The Eutychus Perch by Hurricane at Hypocrisy.com

In his Eclogues, Virgil painted a picture of Elysian Fields where all was perfect.  His shepherdesses were all what we might call perfect 10s, and the shepherds who courted them were hunks with perfect manners.  The scene was known as a locus amoenus, a pleasant place.  In the Italian Renaissance, the poet Petrarch revived the form, and in Spain Garcilaso de la Vega also wrote sonnets in such a style.  The problem, as one bright observer pointed out, is that if one of the sheep smells, the entire scene disappears.

The fact is that Plato’s realm of Forms was being imposed on the material world.  All that heavenly perfection was being projected into what we all know is an imperfect setting.  Platonic thought was one of the aspects of the Classical world that were revived in the Renaissance.  Everyone knew Petrarch’s idealized landscapes and characters were impossible to find on earth, but they could nonetheless be experienced as literature.

Well, almost everyone knew it.  At one point in his wanderings, Don Quixote decides he will go mad and become a shepherd.  It goes without saying that his lady love, Dulcinea, who in real life is a peasant who smells of garlic, is the one he chooses to pine for.  As he establishes himself in the countryside, he meets some real shepherds and experiences their “crude hospitality.”  They are good people, but they do not fit in the world Don Quixote desires to experience.

It is but a small leap, then, to what was going on in Roman Catholic theology in those days.  It too was Platonic, based on a philosophy called realism, which was almost diametrically opposed to what is called realism today.  It held that an institution such as the Church was characterized by an ideal, Platonic perfection independent of the nature of its constituent elements.  Thus, the ultra-Catholic Dante could place some popes in the lowest regions of hell, even as, in their role as popes, they were considered to be perfect.  The point was that the Church and the papacy were viewed in terms of the realm of Forms, not in their material-world imperfection.

The philosophical debate in the time of the Reformation, then, was between the Roman Catholics’ realism and the nominalism of the Protestants.  To the Protestant mind, if the preponderance of elements constituting an entity are rotten, that entity itself is rotten and needs to be reformed.  The Catholics countered that the Church was perfect even though, for example, many Scottish priests were saying mass while seriously drunk, and a cardinal in Rome boasted that on account of his many conquests he had had upwards of 160 children born in one year.  “Of course the earthly representatives of the Church are imperfect.  They are material beings, and sinful in the nature of the case.”

It is out of nominalism that the observation  arises that if one sheep stinks the entire pastoral world disappears.

In our day we may be engaged in a perilous return to realism in the Medieval sense.  Certain automobiles that used to represent the height of elegance but are now engineered badly and built worse continue to be the standard against which other technological items are judged.  No one says, “This is the Lexus of attack aircraft.”  After a certain prominent televangelist fell and it was revealed that he was a smashing hypocrite, huge numbers of his followers remained faithful to him, saying, “Oh, but he’s done so much good.” Sure, for his own bank account.  It was notable that when the monster Stalin died, large numbers of Russians wept at the country’s loss.

The tendency is particularly frightening in politics.  There are those who would vote for their chosen  party even if a revived Joseph Stalin were its candidate.  In a day when only something like 43% of our country’s voters feel moral values are important in a candidate, one wonders to what extent we’re buying into the old philosophy that a party and its candidates are perfect in Plato’s realm of Forms, even when, as beings in the material world, they have been proven to be a pack of scoundrels.  It may not be just blind loyalty.  What is at work here just might be a revival of Medieval realism.

Of course, there is also a flip side to this.  Many of us have bought into the notion that our presidential candidates must be squeaky clean.  We even purge certain facts from the records of our Founders, who are then free to live in that realm of Forms where all is perfect.  That means we have unrealistic expectations of anyone in our age who wants to occupy the exalted seat of the presidency.  Perhaps the exposure of their imperfections to public view is what has made the majority decide that morals are not important at all.

This morning, when I realized that the milk for my cereal didn’t smell very good, I didn’t conclude that milk is perfect even when its earthly, material manifestation smells like a sheep.  I poured it out and went for a new bottle.  I’m a hopeless nominalist.

The celebrated Colombian poet and novelist Alvaro Mutis once received a wild ovation from a university crowd in Puerto Rico by announcing, “I want you to know that I support the separation of Puerto Rico from the United States.”  When the applause and cheering settled down, he continued, “ . . . so that it may be returned to its rightful owner, the King of Spain.”  Mutis is a monarchist and, while he freely admits that myriad abominations have come out of the monarchies of history, he also maintains that they are far fewer and have caused far less harm to the common people than those of the dictatorships that have often replaced them.  “Who,” he asks, “would replace a Czar Nicholas with a Joseph Stalin?”

Untold gallons of ink have been spilled over the question of what to do with countries that manage to rid themselves of pernicious governments but are clearly not ready for democracy.  At one point in the nineteenth century, Mexico, having gained its independence from the Spanish monarchy, felt it wasn’t happy about US-style democracy and wanted to install another king.  The resulting sad case of Maximilian and Carlotta is well known, and Mexico went from bad to worse and from worse to terrible.  Even the dictator Porfirio Díaz lamented, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.”  Following its revolution, the country ended up with the cockeyed absurdity of rule by the “Institutional Revolutionary Party.”

Is Mutis right about this, that the world was too quick to toss aside its monarchies?  Someone has commented that France’s government still consists of monarchy punctuated by strikes.  (Another  opinion has it that California’s government consists of apathy punctuated by petitions).  An application of Hegel’s dialectic may be instructive.  Let’s say monarchy is the thesis and some form of government by the people is the antithesis.  What has been happening in many countries is that the synthesis turns out to be a form of absolute, king-like rule by a dictator sprung from the people.  Think of Mussolini.  One would be hard-pressed to summon up a more revolting image of vulgarity than that stock footage of him finishing a speech, crossing his arms and thrusting his chin and lower lip forward in a gesture of swinish arrogance.

Russia under the Bolsheviks, of course, was supposed to implement the Marxist dialectic:  capitalism as t

he thesis, the communist state as the antithesis, and the final synthesis being the withering-away of the state, leaving the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”  What happened in practice was a move directly from a monarchy into the monstrous dictatorship of a new Soviet elite.

In contrast to the Mussolini phenomenon, I had the privilege of being present when Alvaro Mutis was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature in historic Oviedo, Spain.  As a student of Spanish history, I sat in amazed wonderment at the sight of the handsome and elegant Crown Prince Felipe, the future Philip IV, presenting Yehudi Menuhin with the prize for music.  (Mstislav Rostropovich received one on that occasion as well.)  To be sure, Felipe’s ancestors, Ferdinand and Isabella, had expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492, at least in part in order to take possession of the property of many of them.  Christopher Columbus is said to have stood at the port of Seville watching them leave, knowing that their departure would finance his trip to the west.  But now, 505 years later, the crown prince of Spain made it up to a representative of the Jewish race, at least in some small measure, as Queen Sofía, a good friend of Menuhin’s, sat in the balcony beaming.

One thinks too of St. Louis, king of France.  On his deathbed in the home of a compassionate Muslim scribe, his last words were reported as “Beau Sire Dieu, gardez-moi ma gent” (roughly, “Good Father God, take care of my people for me”).  Not “Oh, Lord, am I good enough to go to heaven?” or “Lord God, cut short my time in purgatory,” but “Take care of my people for me.”

I don’t know of anyone who believes it is possible any longer to restore the institution of absolute monarchy anywhere in the world, even though we love our monarchies as a symbol of the good that used to be in them.  On being told that the queen mother of Denmark walked out of the palace grounds every day to buy fresh flowers, travel writer Bill Bryson asked in surprise, “Well, who watches out for her?”

The Dane whom he was talking with answered, “Why, we all do.”

What sort of solution might there be in all this?  George Washington firmly rejected what would have been the irony of his having defeated King George of England only to become King George of America.  However, even as he was very open to receiving the common people into his presence, he was insistent that the president must be treated with the utmost respect.  Perhaps his was the best synthesis.  Perhaps the new dialectic is this one:  Thesis:  monarchy; antithesis:  democracy; synthesis:  democratic government with the dignity of a monarchy.

This solution, though, leaves open the question of what would be best for a people who have just been freed from an unjust form of government.  Many feel it would be a benevolent dictatorship, but those are hard to come by simply because, with few exceptions, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  I’ve been told to choose my battles wisely, and frankly, I don’t have an opinion I’d feel comfortable fighting for.

We Gentiles miss the point of some passages in the Hebrew Scriptures because we fail to understand the Jewish sense of humor.  The Book of Jonah, for example, is meant to be taken as the very funny story of a man who tries to escape from God by leaving the territory he thinks God is limited to, but then is very happy to learn that even the belly of a submerged fish is within God’s domain.  At the end Jonah is grumpy because, even though his preaching has resulted in wholesale repentance (and who wouldn’t listen to a prophet in rags who smells like the belly of a fish?), he’s afraid God is going to spare the hated Ninevites.  You see, if the destruction you foretell doesn’t take place, you’re to be stoned as a false prophet.  So God has to give Jonah a lesson in perspective.  Funny stories often have a serious point to them.

The Book of Judges, though, is a comic masterpiece, matching genre to subject matter.  For the author, everything is topsy-turvy in Israel, and he writes accordingly.  We read about a long series of judges, none of whom ever does any judging.  You have a crack regiment of left-handed slingshot artists from the tribe of Benjamin, which means “son of my right hand.”  There is Gideon, whose astounding military victory leads the people to ask him to be their king.  He says, “Naw, I don’t think so.  God is supposed to be our only king.”  Then he goes home and names his son Abimelech, which means “my father is king.”

Chapter four of Judges has the story of a dramatic victory of God’s people over the Canaanites, but again everything is out of kilter.  It seems the obvious choice of a man to lead the Israelite army in battle against them is Barak, whose name means “thunderbolt.”  Barak doesn’t like the odds of a bunch of foot soldiers going out against 900 iron chariots, though, so a prophetess named Deborah, which means “bee,” stings him hard, essentially calling him a wimp, which he is.  Finally he agrees to attack, but only if Deborah goes with him.  Well, sir, this is the age of male dominance, and she says, “Fine, but I’m warning you that a woman will get the credit.”

The Lord fights for Israel and gives them so great a victory that even muy macho General Sisera of the Canaanite army flees for his life.  His people have been on friendly terms with a segment of the Jews known as the Kenites.  Their name is a little strange, because it seems to mean they were descended from Cain, who murdered his brother Abel.  For this reason they were somewhat marginalized from mainline Israelite society.  The Kenites were blacksmiths and did contract work for the Canaanites on their iron chariots and the like, so Sisera felt he would be safe in the tent of a lady named Jael.  Well, Jael’s name means “mountain goat” (whose idea was it to put that on her birth certificate?), but it also sounds like “Yahweh is God.”  Along with her family history of bashing people’s heads in, that should have been a clue for Sisera about where his friend’s ultimate loyalties lay.

Jael invites the exhausted Sisera in and says, essentially, “You look all in, Sisera honey.  Lie down here and I’ll give you something to drink.”  Well, it seems she gives him fermented goat’s milk, which on an empty stomach knocks him cold, whereupon this presumed descendant of the killer Cain takes a tent peg she has handy and drives it through his . . . temple.  That’s what all the translations say, but the word is used only once in the Hebrew Bible and no one knows for sure what it means.  The commentators are befuddled about why the author chose that puzzling term.

I’m convinced, though, that it’s one more play on words by the author of Judges, who would have made it big in the Borscht Belt.  I think that, before this story was written down, it was told to soldiers sitting around their campfires on the nights preceding battles.  Here’s the scene:  Implicit in the narrative is the fact that General Thunderbolt is madly trying to catch Sisera and dispatch him.  The phrase “through his  ______” in Hebrew is b’raqoth, which sounds very much as if it contains Barak’s name.  This woman has literally stolen his thunder.  I’m sure the storyteller would pronounce b’raqoth with a knowing smile, and the troops would howl with laughter at the joke on the wimp.  They would also be expected to get the message about the courage that was expected of them.

Actually, she probably caught him in the jugular.

So Jael the super-hero is a hypocrite.  Pretending to be a friend of the Canaanite general who gives her and her husband employment, pretending to render him that famed Middle Eastern hospitality, offering him the sustenance that guarantees that she will protect him forever, she treacherously kills him.  In time of war, hypocrisy can be useful.

Religious hypocrisy is nothing new, of course, nor is it a rare aberration, since religion represents power, and power attracts the unscrupulous.

That does not mean religion itself is at fault.  Asked about hypocrites in the church, Billy Graham confronted his questioner with the fact that, if he learned he had been given a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, he probably wouldn’t reject twenty-dollar bills from then on; he would just be more careful not to take the phony ones.

The fact is, it’s pretty hypocritical to reject religion because the church has phonies in it.  That’s like rejecting democracy because a lot of politicians within the system are corrupt.  (As Sir Winston put it, democracy is the worst form of government in the world—except for all the rest.)

Perhaps the greatest example of hypocrisy in the Hebrew Scriptures is the case of King David in his sordid affair with Bathsheba.  When asked by the prophet Nathan what should be done about a rich man who has stolen a poor man’s beloved, and only, lamb, David explodes in fury, promising severe punishment.  Nathan coolly tells him, “You are the man.”  Perspective is a hard thing to have to face when you’re guilty of adultery and a cover-up involving murder.

The New Testament too has plenty of hypocrisy to tell us about.  How about Jesus’ enemies, who, hearing that Jesus has raised Lazarus from the dead, decide to kill him?  No challenging the veracity of the story, no questions about how God might want them to respond to such a miracle, just a decision to kill, as Peter expresses it soon afterward, the author of life.  That makes about as much sense as some of the blather coming out of this presidential campaign.  Did you know, for example, that Sarah Palin studied in Moscow?  (Never mind that it was Moscow, Idaho.)

And isn’t it touching to hear the proponents of abortion on demand feigning concern about whether Palin would have enough time to care for her baby if she were vice president?

Still, it seems much of today’s most ground-shaking hypocrisy is coming out of what Christians tend to call the visible church (as opposed to the true church within it).  A pastor I know was forced to deal with a conspiracy to convert his Presbyterian church into—get this—an Arminian dispensationalist charismatic Baptist church.  (If you don’t know what those terms mean, suffice it to say they are quite foreign to Presbyterian tradition and would make John Knox turn purple.)  The pastor asked one of the leaders of said conspiracy, “When you became a member of this church you swore to uphold its constitution, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“You lied, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes.”

“When you became an elder you again swore to uphold that constitution, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“You lied again, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“What does that make you?”

. . . . . . . . . . .

Here’s an a fortiori argument:  How shall we then classify the majority of delegates to the recent General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) (hereinafter PCUSA), who, having sworn that same oath, bypassed the neat Aristotelian chain of authority that is supposed to structure the denomination’s decisions and procedures?  The Book of Order clearly states that authority moves up the scale from the local church sessions to the presbyteries to the synods to General Assembly to the constitution (consisting of the Book of Confessions and the Book of Order) to the Bible, and finally to Christ himself.

This year General Assembly chose to jump over at least two levels of authority above it and pass legislation forbidden by both the constitution and the Bible.  That is, local churches are now free to perform marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples and ordain practicing homosexual pastors.  What one thinks of homosexuality is not the primary issue here.  The issue is that a body properly constituted as being under a higher authority has violated its constitutional position and behaved like some sort of autonomous council of bishops.  The fact that a committee is now excising from the Book of Confessions a passage in the venerable Heidelberg Catechism that forbids what they did does not excuse them.  One wonders whether they will next begin cutting passages from the Bible that offend their postmodern sensibilities.

Incidentally, the story running around is that this order will not go into effect unless and until the presbyteries vote to abolish the section of the Book of Order that demands faithfulness in marriage or chastity in singleness.  As I understand it on good authority, that vote is irrelevant, since the order in question is already in effect.

Presbyterians have always prided themselves on being the denomination of democratic order, but the body charged with maintaining that order has hypocritically shunted aside its responsibility in favor of being politically correct.

Before all this flap began, I was informed by a high official of the PCUSA that some presbyteries would not even speak to me about ordination for the simple reason that I graduated from a conservative seminary, more specifically a seminary known for espousing a theology in line with the PCUSA’s Book of Confessions.

Can you spot what’s wrong with this picture, children?

In short, the PCUSA’s General Assembly has in effect ceased to be truly Presbyterian.  Furthermore, the very Greek word for “church,” ecclesia, means “called out,” specifically called out of the ruling world order.  When a church body instead allows the value system of that world order to force it away from its own highest principles, can that body even call itself a church?

Or are they going to define “called out” as meaning called out of their own founding doctrines?