Back of the Envelope

The latest Christian Carnival, number sixty-six, is up at Pseudo-Polymath. Check it out.

A new pope has been selected:

With unusual speed and little surprise, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany became Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday, a 78-year-old transitional leader who promises to enforce strictly conservative policies for the world's Roman Catholics.

I don't know anything about Ratzinger, aside from what the news article says, but if the AP is calling him a hardliner, I suspect he's my kind of pope. (The article has changed since I first read it, and it's no longer calling him a "hardliner," but a quick read-through of the article will show that the implication is still there.) This quote, for example, shows why he's not liberal enough for the AP, and why I like what I see so far:

As dean of the College of Cardinals, Ratzinger had delivered a particularly sensitive homily at John Paul's funeral. He followed it up with a fiery speech to the cardinals before they entered their conclave Monday, warning about tendencies that he considered dangers to the faith: sects, ideologies like Marxism, liberalism, atheism, agnosticism and relativism — the ideology that there are no absolute truths.

"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as a fundamentalism," he said. "Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along by every wind of teaching, looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards."

Becoming pope at 78, it's highly unlikely he'll serve anywhere near the twenty-six years that John Paul II did.

Not being Catholic, I don't have a whole lot personally invested in the new Pope, but that doesn't mean that I don't respect the influence he has in the Christian church, even those parts of it that don't acknowledge his word as authoritative.

In the course of talking of the Papal selection, Michael Novak has some interesting words to say about providence:

Meanwhile, to jump back to the way God can work at a conclave: In between details like the weather, personal illness, chance encounters, and accidental perceptions thrown off by odd angles in the way people meet — not to mention unsummoned thoughts and images and intimations — there are a host of ways in which the Divine Artist of events can set the stage and arrange actions, without in the least interfering in the natural laws of human nature and history, or even in the perfect freedom of will of those who make decisions.

In fact, so much of our lives are outside of anybody's powers of decision, or even of complete knowledge. The Holy Spirit (God Himself, thought of as Three-in-One) has more than enough room to work as the great consummate Artist of events, without calling upon a ready repertoire of miracles. Occasionally, it takes one of the latter. But every year, when a tiny seed dies in the ground, and blossoms into a full shock of corn, thrusting out six or eight full ears of comparable seeds, nature itself is abundant in "miracles" of an un-miraculous, regular sort. It does not seem too far a stretch to allow for occasional real miracles, even though one prefers not to ever count on them.

That is: I think the Holy Spirit can work miracles in a conclave. Yet I can clearly see so many utterly natural, contingent possibilities that I fail to see why He would have to.

Providence is generally thought of as the way God arranges what looks like chance and coincidence to work to accomplish his will. It's the word that would generally be used to describe the divine activity that Mr. Novak is describing here. To answer the question that I posed in this post's title, here is what Michael Novak has to say:

We do not have the promise that the Holy Spirit, personally, will choose each and every pontiff, in conclave after conclave. Rather, each pontiff chosen is blessed with the protection of the Holy Spirit, for the sake of the people he serves, at least to put some limit on the colossal damage that a truly bad pope has sometimes caused. Yet normally, out of respect for the rules of nature and liberty He Himself set, the Holy Spirit works through the actions and contingencies of real, concrete, finite, limited human beings — those 115 cardinals this time — doing their best to think through the needs of the Church.

This is probably closer to the way I see things than the standard Evangelical answer.

Tired of listening to me moan about my life? Then go read this week's Christian Carnival at AnotherThink. It's a whole lot better reading than the whining around here!

It is a sad fact that even in groups that strive to be accepting, some people just don't fit in. Even in Christian fellowships, there are certain people who make others uncomfortable. I've observed this myself, and generally the person who has this difficulty is a guy, socially awkward or downright inept, who in his attempts to connect to other people tend to drive them away. This is particularly the case when the person he's trying to connect to is a woman, and he makes her feel uncomfortable. In a day and age where concern over harassment gives management and legal services fits, it's easy to see where this may be grounds for asking the person to leave. If he makes the women feel uncomfortable, if he makes the "fellowship environment" intolerable, then it's better that he leaves rather than drive everyone else off, right?

Well, unless you take Jesus's commands to love your neighbor as yourself seriously. Now, the person who comes to mind wasn't at all ill-meaning, just awkward. He certainly wasn't shy about talking to women in a direct manner, but he was, as near as I could figure, harmless. I'm pretty sure he could take no for an answer, he just wasn't very good at figuring out the hints that usually mean no. That one fellowship actually asked him to leave bothered me immensely. What good is it if you only love those who are easy to love? The Bible calls on us to love our enemies, surely it calls on us to love our more annoying brothers as well.

I bring this up because I've noticed a tendency for Christian fellowships to justify this sort of reaction to people they have difficulty with. That conflicts happen shouldn't surprise us, nor should the fact that some people make us uncomfortable. But if you're a comfortable Christian, you're doing something wrong. God calls us to do things that are distinctly uncomfortable, and that includes loving those who are hard to love.

The Sixty-fourth Christian Carnival is online at Proverbs Daily. With sixty-two entries there's plenty to read.

Nick Queen has the most recent New Christian Blog Showcase up. This week he's highlighting Stand Up and Walk and Thoughts of a Stranger.

As you already know, the Pope died this weekend. Not being Catholic, I never saw him as my spiritual leader, but we evangelicals have a rather loose definition for "spiritual leader" in any case. While we believe in the authority of the Church as the body of Christ, we tend to have rather less respect for the formal hierarchy, believing that all must submit to the authority of God and that it is quite as possible for the clergy to go astray as it is for the laity. Admittedly, not all evangelicals have as lax a view of the hierarchy of the Church as a former Southern Baptist like me. Even I, however, believe that the church as a whole has been granted the authority to choose its leaders, and in so doing it hopefully reflects the will of God, and even when it fails to do so, it implicitly asks God to make the one given authority worthy of it. Thus I could and did see the Pope as a human being invested with authority by the church and thus by God, and I believed that even though he could be mistaken, it behooved me to listen when he spoke.

There are many others who can speak on the Pope's role in teh anti-Communist movement, or his leadership in defending the culture of life and traditional sexual mores in a day and age when they are out of vogue. For me, Pope John Paul II was simply the Pope. I have no memory of any other, and he was, for most of my time growing up, one of the few representatives of Catholicism that I would hear or see on the news. Bouncing around between fundamentalist and evangelical Southern Baptist churches, Catholicism as a whole was viewed with skepticism, but the Pope and Mother Teresa were the two Catholics even we respected. They were the living proof that Catholics were Christians too. Some of them, at least.