The cleansed life of media and AI. . .

Everyone knows that life is messy.  You love the wrong people and the wrong people love you.  Love is not idyllic but hard, a struggle even at is best.  Children are mixed blessings and bring a lot of baggage into your lives.  Friends ignore, deceive, and betray you.  The good do not prosper and the evil seem to do just fine.  Moral people don't always make great leaders and immoral people sometimes lead better.  Wars are terrible but seemingly inescapable.  The weather always rains on your plans and your parades.  I could go on but I think you get my drift.  Life is messy and disappointing and hard.  That is the way it is.

We look for an easier life.  We insulate ourselves from people in an effort to prevent them from hurting or betraying us.  We hedge our bets even with the love of our lives.  We like the idea of freedom but find its practice is a dirty business.  So it is no wonder that social media has an appeal for us.  We can make friends who will never show up at an awkward moment or betray us (we can always unfriend them).  We can make sure that our friends are pure and without any nasty strain of conflict or disagreement with the views we hold.  We can be romantic through means and hit the off button when the feeling passes.  We can make sure a whole world knows our story and our slant on things but we can prevent theirs from interrupting us while we are on our soapbox.  I get it.  Media makes it safer to have friends and even live with your families.

AI is part of that deal.  Have you ever noticed how complimentary AI is when their bot reviews our work or helps us find what we want?  It is so nice how deferential they are to us -- the hidden wisdom of those data centers and the chatbots who are almost human.  We wish that the folks at work were that nice or the folks at home.  AI is appealing in part because they are nicer than people in their dealings with us.  You never have to say you are sorry and you never have to muster up the words to forgive the hidden humanoid who is there at your beck and call.  The bots can do all things well enough to be better than the real thing -- even relationships and sex!  Who is not impressed with the appeal of a make your own friend, companion, or lover?

Our virtual AI “companions” seem to be willing to trust our secrets, be sympathetic to our quirks, nice, and, even more importantly, attentive.  Lord knows, we live in a world of distracted, indifferent, duplicitous, and disappointing people.  Perhaps the promise of AI is that it will someday offer a real enough alternative to simply check out of the mess of relationships, friendships, etc... Even our own bodies can be transcended and we do not have to be bound by our looks or size or shape or, even, gender.  At some point, we will be able to travel without leaving home, just as eat food we do not cook or even leave the house to obtain.   The surprise here is not that these things are offered to us but that we are so attracted to them and tempted by them to surrender our very humanity to what can never be human.

If for these reasons alone, the Church should be wary about tying our fortunes to AI and media in general.  We do not have the luxury or having a virtual relationship with a real God.  It is about time that we said this out loud in public.   

Who are the real thought police?

The real thought police are not conservatives but those on the leading edge of progressive politics and thought, so-called liberals but really illiberal.  It is dangerous in liberalism to allow people to disagree with the status quo of progressive political and social thought.  The mechanisms are already being put in place to monitor, for now, and eventually control even the private messages of individual people -- messages which dare to express their independence from the woke ideals and their promoters in the world.

An example of this is the fact that the European Parliament voted early in July on the urgency of Chat Control—the scanning of the private messages of citizens charged with no crime and threatening no one except the powers that be.   Of course, this will be heralded as necessary access to prevent violence, to protect children, to end hate speech, and to make for a more civil society.  Who is naive enough to believe that it will end with scanning or monitoring of such messages?  As Rod Dreher as suggested, this is not for building an infrastructure to deal with today but the establishment of an infrastructure for tomorrow.  It is always good to remember that we never surrender our freedom all at once but in small steps over time.  We surrender it line by line of rhetoric and computer code and it is never to control but to protect -- a reason no reasonable person would dare to argue with but it never stops there.

You must hearken back to the case of Päivi Räsänen, the Lutheran member of parliament from Finland now convicted by a Finnish court of hate speech — for quoting the Bible, and for criticizing LGBT ideology  —  after being exonerated several times before. Though she was twice acquitted by the courts, the Finnish state was not satisfied and tried her a third time in order to gain the conviction they wanted. The consequences of this conviction are not limited to Finland.  In fact, Päivi was prevented from flying through London’s Heathrow airport on a flight back because she’s a convicted hate criminal and that made her either dangerous or a persona non grata in the UK even for a temporary moment in an airport awaiting a connecting flight!  The UK insists she is unwelcome there.  This is Päivi Räsänen, an elected European lawmaker, denied travel through Heathrow Airport on  orders of His Majesty’s government for daring to quote the Bible in public.  The irony here is that this is done in the name of the King who is charged with defending the (Christian) faith of the Church of England.

Now who is the thought police you should rightly fear?   

Update:   Räsänen has filed an application to appeal her conviction to the European Court of Human Rights in July, commencing the final legal juncture of a landmark case for freedom of speech in Europe.  Stay tuned.  

A strange paradox. . .

Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.  Or something like that was said by Barry Goldwater.  It did not matter since LBJ showed a mushroom cloud with the express intention of saying it was either him or nuclear holocaust.  In the end it was enough to push the Texan to a mighty big victory and to tarnish the reputation of an otherwise honorable opponent.  I wonder if they were really as far apart as the commercial suggested.  In the end, the party that nominated Johnson went on to see Chicago riots and the landslide shift to the other side four years down the road.  It is a strange paradox when you set it up so that your friends are not friendly enough and your enemies are not who you think them to be.  Such is the case in religious politics as well.

Rome recently saw the SSPX, a traditionalist group loosely on the fringes of Rome, defy the papal threat and ordain their own bishops.  I get it.  They spat in the face of the pope, for Pete's sake.  That is how it appears, anyway.  But is it exactly that?  Watch the videos posted of the ordination of their bishops in Switzerland and the ordination of a bishop in Laredo, Texas, and it is not so clear.  The trad group is pious and reverent and churchly while the Roman group sounds almost Protestant casual doing the same thing -- a more liturgical version to be sure but not exactly high church either.  The dispute with the SSPX seems to fall around the Council nobody seems to agree on what it said or means -- Vatican II.  Some, like Benedict XVI and John Paul II, insist that Vatican II did nothing but a new coat of paint on the old church and nothing of substance in doctrine or practice really changed.  But that is certainly at odds with the liturgical reforms of Paul VI which were not quite Vatican II but have claimed the label.  The SSPX does not like some of what the Council said and little of what Paul VI promulgated.  On this, a host of folks uneasily within Rome seem to agree.

Rome has also seen others who seem to fit within the fold turn the Mass into a circus, resist every attempt at reverence, and make the little visit with God into a homey little sit down.  On top of that there are official voices clamoring for the ordination of women, for a voice and vote on the things of importance, and for a friendlier view to the LGBTQ+ community.  It is not quite important that they do not seem to be going anywhere to change Rome but the fact is that they get to flaunt their outrageous views seemingly without recrimination while Pope Francis tried to evict a conservative cardinal from his Roman apartments for daring to question him through official channels.  It certainly does seem that to err on the conservative side is more cause for Vatican complaint or discipline than to go the other direction. Does that mean that the liberal edge is more friendly with Rome than the more conservative, traditional side?  What a paradox?  Your friends are more those who stretch the limits of faith and practice within the boundaries than those who try to rein in the extremes?  Really?  Not to mention the fact that the previous Pope ceded control over who is ordained to the Chinese communists and the new one seems comfortable with that.  So four bishops from the conservative side are a bigger outrage than how many from the Chinese government?

Before you shrug your shoulders and suggest this is a Roman problem, the same thing exists in Lutheranism and in Missouri.  There seems to be plenty of latitude given to those who stretch the borders of faith and practice one way but not so much the other way.  If the people like a pastor who is not living within the boundaries of confessional Lutheran faith and practice, it seems okay to let him be.  But a conservative pastor who tries to bring the folk back into the fold is claimed to be rigid or overbearing and handed a resignation letter to sign.  Yes, I know, there are many nuances to these cases but it is no wonder sometimes it is hard to figure out who your friend and who is not anymore.  All of this attests to the fact that the most dangerous thing in any church body is someone who is pious and faithful on the conservative side of things.  Across Lutheranism it is the same.  Liberals get away with denying just about everything and ignoring our very Confession while conservatives who hold the line are seen as loving rules more than people and more like a law-giving Moses than a grace-giving Jesus.  But is it always that simple?  Are the folks more dangerous to the health and life of the Church more those who conserve or those who innovate?  We are still a church body intimidated by large parishes that seem more evangelical than Lutheran while fearful of the small parish that keeps the tradition without apology.

We all seem to love the muddy moderate middle more than anything else.  Liturgical but not too liturgical, conservative but not too conservative, and confessional but not too confessional.   We Lutherans know this only too well but apparently we are not alone.  Rome and the Episcopals would rather sell a building once used for Christian worship to a Muslim group than to a conservative one.  That statement can be shown truthful with myriad examples.  Even the ELCA was guilty of that.  Who are the friends of orthodox Christianity?  Those who hold to the creeds, councils, confessions and liturgy of the Church or those who like to live on the wild side?  The answer seems obvious but, depending upon who you talk to, it is not.  Leo will excommunicate the SSPX principals for their action but warn those who flaunt Roman teaching and practice on the other side.  Even a certain Tucho seems to exemplify this desire to live on the edge while talking tough with the rad trads.  It is not always different even among those who claim to abhor popes (like Missouri).  It is a strange paradox, indeed, that we treat those who skirt the left boundary different than those who do the same to the right. 

Political humor. . .

A wise person’s heart directs him toward the right, but the foolish person’s heart directs him toward the left.  Ecclesiastes 10:2 NASB

Is that a small thing?

It has been said that an appeal to church councils is not as much as some think.  In fact, Luther himself says as much in his work On the Councils of the Church (first section) and again in his Treatise to the German Nobility (written some 18 years apart).  He is defraying the position of Rome and the Pope as well as conciliarism in general by seeming to demean them for merely explaining and asserting what is already there in Scripture.  I get it.  He is right, of course.  Faithful councils did not make up answers to the vexing questions of the day but concerned themselves with what Scripture says and then applied that to those vexing questions of the day.  But doing that is not a small thing.  It is the same problem I have who insist that ordination is merely apostolic custom -- well, yes, but, is apostolic custom something small or something important?

We tend as Lutherans to sound like we are demeaning both the testimony of the fathers and the edicts of the great councils as if they were not doing anything much at all but simply repeating Scripture and applying Scripture to the problems of the moment.  We are certainly NOT saying that this is a small thing.  They could have invented positions for the Church without Scriptural substance or support.  There were plenty who did (some of those deemed heretics and some who have a rather orthodox reputation).  We as Lutherans labored against all sorts of things not explicitly or even implicitly found in Scripture -- from the treasury of merits to purgatory to papal infallibility to a host of things down through the ages.  Inventive theology is fun and interesting but it lacks the warrant of God's voice and the blessing of His Spirit.  We need to stick with Scripture and then to apply Scripture even to those things not explicitly addressed in Scripture and then to shut up instead of venturing far from God's Word.  We are counseled by God's Word neither to add to it nor to detract from it even as we are called to heed its voice and hold fast to what it says.  But, of course, sometimes folks are of no mind to listen to what God says.  So when the Church can muster the courage to speak what God has said, it is never a small thing.

When a body like the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod comes together to commend what Scripture says and what our Confessions affirm and even what the fathers have said and councils have judged, it is not a small thing.  We live, after all, in a world in which inventive theology (and liturgy) is the regular practice of some, even many.  If that were not true we would not have seen the ordination of women, the embrace of same sex marriage, the promotion of birth control as normative and good, the acceptance of abortion as a women's health issue, the support for the myriad of genders, and so many other things.  These can only occur when we skip over what Scripture says and appeal to another authority or listen to another voice over what God has said.  So when we come together and say again what the Bible says, councils have confessed, fathers have testified, and confessions have adopted, it is never a small thing at all.  For the reality is that everywhere around us churches are ignoring what God has said in favor of all kinds of authorities in competition with God's Word.  So don't demean that as something unimportant or small when it happens that the Church marshals the courage to say this is what God has said and this we believe, teach, and confess.

At the same time, however, we must admit that there are many who disagree over what Scripture is even saying and who spend their days in creative exegesis in order to make God's Word say something different than what it does.  So when we promote the faithful exegesis and confess the truth of God's Word and, in so doing, appeal to council and the testimony of the fathers, that is a good thing.  It does not give councils or the fathers an authority greater than God's Word but it does show that we are not promoting novelty nor are we falling into the creative exegesis temptation so prevalent today but that we stand with those who have stood before us on the truth of God's Word.  That is not a small thing either.  Appealing to the witness of councils and the fathers in support  of what Scripture says is doing exactly what we ought to be doing as assert and give support to the fact that we are building upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, living in faithfulness to the traditions handed down to us, and giving care to holding to the sacred deposit once given to us and which we commend to those who follow us.  None of this is a small thing but a very important way that we testify to the catholicity and apostolicity of the faith we confess and which we live out around this Word and Sacrament.