vol VII: Notes
1999
Notes
[Notebook DB 52A Mathesis]
[Sunday 5 December 1999 - Saturday 11 December 1999]
[page 153]
Sunday 5 December 1999
The fundamental problem of linguistics
Monday 6 December 1999
[page 154]
Both extremes, narcissism and science are needed for practical life.
A modern reflection of this tendency is the introspective analysis of knowledge presented in works such as Bernard Lonergan's Insight. Lonergan
The power of science arises because it simplifies its works to processing text without prejudice as to its meaning. This is achieved by the use of mathematics, a neutral language whose terms do not have the connotation of natural languages. One sees problems caused by by the properties of natural languages arising continually in religious debate. As a single example, consider the debate on justification which was central to the Reformation and caused loss of blood to n humans in the religious was surrounding the Reformation. Protestant Reformation - Wikipedia, Justification (theology) - Wikipedia
The fundamental problem approached by the Renaissance was to discover the true thoughts of the ancients through the artefacts they left us, texts, mosaics,
[page 155]
paintings, sculpture, architecture, jewellery, weapons, money and so on.
Act: money 'Symbol charged with value'.
So we put the heart back into Platonism by processing it with ops. It becomes pastoral. We compute by shepherd.
The natural fit between Christianity and Platonism seems to result partly from shared political motivations, the preservation of the ancient status quo against usurping forces.
To get something exactly wrong is nearly as good as to get it exactly right.
The relationship between text and reality is mediated by superposition.
. . .
Copernicus: practical calculation
[page 156]
History: fan in and fan out. The boundaries of the light cone are null geodesics, length zero. The bisector of the light cone moves through time but not space (x = const). t = const is not permitted.
Thomas:
dividens : (analysing)
componens: (synthesising)
. . .
The universe is vast and has a vast history. Here we outline the merest skeleton to give roots to the central idea of this thesis, which is well captured by the hypothesis that the universe is mathematics incarnate. From this hypothesis we can derive an answer to the question is the universe divine . . .
[page 158]
So the problem arose of linking the view outward with the view inward, a task taken up vigorously by Descartes.
Operational decoding of text which reached its Platonic perfection in the Turing machine.
Newton introduced a new dynamics which was not logically pure. In his formal treatment of motion, he did not deal with Zeno's problems with motion but simply invented the formalism of fluxions (calculus) and forged ahead on the basis of the fit to the results. The resolution of the logical problems has taken (to date) another three centuries and delivered to us not just the benefit of space travel, but the theory of computation itself.
Tarski: The semantic conception of truth and the foundation of semantics. Tarski
The essence of a network
a) interrupt
b) new data
Tuesday 7 December 1999
Fortress: Introduction to Contemporary Theology Miller
I Karl Barth 1886-
The Cantor Universe allows infinite depth of meaning [recursive construction of meaning].
Miller page 4: 'Epistle to the Romans' 1919,
page 5: 'terrible manifesto' of 93 German intellectuals on the day of the outbreak of World War I - signatories included almost all his German teachers. Karl Barth - Wikipedia
page 6: 'In his discovery of "the strane new world within the Bible" he encountered, most notably, the stark doctrine of the wholly-otherness of God - he was fond of citing the line from Ecclesiasticus, "God is in heaven and thou art on earth".'
'It was such talk as this that really inaugurated twentieth . . .
page 7: Existentialism: subjectivity must be the starting point: Kierkegaard: truth is subjectivity
[page 160]
Miller page 9: Barth: 'We must hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.'
page 12: Barth & divine election, predestination - Calvinism.
page 13: '. . . the divine and eternal decision to redeem humanity through Christ is from the start inseparably involved in the divine nature itself., ' [Sounds like crap - why should the high God take the slightest notice of little us]. [Middle Platonism, Philo]
page 14: 'Barth affirms the resurrectiona s a real and objective event which occurred in space and time.'
Evolution is essentially dialectic: one survives in a concrete environment.
So quantummechanics bonds to evolution.
page 17: Brunner 'A theology of encounter - I-Thou.'
page 18: Barth vs Brunner: 'Is there, apart from divine revelation, any pint of contact between God and the human being? Barth denies:
[page 161]
' Miller page 22: '. . . universalism, the idea that everyone will eventually be redeemed.'
page 24: Christian Realism Reinhold (1892-1971); H Richard Niebuhr (1992 - 1962)
'Reinhold became, surely, the towering figure of the first half of twentieth cetury American theology.'
page 26: H. Richard: liberalism: 'A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgement, through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.' Right on.
page 27: 'Sin: Nature and Destiny of Man.'
page 28: Niebuhr: 'the doctrine of orignal sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.'
page 34: R Niebuhr: 'God gives the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that can be changed and the wisdom to distinguish one from the other.' [you wish]
page 35: Rudolph Bultmann - C20 NT Scholar.
[page 162]
Miller page 36: Formcriticism = Formesgeschichte.
page 37: Interested in the ingredients of Christianity, especially gnosticism. See The Gospel of John 1941. Bultmann
page 39: Jesus of History vs Jesus of Faith
page 41: Demythologisation
page 42: 'is the method of interpretation which tries to recover the deeper meaning behind the mythological conceptions. (Jesus Christ And Mythology, 18) Bultmann
page 43: Demythologised using Heidegger's existentialism.
page 46: 'Theology is not concerned with whether of not something could be shown to have actually happened once upon a time but with what it could mean for humanity.
page 49: Cullmann: heilsgeschichte = salvation history = god always at work.
[page 163]
Miller page 53: 'Whether the personal and existential aspects of the gospel can be so neatly separated from their historica moorings is a good question, It is probably the question, . . . '
page 54: Albert Schweitzer The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 1906. Schweitzer
James Robinson: The New Quest of the Historical Jesus, 1959 Robinson
page 55: Paul Tillich (1886-1965)
page 56: Tillich: 'theology of culture'.
page 58: Calvin Institutions 'The knowledge of ourselves is not only an incitement to seek after God, but likewise a considerable assistance toward finding him. On the other hand it is plain that no man can arrive at true knowledge of himself without having first contemplated the divine character and then descended to the consideration of his own.'
To take an extreme postion is to invite the oposite.
God = { humanity } as experienced by each person on a network communicating with all others.
[page 164]
Miller page 59: Tillich: 'The question of the existence of God can neither be asked nor answered. If asked, it is a question about that which by its very nature is above existence, and therefore the answer, — whether negative or affirmative — implicitly denies the nature of God. It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as to deny it. (Systematic Theology I, page 237) Tillich
Wednesday 8 December 1999
page 61: 'According to Tillich, humans are guilt ridden, painfully conscious of their finitude, and threatened with meaninglessness.
page 62: Tillich: Religion = ecstatic manifestation of the ground of being.
Protestant principle: justification by faith alone.
page 64: Tillich: faith = 'ultimate concern'
page 66: Tillich: 'knowledge of revelation, although mediated primarily through historial events, does not
[page 165]
imply factual assertions, and is therefore not exposed to critical analysis of historica research [ie it is an untestable hypothesis and no use to . . .'
Coupling - transfinite coupling, the frequency of spiritual events is low.
. . .
The Church is an organism that gains its sustenance from feeding on human activity like any other corporation. In a free and just economy
[page 166]
both parties to any contract expect to benefit from the contract, otherwise there would be no point in entering it. So the Church receives income from the faithful on a promise of salvation. What does this promise mean? It is deliverable? If Tillich is right there is no physically observable (that is historical) correlate of the promise of salvation. The Church cannot deliver the goods, and in the light of modern corporate ethics, has no right to tout for sustenance.
Interior action / exterior action. It is clear that every action has an infinite interior since the quantum of action is determined by an infinite space of states.
The parallel between being and mind; the parallel between text and universal structure is observable. So if a mathematician can construct transfinite numbers using finite symbols, the Universe can construct infinite reality using . . .
Acts blend seamlessly by direct product of Hilbert spaces. Hilbert space - Wikipedia
[page 167]
Mystica experience is pure mental act because no processing cycles are wasted n reflection, is control system is operating happily at a layer below (and so not involving) conscious advertence.
Falsely advertising and claiming payment for seats at an event that is not going to occur.. . .
Thursday 9 December 1999
Friday 10 December 1999
Wiener bonded the state space established by Gödel to the operators made available by computing to give a model of a system or animal, something which takes positive steps to continue its own existence by gathering resources, avoiding danger and reproducing.Deutsch grounded the formal theory of the world in the physics. This we might call
[page 168]
zeroth order grounding, ie in the set of smallest symbols (Ie those whose communication is associated with one quantum of action) The rest of the world is constructed from thus basic structure by the assembly of lattices of states. Deutsch
Don S Browning; Fundamental Practical Theology Browning
Browning page 1: 'This book is for anyone who has ever asked, in what ways do religious communities make sense.
people on the boundary between religious and secular life.
page 2; practical wisdom 'phronesis' (Matthew 7:24) Matthew 7:24-27
'communities of memory . . . are an antidote to the corrosive acids of Western individualism and liberalism.'
'congregational studies'
page 3: 'To admit, in academic theological circles that one is a theologian has been, in recent years, to court embarrassment.
page 4: 'We are in a period of social reconstruction . . . '
[page 169]
In this book I am interested in how communities and religious communities at that, exercise practical reason.
theology: 'systematically articulated superstition'.
Browning page 5: theology: 'systematic reflection on the historical self understanding of a particular religious tradition.'
'. . . religious traditions inevitably express their self understandings in the language of myth, story symbol and metaphor.'
the proof of the pudding is in the eating, not the recipe.
page 6: 'We are so embedded in our practices, take them so much for granted, and view them as so natura and self-evident that we never take time to abstract the theory from the practice and look at it as something in itself.
'public church'
'religious communities go from moments of consolidated practice to moments of deconstruction to new, tentative reconstructions and consolidations.'
page 7: 'strenuousness': Morale = keep up the strenuous.
page 170]
Barth: Theory to practice model.
'Not subspeciality called "practical theology" but theology as such.'
What happened to 'pure' and 'applied'?
page 8: Logical conclusion of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Jurgen Habermas, William James, John Dewey: 'practical thinking is the centre of human thinking.'
page 10: 'What shall we do?'
page 11: 'Practical reason, I will argue, always has a narrative envelope.'
page 25: 'both practical theology and the description of situations proceed as dialogues or conversations.'
Practical ≡ all theory is realised in act
page 16 Ricoeur: conflict of interpretations'.
[page 171]
conflict may occur at one transfinite level (peer process, level of interpretation) and not others
What is the practice of the world: Maupertuis, Darwin, Lagrange. In the arts structures are identified by names.
Browning page 16: 'thickness ≡ depth ≡ physically grounded
Nothing happens without a physical act.
Bottom line [accounting] vs Integrity of product.
page 18: "Where do you think we should go from here?' Game 'play with the question.
Universities are paid to play also clergy etc.
page 19; congregation: family / world: a congregation (village) works by us being ourselves in dialogue.
. . .
[page 172]
Browning page 22: theology as a social science.
'The question to be put to any researcher is not only What did you learn? but also How did you interests and social location influence the questions that guided you?
page 23: 'was to gain new insights into the way Christian education interacts with its congregational context.'
'sanctuary congregation' refugees.
Bonhoeffer on the cost of discipleship.
'the role of the sacrifice of the cross'
Pastoral care = 'poimenics'
go beyond the clerical paradigm.
. . .
[definition of] theology: the study of human communication protocols from love to war.
[page 173]
Browning page 28: 'Apostolic Church of God' Arthur Brazier Arthur M. Brazier - Wikipedia
page 30: Pentecostal: Azusa St Mission, Los Angeles 1906: Azusa Street Revival - Wikipedia
'research to illustrate some of my convictions abut the relation of social science research to practical theological thinking.
page 31: 'extensive referral and counselling program that provided legal, marital, youth, job placement, college preparation and substance abuse services to members and their extended families.'
'triumph of the therapeutic'. Family angle of vision.
page 32: patriarchal sexually repressive.
page 33: 'At first glance, the practical theology of the Apostolic Church seemed anything but an example of critical hermeneutical of revised correlational approach - the approach I will champion in the rest of this book.
Niebuhr
page 175: Methodological principle: embrace and harmonize all the theological traditions and views as examples of the same thing.
'local theology' Schreiter, 1985. Schreiter
page 34: 'Practical philosophy'
What is the difference between practical and technical: phronesis and techne?
critical reflection about the goals of human activity is both possible and necessary.
[definition of] practical theology 1: Schleiermacher - theological reflection on the tasks of the ordained minister or the leadership of the church. 2: Browning: critical reflection on the Church's ministry to the world.
The central practical concern: safety - security. Use analogy to safe industrial practices.
page 36; 'radical implications of the turn to practical philosophy.[page 175]
'fundamental practical theology' is the most inclusive form of theology, served by (containing) all the others.
[definition] 'fundamental practical theology': 'critica reflection on the church's dialogue with Christian sources and other communities of experience and interpretation with the aim of guiding its action toward social and individual transformation.'
Meaningless without attributing a direction to the transformation.
page 37: Authority given as well as taken. Power is taken.
How to distinguish between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften:
'Gadamer was the mot recent thinker in this tradition who has attempted to find the philosophical ground for disciplines such as history, philosophy, sociology and the law. These are the disciplines that should study the meaning of the action of human beings considered as relatively free and intentional creatures.
Conscious = layered [self-aware]
'disciplines that study objects (in contrast to intentional human subjects) in the natural world.
Our interpretation is in terms of our own mind projected into others.
What is so special about being intentional? Fear of death.
I have rather despised sports and excellence and all that sort of stuff and really only enjoy the olympics, like the formula one, for the fuckups.
They say a week is a long time in politics. Every tick of the clock is a new layer of meaning.
The mark one receives from an examiner is a measure of the distance between the examiner and the examinee. The distance depends on the true distance of ideas + lack of communication.
[page 177]
Einstein: Every space can be described as the integral of a metric.
Heidegger / Husserl / Dilthey / Schleiermacher.
Browning page 37: 'Gadamer has developed the idea that all these cultural disciplines are rooted in the fundamental structure of human understanding - a structure he describes under the mode of dialogue and conversation.
Husserl:
page 38; 'The relationship of understanding and moraity. This topic is very important for the reconceptualization of practical theologyy I am attempting here.
'Gadamer says we must use biases positively.'
[page 178]
. . .
Salvation is a universal phenomenon. Jesus is just a particular myth of salvation.
Theologians have aways sent the young men out to die but I avoided death by becoming a theologian. [Don't] win eternity by killing others
I see the desire for eternal life as a sort of greed engendered by the poverty of spirit that sees our current existence as a vale of tears rather than a beatific vision.
Denial of death is a denial of life also, since eternal life, insofar as it is considered to be without movement, is tantamount to death.
Browning page 38: 'Understanding and interpretation, whether in law, history or theology, have for Gadamer a broadly moral concern with application.'
[page 179]
Browning page 39: Gadamer; 'Application is neither a subsequent not a merely occasional part of the whole phenomenon of understanding, but co-determines it as a whole from the beginning.
An act is determined by before and after, each of which are points in transfinite space.
page 40: 'These hermeneutic thinkers have all undercut what philosophers call "foundationalist" preoccupations with anchoring knowledge on pure and undistorted sense impressions or something like a priori first principles or transcendental notions, that is something certain, objective and neutral. Both Gamamerian hermeneutic theory and North American pragmatism have blocked the bid by naive realism, positivism and various forms of Kantian or phenomenological idealism to rid knowledge of history, tradition, finitude and partiality. They have helped us to understand how all cultural science (Geisteswissenschaften) and many, if not all natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) can best be understood as dialectical movements of traditions of theory-laden practice to theory and back to new theory-laden practice. [via techne].
[page 180]
'effective history' - all history is in the present.
'The envelope of practical reason is the focus of the larger task of reconstructing our experience by reconstructing amending or consolidating our general picture of the world.'
Browning page 41: 'The present is largely a product of the past.' [remove 'largely']
'Through our cultural heritage, these texts and monuments shape the fore-understandings that make up the practical questions we bring to our efforts to interpret them.
page 42: 'Our fore-concepts are necessary for interpretation, but we must be aware of them.
'There is a concern with application however mute and unacknowledged, present from the beginning.
All along we are looking for tolerance (the liberal tradition) = freedom.
'Guided by Gadamer's view of the practical nature of hermeneutics, I would like to propose a theory
[page 181]
of the structure of theological studies.
practical theology = descriptive, historical, systematic and strategic. Also techne = tactical.
page 43: Schleiermacher [definition] positive science: 'an assemblage of scientific elements which belong together, not because they form a constituent part of the organization of the sciences, as though by some necessity arising out of the notion of science itself, but only insofar as the are requisite for carrying out a particular task.'
page 44: 'Theology as an academic enterprise assesses the truth of the Christian claims.
David Tracey: poles of theology: confessional / apologetic.
'dulce et decorum est pro patria mori'
'timor mortis conturbat me'
[page 182]
Browning page 45: 'Tracy grants that faith and confession precede reason; our thought is situated historically and shaped before it becomes conscious and critical.'
'People living in modern luralistic socities have a variety of confessional beginning points.'
page 46: Tracy: 'Christian theology becomes a critical dialogue between the implicit questions and the explicit answers of the Christian classics and the explicit questions and implicit answers of contemporary cultural experiences and practices.
Tracy [definition] 'Practical theology is the mutually critical interpretation of the interpreted theory and praxis of the Christian faith with the interpreted theory and praxis of the contemporary situation,'
knowledge, representation.
page 48: 'This is why hermeneutic sociogy, when properly conceived, fades into descriptive theology.'
[page 183]
'Practical theology describes practices in order to discern the conflicting [?] cultural and religious meanings [realities? perceptions of reality?] that guide our action and provoke the questions that animate our practical thinking,'
The transfinite network gives us a way to capture the observation that every moment of time may bring with it reinterpretation of the previous moment ending (for each particle) only in death.
'Awareness by the researcher of the ideological nature of description.'
That is the researcher is not immaterial: all information / entropy is physically represented.
Death and error are not sins imputable to humanity (and so imputed by organisations that deal with humanity).
a) we die
b) we kill to live, because god is actus purus nothing more can fit.
[page 184]
The Parmenidean view is intended not as a proof for the existence of god but as a claim to immortality, since we know within ourselves the mystical . . .
One may criticize a book by criticizing its milieu, or criticize it as an element of a milieu.
page 49: Historical: 'What do the normative texts that are already part of our effective history really imply for our praxis when they are confronted as honestly as possible?'
'Different churches have different classics.'
page 50: 'A hermeneutic dialoge with classic texts us not just a solitary conversation between an interpreter and his or her texts . . . should be a community effort . . . working consensus.
Charles pierce / Josiah Royce
page 50: 'Royce developed . . . the idea that interpretation always proceeds within a community.'
[page 185]
Browning page 51: Pierce: scientific community
Royce: 'beloved community'.
Systematic theology:
'What new horizon of meaning is fused when questions from present practices are brought to the central Christian witness? What reasons can be advanced to support the validity claim of this new fusion of meaning?'
page 52: Godamer: no text.
Bernstein 1983, 153: 'the best possible reasons and arguments that are appropriate to our hermeneutical situation in order to validate claims to truth.'
'theological ethics is generally seen as a dimension of systematic theology.'
page 53: 'wistful hearts' who want to believe and cannot.
Arthur Brazier helps his congregation cope with the pressures of modernity. . . He supports his high cognitive expectations with artful use of intense and communally
[page 188]
reinforced religious exerience.
Do we discuss the ethics of this?
Browning page 55; 4the Movement
'Practising Strategic Practical Theology
1. How do we understand this concrete situation in which we must act?
2. What should be our praxis? [Does this mean what should we do?]
3. How do we critically defend the norms of our praxis?
4. What means, strategies and rhetorics?
page 58: Brazier: 2 languages: in church / in pubic
'Within the flux and turns of history, our present practices seem secure only for a period before they meet a new crisis that poses new questions that take us through the hermeneutic cycle again.'
Students: 'Once they understand the structure of theology and the structure of theological education
[page 189]
they will have achieved a deep insight into the structure of all acts of ministry . . . '
Browning page 59: 'The interpretation of situations seldom is thought to include the personal histories that people bring to praxis.'
CPE = clinical pastoral education, Anton Boisen 'human document' in hospital
page 60: 'A theology is revisionist if it critically correlates its investigations into the two sources of theology. These two sources are "Christian texts and common human experience and language."
Common cultural experience and practice must be correlated to Christian texts.
page 61: personal and corporate experience
Talcot Parsons : personality system / social system / cultural system
CPE is effective becasue it includes in its reflective processes interpretations of the personal dimensions of
[page 190]
practices.
Says very little about the pressure of time.
Browning page 61-2: 'The first movement of the theological task, the movement of descriptive theology, should not omit the intimate descriptions of our personal psychosocial and religion-cultural histories.Theology seems to be in an epicyclic phase, where things become abnormally complex because the centre is in the wrong place.
All this strategic practical theology is just human relationships in the workplace.
. . .
We object to pragmatism because it is too narrow, inclined to be oriented toward some corporate bottom line, as the artificial goal of salvation in the Church.
[page 191]
Browning page 63: Ames defined god as a socia process undergirding the ideals of society and helping to bring these ideas into reality, (Ames, 1929) Ames
Dewey: A Common Faith Agnostic Christianity that made this church almost indistinguishable from the Unitarian-Universalist Church.
University if Chicago: liberalism and pragmatism joined hands.'monogamous and covenanted heterosexual marriage.'
page 64: 'The theology of the church of the covenant.'
Juan Segundo: Liberation Theology; Jospeh Hough; John Cobb.
[definition] Theology Charles Wood: critical inquiry into the validity of Christain witness.
page 69: Critical practical theology: Jurgen Habermas
[page 192]
'[Habermas] has made a positive proposal for mediating between the conflicting interests of modern societies. He believes the self justifying ideologies of interest groups must be uncovered and their distorted communication exposed and criticised. For this to occur, ideology critique must rely on a theory of undistorted communication.'
What do iIthink about this: we are looking for the optimum level of control between control freaks and anarchists.
'Habermas believes all communication involves claims about the comprehensibility, truth, truthfulness aNd rightness of what is said.'
page 71: Don has 5 validity claims:
1. visional - metphysical validity
2. Obligational - rightness
3. tendency - need
4. environmental - social
5. rule - rule
[page 193]
'. . . a critical-correctional practical theology must support its implicit validity claims if it takes part in the discourse of a free society aimed at shaping the common good.'
Communication → correlation
Giving directions: very succinct to local / very verbose to stranger.
II Descriptive Theology
page 77: 'Human Sciences and Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics - code for any bullshit you like
congregational studies = tribal studies in socio / psycho / anthropology.
The boundary of any symbol is chaotic in That a tiny move may take you inside or outside the symbol.
I am pleased at invite to dialogue. THis is why I came. The beauty of my position this time (as opposed to my last interaction of the Church) is that [I can leave when I want].
[page 194]
Scientific name for dialogue is game.
My purpose here is to enter Into dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church.
Each word in a sentence represents an action like a note of music. A fluent reAder or player 'draws the lines' between the symbols with ease.
The hermeneutic task has to do not just with ancient texts but contemporary ideas.
I am entering into dialogue with the church as a paying customer, rather than as a voluntary slave who volunteered under false pretences.
Paying customer with relatively welL defined rules of engagement.
Browning page 77: 'We were to helP our societya And the Church regain their appreciation for the richness of congregational life.'
Potential richness, as congregation may
[page 195]
be an instrument of repression.
Browning page 78: 'Church growth movement' Theological perspective nearly left out.'
'We did not understand the role of theology in description because we did not have a hermeneutical understanding of the descriptive task.
One can go on multiplying the context of interpretation to deeper and deeper Feynman diagrama but the yield is a diminishing return - we could go on until gravitation became relevant at a certain level of precision.
God is dead. Theology is dead. Why am I studying the? Because Christianity no longer has a meaningful core it preaches that no other text (eg science) has a meaningful core also.
What this book (Browning) has got to do with theology is hard to tell. It is really just sociology. What has the Bible got to do with theology? Bugger all. The back to the Bible is escapist trash - cf the Reformation. Theology
[page 196]
has to shed its Christian and biblical roots ans become a science in its own right.
Gadamer and all the others are just introducing relativity into the social sciences. What I hear is a function of both the speaker, the channel and the listener. How do we get this into general relativity?
Ditch Browning - gobble gobble like Lonergan, a vast plan for doing nothing.
Next Ford The Modern Theologians Ford
Church + Forestry. No matter how bad you think they are, at least they kept the forests from total destruction. Christianity despite all has made us what we are.
Ford page 720: Christian Theology at the turn of the century.
Pastoral concerns : maintaining the big lie [Hitler] lest the little ones be scandalized.
