Entries in Life

Since finishing up Future of Faith I’ve answered a couple of comments here and on Facebook that left me with the realization that I need to spill my guts one more time on the topic here. I’ve spent a lot of time talking about what I think Cox gets wrong so let me start this off with what I think Cox gets right. First, he’s right that Western Christianity has neglected “orthopraxis” and over-emphasized “orthodoxy”. That may seem like a strange statement coming from someone who has embraced Orthodox Christianity, so let me explain. Orthopraxis, of course, means “Right practice” and, at least in America, I’ve normally heard “orthodoxy” used to mean “right belief” or “right doctrine.” Cox (rightly) opposes this emphasis of belief over practice. And I tend to agree with him when he says that we are seeing a move to emphasize practice over belief. Now, I said this is a strange thing for an Orthodox Christian to say, but its important to see how the word “Orthodoxy” is understood differently in the East than in the West. A slight digression into etymology is necessary. “Orthodoxy” is the combination of two Greek root words: ortho (ὀρθός) meaning “straight” or “correct” and doxa (δόξα). The oldest meaning of doxa is “common belief” or “popular opinion”. However, when the Septuagint (a translation of the Hebrew scripture in Greek in the 3rd and 2nd century BCE) was being translated, the Hebrew word for “glory” (כבוד, kavod) was translated as doxa (δόξα). This second sense of doxa is the one used in the New Testament. And it is this second sense of doxa that the word is used in Eastern Orthodox churches. In this way, when we talk about “Orthodoxy”, we’re talking about “correct glory” or “right worship” instead of “right belief”. This sense of “Orthodoxy” is closer in meaning to “orthopraxis” than the way we normally hear the word “orthodox” used in the West. For proof, you need go no farther than the “Orthodox” Presbyterian Church’s website where they have a Q&A on their use of the word “orthodoxy” in which the explicitly contrast it with the Eastern Orthodox usage of “right worship”. Now that I’ve finished my etymological digression — of which I might feel guilty had Cox not made some interesting etymological choices himself – let me return to Cox. My initial reading of Cox was frustrated by his focus on what he called the “corporate takeover of the Church”. He painted Constantine’s influence on Christianity as almost completely negative even to the point where he began to make what sounded to my ears as slanderous statements. At one point he says that the post-Constantinian church was falling over itself to claim that early Christians were loyal subjects of Cesar. Which sounds strange when you’re aware of the constant stream of martyrs who are celebrated as saints because they wouldn’t participate in the worship of Cesar as a god. This, and John Goerzen’s approach to the book as a “history of faith” made it very difficult for me to read the first half. I was arguing with Cox too much. It wasn’t until I got past the retrospective aspects of Future of Faith that I was able to see there was a lot of good in the book. Don’t get me wrong: I am well aware of the mistakes and abuses of power in the Church. However, focusing on only the failures of the early church while ignoring what it did well is the very definition of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.” But this much I hope Cox is right about: that Christians will begin to emphasize right living and right worship over right belief. This doesn’t mean (as Cox supposes) that we have to become acreedal, but it does mean we give up formulating creeds. Nor does it mean (again, as Cox seems to) viewing hierarchy as a bad thing. Forming non-hierarchical churches hasn’t meant that people stopped abusing each other. In fact, an argument could be made that getting rid of hierarchy, instead of taking away the power to abuse, simply redistributes the power to abuse to everyone relatively equally. Cox’s “Future of Faith” has its failings. It’s a autobiography of Cox’s faith with some personal observations disguised as sweeping generalizations. But when he manages to get beyond his obsession with creeds and hierarchy he makes some really good points.

This is only a small aside from Cox’s chapter on the Bible: “Meet Rocky, Maggie, and Barry”.  For the most part, I find this chapter fairly un-controversial — which is not to say that people aren’t going to argue with him, just that I don’t feel the need to. But the one thing I stood out was at the bottom of page 159 where he says: But here “faith” is once again debased into accepting as true something for which you have no evidence. The problem is that this is exactly how the word “faith” has been used for centuries — at least since the author of Hebrews wrote: Now faith is assurance of things hoped for, proof of things not seen. So what Hebrews calls “faith”, Cox calls “debased”.  No wonder I’ve been struggling with The Future of Faith so much: he’s re-defining a clearly understood term and expecting everyone to play along.  I imagine I’m not the only one confused.

Since I couldn’t get to sleep, I read some more of Cox’s Future of Faith.  Since I have read through most of his take on the early church (which I found especially hard to swallow — because of where he chose to put his emphasis and the frame that he used to present the history), I found the reading much easier. Perhaps it was also because I decided to read it as a Cox’s spiritual autobiography rather than, as the title suggests, a grand vision for how people of faith should live. Since, in these later chapters, I don’t feel the need to argue with him, I found myself agreeing with his assessment of where Christians are, for the most part, and where they need to go.  As I read about his encounter with Ratzinger in “No Lunch with the Prefect”, I found myself agreeing with his vision for the role the papacy could play in Christianity. He clearly doesn’t understand the inertia of social systems — at one point he seems to expect the Catholic church to make a dramatic course change because we now “know” that Peter himself didn’t teach Apostolic succession, though almost all of his successors did.  And his claim to “understand” fundamentalism because he spent a couple of semesters in college in <a href=”http://www.intervarsity.org/”>IVCF</a> is pretty shaky (though, he is right that he probably understands it better than those who lack even that exposure). But in these later chapters I find that I’m agreeing with him a lot more than in the earlier chapters.  I don’t like his view of history and I think he could benefit from some more exposure to Eastern Christianity, but when it comes to where Christianity is at present, I don’t think he is far off.    

John Gorezen had some great questions on the last reflections post that I did and I finally posted some answers. Hopefully this post will provide for further discussion.

Spiritual autobiography

The more I read of Cox’s book, the more I have to conclude that this book is more a picture of Cox’s own spiritual development rather than any grand vision of what the “Future of Faith” holds. Nothing convinces me more of this (so far) than chapter titled “The Road Runner and the Gospel of Thomas”. The first hint comes when he says, at the top of page 56, that “Christianity is no longer a ‘Western’ religion. … Its vital centers now lie in Asia, Africa and Latin America.” (emphasis mine) First, this ignores that Latin America is called “Latin” because it was Christianized by Europeans and the people living there now — the Christians living there now — are the descendants of Europeans and Native Americans. I suppose he gets past this problem with the insertion of “vital” but, there, too, he ignores the vital centers of Eastern Christianity: Constantinople (Asia minor) and then Moscow (Asia) were the “Romes” of the East until the 20th century. For a historical background of the church in the East, I recommend Lars Brownworth’s 12 Byzantine Rulers series of lectures in podcast form. The Ethiopian and Egyptian churches continue to be vital centers of Christianity in Africa. I could even argue that, since the people of the Egyptian church are not the majority religion in that country that they have more in common with the early Church. For more on the spirituality of these churches, I can recommend Speaking of Faith’s Preserving Words and Worlds program. It provides some insight into native African Christianity’s long and lively tradition (as well as that of the Turkish Christian minority). Again, it looks like Cox seems oblivious to any Christianity that doesn’t have deep roots in the West or that was born of the West’s missionary movements. But if we see this book as Cox’s spiritual autobiography rather then as his view of the “Future of Faith”, we can certainly forgive him.

Three Changes

Cox outlines three changes that happened since he was in seminary. I was born and have lived entirely after all of these changes, so I see their impact in a completely different way than Cox. The changes he sees are 1) The understanding that Christianity was not as intellectually unified as he was first taught, 2) “Apostolic Succession” didn’t come directly from the twelve apostles and 3) the influence of the Roman Empire on the early Christians was enormous. The third item, the influence of the empire, is the least surprising to me. Cox claims that the church “softened [its] attitude toward the Roman Empire from passive resistance to docile subservience; then they tried to suggest that the Christian movement had been made up of loyal subjects of the divine emperor from the beginning.” I find this sort of slander against the post-Constantinian church revolting. One needs to look no further than early post-Constantinian bishops like St. Nicolas (yes, that St. Nick) and St. Chrysostom. In fact, if we look at Chrysostom’s “Two Homilies on Eutropius” we can quickly see that as the Archbishop of Constantinople (Rome of the East) he was no toady of the government or its emperor despite being appointed by the Emperor. And, as to the influence of the Roman empire on the early church, I have always understood that the early church saw itself as directly opposed to the empire. Certainly the Diocletianic Persecution has always been known to the church and to say that anyone ever suggested those Christians were “loyal subjects of the divine emperor” flies in the face of a very ancient understanding of history. The first and second points (intellectual unity of the early church and apostolic succession) don’t seem that important to me. Whether or not Paul and the other Apostles thought that there was such a thing as apostolic succession seems less important to me than the continuity of the church. And a lack of intellectual unity among the early Christians isn’t that surprising: they were persecuted and communication was difficult. If they weren’t able to hold big councils for a couple hundred years to hash out there differences, then I’m not surprised they had some.

Historical Jesus and Mystical Christ

The last bit I want to comment on is the way Cox divides Jesus Christ into the “Historical Jesus” and “Mystical Christ” as a way to avoid believing in the Resurrection while still remaining Christian. Once you’ve rejected the Creed and declared that “Modern” Christians just won’t be able to accept some things that are in the Creed, I suppose the separation of the Historical Jesus from the Mystical Christ isn’t a surprise. But first, let’s be clear about something. Early Christians who were not eyewitnesses to Jesus ministry were no more likely to believe in Jesus’ resurrection than modern Christians are. The gospel of John tells us as much when Jesus says “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” That we’ve managed to convince ourselves that we’re just more sophisticated than early Christians simply because they accepted this idea of the resurrection where we do not is silly. It was a different time and, in many ways not something we can easily comprehend. But we can easily see in their writing and sermons, if we take a few minutes to look, that they struggled with the same things we struggle with. Again, I come back to the Creed. If everyone easily accepted what they were told, there would be little need to communally recite the “I believe” of the Creed. It could be relegated to some esoteric bit of knowledge the priests just tell their congregants “Here is what you have to think.” To put this, loosely, in terms of Freudian psychology, we recite “I believe” to remind ourselves of where we’re headed, not as a reflection of what is going on in our id or ego at this moment, but of where our super-ego is trying to direct us. (I’m not sure that analogy is completely appropriate, but it feels close enough for now.) After dismissing almost every mystical (i.e. any part that cannot be rationalized) aspect of the Creed — the Trinity, the Virgin birth, the resurrection of Christ — I’m left wondering why Cox even bothered writing this book. It isn’t as if these ideas about Christianity are new or that they compromise the “Future of Faith”. They’ve been around at least since the Enlightenment and before. I’ve written enough for now. I hope to finish this book up in the next couple of weeks and post my final take then. In the meantime, I welcome your comments. And I’ll try to respond more quickly.

I’m a little frustrated that when I talk about manageability, people get confused. Manageability makes it simple for system administrators to deploy desktops and for users to share data.

This isn’t just about setting up servers. Ubuntu, based on Debian, is great as a server OS.

This isn’t just about automating tasks. Landscape or puppet can help out here, but that only goes so far. They’ll take care of monitoring, package updates, and automating tasks.

A sysadmin of an office or an IT group for a larger organisation still needs some central management interface for all his users. He needs to make it easy for people to share data across a network and have unified, secure credentials for login, email, and web access. If a user’s login account isn’t the same as their email account — if they can’t use the same address book in their desktop mail client as they do in webmail — then you have a management problem.

There is a known solution to this problem. Kerberize your apps and make them speak LDAP. Many applications already have this capability. The manageability problem that Ubuntu has is not really a lack of capability, it is one of integration. System and Network administrators tend to understand the problem better than developers of desktop or server software, but most of them already have their hands full managing their own organisation and don’t have time or, often, the capability to start integrating all the software and configuration into something that anyone can deploy easily.

And so, Microsoft continues to win on the desktop. Not because an individual PC running Windows is easier for most people to use, but because its easier to set up Active Directory to work with Outlook and Exchange than it is to roll your own directory service with the tools available out of the box on Ubuntu. Bug #1 will never be solved until directory services and authentication are integrated into every aspect of Ubuntu.

Now, as frustrated as I am that most people don’t seem to understand the problem when I talk about it, I am pleased to see that others are aware of the problem, and have actually put some effort into planning out an approach to solving it.

The best example of this would be the EDUbuntu people. Their EDUbuntu User Managment blueprint is a great outline of exactly what needs to take place to solve this managability problem.

But they created this blueprint over four years ago and almost nothing has happened on it.

Launchpad is littered with similar blueprints (below) that show other people’s aborted efforts to solve part or all of the problem. Unfortunatly, no one group has really tried to spear-head this and so most of these efforts (at least when I did my survey a few months ago) are dead or dying.

I’d really like to get this problem solved so that setting up an Ubuntu-based directory service would be as easy — easier, even — as setting up Active Directory.

Look over the blueprints below, find a place you can help. Let’s get this moving forward!

• Turnkey identity management
• Identity management reference/test config
• Default LDAP DIT for user and group management
  
• implement simply DIT for Ubuntu server
• Make Ubuntu authenticate against Network Authentication services
• Single User Interface to Join and Participate in Microsoft Active Directory Domains
• Architecture of a directory infrastructure
• Enable user login to leverage a directory infrastructure
• Identity management and network authentication in Hardy
• Integrated Active Directory Logon
• 389 Directory Server Inclusion in Karmic
• Directory service included in Ubuntu Server
• Configuration of services to integrate with a directory
• Enable services to leverage a directory infrastructure
• Open Directory Service package
• Integrate OpenDS in Jaunty
• Search for a published printer in an Active Directory
• EdubuntuUserManagement
• Easy active directory integration for EDUbuntu
• An integrated directory server for Ubuntu-server
• LDAP Integration
• Ubuntu Server MS Integration Proxies
• Seamless integration into a Windows domain environment (Active Directory)
• Make a LDAP Server as easy to install as a LAMP Server
• Managing the directory
• System Security Services Daemon for Ubuntu
• Make LDAP the default configuration backend for Ubuntu
• Create new tasksel tasks for common server use cases
• Free Identity Policy Audit infrastructure for Ubuntu as the freeipa.org project
• Authentication/Authorization/Access control/Accounting/Auditing services in the cloud
• Extend mail stack in Ubuntu-server
  

(This is a copy of the message I sent to the UbuntuNGO mailing list.) As a system administrator for several years (I got my first sysadmin job back in ‘97), I’ve been frustrated with the lack of manageability of Linux systems. To reduce the cost of managing desktop systems, directory services that provide single-sign-on and centralized management capabilities are needed. Sure, there are things you can cobble together, there are ways you can integrate Ubuntu into an AD network (see this article on “Seamless Smartcard login” for an example), but these things are more complicated than they need to be. And, while I don’t think the goal should integration with AD, when Microsoft provides tools to easily manage computers throughout an organization, the cost of supporting Microsoft systems is going to be less since the cost of licensing is nothing compared to the cost of paying for the increasingly complex IT support Ubuntu requires without Directory services support built in. No, this isn’t a specifically NGO goal, but it is integral to the goal that UbuntuNGO has of getting NGOs to adopting Ubuntu on the desktop. I went through Launchpad looking for blueprints pertaining to management and directory services and found a number of initiatives. The problem, though, is the hodgepodge of efforts and lack of focus. Directory services integration is absolutely vital to getting NGOs and others to adopt Ubuntu on any sort of scale. Canonical and Ubuntu have done a great job of providing an excellent out-of-the box experience for the individual user, but scaling that up to groups of non-technical users needs work. We can make management of Ubuntu systems on a network just as easy as the use of a Ubuntu itself is, but it will take some work and we can’t expect that a great desktop experience will solve all problems. I’m interested in your thoughts.