by a big prophetic writer? Yep. And finally, to creatively borrow from the Egyptian account of the creation of the world, replacing your people's older version.

Remember, it was more than just power. Egypt was about gold and riches. And style and beauty. And, so it was hoped, occult science on the mummification of the dead.

Israel, then the Judah-infused Israel, didn't go quite to cargo cult length, but it did stretch its claims to Egyptian metaphysical ancestry a fair bit.

As for Nehushtan, the bronze serpent that had reportedly become a cult object by the time of King Hezekiah and his problematic reign? (It's problematic among other things in that, per biblical chronology, Ahaz would have had to be 11 when Hezekiah was born; nice trick on doing both that and being his alleged father. Some critical theology postulates both as sons of Joram, but that doesn't really solve much; it mainly just moves the problem around.)

Anyway, I digress. Nehushtan might have been an aniconic angle inserted by the Deuteronomic historian in Kings as part of touting Hezekiah's reforms.

As far as other aspects of the origin of the Jerusalem-based cultus, modern scholars like this don't see animal sacrifice as central to Egyptian worship, meaning it came from either the Ba'al and El cult of Syria (Aram) or Judah and other wandering Semites who moved into the southern Fertile Crescent, or some combination. And religious tensions, then, arose not from Moses vs Aaron adherents, but retrojections onto that from different subgroups within Ba'alim before it started getting displaced by Yawhists, or by Yahwists. Add into all of this Aaron being Moses elder brother and J, especially, telling "younger brother" stories.

Behind this, in turn, were surely larger struggles within Judah after the fall of Samaria in 722, about aligning with Assyria vs Egypt, or even more, with Babylon vs Egypt as it superseded Assyria. Josiah arguably guessed wrong a century after Hezekiah. And, ignoring Necho's claims to have Yahweh's support, it seems likely that a majority of Judahite leadership agreed with him and disagreed with Josiah's decision to fight. The decision was problematic a generation later. After Nebuchadnezzar's final visit to Jerusalem, the remaining non-peasant non-exiled largely moved to Egypt.