Touch This Tree and You’ll Want to Die

April 4, 2022 By Gene Veith

We were walking on the pathway next to the road headed for the visitors’ center in the Bunya Mountain National Park in Queensland, Australia. We walked next to a shrubby tree with large, raggedy leaves. Meg, our host, said, “You don’t want to touch that tree. It’s a gympie-gympie, an aboriginal word for ‘stinging tree.’ If you touch the leaves, the pain will be so great and so long-lasting that people have killed themselves to make it stop.”

Later, I looked up the details: A scientist studying the plant, Marina Hurley, who made the mistake of touching it, described it as “the worst kind of pain you can imagine – like being burnt with hot acid and electrocuted at the same time.” The pain begins with the slightest touch and then intensifies for 20 to 30 minutes. The initial shot of pain lasts for 4 hours or so, but the agony continues.

“Not only do you feel pain from where you are stung,” says Dr. Hurley, “if it is a really bad sting, within about 20 minutes your lymph nodes under your arms swell and throb painfully and feel like they are being slammed between two blocks of wood.”

As if this weren’t bad enough, this excruciating ago can keep recurring for years! This is because the tiny hairs on the surface of the leaf are still imbedded in the skin. If something touches the affected area or if the skin is exposed to cold water, the hairs release more venom and it all starts over again! The Wikipedia article on the gympie-gympie (dendrocnide moroides) quotes a park ranger, Ernie Rider, who was slapped in the face with the foliage:

For two or three days the pain was almost unbearable; I couldn’t work or sleep… I remember it feeling like there were giant hands trying to squash my chest… then it was pretty bad pain for another fortnight or so. The stinging persisted for two years and recurred every time I had a cold shower…There’s nothing to rival it; it’s ten times worse than anything else.

Those toxic hairs can also break off from the leaves and get into the air, which means that you can breathe them in!

Despite the horrific strength of this venom, the stinging tree won’t kill you. There has only been one fatality directly attributed to the gympie-gympie. It doesn’t even harm human tissue, as other toxins do. But there have been reports of people killing themselves to stop the pain. The gympie-gympie is sometimes called the “suicide plant.”

And yet it does not always affect people the same way. Our other host, Noel, had once touched the plant accidentally. He said the pain was bad, but not as bad as I had been reading. He was able to remove the hairs with sticky-tape and an anti-sting salve was effective in taking away the pain.

Also, one feature of the leaves, which are five to nine inches long, is that they are shot with holes. Something eats these leaves! The unfortunately stung Dr. Hurley found that the holes are caused by “a nocturnal leaf-eating chrysomelid beetle.” Not only that, red-legged pademelons, which look like a small kangaroo, eat the things, sometimes stripping off all their leaves! Other animals, though, such as dogs and horses, experience the full torments.

The photograph that illustrates this post is of the stinging tree we saw. It was right by the heavily-travelled footpath. There were no fences around it, no warning signs, no attempts to protect or even to alert the general public, as one would expect in the litigious United States. Locals just learn to recognize the gympie-gympie and know not to touch it.

But Meg, who was telling us about the plant, pointed out the venomous hairs on the leaves, her finger hovering just a centimeter away from the surface. And we were well-within the range within which, I learned later, we could have breathed them in. Australians are absolutely fearless when it comes to their dangerous flora and fauna.

The stinging tree (a.k.a., gympie-gympie; a.k.a., suicide plant) is a marvel of nature. Those who have a romanticized view of nature might wonder why such a thing exists. Christians might wonder why God created something so horrible to human beings. But I see it as a sign.

There are other things that, if we so much as touch them, can cause horrible pain, not only to ourselves but also to others, and that can lead us to hate our lives. Adultery. Heroin. Crime. Abuse. The whole array of sins that result in shame, guilt, and despair.

The stinging tree recalls not only sin but, even more directly, the primal sin.

The Bunya rainforest is a paradise. The towering trees, impenetrable vines, and lush undergrowth have an unearthly beauty, and the coolness of the air, due to the altitude, so different from the heat of tropical jungles, is exhilarating. But in this paradise is a tree that we must not touch.

This recalls our original paradise, in which “God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die'” (Genesis 3:2-3).

If you touch the gympie-gympie tree or eat its fruit, also covered with the little hairs, you will not die. You will just want to die.

We made that trek by the stinging tree again after I had researched it. And when we came to the tree, even though I knew what the consequences would be, I felt the impulse to reach out and touch it.

Now I know what Adam felt.

Photo: Stinging Tree in the Bunya Mountains by Jackquelyn Veith, who releases it into the Public Domain.

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Finnish Christians Found Not-Guilty in Hate Crime Trial

March 30, 2022 By Gene Veith

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The Finnish Christians who were put on trial for teaching what the Bible says about homosexuality were cleared of all charges.

We have been blogging about the case of Dr. Päivi Räsänen, a medical doctor and member of parliament, and Rev. Dr. Juhana Pohjola, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland, a church body in fellowship with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.

The district court in Helsinki has announced its verdict in the trial. All charges were dismissed. The prosecution was assessed 60,000 Euros in court costs. The unanimous, 28-page decision, stated that “it is not for the district court to interpret biblical concepts.” Furthermore, the defendants had sought to “defend the concept of family and marriage between a man and a woman.” Though some people might find that offensive, “there must be an overriding social reason for interfering with and restricting freedom of expression.”

Since Finland does not have double jeopardy protection as Americans do–whereby defendants cannot be retried if found innocent–the prosecution has two weeks to decide if it wants to appeal the acquittal to the Supreme Court. My sense is that the decisive nature of the district court’s ruling makes that unlikely, but we’ll see.

In the meantime, this is a big win for religious freedom.

HT: Rev._Aggie

Photo: Bishop Pohjola and Dr. Räsänen (Screenshot: ELMDF) via International Lutheran Council

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War in Europe

February 24, 2022 By Gene Veith

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Russia has invaded Ukraine in an all-out assault. And we thought wars like that were things of the past! What we blogged about is happening. Now the question for the United States is whether we will get drawn into this war.

As we said in the post Wars and Rumors of War, President Biden had moved 3,000 of the 90,000 troops we have in Europe to Poland and Romania, countries that border Ukraine, hoping they would be a deterrent to Russian President Putin’s territorial ambitions. That did not work. So now President Biden is moving American troops and aircraft into the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which border Russia and which, like Ukraine, also had been part of the Soviet Union that Putin would like to reassemble. Unlike Ukraine, though, they are members of NATO.

Since all NATO members are obliged to come to the aid of any NATO member that is attacked, the Baltics and the American forces stationed there are a trip-wire for a war involving all of Europe and the United States.

The NATO secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg of Norway, is warning that there is a “real risk” of “full-on” war in Europe:

“Ukraine is a highly valued partner, we support them with military support, with political support,” he said. “But when it comes to NATO allies we provide absolute security guarantees. Meaning we make it absolutely clear that an attack on one ally will trigger a response from the whole alliance – one for all, all for one.

Right. The thing is, though, NATO, for all practical purposes, is the United States. Most of the 30 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization contribute far less than the 2% of their gross domestic product on defense that their charter commits them to, so that the alliance relies primarily on American forces for its military clout. And, in a statement about Russia’s invasion, Biden reiterated that the U.S. would “defend every inch of NATO territory.”

NATO expansion, with the prospect of Ukraine joining, is one of Putin’s grievances, but since Ukraine is not a member of the alliance, European and American troops are not coming to its defense. And yet the West and Ukraine do have a security agreement.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is invoking the Budapest Memorandum. As reported by Frances Martel,

The country had abandoned all nuclear ambitions in 1994, signing the Budapest Memorandum that issued security guarantees from the West – meaning Western countries would fill in the defense gap left by Ukraine destroying its nuclear weapons – in exchange for Kyiv agreeing not to pursue nuclear weapons development. . . .

If the guarantors of the memorandum – the United Kingdom and America – fail to end the Russian colonization of Ukraine, Zelensky asserted, “Ukraine will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and all the 1994 package decisions have been called into question,” indicating he would pursue nuclear development.

So if the United States is a guarantor, that is another potential entanglement that could draw us into the war. And Zelensky’s threat to go nuclear is also unsettling. But he probably would not have time. The Russians, though, are issuing nuclear threats against any nation that comes to Ukraine’s defense, saying if they do, they will experience “consequences greater than any you have faced in history.”

Russia’s pretext for invasion was its recognition of two pro-Russian Ukrainian provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk, then sending in “peace-keeping” troops to protect their “independence.” But that was only the first step. Today’s reports tell of troop and tank incursions into all of Ukraine from the north, south, and east. Ukraine’s major cities are being bombed, with air strikes and missiles. Heavy civilian and military casualties are being reported.

Meanwhile, U.S., European, and Russian naval forces are maneuvering near each other in the Mediterranean Sea.

Biden said that the troops he has placed in the vicinity are not there to “fight Russia,” but will inflict “pain” on Russia through economic sanctions. Authoritarian rulers, of course, care little for the economic well-being of their subjects. And if sanctions are so severe that they do cripple a nation economically, they sometimes can have unintended consequences. For example, when Japan invaded China before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. imposed sanctions that cut off fuel exports. Whereupon Japan, desperate for fuel, simply expanded the war by invading oil-rich Southeast Asia.

If Biden seems to be out of his league, Republicans are all over the place in what they think the United States should do, with some wanting to get tougher than Biden is, while others believe that the U.S. should have nothing to do with the crisis.

Whatever we do, whatever Putin does, and whatever we should do, we are in perilous times. We Americans have had our personal peace and affluence interrupted by pestilence. Now our complacency may have an even bigger interruption by another horseman of the Apocalypse: War.

Illustration: Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov (1887), http://lj.rossia.org/users/john_petrov/166993.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2649874

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Should Churches Keep Putting Services Online?

February 18, 2022 By Gene Veith

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In perhaps the most extraordinary state action in the COVID-19 lockdown, churches were not allowed to hold in-person services. So they took advantage of today’s technology and began streaming services, so that worshippers could participate online via Facebook, YouTube, or the church’s website.

By now, the restrictions are mostly over, and the majority of churches are meeting in person as usual. But many of them are still streaming their services. Before, the online services consisted largely of the pastor addressing a camera, with participants at home following along with their hymnbooks. Now congregations are streaming their in-person services, showing not just the pastor but the rest of the congregation with audio of the music. The online services are thought to be a good means of outreach and a way for shut ins and other members who have to be absent to participate in worship.

In an article entitled Why Churches Should Drop Their Online Services, published in the New York Times, no less, Tish Harrison Warren, a priest in the Anglican Church of North America, argues that congregations should stop doing that. She gives four reasons:

(1) We are bodies and worship should engage all our senses;

(2) The risk of being separated from others is greater than the risk of COVID, at least now;

(3) We need embodied community;

(4) Gathering in person forces us to deal with people who are different from ourselves.

Now a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor, David Kummer, has written a rebuttal to that position, posted by the Acton Institute, Reply to The New York Times: Online worship is still worship.

He begins by agreeing with those four points.

What must be realized about online worship, however, is that it is additive in its congregational function. It does not replace in-person worship. It provides an option for people to engage with their community when they cannot be physically present within it—whether they’re sick at home, on vacation, or, yes, whether they drank a bit too much the night before. The church at her best has never been in the game to force someone’s hand. Rather, because Jesus disperses his gifts abundantly and graciously, we’re given the blessing of doing the same. It is his church, and we’re in no position to withhold the gifts he gives for everyone.

He then defends online worship in terms of the Lutheran theology of worship:

Because I’m a Lutheran Christian, I believe worship is first and foremost an act of God, hence the liturgies for Holy Communion in our hymnal are entitled Divine Services: God comes to serve his people through his means of grace, declaring them forgiven by the power of his Word!

For those who know anything about Lutheranism, one might be surprised that I don’t agree with Ms. Warren. After all, Lutheranism confessed in the 16th century and still does that in the Lord’s Supper and in Holy Baptism, God conveys and delivers His forgiveness through means—something tangible in person. In the case of the Lord’s Supper, Jesus gives us his body and blood through the bread and wine for the forgiveness of sins. Similarly, in Holy Baptism the Word-drenched water buries all original sin, and sins, in the tomb of Christ. In absolution, the embodied pastor forgives God’s people in the stead and by the command of Christ. For Martin Luther and those after him, the means of grace were central to how God acts in our life: They are tangible elements bringing God and his hard-earned, gracious love right before our eyes.

So, because worship is first and foremost about God coming to us through his Word, where a person receives that Word is not essential; the Word does not lose its power in its transmission through airwaves or electrons.

Rev. Kummer says that streaming services “is not anti-sacramental.” This is because the Word operates sacramentally. The Lord’s Supper is indeed important, but he communes the congregation’s shut-ins when he visits them. In the meantime, even though they cannot leave their homes, they are able to feel connected with their congregation, participating in its liturgical life and being built up by God’s Word.

“Online services overcome the barrier of distance and offer fellowship of a kind,” says Rev. Kummer, “one not defined by proximity but by confession of faith, which is the core of fellowship.”

Two other perspectives to consider:

(1) Trevin Wax warns that ‘Gotcha’ Sermon Clips Are Bad for the Church. Now that pastors’ sermons are generally available online, some people are taking the opportunity to vilify pastors for what they say, often editing out clips and taking them out of context in order to tear down their ministry. Rev. Wax points out that a sermon is an intimate address from the pastor to his flock, and is not always appropriate for outsiders.

Then again, I would add, sermons can also be proclamations of the Gospel to outsiders, and they would do well to be careful about what they say even to their members. The social media rule holds true even for sermons: Don’t say anything on the internet that you don’t want the world to know. And yet if you preach with this mindset, you risk censoring yourself.

(2) Another Missouri Synod pastor and media expert A. Trevor Sutton agrees that online worship can be legitimate. But in his essay Bringing Common Sense to the Online-Worship Debate, he explains how digital media throws off the unity of the senses that is critical both to worship and to human life.

I co-wrote Authentic Christianity with Trevor, who is also the author of a new book on Christianity and digital media entitled Redeeming Technology .

So here are my questions: What do YOU think? Is your church still streaming your services or has it stopped doing so? Why? What has been your congregation’s experience with all of this?

Image by Russ Allison Loar, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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The “Lord of the Rings” Series Will Be Family Friendly After All

February 15, 2022 By Gene Veith

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Contrary to earlier reports, Prime’s upcoming series The Rings of Power, a prequel to Lord of the Rings, will be family friendly. And, according to those who have previewed the first three episodes, it actually sounds really good.

When the series was in pre-production, as we blogged about, a call went out for extras who were “comfortable with nudity,” and the project hired an “intimacy coordinator,” that is, someone who choreographs sex scenes. So the legitimate fear went out that Jeff Bezos and Amazon were planning to turn J. R. R. Tolkien’s Christian classic into another Game of Thrones, the sex-and-gore drenched fantasy epic that was a smash hit for HBO.

Entertainment journalists Anthony Breznican and Joanna Robinson were given a preview of the first three episodes, along with access to the filmmakers, including showrunners Patrick McKay and JD Payne. Their writeup, which includes many details about the production and the plans for the show, was published in Vanity Fair in a story entitled Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Series Rises: Inside The Rings of Power.

They asked the showrunners directly about this (“Westeros” being the land of Game of Thrones), and here is the response:

So will there be Westerosi levels of violence and sex in Amazon’s Middle-earth? In short, no. McKay says the goal was “to make a show for everyone, for kids who are 11, 12, and 13, even though sometimes they might have to pull the blanket up over their eyes if it’s a little too scary. We talked about the tone in Tolkien’s books. This is material that is sometimes scary—and sometimes very intense, sometimes quite political, sometimes quite sophisticated—but it’s also heartwarming and life-affirming and optimistic. It’s about friendship and it’s about brotherhood and underdogs overcoming great darkness.”

Referring to the “chaos” of pre-production, including the challenge of the COVID lockdown as filming began in New Zealand, the journalists give their impression of the series based on the previews:

Whatever other chaos might befall them, they [the showrunners] finally felt they were on the right path. The first three episodes, which V.F. has seen, suggest they were. The show is a lavish, compelling mix of palace intrigue, magic, warfare, and mythology—and there are enough mysteries to power a thousand podcasts. Some characters will be familiar, and they will be the initial attraction as viewers watch their legendary fates unfurl. But the entirely new faces may ultimately become even more involving, since their destinies are literally unwritten.

The series is about what Tolkien called “The Second Age of Middle Earth,” whereas The Lord of the Rings is set in the “Third Age. It is based on The Silmarillion and Tolkien’s Appendices to his trilogy. It will focus on the forging of the Rings of Power, as in the LOTR poem:

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

As such, the series will tell a complex, interwoven tale of elves, dwarves, men, and rise of Sauron, the “Dark Lord.” Breznican and Robinson quote showrunner Patrick McKay on the scope of the 50-hour saga, which will be broken down into five seasons of 10 one-hour shows:

Their series will juggle 22 stars and multiple story lines, from deep within the dwarf mines of the Misty Mountains to the high politics of the elven kingdom of Lindon and the humans’ powerful, Atlantis-like island, Númenor. All this will center, eventually, around the incident that gives the trilogy its name. “The forging of the rings,” says McKay. “Rings for the elves, rings for dwarves, rings for men, and then the one ring Sauron used to deceive them all. It’s the story of the creation of all those powers, where they came from, and what they did to each of those races.” The driving question behind the production, he adds, was this: “Can we come up with the novel Tolkien never wrote and do it as the mega-event series that could only happen now?”

The problem is that Tolkien’s history and appendices give a general overview, along with some details, but not enough for a comprehensive story, as he did with his novels. Furthermore, the events Tolkien chronicles as taking thousands of years will here be condensed into a time-frame that can be streamed on video as a single story. Thus, The Rings of Power makes changes, including adding storylines and some completely new characters (in addition to younger versions of the long-lived elves of LOTR). Tolkien purists are likely to find such adaptations presumptuous.

But it sounds like the creators of the show are trying to be faithful to the spirit and themes of Tolkien’s vision. And the story itself, just in its own terms, sounds like something I would enjoy greatly. So I have put the September 2 premiere on my calendar.

Prime showed a brief trailer as a SuperBowl commercial. Here it is:

Image by Peter J. Yost, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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The First English Translation of Hamann’s “London Writings”

January 31, 2022 By Gene Veith

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To show the relevance of Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) today, he may have been the first, in 1784, to add to an unrelated word the prefix “meta.”

In his day, he had an impact on thinkers ranging from Goethe to Kierkegaard to C. F. W. Walther. Today he has been rediscovered and is credited with anticipating–and critiquing–both modernism and postmodernism. Notre Dame professor John Betz sees in Hamann’s thought the only way forward from postmodern nihilism, opening the door to a “post-secular” vision.

Hamann also was a devoted Christian, whose cutting-edge philosophy was largely a sophisticated application of his confessional Lutheran theology.

Unfortunately, not all of Hamann’s writings–which are notoriously challenging to read, due to his playful multi-leveled style–are available in English. But now Hamann’s most foundational work, the London Writings–in which he tells of his conversion to Christianity, meditates on Scripture, and formulates the ideas he would develop throughout his life, doing so in a clear, engaging style–has been translated in its entirely into English.

And the translator is John W. Kleinig, the Australian theologian known to many of us Lutherans in the U.S. as the author of books like Grace upon Grace and Wonderfully Made and for his work with the Doxology ministry. I was privileged to work on this project with him.

Hamann was part of a circle of young Enlightenment rationalists, including Kant. The father of one of them in Riga hired the 28-year-old Hamann to go to London to arrange some business negotiations. But his mission was a failure, Hamann fell in with dissolute company, and he was soon destitute. At this low point in his life, he picked up an English Bible and started to read it. The Law and the Gospel had their full effect on this bright but troubled young man, and he was transformed into a fervent follower of Christ and a rapturous lover of Scripture.

The “London Writings” were written during this period in the midst of his spiritual awakening, which also proved to be a catalyst for ideas about the physical world, language, reason, and faith that he would develop for the rest of his life. They consist of nine works:

(1) “On the Interpretation of Sacred Scriptures.” A brief summary, with statements like this: “The inspiration of this book is as great an act of self-effacement and condescension as the creation of the world by the Father and the incarnation of the Son.”

(2) “Biblical Meditations of a Christian.” Hamann’s notes as he read the Bible from beginning to end, amounting to a Christo-centric Bible commentary that is electric with unexpected insights.

(3) “Thoughts on the Course of My Life.” The account of his life and his dramatic conversion.

(4) “Thoughts on Church Hymns.” Hamann would later say that his spiritual life centers in the Bible, Luther’s Small Catechism, and his church’s hymnal. Here he meditates on the lyrics of classic hymns, some of which we still sing today, culminating in his own ecstatic joy in the Ascension of Christ and in our union with Him.

(5) “Deuteronomy 30:11-14 together with Romans 10:4-10.” Tying together two texts that say, “the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart.” Thoughts on connection between the Word and Faith.

(6) “Fragments.” Our thoughts, Hamann says, are fragments, which we must gather together into baskets, as the Disciples did after the feeding of the 5,000. A collection of brief thoughts on a variety of topics, some of which Hamann would continue to develop.

(7) “Meditations on Newton’s Essay on Prophecies.” Not Isaac Newton the scientist, nor John Newton the hymn writer, but Thomas Newton the Anglican theologian. Here Hamann writes about the Holy Spirit.

(8) “Further Thoughts on the Course of My Life.” Hamann picks up his life story after he leaves London and goes back home. We see how his rationally Enlightened friends now reject him and trace the course of his ill-fated courtship of Katherina Berens.

(9) “Prayer.” A wide-ranging prayer that Hamann would continue to use in his morning and evening devotions.

This translation with commissioned in 2017 by George Strieter of Ballast Press, a micropublisher that reprinted Gustaf Wingren’s Luther on Vocation and Adolf Koeberle’s Quest for Holiness, both of which were taken over by Wipf & Stock. George had read about Hamann in Oswald Bayer’s book about him, which did much to facilitate his rediscovery. He told me about Hamann, and then Dr. Kleinig put me onto Betz’s book, probably the best introduction to his thought. George had the idea to translate the London Writings, and together we persuaded Dr. Kleinig, who is fluent in German, to take on this enormous project. Not only did he do the translation, he also provided extensive introductions to each section, footnotes, and references to Hamann’s Biblical allusions.

I edited the translation. That means, at first, I worked with Dr. Kleinig as his reader, going over his renditions, discussing with him how to express certain passages, and making the occasional suggestion. Once the manuscript was finally finished, a process that took two years, my editorial duties shifted to the publishing side, setting the book into type, requiring me to learn InDesign publishing software–which, believe me, was not easy–and then preparing the exhaustive topical index and Scriptural index. This was my big project during the pandemic lockdowns! Then George and I had to see the project through the printing process, which proved to be a difficult and time-consuming task in itself.

Now, four years later, London Writings: The Spiritual & Theological Journal of Johann Georg Hamann, is finally completed and available to all!

You can buy it at the website, which includes other information you might want to look at, or via Amazon. I urge you to buy it, urge any libraries you are connected with to buy it, and otherwise spread the word.

This book can be a game-changer for contemporary theology, putting it back on a Biblical, Christ-centered track, and for those attempting to find a way past the dead ends of postmodernism. But reading this book is also profoundly devotional. It rekindled for me the joy of reading and studying God’s Word.

I’ll have other posts over the next few days that will focus on some of the content of the London Writings to show you what I mean.