The metaphysics of historical criticism

1. I, the historical critic, exist.

2. That is to say, my mind exists.

3. My mind is not deceived by a demon.

4. My mind is not self-deceived.

5. My mind has access to external reality.

6. External reality exists.

7. External reality is apt to be known by a mind like mine (and by other rational beings, should they exist).

8. I am a rational being, in virtue of my mind’s existence and capacity to know external reality.

9. My mind’s access to external reality via my rational nature is epistemically reliable.

10. Natural languages are, likewise, a reliable vehicle of rational pursuit of knowledge of external reality.

11. Natural languages are a reliable vehicle of communication between rational beings.

12. At least, that is, between rational beings of a shared nature.

13. There are rational beings of a shared nature; other minds exist besides my own.

14. (I can know this—I am in a position to know it, with something like certainty or at least confidence—just as I can know the foregoing propositions and many others like them.)

15. Mental life is linguistic and vice versa; human minds, or rational persons, communicate through natural languages.

16. I can (come to) know what other persons think, believe, intend, hope, or love.

17. I can (come to) know such things through many means, one of which is the use of a natural language.

18. Natural languages can be translated without substantial loss of meaning.

19. Rational users of natural languages are capable of mastering more than one such language.

20. Such mastery is possible not only of living languages but of dead languages.

21. Such mastery is possible not only through speaking but also through reading and writing.

22. Written language is not different in kind than spoken language.

23. The living word can be written down and understood through the eyes alone, without use of the ears or of spoken language.

24. The written word offers reliable access to the life—norms, beliefs, hopes, fears, behaviors, expectations, habits, virtues, vices, and more—of a culture or civilization.

25. This truth obtains for ancient, or long dead, cultures as for living, or contemporary, ones.

26. (“Truth” is a meaningful category.)

27. (Truth is objective, knowable, and not reducible merely to the perspective of a particular person’s mind or thought.)

28. (There are truths that both antedate my mind’s existence and exist independently of it.)

29. (The principle of non-contradiction is itself true.)

30. (The prior four propositions are true irrespective of any one individual’s affirmation or awareness of them, including my own.)

31. Records of ancient peoples’ and regions’ artifacts offer a limited but nevertheless reliable window onto their respective cultures.

32. Through accumulation, comparison, and interpretation of evidence, probabilities of likelihood regarding both historical events and certain cultural beliefs and practices can be reliably achieved.

33. The space-time continuum in which ancient peoples lived (“then and there”) is one and the same as mine (“here and now”).

34. The sort of events, experiences, and happenings that mark my life or the life of my culture (“here and now”) likewise marked theirs (“then and there”).

35. These include occurrences commonly labeled “religious” or “spiritual” or “numinous.”

36. Such occurrences, however labeled, are knowable and thus (re)describable without remainder in wholly natural terms.

37. They can be so described because religion is, without remainder, a natural phenomenon.

38. That is to say, as an artifact of human social life, religion is “natural” inasmuch as it is a thing that humans do, just as dancing, gambling, and wrestling are natural, inasmuch as they are things humans do.

39. In a second sense, too, religion is “natural”: it is a thing wholly constructed by human beings and thus without “reference” beyond the human lives that give rise to it.

40. There are, in a word, no gods; God does not exist.

41. Neither are there spirits, angels, demons, ghosts, jinn, souls, astral beings, or any other entities, living or dead, beyond this universe or however many universes there may be.

42. Accordingly, there are no interactions with or experiences of such beings, divine or celestial or otherwise.

43. Accordingly, such “beings” do not act in the world at all, for what does not exist cannot act; a nonexistent cause has nonexistent effects.

44. Accordingly, miracles, signs, and wonders are a figment of human imagination or an error of human memory and experience.

45. What happens, happens in accordance with the laws of nature recognized and tested by contemporary scientific methods and experiments.

46. Claims to the contrary are knowable as false in advance, prior to investigation; they are rightly ruled out without discussion.

47. There are always, therefore, alternative explanations in natural terms.

48. This principle applies to every other form of mystical or transcendent experience, whether dreams or visions or foreknowledge or prophecy or glossolalia.

49. The fact that many contemporary people continue both to believe in religious/spiritual realities and to claim to experience them is immaterial.

50. Any attempt to undertake any form of epistemic inquiry based on any other set of principles besides the foregoing ones is ipso facto unserious, unscientific, irrational, and to be dismissed with prejudice as unnecessarily metaphysical, unduly influenced by philosophical commitments, biased by metaphysics, prejudiced by religious belief, and ultimately built on unprovable assumptions rather than common sense, natural reason, and truths self-evident to all.

East/West Christianity: an unfinished love story

My brother texted this to me the other day, and he gave me permission to share it here. It’s about the relationship between Eastern and Western Christianity, i.e., Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism (or: Catholicism East and West). I’ve made a few modest edits. Enjoy.

*

Been reading lots on history of East–West divide lately, so here’s me thinking out loud and writing down my thoughts. My analogy that helps me think about the stormy relationship between East and West (obviously from my Orthodox-sympathetic viewpoint, though one that yearns for union!):

100-850 – Honeymoon period. East nods to “headship” of West; they have their differences, but nothing that love doesn’t cover; as Christ died for the church, the West leads through service and love

850-1050 – First big fight. Starting to grow apart; realizing they meant different things by “headship”; East losing trust in West

1054 – West files divorce papers. East says “so be it,” but doesn’t really mean it in her heart

1100-1400 – Trial separation. Ignore each other to avoid fighting; when they interact, it’s only words spoken in anger; in 1204 the West does something the East might one day forgive, but will never forget.

1400s – Marriage counseling. The East needs the West more than the West needs the East; while the East wants an apology and compromise, the West expects submission; the Easts grants it on paper, but doesn’t mean it and takes it back as soon as the West is out of earshot.

1450-1869 – Diverging paths. The West prospers; the East goes through hell.

1870 – Divorce finalized. Irrevocable words and actions taken by the West, followed by the East.

1870-1965 – Fallout. East descends deeper into hell; West also suffers while flourishing in other ways; whether fast-evolving changes count as maturation or backsliding remains to be seen.

1965-present – Second thoughts. Both lovers have regrets; the West realizes it may at times have overstepped its bounds and misses terribly the beauty of the East; the East realizes she’s really missed the West’s leadership of and organization for the family; they rip up the original divorce papers; they exchange meaningful gifts; they go back to counseling; could they make this work again?—they realize that in really important ways, the same candle has always burned in both their hearts; they’re even aligned more than ever in their worldview and beliefs; but they also discover their personalities and eccentricities make each of them feel foreign to the other; the East has had a really rough go of it since they separated and feels that the West sometimes took advantage of her weakness instead of reaching out to help; some words spoken by the West can’t be unspoken; can the East live with them? can the West soften them? can the East forgive and forget? can the West remember and reclaim its first vows? can the West compromise? can the East submit?

My latest: a review of Mark Noll in The Christian Century

In the new issue of The Christian Century I have a review of Mark Noll’s latest book, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911. Superlatives fail, as they usually do with Noll’s work. The book is more than a “mere” history, though. It has an argument to make. Here’s how I begin to lay it out:

The United States was, from the start, founded and widely understood as a repudiation of and alternative to European Christendom. Whatever the proper relationship between church and state, the federal government would have no established religion—would not, that is, tax citizens in sponsorship of a formal ecclesiastical body. On this arrangement, most nascent Americans agreed. What then would, or should, the implications be for Christian faith and doctrine in the public square? How could Christian society endure without the legal and political trappings of Christendom?

Answer: through the Bible. Not the Bible and; not the Bible as mediated by. The Bible alone. America would be the first of its kind: a “Bible civilization.” That is to say, a constitutional republic of coequal citizens whose common, voluntary trust in the truth and authority of Christian scripture would simultaneously (1) put the lie to the “necessity” of coercive religious regimes, (2) provide the moral character required for a liberal democracy to flourish, and (3) fulfill the promise of the Protestant Reformation. Sola scriptura thus became the unwritten law of the land. Regardless of one’s confession or tradition, the sufficiency of the Bible for all aspects of life—the canon as the cornerstone for religion, ethics, and politics alike—was axiomatic. For more than a century, it functioned as a given in public argument. Only rarely did it call for an argument itself.

Keep reading for more, including a disagreement with Noll regarding how to interpret prior generations’ disputes over how to read the Bible, in this case about chattel slavery.

“The latest scholarship”

One often hears folks in biblical studies refer to “the latest scholarship” on such-and-such topic. Or they will refer to author X or book Y being “out of date.” Or when writing a scholar will refer to “the latest studies” or “the most recent research.”

I’ve poked fun at this tendency before. A few years back I penned “An honest preface to contemporary academic interpretation of the New Testament”:

The figures and authors of the New Testament, especially Jesus and Paul, taught and wrote primarily during the middle half of the first century A.D. Their teachings and texts were not, alas, understood in the 2nd century, nor were they understood in the 3rd century, nor were they understood in the 4th century, nor were they understood in the 5th century, nor were they understood in the 6th century, nor were they understood in the 7th century, nor were they understood in the 8th century, nor were they understood in the 9th century, nor were they understood in the 10th century, nor were they understood in the 11th century, nor were they understood in the 12th century, nor were they understood in the 13th century, nor were they understood in the 14th century, nor were they understood in the 15th century, nor were they understood in the 16th century, nor were they understood in the 17th century, nor were they understood in the 18th century, nor were they understood in the 19th century, nor were they understood in the 20th century. Such periods, unfortunately, were not up to date on the latest scholarship.

I am.

That is the spirit of historical-critical hubris in a nutshell. Less sarcastically, I’ve reflected on what I call “subjunctive scholarship,” or biblical scholarship in the subjunctive mode (or mood, if we want to be strict about it). Here’s the object of critique:

If you read enough biblical scholarship, you come to realize that one of the guild’s endemic features—for at least a century, probably two—is an overweening confidence in its claims. Such claims usually partake of a rhetoric of calm certainty; all too often what are contestable judgments based on slim evidence are instead asserted as facts, or at least as bearing a supreme likelihood of being true. These judgments in turn become the basis for still further judgments, or proposals, that are themselves even flimsier in terms of probability or breadth of justifying reasons. So far as I can tell, this style of scholarship is of a piece with the broader approach not only of history but also the social sciences.

I offer a couple counter-proposals for how to frame a work of historical biblical scholarship:

(1) In what follows I will write as if it were the case that X, though I am by no means certain or even confident that this hypothesis is true…

(2) In this essay/book I will follow lines of speculative reflection regarding a set of issues about which we lack anything close to sufficient evidence to support confident claims; accordingly, my ideas and proposals will follow a certain pattern: “If it is the case that X, then Y might reasonably follow,” allowing that I can make no dispositive arguments in favor of X, and that any number of alternatives to X are plausible; for that reason I will also trace some of those plausible alternatives and see what they might lead.”

Such argumentative frameworks are, granted, not exactly sizzling compared to the sort of rhetoric that attends much “cutting edge” scholarship. But the gains are worth it, gains in both epistemic humility and intellectual curiosity. Also in the honest pursuit of truth, given how little we do or can or will ever know about, in this case, the texts and wider contexts of culture and politics, persons and happenings in the first century.

Here’s one other observation I make in that post:

[To write in the subjunctive would] make clear—with no ifs, ands, or buts—that one or more premises of [a scholarly proposal] are arguable, indeed so arguable that it would be laughable to presume them to be self-evidently true to any reasonable person. Such a proviso would also signal the self-awareness on the part of the scholar that seemingly commonsensical consensus scholarly judgments inevitably come under fire in and by subsequent generations of scholars. What is taken for granted today is up for grabs tomorrow. No reason to act as though that isn’t the case.

Here’s the question I want to ask (one I may have asked elsewhere, though I can’t seem to find it in the following form), a question that might sound pedantic or sardonic but is meant in earnest. What good is being “up to date” on “the latest research” on X when the one thing about which we may claim disciplinary or epistemic certainty is that, whatever “the latest research” says about X today, it will be disputed by whatever “the latest research” says about X tomorrow? Put differently, if the force of academic arguments in the present tense depend upon a rough consensus about intrinsically contestable matters, and if the history of the discipline reliably informs us that every rough scholarly consensus is inevitably heavily revised or jettisoned by subsequent generations of scholars, or at least becomes subject to destabilization and thus no longer remains a consensus, then isn’t the whole towering edifice built on sand? Isn’t every argument built, with full awareness, on a foundation that everyone knows, as a matter of fact, will no longer exist within a matter of decades?—just to the extent that the foundation’s stability depended (at the time of the argument’s being made) upon its being more or less unquestioned, which is to say, a matter of present-day (though not future) consensus?

Note well that I am not calling into question either growth in historical knowledge or the ability to make claims to knowledge in this or adjacent realms of inquiry. Rather, I am calling into question the rhetoric, the confidence, and the rhetoric of confidence that attend such claims to knowledge. At a deeper level I am further calling into question the method of the inquiry, built argumentatively and even logically upon claims to present-day achievements of consensus that everyone knows but chooses to forget will be undone eventually—and often sooner rather than later.

Instead of qualifying historical and textual arguments into oblivion, however, acknowledging and accepting this critique should function to liberate biblical scholarship and historiography more generally. For it entails that works in biblical studies do not expire the year after publication. The value of the car, so to speak, doesn’t plummet once it’s driven off the lot. Sometimes colleagues in biblical studies speak as though, on one hand, they can’t propose ideas in public unless and until they’ve read everything published up to and including today (perhaps also forthcoming works!); and, on the other hand, that the sell-by dates for the very ideas they’d like to elaborate are, sad to say, the day after they propose them.

That sounds at once emotionally grueling, humanly impracticable, intellectually stifling, and epistemically indefensible.

The fundamental problem, it seems to me, is construing biblical scholarship on analogy to the hard sciences, rather than classing it among the hermeneutical arts. To be sure, there is sifting of evidence, and some of that evidence qualifies as “hard.” But the work of making sense of the canonical Jewish and Christian texts, including making historical sense of them, is finally interpretive in character. Not only is interpretation not “scientific” in the colloquial or disciplinary sense. To treat it as such is essentially to distort the task of understanding—in this case, understanding texts in their historical and cultural contexts—as well as the nature of disputation regarding proposals for such understanding. It takes on faith what is unproven, considers evidentially dispositive what is anything but, concedes to consensus what is and shall always be arguable. In short, it artificially constricts both the range and the force of what one may (and must) say as a member of the guild. And it does so for no good reason.

That’s not to say one may or should avoid reading “the latest” in one’s discipline. Staying “up to date” is in general a reasonable expectation for academics. But it is not and cannot be a condition for holding or proposing a plausible opinion on a contested topic, much less for rejecting, out of hand and sight unseen, “old” or “outdated” scholarship on said topic. Nine times out of ten, what makes “new” research new is not an archeological discovery or fresh material evidence. It is an innovative theory, speculative reconstruction, or alternative explanation of preexisting materials (usually just the texts themselves) that is “the latest” on the scene. Such proposals are well worth appraising. But they do not ipso facto rule out antecedent ideas. Even where they attempt to do so, they rarely succeed on the merits; when they do so succeed, often as not the rationale is fashion, an itch for novelty, or social pressure (that latter phrase being a serviceable gloss for “scholarly consensus”).

In any case, what I most want, as an outsider to the field of biblical studies but as one who reads it regularly for pleasure and profit alike, is for members of the discipline to be and to write and to teach free of this tiresome burden imposed upon them. That burden is called “being up to date,” which in turn carries with it a methodological mindset that treats the humanistic arts of interpreting ancient texts as a sort of hard science that accords omniscient experts, and them alone, the authority to make even the most modest suggestions about how to understand the Bible in its original historical contexts. Such a mindset also renders all biblical scholarship negligible or moribund within a decade after its publication. That’s just silly. Moreover, it ends up lowering the quality of such scholarship even on the day of its publication, since it is invariably pitched in such a way both that it must be “cutting edge” (ramp up that PR machine) and aware of its immediately diminishing relevance (grasp for those straws while you can), all the while focusing disproportionately on minute debates from recent years instead of the big questions at the heart of the subject matter. Not to mention the typical unspoken pretense that no one tried to exegete the text in question until the last two centuries.

That’s what I’d call being “up to date.” If you can tell me what the Greek and Latin and Syriac fathers and medievals and reformers all thought about this or that text, then you’ve got my attention. If, by contrast, mostly you know the Anglophone academic “consensus” regarding half a chapter in Philippians circa 1986–2011, though you’re aware that’s been overturned in the last decade, so obviously you need to bone up on the latest articles before you proffer an opinion … you’ve lost me.

To that sort of disciplinary formation, I have a simple message.

Be free!

Abraham our contemporary

The Bible is not a human record from the distant past, full of a mixture of inspiring and not-so-inspiring stories or thoughts; nor is it a sort of magical oracle, dictated by God. It is rather the utterances and records of human beings who have been employed by God to witness to his action in the world, now given to us by God so that we may learn who he is and what he does; and the “giving” by God is by means of the resurrection of Jesus. The risen Jesus takes hold of the history of God’s people from its remotest beginnings, lifts it out of death by bringing it to completeness, and presents it to us as his word, his communication to us here and now. Because we live in the power of the risen Christ, we can hear and understand this history, since it is made contemporary with us; in the risen Christ, David and Solomon, Abraham and Moses, stand in the middle of our assembly, our present community, speaking to us about the God who spoke with them in their lifetimes in such a way that we can see how their encounter with God leads towards and is com­pleted in Jesus. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus speaks of Abraham being glad to see his coming (John 8.56); this is the thought that the icon represents. Just as Jesus reintroduces Adam and Eve as he takes each of them by the hand, so he takes Abraham and ourselves by the hand and introduces us to each other. And from Abraham we learn something decisive about faith, about looking to an unseen future and about trusting that the unseen future has the face of Christ. Thus a proper Christian reading of the Bible is always a reading that looks and listens for that wholeness given by Christ’s resurrection; if we try to read any passage without being aware of the light of the resur­rection, we shall read inadequately.

—Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light: Praying with Icons of Christ (Eerdmans, 2003), 33-34. This paragraph is part of a larger reflection on an Eastern icon of the anastasis. The comment about the fullness of Scripture, even Scripture itself, being given in, by, and through the resurrection of Jesus is a theme developed further, in recent years, by John Webster and especially John Behr, to great effect.

(In)defectibility, local and regional

Churches die. Christian traditions die. Denominations die. Whole regions and epochs of once flourishing ecclesial and liturgical life die.

Does that sound harsh? It’s certainly cause for lament. But it’s a plain truth of history, and the church’s faith has no grounds for disputing it.

Nevertheless I have often found myself within earshot of Christians, especially pastors and church leaders, who casually suggest otherwise. They take the possibility, not to mention the assertion, that individual or local or regional churches and their concomitant institutions and organs of self-propagation and tradition might die—might even, in terms of statistical or demographic probability, be bound for death sooner rather than later—to be contrary to confidence in the gospel, and/or a denial of the faith, and/or sign of a lack of trust in God, and/or cause for despair. How could you get up in the morning, as a Christian or a pastor, believing that?

Well. The first thing to say to that is that Christians don’t get out of bed because they have reason to believe things will go well for them. On balance, the likelihood of a Christian’s suffering is directly, not inversely, proportional to her faithfulness in discipleship. At the very least, faithfulness is not a guard against bad things happening. We should expect to be Jobs, every one of us, and cry out in thanks when we are not. We follow the Lord to Golgotha. Eternal life comes after crucifixion: it does not precede it, much less avoid it.

Be that as it may. The simpler point concerns the doctrine of indefectibility. This doctrine teaches that, follows the promise of Jesus to St. Peter, the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church. And that is true. The church will not blink out of existence, no matter how weak or frail or corrupt or small it becomes. The church will be here when the Lord returns. The saying is sure. Every Christian bets her life on it.

But “the church” doesn’t mean your church. It means the church catholic. Leave aside whether that honorific applies to one institutional form or ecclesial tradition in particular. What it doesn’t include is the local parish or congregation to which you belong. It doesn’t include all the churches in your city put together. It even doesn’t include all the churches on your continent put together. Nor, finally, does it include your denomination or stream of ecclesial tradition. There may come a day when there are no more Moravians or Wesleyans or Baptists or Stone-Campbellites or Calvinists or Lutherans around. There may come a time when North America is a burnt-over district for faith (to use a phrase from the late Robert Jenson)—when not one community of Jesus’s gospel remains in these ancient lands. That is a possibility. Perhaps they will lie fallow, the people left behind growing weary, eventually panting after Christ. We may trust that such a thing would be superintended by divine providence. Perhaps it would lead, decades or centuries hence, to a great revival. But for the time being, and indeed into the indefinite future, we aren’t promised one single thing about survival: that is, the survival of our communities, our institutions, or our regional and national denominations, however strong or weak they may appear at any one time.

That may be a hard pill to swallow. Better to accept the truth, though, than to live by a lie. More to the point, it reminds us that our trust, finally, is in God alone. The only history with a side worth being on is his. Vindication won’t come short of glory. But it will come soon enough.

A test for your doctrine of Scripture

Here’s a test for you.

Suppose that scientists created a sort of time machine. Not one that could transport someone from the present into the past. But one that could give anyone in the present a perfect window onto the past: clear, detailed, and controlled. Like a God’s-eye documentary recording of all that transpired in then and there, whenever and wherever. You wouldn’t be able to affect or change anything—what’s past is past, what’s done is done—but you could observe it.

Here’s the question.

Would the time machine obviate the necessity or utility of the Bible for Christians?

Better put: Would the time machine render redundant any and all narrative texts in the church’s canon of Holy Scripture? Because the function of those narratives is to inform us of what happened at such-and-such a time in such-and-such a place with such-and-such persons? And with the advent of the time machine, those happenings would be available to us in exponentially greater detail, minus literary and genre trappings and revisions and agendas and interpretations, plus supremely wider historical and factual context?

Your answer to these questions says a great deal about your understanding of the nature and purpose of Holy Scripture in the church.

And allow me to say, ever so gently, that if your answer to these questions is Yes, then there is a problem in your doctrine of Scripture.

The adventure of history

This week I’ve been listening to Ernst Gombrich’s A Little History of the World on Audible. I’ve had it on my shelf for a while but I decided it might be good in audio form. I was right: it is wonderful. I’m a little over halfway through, and it’s been sheer pleasure. Since the original German edition of the book is nearly a century old, it’s been translated into dozens of langues, and the English version came out to wide acclaim almost 20 years ago, I take for granted that I have nothing new to say about the glories of this happy wee volume. But listening this week did bring one thought to mind that’s possibly worth sharing: Gombrich has something to teach us about what it means to tell history as a cultural and pedagogical practice.

God help me from wading into the treacherous waters of recent debates over how we do history, in general and in the classroom. But, if I am going to get wet, let me at least avoid wading and just dip a toe or two in from above.

Here’s Gombrich’s lesson, in all its simplicity: For all its many faults and crimes, errors and sufferings, human history is an adventure. And if you don’t tell it as an adventure, you’re doing it wrong. Why? For two reasons.

First, because unadventurous history is boring—one damn thing after another—and no one, not adults and certainly not children, wants to hear about ancient people in faraway lands doing one damn thing after another. Besides, history isn’t boring, so to make it boring is the hard thing, the perpetual own goal of perhaps the most fascinating subject in the world. In this case, the straight route is the best: make the telling as absorbing as the thing itself.

Second, history should be told as an adventure because nearly everyone and everything (and every time and every place) in history is, by comparison to those who are learning or studying history and their immediate surrounding contexts, different—foreign, alien, strange, exotic: all the words you’re supposed to avoid. And what Gombrich succeeds at most, besides making history both accessible and exciting, is rendering the difference of his subjects to such a degree that, no matter what he is talking about, it sounds attractive, appealing, unimaginably magnificent.

Already by the book’s midpoint, for example, Gombrich has discussed China, India, Greece, Rome, Persia, Israel, and the Arabs, as well as Confucius, Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Aristotle, and Muhammad. Guess what? Every single one of them shines like the sun. Gombrich constantly poses rhetorical questions to the reader, ostensibly a child of 10 or 12 years, questions like “Isn’t that wonderful?” or “Don’t you think that’s marvelous?” or “What must it have been like to be there?” or “Beautiful, don’t you agree?” We hear of a sage’s austere simplicity or a general’s peerless courage or a prophet’s irresistible charisma or a governor’s prudent planning, and we nod along with sympathetic understanding. Even when he is recounting what might appear to modern ears as immoral, cruel, or bizarre, Gombrich maintains a light touch, asking the reader, whether explicitly or implicitly, Why might he have done that? Why might others have celebrated it? Can you imagine living at such a time? What unintended benefits redound to us? There isn’t a high horse in sight. Gombrich knows that history is human, and he never lets you forget that the cultures and peoples and individuals and actions recounted in history are wholly of a piece with you and me, today, because we here and now, like they then and there, are human through and through. That means deception and violence and pain, even as it means glory and love and virtue, too. Above all, in the wide sweep of historical perspective, it means realizing the incalculable debt we owe to our forebears, none of whom we can thank, but a few of whom we can come to know, if belatedly. Mathematics from Arab scholars, architecture from Roman builders, theater from Greek dramatists, justice from Jewish prophets, compassion from Christian preachers, manuscripts from cloistered monks: the gifts keep on stacking up, one on top of another. A child, upon closing this book, apart from wanting to learn more more more about all this fascinating material, will feel in her heart nothing so much as bottomless gratitude, rooted in an unquestionable conviction that the ancients are simultaneously entirely different from her and yet the very same.

That is how history should be taught, or it seems to me. Critique follows understanding; deconstruction follows the building of sturdy foundations. In a word, everything turns on affection. Speaking for myself, as I listen to each chapter coming to a close, it is affection more than anything that wells up in me—at times to the point of tears.

The great cataract of nonsense

Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether. Most of all, perhaps we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many place is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune form the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

—C. S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time”

François Furet on revolutionary consciousness

[T]he revolutionary situation was not only characterised by the power vacuum that was filled by a rush of new forces and by the 'free' activity of society. . . . It was also bound up with a kind of hypertrophy of historical consciousness and with a system of symbolic representations shared by the social actors. The revolutionary consciousness, from 1789 on, was informed by the illusion of defeating a State that had already ceased to exist, in the name of a coalition of good intentions and of forces that foreshadowed the future. From the very beginning it was ever ready to place ideas above actual history, as if it were called upon to restructure a fragmented society by means of its own concepts. Repression became intolerable only when it became ineffectual. The Revolution was the historical space that separated two powers, the embodiment of the idea that history is shaped by human action rather than by the combination of existing institutions and forces.

In that unforeseeable and accelerated drift, the idea of human action patterned its goals on the exact opposite of the traditional principles underlying the social order. The Ancien Régime had been in the hands of the king; the Revolution was the people's achievement. France had been a kingdom of subjects; it was now a nation of citizens. The old society had been based on privilege; the Revolution established equality. Thus was created the ideology of a radical break with the past, a tremendous cultural drive for equality. Henceforth everything - the economy, society and politics - yielded to the force of ideology and to the militants who embodied it; no coalition nor any institution could last under the onslaught of that torrential advance.

Here I am using the term ideology to designate the two sets of beliefs that, to my mind, constitute the very bedrock of revolutionary consciousness. The first is that all personal problems and all moral or intellectual matters have become political; that there is no human misfortune not amenable to a political solution. The second is that, since everything can be known and changed, there is a perfect fit between action, knowledge and morality. That is why the revolutionary militants identified their private lives with their public ones and with the defence of their ideas. It was a formidable logic, which, in a laicised form, reproduced the psychological commitment that springs from religious beliefs. When politics becomes the realm of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, and when it is politics that separates the good from the wicked, we find ourselves in a historical universe whose dynamic is entirely new. As Marx realised in his early writings, the Revolution was the very incarnation of the illusion of politics: it transformed mere experience into conscious acts. It inaugurated a world that attributes every social change to known, classified and living forces; like mythical thought, it peoples the objective universe with subjective volitions, that is, as the case may be, with responsible leaders or scapegoats. In such a world, human action no longer encounters obstacles or limits, only adversaries, preferably traitors. The recurrence of that notion is a telling feature of the moral universe in which the revolutionary explosion took place.

No longer held together by the State, nor by the constraints that had been imposed by power and had masked its disintegration, society thus recomposed itself through ideology. Peopled by active volitions and recognising only faithful followers or adversaries, that new world had an incomparable capacity to integrate. It was the beginning of what has ever since been called 'politics', that is, a common yet contradictory language of debate and action around the central issue of power. The French Revolution, of course, did not 'invent' politics as an autonomous area of knowledge; to speak only of Christian Europe, the theory of political action as such dates back to Machiavelli, and the scholarly debate about the origin of society as an institution was well under way by the seventeenth century. But the example of the English Revolution shows that when it came to collective involvement and action, the fundamental frame of intellectual reference was still of a religious nature. What the French brought into being at the end of the eighteenth century was not politics as a laicised and distinct area of critical reflection but democratic politics as a national ideology. The secret of the success of 1789, its message and its lasting influence lie in that invention, which was unprecedented and whose legacy was to be so widespread. The English and French revolutions, though separated by more than a century, have many traits in common, none of which, however, was sufficient to bestow on the first the rôle of universal model that the second has played ever since it appeared on the stage of history. The reason is that Cromwell's Republic was too preoccupied with religious concerns and too intent upon its return to origins to develop the one notion that made Robespierre's language the prophecy of a new era: that democratic politics had come to decide the fate of individuals and peoples.

The term 'democratic politics' does not refer here to a set of rules or procedures designed to organise, on the basis of election results, the functioning of authority. Rather, it designates a system of beliefs that constitutes the new legitimacy born of the Revolution, and according to which the people', in order to establish the liberty and equality that are the objectives of collective action, must break its enemies' resistance. Having become the supreme means of putting values into action and the inevitable test of 'right' or 'wrong' will, politics could have only a public spokesman, in total harmony with those values, and enemies who remained concealed, since their designs could not be publicly admitted. The people were defined by their aspirations, and as an indistinct aggregate of individual 'right' wills. By that expedient, which precluded representation, the revolutionary consciousness was able to reconstruct an imaginary social cohesion in the name and on the basis of individual wills. That was its way of resolving the eighteenth century's great dilemma, that of conceptualising society in terms of the individual. If indeed the individual was defined in his every aspect by the aims of his political action, a set of goals as simple as a moral code would permit the Revolution to found a new language as well as a new society. Or, rather, to found a new society through a new language: today we would call that a nation; at the time it was celebrated in the fête de la Fédération. 

—François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (trans. Elborg Forster; 1978), 25-27

On finding race and racism in the New Testament

I am skeptical of attempts to center contemporary Christian conversations about race on New Testament texts purported to feature or critique racism. From what I can tell, this move is a common one. Pericopes adduced include Jesus's encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman, his meeting with the Samaritan woman at the well, and the parable of the good Samaritan. Most often, however, I see writers, pastors, and preachers use the example of gentiles in the early Jewish church, deploying some combination of Acts 15, Ephesians 2, Galatians, and Romans in order to illustrate the ostensible overcoming of racism in the early Jesus movement as an abiding example for churches struggling with the same problem today.

Why am I skeptical of this move? Let me try to spell out my reasons succinctly.

1.  Race is a modern construct. What we mean by "race" does not exist in the New Testament, either as a concept or as a narratively depicted phenomenon.

2. Racism, therefore, also does not exist in the New Testament. I'm a defender of theological anachronism in Christian exegesis of Scripture, but speaking of "racism in the New Testament" is the worst kind of anachronism. It's a projection without a backdrop, a house built on sand, a conclusion in search of an argument.

3. Prejudice toward, suspicion of, and stereotyping of persons from other communities—where "other" denotes differences in region, language, cult, class, or scriptural interpretation—did exist in the eastern Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire in the first century. Inasmuch as contemporary readers want to draw analogies between forms of modern prejudice and forms of ancient prejudice, as the latter is found in the New Testament, so be it.

4. It is a fearful and perilous thing, however, to attribute such prejudice to those Jews who populated the early church or who opposed it. Why? First of all, because today it is almost uniformly gentiles who make this claim, and gentile Christians have an almost ineradicable propensity to assign to Jews—past and present—sinful behavior they seek to expunge in themselves. (See also #7 and #10 below.)

5. Moreover, Jewish attitudes about gentiles in the first century were neither uniform nor simple nor reducible to prejudice. The principal thing to realize is that, according to the witness of both the prophets and the apostles (that is, the Old and New Testaments), the distinction between Jews and gentiles is a creation of God. There are Jews and gentiles because God called Abraham and all his descendants with him to be set apart as God's holy people. All those not so called, according to the flesh, are gentiles. This distinction is maintained, not abolished, in the preaching of the gospel by the Jewish apostles in the first half century of the church's existence.

6. First-century Jewish beliefs about and relations with gentiles, then, were informed by scriptural testimony. God's word—that is, the Law, the prophets, and the writings—has a lot to say, after all, about the nations (the goyim or ethne). Go read some of it. See if you walk away with a clear, obvious, and uncomplicated view about those human communities that lie outside the election of Abraham together with his seed. Focus in particular on the book of Leviticus. Then go read chapter 10 of the book of Acts. Is St. Peter blameworthy for his hesitancy about Cornelius and his household? Is he foolish or shortsighted, much less prejudiced? Or is he following the way the words run in the Torah until such time as an angel of the Lord Jesus provides a vision paired with a divine command to act according to an alternative and heretofore unimagined interpretation of Torah? (An interpretation, note, only possible now in the light of the resurrection of the Messiah from the dead.) I'd say it's fair to think Peter, along with his brother apostles, was not in the wrong if God deemed a vision necessary to change his mind—a vision, mind you, that is didactic, not an indictment.

(7. As a historical matter, it is also worth drawing attention to the work of scholars precisely on persons such as Cornelius, gentile God-fearers and friends and patrons of the synagogue in the diaspora. The caricature of Jews living outside the land in the first century, distributed across countless cities in the Roman Empire and elsewhere, as bitter, sectarian, resentful, fearful, and hostile ethnic fundamentalists is just that: a caricature. Indeed, one should always beware of anti-Jewish sentiment lingering just beneath and sometimes displayed right on the surface of historical scholarship as well as popularized historical treatments of the Bible.)

8. As for Acts 15—the culmination, as St. Luke tells it, of Peter's vision, of Saul's conversion, of Pentecost, of the ascension, of the birth of Jesus, in fact of the calling of Abraham and the creation of Adam—the story is hardly one of racism or even of ethnic prejudice. The question for the nascent apostolic church was not whether gentiles could join. It would certainly qualify as something akin to ethnic prejudice if the exclusively Jewish ekklesia said, "We don't want your kind here." But that's not what they said. All saw and glorified God for the wonders he'd worked among the gentiles, drawing them to faith in Jesus Messiah. The question—the only question—was on what terms they would enter, that is, by what means and in accordance with what rule of life they would become members of Christ's body. Would they, like the Jews, follow the Law of Moses? Would they honor the Sabbath, keep kosher, be circumcised? Or would they not?—that is, by remaining gentiles, not subject to Torah's statutes and ordinances. Either way, they would be saved; either way, they would believe in Jesus; either way, they would receive baptism and thereby Jesus's own Spirit. The issue, in short, was not an ethnic, much less a racial, one. The issue was the will of God for those believers in Jesus who were not descendants of Abraham. And after not a little disputation and controversy, the apostolic church discerned that it was the Spirit's good pleasure for the church to comprise Jews and gentiles both, united in the Messiah as Jew and gentile, neither becoming the other nor both becoming a third thing.

9. It turns out, therefore, that the climactic tale of gentiles being welcomed into Jewish messianic assemblies around the Mediterranean Sea in the years 30–80 AD has nothing whatsoever to do with race, racism, or ethnic prejudice. Acts 15 is simply not about that. Insinuating that it does either distorts its proper significance or metaphorizes a text without grounding, or even the need, to do so.

10. None of the foregoing is meant to suggest that either the New or the Old Testament is thus reduced to silence on pressing challenges facing the American church today, not least the seemingly unexorcisable demon of anti-black racism. Nor, as I said above, is it impossible, or imprudent, to draw analogies between scriptural instances of out-group derogation and present-day experience, or between the complications arising from Jew-gentile integration in Pauline assemblies and similar complications in American churches. Nor, finally, does the wider witness of Holy Scripture have nothing to say about the bedrock principles that ought to inform Christian speech about these matters: that God is sovereign, gracious Creator of all; that every human being is created in the image of God; that each and every human being who has ever lived is one, in St. Paul's words, "for whom Christ died." I only want to emphasize what we can and what we cannot responsibly read the canon to say. More than anything, though, I want to encourage gentile Christians to be vigilant in their perpetual war against Marcionitism in all its forms. There is a worrisome tendency in recent Christian talk about white racism in America to frame it, biblically and theologically, as anticipated and foreshadowed by Jews. Even when unintended—and I have no doubt it usually is—that is a morally noxious, canonically warped, theologically obtuse, and historically false claim. The early Jewish church did not resist gentile inclusion due to its racism against gentiles. It had none, for there was none to have. There is, lamentably, plenty of racism in the world today. Look there if you want to address it. You won't find any in the pages of the Bible.

100 theologians before the 20th century

Earlier this summer I set myself the task of creating a list of 100 theologians before the 20th century. Partly for myself, since I'm an inveterate list-maker and lists help me organize my reading habits; in this case, I would see where my training had left gaps and blind spots that I needed to fill in. But partly, also, for my students, who regularly ask me who they should read from the tradition—not only where to start, but a kind of curriculum or "who's who." So I set out to answer that very question: who's who?

The current list has 153 entries on it. I still want to cull it down to a clean 100, but I figured I would share it here in its unfinished, bloated form. I covet your corrections: Who am I missing? Who have I misnamed? Who is or is not a saint? Whose dates are mistaken? If you had to cull the list down to 100, which dozen (or more) figures would you nix?

I've separated the list into four groups, ranging from 32 to 50 theologians per period: patristic, medieval, reformation, and modern. The cut-offs, naturally, are bound to be arbitrary, but they're roughly accurate, I think. I'm a Westerner making a list in the West, so the Protestant Reformation is a meaningful period in a way that it isn't for the East—but then, I conclude that "age" with Dositheus II, who is a fitting representative of the East's encounter with reformed faith.

As for my goals and criteria:

First, the list is ecumenical; Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestants of every stripe are included.

Second, influence is important; I want the "relevant" names who decisively drove events, doctrines, controversies, etc.

Third, substance is important, too; indeed, on the final list I'm willing to opt for quality over legacy, if it comes down to that.

Fourth, I want epochs, traditions, regions, cultures, and languages to be disparate and representative of the church catholic at any one slice of time in history.

Fifth, orthodoxy is preferable but not required. Partly that's the nature of an ecumenical list (plenty of folks here have anathematized one another!), but even in terms of loose small-o orthodoxy, there a few whose credentials are questionable. So be it—if their thought is significant and worth engaging.

Sixth, candidates for the list have to have left substantial theological writings: St. Benedict, St. Lawrence, and St. Francis are all left off for that reason.

Seventh, I've included a few poets, but only those whose theological imaginaries have decisively informed the church's grammar and devotional practices, such as Dante and Milton; doubtless Herbert, Donne, and Hopkins, among others, could also be included, but I've left them off for now.

Eighth, the cut-off for the 20th century is difficult. What if your someone's straddles both sides of the dividing line? One criterion I used was whether a theologian's writing was equally distributed, or weighted toward the 19th century; another was whether a theologian's major work came before the year 1900. In the end, though, since (a) World War I ended in 1918, (b) Barth's Römerbrief came out in 1919, and (c) the current year is 2020, I used the "hard" cap of 1920.

Finally: Why theologians before the 20th century? First, because almost to a person, these are figures my students have never heard of and certainly have never read. Second, because duh, these are the fathers and mothers of the faith, who handed it down for 19 centuries to the present; they are worth attending to for their own sake. But third, because if I were to make a list of theologians worth reading from the last 100 years, I'd come up with at least as many names, and probably more. That's the job most seminaries and classrooms presuppose as the relevant task, apart from the stray history class or two. But that ends up sidelining the thinkers below. Imagine instead a graduate program in theology that ensured that students would read 2-4 major works by each of the theologians below (or at least by 100 of them). Imagine the theological range and depth, indeed the spiritual formation, that students would receive. Some programs are in fact trying that out. May their tribe increase.

In any case: to the list. Again, I welcome feedback. Leave a comment or drop me a line directly (brad DOT east AT acu DOT edu). Enjoy. [Update: suggested additions follow the list.]

Patristic Period

1. St. Ignatius of Antioch (d. 108)
2. St. Justin Martyr (100-165)
3. St. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130-202)
4. St. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-215)
5. Tertullian (c. 155-240)
6. Origen (c. 184-253)
7. St. Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258)
8. Eusebius of Caesarea (265-339)
9. St. Athanasius (c. 297-373) 10.
   
10. St. Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306-373)
    
11. St. Hilary of Poitiers (c. 315-368)
    
12. St. Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 315-386)
    
13. St. Basil the Great (c. 329-379)
    
14. St. Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 330-390)
    
15. St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-395)
    
16. St. Ambrose (c. 340-397)
    
17. St. Jerome (c. 343-420)
    
18. St. John Chrysostom (c. 347-407)
    
19. St. Augustine of Hippo (c. 354-430)
    
20. St. John Cassian (c. 360-435)
    
21. St. Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376-444)
    
22. St. Peter Chrysologus (c. 400-450)
    
23. Pope St. Leo the Great (c. 400-461)
    
24. St. Severinus Boethius (477-524)
    
25. St. Gregory the Great (c. 540-604)
    
26. St. Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636)
    
27. Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 565-625)
    
28. St. John Climacus (c. 579-649)
    
29. St. Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662)
    
30. St. Isaac of Nineveh (c. 613-700)
    
31. St. Bede the Venerable (c. 673-735)
    
32. St. John Damascene (c. 675-749)

Medieval Period

1. Theodore Abu Qurrah (c. 750-820)
   
2. St. Theodore of Studium (c. 759-826)
   
3. St. Photius the Great (c. 810-893)
   
4. John Scotus Eriugena (c. 815-877)
   
5. St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022)
   
6. St. Gregory of Narek (951-1003)
   
7. St. Peter Damian (1007-1072)
   
8. Michael Psellos (1017-1078)
   
9. St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109)
   
10. Peter Abelard (c. 1079-1142)
    
11. St. Bernard of Clairvaux (c. 1090-1153)
    
12. Peter Lombard (c. 1096-1160)
    
13. Hugh of St. Victor (c. 1096-1141)
    
14. St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)
    
15. Nicholas of Methone (1100-1165)
    
16. Richard of St. Victor (1110-1173)
    
17. Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202)
    
18. Alexander of Hales (1185-1245)
    
19. St. Anthony of Padua (1195-1231)
    
20. St. Albert the Great (c. 1200-1280)
    
21. St. Bonaventure (c. 1217-1274)
    
22. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
    
23. Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1328)
    
24. Dante Alighieri (c. 1265-1321)
    
25. Bl. John Duns Scotus (1265-1308)
    
26. William of Ockham (c. 1287-1347)
    
27. Bl. John van Ruysbroeck (c. 1293-1381)
    
28. Bl. Henry Suso (1295-1366)
    
29. St. Gregory Palamas (c. 1296-1357)
    
30. Johannes Tauler (1300-1361)
    
31. St. Nicholas Kabasilas (1319-1392)
    
32. John Wycliffe (c. 1320-1384)
    
33. Julian of Norwich (c. 1343-1420)
    
34. St. Catherine of Siena (c. 1347-1380)
    
35. Jan Hus (c. 1372-1415)
    
36. St. Symeon of Thessaloniki (c. 1381-1429)
    
37. St. Mark of Ephesus (1392-1444)
    
38. Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464)
    
39. Denys the Carthusian (1402-1471)
    

Reformation Period

1. Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)
   
2. Thomas Cajetan (1469-1534)
   
3. St. Thomas More (1478-1535)
   
4. Balthasar Hubmaier (1480-1528)
   
5. Martin Luther (1483-1546)
   
6. Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531)
   
7. Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566)
   
8. Thomas Müntzer (1489-1525)
   
9. Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556)
   
10. St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556)
    
11. Martin Bucer (1491-1551)
    
12. Menno Simmons (1496-1561)
    
13. Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560)
    
14. Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562)
    
15. St. John of Ávila (1500-1569)
    
16. Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575)
    
17. John Calvin (1509-1564)
    
18. John Knox (1514-1572)
    
19. St. Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582)
    
20. Theodore Beza (1519-1605)
    
21. St. Peter Canisius (1521-1597)
    
22. Martin Chemnitz (1522-1586)
    
23. Domingo Báñez (1528-1604)
    
24. Zacharias Ursinus (1534-1583)
    
25. Luis de Molina (1535-1600)
    
26. St. John of the Cross (1542-1591)
    
27. St. Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621)
    
28. Francisco Suárez (1548-1617)
    
29. Richard Hooker (1554-1600)
    
30. Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626)
    
31. Johann Arndt (1555-1621)
    
32. Johannes Althusius (1557-1638)
    
33. William Perkins (1558-1602)
    
34. St. Lawrence of Brindisi (1559-1619)
    
35. Jacob Arminius (1560-1609)
36. Amandus Polanus (1561-1610)
    
37. St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622)
    
38. Jakob Böhme (1575-1624)
    
39. William Ames (1576-1633)
    
40. Johann Gerhard (1582-1637)
    
41. Meletios Syrigos (1585-1664)
    
42. John of St Thomas (1589-1644)
    
43. Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661)
    
44. John Milton (1608-1674)
    
45. John Owen (1616-1683)
    
46. Francis Turretin (1623-1687)
    
47. Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706)
    
48. Philipp Spener (1635-1705)
    
49. Thomas Traherne (c. 1636-1674)
    
50. Patriarch Dositheos II of Jerusalem (1641-1707)
    

Modern Period

1. August Hermann Francke (1663-1727)
   
2. St. Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787)
   
3. Nicolaus Zinzendorf (1700-1760)
4. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)
   
5. John Wesley (1703-1791)
   
6. St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain (1749-1809)
   
7. St. Seraphim of Sarov (1754-1833)
   
8. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834)
   
9. St. Philaret of Moscow (1782-1867)
   
10. Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860)
    
11. Johann Adam Möhler (1796-1838)
    
12. Charles Hodge (1797-1878)
    
13. St. John Henry Newman (1801-1890)
    
14. John Williamson Nevin (1803-1886)
    
15. Alexei Khomiakov (1804-1860)
    
16. F. D. Maurice (1805-1872)
    
17. David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874)
    
18. Isaak August Dorner (1809-1884)
    
19. Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903)
    
20. Heinrich Schmid (1811-1885)
    
21. St. Theophan the Recluse (1815-1894)
    
22. J. C. Ryle (1816-1900)
    
23. Philip Schaff (1819-1893)
    
24. Heinrich Heppe (1820-1879)
    
25. Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889)
    
26. John of Kronstadt (1829-1909)
    
27. Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920)
    
28. B. B. Warfield (1851-1921)
    
29. Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900)
    
30. Herman Bavinck (1854-1921)
    
31. Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923)
    
32. St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897)

Suggested additions [last updated 24 July 2020]:

1. Evagrius Ponticus
   
2. The Cloud of Unknowing
   
3. Theologia Germanica
4. Francisco de Vitoria
5. Jose de Acosta
   
6. Gerard Winstanley
   
7. Blaise Pascal
8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
9. David Walker
   
10. Søren Kierkegaard
11. Rauschenbusch
12. Alcuin of York
    
13. Rabanus Maurus
14. Paschasius Radbertus
15. Cassiodorus
16. G. W. F. Hegel
17. George MacDonald
18. Ignaz von Döllinger
19. Tobias Beck
20. Adolf von Harnack
21. Giovanni Perrone
22. Franz Overbeck
23. August Vilmar
24. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
25. Léon Bloy

Sorting nationalism and patriotism with John Lukacs

One of the most curious things in the last few years has been the reinvigoration of the term "nationalism" as a political signifier and "nationalist" as a self-identification. In both scholarly and popular Christian discourse, at least, this is curious especially because, so far as I can tell, "nationalism" became in the last few decades a consensus word for the extreme, blasphemous, and/or heretical corruption of the virtue of patriotism. I have books on my shelf—one for college freshmen, another for graduate students, another for the broader reading public, another for fellow academics—all of which trade on this settled usage.

Now "nationalism" is back, not just as a historical-political force but as a terminological boundary marker. Unfortunately, though, its political associations as well as its function as a football in ideological disputes have contributed to something less than clarity. So that, e.g., to be nationalist is to be for "America first," or in less loaded terms, to be committed to one's fellow citizens and immediate neighbors in lieu of foreign adventurism and nation-building abroad. Or, e.g., to affirm that Christians can be nationalists means little more than that Christians can affirm the modern project of the nation-state, the regional boundaries within which such a state exists, and the groups and goods and cultural endeavors internal to that state. Or, e.g., even just to be happy in one's given national context and to be proud of its accomplishments and civic life.

That's quite the range. It seems to me that "patriotism" is a perfectly fine term for the last example. And the second-to-last example does not make one a nationalist in the prescriptive sense; it merely means that one accepts and/or approves of there being nations (of this sort) at all. It seems to me that "nationalism" should retain the stronger—not to say (yet) the inherently pejorative—terminological definition and concomitant evocations and allusions. Or else we're just going to be loose in our language and keep talking past one another.

There is no better thinker from whom to learn about nationalism defined in strict terms than John Lukacs, the Jewish-Catholic Hungarian-American immigrant and historian who died earlier this year at the age of 95. His 2005 book Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred is one of the crucial texts for understanding our moment. A helpful byproduct is lucidity regarding terms, their histories, and their political uses and connotations.

Let me close with a sample set of quotations on the topic of nationalism. I commend the book along with Lukacs's voluminous output to any and all who find themselves interested by this (pp. 35-36, 71-73; my bold print, for emphasis):

"Soon after 1870 there appeared something else: a phenomenon whose evidences, here and there, were there earlier, but the breadth and the substance and the character of which began to change. This was modern and populist nationalism. Yet 'nationalisme' and 'nationaliste' became French words only after 1880; in Britain, too, they had appeared not much earlier. The reason for this relatively late gestation of the nationalist word was that 'patriot' and 'patriotism' already existed; and, at least for a while, it seemed that the meaning of the latter was sufficient. When, a century earlier, Samuel Johnson uttered his famous (and perhaps forever valid) dictum that Patriotism Is The Last Refuge Of A Scoundrel, he meant nationalism, even though that word did not yet exist. One of the reasons why there exists no first-rate book about the history of nationalism is that it is not easy to separate it from old-fashioned patriotism. And these two inclinations, patriotism and nationalism, divergent as they may be, still often overlap in people's minds. (When, for example, Americans criticize a 'superpatriot,' what they really mean is an extreme nationalist.) Nonetheless, the very appearance of a new word is always evidence that some people sense the need to distinguish it from the older word's meaning: that a nationalist is someone different from a patriot.

"Patriotism is defensive; nationalism is aggressive. Patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a 'people,' justifying many things, a political and ideological substitute for religion. Patriotism is old-fashioned (and, at times and in some places, aristocratic); nationalism is modern and populist. In one sense patriotic and national consciousness may be similar; but in another sense, more and more apparent after 1870, national consciousness began to affect more and more people who, generally, had been immune to that before—as, for example, many people within the multinational empire of Austria-Hungary. It went deeper than class consciousness. Here and there it superseded religious affiliations, too.

"After 1870 nationalism, almost always, turned antiliberal, especially where liberalism was no longer principally nationalist. ...

"The state was one of the creations of the Modern Age. Its powers grew; here and there, sooner or later, it became monstrously bureaucratic. Yet—and few people see this, very much including those who prattle about 'totalitarianism'—the power of the state has been weakening, at the same time the attraction of nationalism has not.

"Hitler knew that: I have, more than once, cited his sentence from Mein Kampf recalling his youth: 'I was a nationalist; but I was not a patriot.' Again it is telling that in Austria 'national' and 'nationalist' meant pro-German, and not only during the multinational Habsburg monarchy and state. Well before the Second World War an Austrian 'nationalist' wanted some kind of union with Germany, at the expense of an independent Austrian state. This was also true in such diverse places as Norway or Hungary or other states during the Second World War: 'national' and 'nationalist' often meant pro-German.

"Nationalism, rather than patriotism; the nation rather than the state; populism rather than liberal democracy, to be sure. We have examples of that even among the extremist groups in the United States, too, with their hatred of 'government'—that is, of the state. We have seen that while true patriotism is defensive, nationalism is aggressive; patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a 'people,' justifying everything, a political and ideological substitute for religion; both modern and populist. An aristocratic nationalism is an oxymoron, since at least after the late seventeenth century most European aristocracies were cosmopolitan as well as national. Democratic nationalism is a later phenomenon. For a while there was nothing very wrong with that. It won great revolutions and battles, it produced some fine examples of national cohesion. One hundred and fifty years ago a distinction between nationalism and patriotism would have been labored, it would have not made much sense. Even now nationalism and patriotism often overlap within the minds and hearts of many people. Yet we must be aware of their differences—because of the phenomenon of populism which, unlike old-fashioned patriotism, is inseparable from the myth of a people. Populism is folkish, patriotism is not. One can be a patriot and cosmopolitan (certainly culturally so). But a populist is inevitably a nationalist of sorts. Patriotism is less racist than is populism. A patriot will not exclude a person of another nationality from a community where they have lived side by side and whom he has known for many years; but a populist will always be suspicious of someone who does not seem to belong to his tribe.

"A patriot is not necessarily a conservative; he may even be a liberal—of sorts, though not an abstract one. In the twentieth century a nationalist could hardly be a liberal. The nineteenth century was full of liberal nationalists, some of them inspiring and noble figures. The accepted view is that liberalism faded and declined because of the appearance of socialism, that the liberals who originally had reservations about exaggerated democracy became democrats and then socialists, accepting the progressive ideas of state intervention in the economy, education, welfare. This is true but not true enough. It is nationalism, not socialism, that killed the liberal appeal. The ground slipped out from under the liberals not because they were not sufficiently socialist but because they were (or at least seemed to be) insufficiently nationalist.

"Since it appeals to tribal and racial bonds, nationalism seems to be deeply and atavistically natural and human. Yet the trouble with it is not only that nationalism can be antihumanist and often inhuman but that it also proceeds from one abstract assumption about human nature itself. The love for one's people is natural, but it is also categorical; it is less charitable and less deeply human than the love for one's country, a love that flows from traditions, at least akin to a love of one's family. Nationalism is both self-centered and selfish—because human love is not the love of oneself; it is the love of another. (A convinced nationalist is suspicious not only of people he sees as aliens; he may be even more suspicious of people of his own ilk and ready to denounce them as 'traitors'—that is, people who disagree with his nationalist beliefs.) Patriotism is always more than merely biological—because charitable love is human and not merely 'natural.' Nature has, and shows, no charity."

New essay published in The Los Angeles Review of Books: "Enter Paul"

I have a new essay published this morning over in The Los Angeles Review of Books, titled "Enter Paul," on Paula Fredriksen's two latest books, Paul: The Pagans' Apostle and When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (both from Yale University Press). Here's a sample:

"Put it this way: an itinerant rabbi from the Galilee — the backwaters of Palestine — leads a popular movement among the Jews, one that comes to an ignominious end when he is executed for sedition by the Roman authorities. Some of his followers form a small community in Jerusalem, proclaiming that not only was this rabbi and prophet the longed-for Messiah of Israel, but he is alive, in glory with God, vested with impregnable power and heavenly authority. These messianic Jews share goods in common and worship daily at the temple, praying and waiting eagerly for Jesus’s imminent return, when he will drive out the pagan occupiers and restore his people’s fortunes.

"Pause the frame there. Nothing about this picture offers even a hint that this same community — one defined by exclusive loyalty to Jesus, Israel’s Messiah and Lord — will, centuries hence, find itself filling the Roman Empire, legalized and endorsed by that same empire, dominated by gentiles, not Jews, and led by men like Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis.

"How did this happen? Why did it happen? To answer, we need to leave Augustine behind and follow Fredriksen into the world of the eastern Mediterranean in the first century of the common era, specifically Jewish life under the thumb of the Roman Empire."

Read the rest.

Talismanic invocations of scholarship

One of the silliest, and most annoying, trends in public Christian discourse is the use of academic scholarship. I've no doubt the trend I have in mind is present on all sides, but where I see it most is in newly liberated ex-evangelicals, whether pastors or laypeople, but certainly in popular writers.

Not only is "scholarship" used in the singular, as if two centuries' worth of study of the Bible in all its variety of contexts across dozens of countries in as many languages can be considered monolithic and unanimous. Even more, it's waved around as a kind of talisman, evidently with the expectation of an effect that can only be called apotropaic—which, we may infer, is the effect it had initially on the person so using it.

It's true that any number of stupid or damaging claims about the Bible and Christianity are a function or result of ignorance, and that education can remedy some of this. But the truth is that scholars disagree about very nearly anything and everything you can formulate a question about regarding the origins and interpretation of Christian figures, events, and teachings. About almost nothing can we say, "Scholars say..." and fill in the blank with a true, uncontested, non-banal claim. And even then, if such a claim did exist, I assure you that we could find someone 50 years ago or 50 years hence who did or will disagree with the would-be consensus.

Moreover, the "scholars say" line is typically used in an unsophisticated way. For example, if what Paul had in mind, or the anonymous final redactor of the fourth Gospel, was X, then that just settles the matter: it meant and means and will mean for all time this singular thing, X—protestations and counter-readings and reception history and reinterpretations and figural exegesis and the rest be damned.

Finally, the use of "scholars say" is often, at bottom, just an exercise in rhetorical trumping. It's a defeater in intra-communal arguments about God, the Bible, and history, wielded as a weapon. And naturally, there are always good reasons to discount the other side's scholars (falsely so called).

Having said that, I do think that many use the phrase in a sincere, almost obsequiously religious and deferential way: the experts have spoken, thus saith the Lord. There's always a magisterium, in other words. Just find yourself the right one. Which is to say, the one that supports your opinion.

John Lukacs on what makes history

"This short history of the twentieth century is not a philosophical treatise. But at this point I am compelled to add two brief digressions. The first is a summary of my view of history, which goes contrary to the still very widely accepted categorical beliefs of why and how history happened and happens, of course including that of the Second World War. The current, often deemed 'scientific' belief is that history, perhaps especially in the democratic age, is the result of great material and economic factors, of which the lives, acts, and thoughts of people are largely the consequences. That is less than a half-truth. In 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany not just because of the economic crisis of 1930–1933, but because of the political mood of many Germans at that time. It was not the state of the British economy that made the British government reluctant to resist Hitler in the Thirties. It was not inferiority of materials or armaments that led to the collapse of France in 1940. There was no economic reason for the Japanese to plan and then make war on the United States. Of course, it is true that the tremendous material power of the United States (and the enormous size of the armies of the Soviet Union) made the war winnable against Germany and Japan. But there, too, what mattered was the resolution and the near-unanimity of the American people, and the unwillingness of the Russian people to oppose Stalin. What people thought (and think), what they believe, what they choose to think, what they prefer to believe—that is the main essence of their lives, of which their material conditions and economics desires are most often the outcomes, and not the other way around."

—John Lukacs, A Short History of the Twentieth Century (Belknap, 2013), 126-127. Lukacs, who will be 95 in January, was born in Hungary to a Jewish mother and a Roman Catholic father. Since the 1940s, he has lived in the United States and taught and written as a historian. Much of what he writes in this brief but enthralling book he lived through himself—sometimes up close. There is nothing quite like reading a truly independent mind, as evidenced in the quote above. As it happens, to make an odd comparison between two authors, I am currently reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, whose founding premise is the idea of "psycho-history," what Asimov calls "the quintessence of sociology." By its precise mathematical formulas, it can predict (in the novel) what will happen hundreds and thousands of years in the future, treating masses of human beings the way scientists treat elements and atoms. Lukacs, for his part, stands against the materialists and the determinists alike. It's a breath of fresh air.

Why there's no such thing as non-anachronistic interpretation, and it's a good thing too: reflections occasioned by Wesley Hill's Paul and the Trinity

For some time now I have been convinced that the issue at the root of all conversation and controversy regarding historical criticism and theological interpretation of the Bible is anachronism. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to write an article on the topic in the next year or two; I've touched on the theme in a paragraph or two in a couple of articles already, but it deserves a treatment unto itself. Until then, let me use Wesley Hill's wonderful book Paul and the Trinity: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters as an occasion to discuss what's at play here.

Programmatically: The fundamental hermeneutical first principle of self-consciously historical-critical study of the Bible is that such study must avoid anachronism. Two hermeneutical values underlie or spin off this principle: on the one hand, what makes any reading good is whether it is properly historical; therefore, on the other hand, all reading of the Bible ought to avoid anachronism—or to say the same thing negatively, anachronistic readings of biblical texts are by definition bad.

Enter scholars like Hill: supple interpreters, subtle thinkers, careful writers, sophisticated theologians. What Hill aims to show in his book is that the conceptual resources of trinitarian theology may be used in the reading of biblical texts like Paul's letters as a hermeneutical lens that enables, rather than obstructs, understanding. More to the point, such understanding does not stray from the canons of historical criticism, which is to say, it does not fall prey to anachronism. Thus, his project "plays by the rules" while bringing to bear doctrinal resources otherwise considered anathema by historical critics (both Christian and otherwise).

Consider his language:

"I need to clarify in what ways the grammar of trinitarian theology will and will not be invoked, and to specify the methodological safeguards that will protect my exegesis from devolving into an exercise in imaginative theologizing." (31)

"The methodological danger that lurks here is one that may be described as a certain kind of 'projection'... To avoid this pitfall, I will adopt a twofold approach: First, the readings of Paul I will offer ... will be self-consciously historical readings, guided by the canons of 'critical' modes of exegesis. At no point will a trinitarian conclusion be allowed to 'trump' what Paul's texts may be plausibly shown to have communicated within his own context. Second, trinitarian theologies will be employed as hermeneutical resources and, thus, mined for conceptualities which may better enable a genuinely historical exegesis to articulate what other equally 'historical' approaches may have (unwittingly or not) obscured." (45)

"[Paul's theology's] patterns and dynamics may be newly illumined and realized within new contexts and by means of later conceptualities, which are to some degree 'foreign' to the texts themselves." (46)

"...the use of trinitarian theology in the task of reading Paul in an authentically historical mode..." (46)

"my goal is not to 'find' trinitarian theology 'in' Paul so much as to use the conceptual resources of trinitarian doctrine as hermeneutical aids for reading Paul afresh. [This book addresses the] question of whether those trinitarian resources may actualize certain trajectories from Paul's letters that he would have expressed in a different idiom." (104-105)

"[Recent] studies are rightly concerned to respect the linear unfolding of historical development, rather than anachronistically imposing later theologies back onto Paul's letters. But my thesis ... has been mostly taken up with demonstrating the converse: that trinitarian doctrine may be used retrospectively to shed light on and enable a deeper penetration of the Pauline texts in their own historical milieu, and that it is not necessarily anachronistic to allow later Christian categories to be the lens through which one reads Paul. ... I have tried ... to show that the conceptual categories of 'persons in relation' developed so richly in the fourth century and in the following theological era, may enable those who live with them to live more deeply and fruitfully with the first century apostle himself." (171)

"Is it possible ... that a kind of broad, pluriform trinitarian perspective, far from being an anachronistic imposition on the texts of Paul, may instead prove genuinely insightful in a fresh look at Paul?" (169)

Let me be clear: Hill masterfully demonstrates his thesis. Anyone who knows my theological interests knows that Hill is preaching to the choir. The concepts, categories, and modes of reading developed in the 4th and 5th centuries by the church fathers constitute a hermeneutic nonpareil for faithful interpretation of the Christian Bible, the epistles of Paul included. And Hill shows us why: positively, because that hermeneutic was constructed precisely in response to the kinds of challenge for talk about God, Christ, and Spirit found in Paul's letters and elsewhere; negatively, because contemporary historical critics have not learned the exegetical-theological lessons of trinitarian doctrine, and thus largely replay the terminological debates from the side of opposition to Nicaea (e.g., distinction obviates unity, derivation implies subordination, etc.).

But when I say that Hill demonstrates his thesis, I do not mean that he succeeds in offering a reading that avoids anachronism. He does not. But the fault is not with him. The fault is with the criterion itself. His only fault—and it is a minor one, but an instructive one nonetheless—is to play by the rules set for him by biblical criticism. Because the truth is that avoiding anachronism is impossible. The act of reading is itself irreducibly, unavoidably, essentially anachronistic. In particular, reading any text from the past, indeed a religious text from the ancient past, just is to engage in anachronism.

So the issue is not that Hill's trinitarian hermeneutic for Paul is anachronistic. It's that the non-trinitarian hermeneutics of every one of his peers—Dunn, Hurtado, McGrath, Bauckham, whomever—are equally anachronistic.

Hill gestures toward this fact in his critique of the use of "monotheism" as a category applied to Paul, as well as the language of a vertical axis on which to plot the relative divinity of God and Jesus. But the critique goes all the way down. And this cannot be said forcefully enough, given the depths of historical criticism's rejection of anachronism, both for its own exegesis and that of anyone else, and given the extent of its influence not only over the academy but over the church. In a word:

Historical-critical exegesis is fundamentally, inescapably anachronistic.

What do I mean by this, and on what grounds do I say it?

First, and most basically, because historical criticism is itself a contingent, lately constructed mode of reading not universally found among all communities of reading. Put differently: the attempt to read without anachronism is a parochial idea—created at a certain time and place, and therefore present in some cultures and not others. So that the suggestion that non-anachronistic reading is what it means to read well is self-refuting, if reading was ever a successful practice outside of Western culture in the last few centuries.

Second, because all reading is anachronistic, as I said above. Let's limit that claim to the readings of texts not written in one's own immediate time and place and/or addressed to oneself (i.e., not emails received moments after sending). To read a text outside of its original context and audience means to read that text in a new, different context, by or with a new, different audience—in this case, you, the reader. That means that the language, customs, assumptions, beliefs, practices, background knowledge, relationships, intentions, and so on, that pertained to the original setting of the text are no longer present, or present in the same way, and that you bring to the text entirely different customs, knowledge, experience, etc. To read a text in such a setting invariably changes how the text is read. And however much one tries to mitigate such contextual factors, resistance is futile; indeed, resistance is itself a sign of doing something different—engaging in a different practice, through different means, with a different end—than the original audience in its original context.

Now, third, the objection might arise: Does that mean we simply cannot arrive at historical understanding? Not at all. My point is the opposite: True historical understanding is always anachronistic. Because historical self-understanding, historical consciousness, is itself a historical achievement, a contingent event. The way that we late moderns "think" history is not native to history's actors; "putting ourselves in their shoes," trying to think their thoughts after them, in just the way they thought them, ruthlessly identifying and trying to eliminate any stray intrusions of modern thoughts and even modern applications—that is, strictly speaking, something our forebears did not do. We can do it, we can play the game, but it's a game we're playing (just like chess or basketball, which are real games with real rules we can really play in the present, but which have not always existed, even if analogous games existed in other cultures, past or present); it's not a sort of time machine of the mind. Even that metaphor fails, since the trouble with time machines, as with observation of nature, is that they don't leave the past untouched. The same goes for historical investigation. You bring the future with you.

Fourth, the insight of Gadamer is key here: Historical understanding is a possibility, but lack of anachronism is neither possible nor desirable. That would entail leaping over the history in between the text in question and the present. But that history has, quite literally, made the reading of that text now, in this setting, possible; furthermore, texts bring with them the histories of their reception that have attended them ever since their inception. Those histories not only inform our interpretations in the present, however historically rigorous: they set the conditions for them. To make the claim, "Paul's conception of God and Christ is binitarian," is to locate oneself on a timeline; it is not a claim that was made, because it could not have been made, prior to a certain moment in our history. And, as a claim, it would be no more intelligible to Paul than to Anselm. That is what makes it anachronistic.

Fifth, the most important reason why historical-critical reading is essentially anachronistic is the way that it uses—quite explicitly and without apology—resources outside the text, resources foreign to the text's original audience, as a means of interpreting the text. Examples are obvious: monographs and articles, concepts created long after the text's composition, archeological findings, data regarding life and neighboring cultures prior to and contemporaneous with the text's original setting. Historical-critical exegesis often proposes readings of ancient religious texts (say, Genesis 1) that would have been impossible in the original context, because no one at the time had, or could have had, the kind of comprehensive knowledge about their own time and place that we have since amassed. (It is worth noting that this exegetical procedure is not different in kind than reading Genesis 1 in light of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, or scientific theories about the origins of the universe.) In a manner of speaking, the best historical-critical interpretations are self-consciously maximalist in just this way: they are so exhaustive in searching out every possible detail, contour, allusion, and influence that such an interpretation in the text's original setting would have been unthinkable—indeed, no such interpretation would have been possible until now, this very moment in time. Undertaken in that sort of self-conscious way, anachronism would be welcomed and readily admitted as the very occasion and goal of historical reading.

Much more could be said; Lord willing, I'll say it in print here in a few years. For now, recall Hill's rhetorical question in the book's conclusion: "Is it possible ... that a kind of broad, pluriform trinitarian perspective, far from being an anachronistic imposition on the texts of Paul, may instead prove genuinely insightful in a fresh look at Paul?" (169). Let me take a lesson from Hill and apply it to his own work: these are not competing claims; it is not an either/or situation. Bringing trinitarian doctrine to bear on the letters of Paul is both anachronistic and richly insightful. Whether or not it is more insightful than non-trinitarian readings, whether or not it does greater justice to the texts considered as a whole and in all their literary-theological diversity, is a separate question, one not governed exclusively by historical concerns. I happen to side with Hill's answer. But even if we were wrong in our judgment, it would not be because our reading was anachronistic. An ostensibly superior reading would be, too.

Reinhold Niebuhr on the distinction between growth and progress

"The inner relation of successive civilizations to each other may be described as 'unity in length' or in time. The inner relation of contemporary civilizations to each other may be described as 'unity in breadth' or in space. The former unity is more obvious than the latter one. The history of Western civilization is, for instance, more clearly related to Greece and Rome than it is to its own contemporary China. Yet there are minimal relations of mutual dependence even in 'breadth.' While the Western world has elaborated science and techniques to a greater extent than the oriental world, it would not be possible to comprehend our Western scientific development without understanding the contributions of oriental scientific discoveries towards it.

"Perhaps the most significant development of our own day is that the cumulative effect of history’s unity in length is daily increasing its unity in breadth. Modern technical civilization is bringing all civilizations and cultures, all empires and nations into closer juxtaposition to each other. The fact that this greater intimacy and contiguity prompt tragic 'world wars' rather than some simple and easy interpenetration of cultures, must dissuade us from regarding a 'universal culture' or a 'world government' as the natural and inevitable telos which will give meaning to the whole historical process.

"But on the other hand it is obvious that the technical interdependence of the modern world places us under the obligation of elaborating political instruments which will make such new intimacy and interdependence sufferable. This new and urgent task is itself a proof of the cumulative effects of history. It confronts us with progressively difficult tasks and makes our very survival dependent upon their solution. Thus the development of unity in breadth is one aspect of the unity of length in history.

"These facts seem obvious enough to occasion some agreement in their interpretation, even when the presuppositions which govern the interpretations are divergent. It must be agreed that history means growth, however much the pattern of growth may be obscured by the rise and fall of civilizations. Though one age may have to reclaim what previous ages had known and forgotten, history obviously moves towards more inclusive ends, towards more complex human relations, towards the technical enhancement of human powers and the cumulation of knowledge.

"But when the various connotations of the idea of 'growth' are made more explicit a fateful divergence between the Christian and the modern interpretation of human destiny becomes apparent. As we have previously noted, the whole of modern secular culture (and with it that part of the Christian culture which is dependent upon it) assumes that growth means progress. It gives the idea of growth a moral connotation. It believes that history moves from chaos to cosmos by forces immanent within it. We have sought to prove that history does not support this conclusion. The peril of a more positive disorder is implicit in the higher and more complex order which human freedom constructs on the foundation of nature’s harmonies and securities. The spiritual hatred and the lethal effectiveness of 'civilized' conflicts, compared with tribal warfare or battles in the animal world, are one of many examples of the new evil which arises on a new level of maturity."

—Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: Volume II: Human Destiny (1943), pp. 314-315

Diarmaid MacCulloch on the Psalter as the secret weapon of the Reformation

"The outbreak of war in 1562 was the culmination of a decade of extraordinary growth in French Protestantism. There may have been two million adherents in around a thousand congregations by 1562, while in the early 1550s there had been only a handful of secret groups; the phenomenon is even more spectacular in scale than the sudden emergence of popular Protestantism in Scotland in the same year that had so astonished John Knox. How had such rapid expansion taken place? Public preaching had not been possible on a significant scale to spread the message in France; there had not been enough ministers, and limited opportunities to gather to listen to sermons. Books played a major part, but the two central texts, the Bible and Calvin's Institutes, were bulky and expensive and could not have had a major circulation in the years of persecution before 1560, while a massive increase in Bible publication came only after 1562. Lesser, more easily concealed pamphlets could be more easily distributed and read, but in one respect the Protestant crowds who emerged to fight their Catholic neighbors ignored what Calvin and the ministers of Geneva wrote. Until open war began, Calvin was relentless in conveying a message of moderation and avoidance of conflict. Very few seem to have listened: the clerical leadership was then swept along against its will by popular militancy marked especially by gleeful smashing of images.

"The explanation for this mass lay activism may lie in the one text which the Reformed found perfectly conveyed their message across all barriers of social status and literacy. This was the Psalter, the book of the 150 Psalms, translated into French verse, set to music and published in unobtrusive pocket-size editions which invariably included the musical notation for the tunes. In the old Latin liturgy the psalms were largely used in monastic services and in private devotional recitation. Now they were redeployed in Reformed Protestantism in this metrical form to articulate the hope, fear, joy and fury of the new movement. They became the secret weapon of the Reformation not merely in France but wherever the Reformed brought new vitality to the Protestant cause. Like so many important components of John Calvin's message, he borrowed the idea from the practice of Strassburg in the 1530s. When he arrived to minister to the French congregation there after his expulsion from Geneva in 1538, he found the French singing these metrical psalms, which has been pioneered by a cheerfully unruly convert to evangelical belief, the poet Clément Marot. Calvin took the practice back to Geneva when he returned there to reconstitute its Reformation. Theodore Beza finally produced a complete French metrical psalter in 1562, and during the crisis of 1562–3, he set up a publishing syndicate of thirty printers through France and Geneva to capitalize on the psalm-singing phenomenon: the resulting mass-production and distribution was a remarkable feat of technology and organization.

"The metrical psalm was the perfect vehicle for turning the Protestant message into a mass movement capable of embracing the illiterate alongside the literate. What better than the very words of the Bible as sung by the hero-King David? The psalms were easily memorized, so that an incriminating printed text could rapidly be dispensed with. They were customarily sung in unison to a large range of dedicated tunes (newly composed, to emphasize the break with the religious past, in contrast to Martin Luther's practice of reusing old church melodies which he loved). The words of a particular psalm could be associated with a particular melody; even to hum the tune spoke of the words of the psalm behind it, and was an act of Protestant subversion. A mood could be summoned up in an instant: Psalm 68 led a crowd into battle, Psalm 124 led to victory, Psalm 115 scorned dumb and blind idols and made the perfect accompaniment for smashing up church interiors. The psalms could be sung in worship or in the market-place; instantly they marked out the singer as a Protestant, and equally instantly united a Protestant crowd in ecstatic companionship just as the football chant does today on the stadium terraces. They were the common property of all, both men and women: women could not preach or rarely even lead prayer, but they could sing alongside their menfolk. To sing a psalm was a liberation—to break away from the mediation of priest or minister and to become a king alongside King David, talking directly to his God. It was perhaps significant that one of the distinctive features of French Catholic persecution in the 1540s had been that those who were about to be burned had their tongues cut out first."

—Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (Penguin Books: 2003), 307–308