Resident Theologian
About the Blog
New essay published in Commonweal: “The Specter of Marcionism"
I've got a new essay published in the latest issue of Commonweal titled "The Specter of Marcionism." It uses the combined examples from last year of Andy Stanley's controversial teaching on the Old Testament and the First Things review relitigating the Mortara case to think about the different ways in which Protestants and Catholics struggle with the election of the Jews, Israel's scriptures, and supersessionism. Here's a taste:
"On this, all can agree. God and the Jews are a package deal. As 1 John 2:23 says of God and Christ—that one cannot have the Father without the Son, or the Son without the Father—so here: you cannot have Abraham’s God without Abraham’s children. Reject the latter and you lose the former. In its rejection of Marcionism, the church staked a claim to this principle: the only God with whom it would have to do was the Jewish God, the God of Moses, Hannah, Mary, and Jesus. But the church’s consistency in maintaining this principle was uneven at best. The specter of Marcion continued to haunt Europe. It even casts its long shadow over the Shoah. It is no accident that history’s greatest crime against the Jews came in the heart of Christendom. No longer did Israel’s menace wear the face of a Pharaoh or a Haman. Now it was the brothers of Jesus according to the Spirit who terrorized, or turned away, the brothers of Jesus according to the flesh."
Read the whole thing here.
Lewis's other virtue as a novelist
Last week I listed six virtues that make C. S. Lewis's novels, especially the Space Trilogy, so lovable. I forgot one, though: his ability to describe evil—evil persons and evil deeds—without ever making evil the least bit appealing or interesting.
This isn't because there's no evil in Lewis's world; there's plenty. In fact, it's often embodied not just in human beings but in devils, or in humans possessed by demons. The scale of evil in Lewis is cosmic. But it is also minute, even mundane. And that's what makes his depiction of evil so brilliant, so compelling, yet so unattractive. Evil is boring, ugly, deficient, and stupid. It's imbecilic, infantile, a shallow life-sucking self-sabotage of all that is—which is to say, of all that is good, beautiful, and true. It enlivens nothing and parasitically eats from the inside whatever gives it quarter.
Lewis is able to strike this philosophically informed macro/micro balance without glamorizing the good life (under fallen conditions) or idealizing the virtuous individual precisely because the drama of principalities and powers—of angels and demons in Deep Heaven—is played out every day in the ordinary dramas of neighbors and friends, husbands and wives, parents and children. The tiniest act of charity, unnoticed by a soul, even the soul that offers it, is a mighty moment in the triumph of Good over Evil; and yet the quotidian pettinesses of marriages and workplaces and churches are no less occasions for Satan and all his pomp to win a battle in their (ultimately unwinnable) war against the Lord and all his heavenly host.
All that to say, the characters and actions and ideas representing evil in Lewis's fiction are recognizably wicked, however great or small that wickedness may be, but never once do you, as the reader, find yourself drawn to the evil (notwithstanding your recognition of what might make it emotionally or psychologically tempting in situ). The evil is all too "real," but insubstantial, vaporous, nothing. Because that's what evil actually is, nothing at all, a lack of goodness and being, of what makes life worth living. Contemporary stories' protagonists, so full of "gritty" "moral grayness," are both unserious and unrealistic by comparison.
Because Lewis understood what so many have forgotten: truly to see evil, in story form, is finally to see right through it.
This isn't because there's no evil in Lewis's world; there's plenty. In fact, it's often embodied not just in human beings but in devils, or in humans possessed by demons. The scale of evil in Lewis is cosmic. But it is also minute, even mundane. And that's what makes his depiction of evil so brilliant, so compelling, yet so unattractive. Evil is boring, ugly, deficient, and stupid. It's imbecilic, infantile, a shallow life-sucking self-sabotage of all that is—which is to say, of all that is good, beautiful, and true. It enlivens nothing and parasitically eats from the inside whatever gives it quarter.
Lewis is able to strike this philosophically informed macro/micro balance without glamorizing the good life (under fallen conditions) or idealizing the virtuous individual precisely because the drama of principalities and powers—of angels and demons in Deep Heaven—is played out every day in the ordinary dramas of neighbors and friends, husbands and wives, parents and children. The tiniest act of charity, unnoticed by a soul, even the soul that offers it, is a mighty moment in the triumph of Good over Evil; and yet the quotidian pettinesses of marriages and workplaces and churches are no less occasions for Satan and all his pomp to win a battle in their (ultimately unwinnable) war against the Lord and all his heavenly host.
All that to say, the characters and actions and ideas representing evil in Lewis's fiction are recognizably wicked, however great or small that wickedness may be, but never once do you, as the reader, find yourself drawn to the evil (notwithstanding your recognition of what might make it emotionally or psychologically tempting in situ). The evil is all too "real," but insubstantial, vaporous, nothing. Because that's what evil actually is, nothing at all, a lack of goodness and being, of what makes life worth living. Contemporary stories' protagonists, so full of "gritty" "moral grayness," are both unserious and unrealistic by comparison.
Because Lewis understood what so many have forgotten: truly to see evil, in story form, is finally to see right through it.
My technology habits
Developing good technology habits is one of the driving motivations of my daily life. Particularly since I surrendered and got a smart phone (only three years ago), combined with having children (the oldest is six) and getting a job (now in my second year), the possibility for the internet and screens to overtake my every waking moment has never been greater. A little less than two years ago I read Andy Crouch's The Tech-Wise Family, which galvanized and organized my approach to disciplining technology's role in my life. Here's where things stand at the moment.
Phone
I still have an iPhone, though an older and increasingly outdated model. When I read Crouch I realized I was spending more than 2 hours a day on my phone (adolescents average 3-6 hours—some of my students more than that!), and I followed his lead in downloading the Moment app to monitor my usage. Since then I've cut down my daily screen time on my phone to ~45 minutes: 10 or so minutes checking email, 10-20 or so minutes texting/WhatsApp, another 20-30 minutes reading articles I've saved to Instapaper.
I changed my screen settings to black and white, which diminishes the appeal of the phone's image (the eyes like color). My home screen consists of Gmail, Safari, Messages, WhatsApp, Calendar, Photos, Camera, Settings, Weather, Google Maps, and FaceTime. That's it. I have no social media apps. On the next screen I have, e.g., the OED, BibleGateway, Instapaper, Podcasts, Amazon, Fandango, and Freedom (which helps to manage and block access to certain websites or apps).
When we moved to Abilene in June 2016, we instituted a digital sabbath on Sundays: no TV (for kids or us), and minimal phone usage. Elaborating on the latter: I leave my phone in the car during church, and try to leave my phone plugged into the charger in the bedroom or away from living areas during the day. Not to say that we've been perfectly consistent with either of these practices, but for the most part, they've been life-giving and refreshing.
Oh, and our children do not have their own phones or tablets, and they do not use or play on ours, at home or in public. (Our oldest is just now experimenting with doing an educational app on our iPad instead of TV time. We'll see how that goes.)
Social Media
Currently the only social media that I am on and regularly use is Twitter. I was on Facebook for years, but last month I deactivated my account. I'm giving it a waiting period, but after Easter, or thereabouts, unless something has changed my mind, I am going to delete my account permanently. (Reading Jaron Lanier's most recent book had something to do with this decision.) I don't use, and I cannot imagine ever creating an account for, any other social media.
Why Twitter? Well, on the one hand, it has proved to be an extraordinarily helpful and beneficial means of networking, both personally and professionally. I've done my best to cultivate a level-headed, sane, honest, and friendly presence on it, and the results have so far wildly exceeded my expectations. Thus, on the other hand, I have yet to experience Twitter as the nightmare I know it is and can be for so many. Part of that is my approach to using it, but I know that the clock is ticking on my first truly negative experience—getting rolled or trolled or otherwise abused. What will I do then? My hope is that I will simply not read my mentions and avoid getting sucked into the Darkest Twitter Timeline whose vortex has claimed so many others. But if it starts affecting my actual psyche—if I start anxiously thinking about it throughout the day—if my writing or teaching starts anticipating, reactively, the negative responses Twitter is designed algorithmically to generate: then I will seriously consider deactivating or deleting my account.
How do I manage Twitter usage? First, since it's not on my phone, unless I'm in front of my own laptop, I can't access it, or at least not in a user friendly way. (Besides, I mostly use Twitter as I once did checking blogs: I go to individual accounts' home pages daily or every other day, rather than spend time scrolling or refreshing my timeline.) Second, I use Freedom to block Twitter on both my laptop and my phone for extended periods during the day (e.g., when writing or grading or returning emails), so I simply can't access it. Third, my aim is for two or three 5-10 minute "check-ins": once or twice at work, once in the evening. If I spend more than 20 or 30 minutes a day on Twitter, that day is a failure.
Laptop
I have four children, six and under, at home, so being on my laptop at home isn't exactly a realistic persistent temptation. They've got to be in bed, and unless I need to work, I'm not going to sit there scrolling around online indefinitely. I've got better things to do.
At work, my goal is to avoid being on my laptop as much as possible. Unless I need to be on it—in order to write, email, or prepare for class—I keep it closed. In fact, I have a few tricks for resisting the temptation to open it and get sucked in. I'll use Freedom to start a session blocking the internet for a few hours. Or I begin the day with reading (say, 8:00-11:00), then open the laptop to check stuff while eating an early lunch. Or I will physically put the laptop in an annoying place in my office: high on a shelf, or in a drawer. Human psychology's a fickle thing, but this sort of practice actually decreases the psychic desire to take a break from reading or other work by opening the laptop; and I know if I open it, Twitter or Feedly or Instapaper or the NYT or whatever will draw me in and take more time from me than I had planned or wanted.
[Insert: I neglected to mention that one way I try to read at least some of the innumerable excellent articles and essays published online is, first, to save them to Instapaper then, second, to print out the longest or most interesting ones (usually all together, once or twice a month). I print them front and back, two sides to a page, and put them in a folder to read in the evening or throughout the week. This can't work for everyone, but since I work in an office with a mega-printer that doesn't cost me anything, it's a nice way to "read online" without actually being online.]
One of my goals for the new year has been to get back into blogging—or as I've termed it, mezzo-blogging—which is really just an excuse to force myself to write for 15-30 minutes each day. That's proved to require even more hacks to keep me from going down rabbit holes online, since the laptop obviously has to be open to write a blog post. So I'll use Freedom to block "Distractions," i.e., websites I've designated as ones that distract me from productive work, like Twitter or Google.
I've yet to figure out a good approach with email, since I don't like replying to emails throughout the day, though sometimes my students do need a swifter answer than I'd prefer to give. Friday afternoons usually end up my catch-up day.
I should add that I am a binge writer (and editor): so if I have the time, and I have something to write, I'll go for three or six or even nine or more hours hammering away. But when I'm in the groove like that, the distractions are easy to avoid.
Oh, and as for work on the weekends: I typically limit myself to (at most) Saturday afternoon, while the younger kids nap and the older kids rest, and Sunday evening, after the kids go to bed. That way I take most or all of the weekend off, and even if I have work to do, I take 24+ hours off from work (Sat 5pm–Sun 7pm).
TV
In many ways my worst technology habits have to do with TV. Over many years my mind and body have been trained to think of work (teaching and reading and writing) as the sort of thing I do during the day, and rest from work after dinner (or the kids go to bed) means watching television. That can be nice, either as a respite from mentally challenging labor, or as a way to spend time with my wife. But it also implies a profoundly attenuated imagination: relaxation = vegging out. Most of the last three years have been a sustained, ongoing attempt at retraining my brain to resist its vegging-out desires once the last child falls asleep. Instead, to read a novel, to catch up with my wife, to clean up, to grab drinks with friends, to get to bed early—whatever.
If my goal is less than 1 hour per day on my phone, and only as much time on my laptop as is necessary (which could be as little as 30 minutes or as much as 4+ hours), my goal is six (or fewer) hours per week of TV time. That includes sports, which as a result has gone way down, and movies (whether with the kids or my wife). Reasonable exceptions allowed: our 5-month-old often has trouble getting down early or easily, and my wife and I will put on some mindless episode of comedy—current favorite: Brooklyn 99—while taking turns holding and bouncing her to sleep. But otherwise, my current #1 goal is as little TV as possible; and if it's on, something well worth watching.
Video games
I don't have video games, and haven't played them since high school. We'll see if this re-enters our life when our kids get older.
Pedagogy
I've written elsewhere about the principles that inform my so-called Luddite pedagogy. But truly, my goal in my classes is to banish technology from the classroom, and from in front of my students' faces, as much as is within my power. The only real uses I have for it is PowerPoint presentations (for larger lecture courses to freshmen) and YouTube clips (for a certain section of my January intensive course on Christianity and Culture). Otherwise, it's faces looking at faces, ears listening to spoken words, me at the table with the students or up scribbling on the white board. For 80 minutes at a time, I want my students to know what it's like not to constantly be scratching that itch.
Spiritual disciplines
All of this is useless without spiritual disciplines encompassing, governing, and replacing the time I'd otherwise be devoting to technology. I note that here as a placeholder, since that's not what this post is about; perhaps in another post I'll discuss my devotional regimen (which makes it sound far more rigorous than my floundering attempts in fact amount to).
I have been helped so much by learning what others do in order to curb and control their relationship to technology. I hope this might be helpful to others in a similar way.
Phone
I still have an iPhone, though an older and increasingly outdated model. When I read Crouch I realized I was spending more than 2 hours a day on my phone (adolescents average 3-6 hours—some of my students more than that!), and I followed his lead in downloading the Moment app to monitor my usage. Since then I've cut down my daily screen time on my phone to ~45 minutes: 10 or so minutes checking email, 10-20 or so minutes texting/WhatsApp, another 20-30 minutes reading articles I've saved to Instapaper.
I changed my screen settings to black and white, which diminishes the appeal of the phone's image (the eyes like color). My home screen consists of Gmail, Safari, Messages, WhatsApp, Calendar, Photos, Camera, Settings, Weather, Google Maps, and FaceTime. That's it. I have no social media apps. On the next screen I have, e.g., the OED, BibleGateway, Instapaper, Podcasts, Amazon, Fandango, and Freedom (which helps to manage and block access to certain websites or apps).
When we moved to Abilene in June 2016, we instituted a digital sabbath on Sundays: no TV (for kids or us), and minimal phone usage. Elaborating on the latter: I leave my phone in the car during church, and try to leave my phone plugged into the charger in the bedroom or away from living areas during the day. Not to say that we've been perfectly consistent with either of these practices, but for the most part, they've been life-giving and refreshing.
Oh, and our children do not have their own phones or tablets, and they do not use or play on ours, at home or in public. (Our oldest is just now experimenting with doing an educational app on our iPad instead of TV time. We'll see how that goes.)
Social Media
Currently the only social media that I am on and regularly use is Twitter. I was on Facebook for years, but last month I deactivated my account. I'm giving it a waiting period, but after Easter, or thereabouts, unless something has changed my mind, I am going to delete my account permanently. (Reading Jaron Lanier's most recent book had something to do with this decision.) I don't use, and I cannot imagine ever creating an account for, any other social media.
Why Twitter? Well, on the one hand, it has proved to be an extraordinarily helpful and beneficial means of networking, both personally and professionally. I've done my best to cultivate a level-headed, sane, honest, and friendly presence on it, and the results have so far wildly exceeded my expectations. Thus, on the other hand, I have yet to experience Twitter as the nightmare I know it is and can be for so many. Part of that is my approach to using it, but I know that the clock is ticking on my first truly negative experience—getting rolled or trolled or otherwise abused. What will I do then? My hope is that I will simply not read my mentions and avoid getting sucked into the Darkest Twitter Timeline whose vortex has claimed so many others. But if it starts affecting my actual psyche—if I start anxiously thinking about it throughout the day—if my writing or teaching starts anticipating, reactively, the negative responses Twitter is designed algorithmically to generate: then I will seriously consider deactivating or deleting my account.
How do I manage Twitter usage? First, since it's not on my phone, unless I'm in front of my own laptop, I can't access it, or at least not in a user friendly way. (Besides, I mostly use Twitter as I once did checking blogs: I go to individual accounts' home pages daily or every other day, rather than spend time scrolling or refreshing my timeline.) Second, I use Freedom to block Twitter on both my laptop and my phone for extended periods during the day (e.g., when writing or grading or returning emails), so I simply can't access it. Third, my aim is for two or three 5-10 minute "check-ins": once or twice at work, once in the evening. If I spend more than 20 or 30 minutes a day on Twitter, that day is a failure.
Laptop
I have four children, six and under, at home, so being on my laptop at home isn't exactly a realistic persistent temptation. They've got to be in bed, and unless I need to work, I'm not going to sit there scrolling around online indefinitely. I've got better things to do.
At work, my goal is to avoid being on my laptop as much as possible. Unless I need to be on it—in order to write, email, or prepare for class—I keep it closed. In fact, I have a few tricks for resisting the temptation to open it and get sucked in. I'll use Freedom to start a session blocking the internet for a few hours. Or I begin the day with reading (say, 8:00-11:00), then open the laptop to check stuff while eating an early lunch. Or I will physically put the laptop in an annoying place in my office: high on a shelf, or in a drawer. Human psychology's a fickle thing, but this sort of practice actually decreases the psychic desire to take a break from reading or other work by opening the laptop; and I know if I open it, Twitter or Feedly or Instapaper or the NYT or whatever will draw me in and take more time from me than I had planned or wanted.
[Insert: I neglected to mention that one way I try to read at least some of the innumerable excellent articles and essays published online is, first, to save them to Instapaper then, second, to print out the longest or most interesting ones (usually all together, once or twice a month). I print them front and back, two sides to a page, and put them in a folder to read in the evening or throughout the week. This can't work for everyone, but since I work in an office with a mega-printer that doesn't cost me anything, it's a nice way to "read online" without actually being online.]
One of my goals for the new year has been to get back into blogging—or as I've termed it, mezzo-blogging—which is really just an excuse to force myself to write for 15-30 minutes each day. That's proved to require even more hacks to keep me from going down rabbit holes online, since the laptop obviously has to be open to write a blog post. So I'll use Freedom to block "Distractions," i.e., websites I've designated as ones that distract me from productive work, like Twitter or Google.
I've yet to figure out a good approach with email, since I don't like replying to emails throughout the day, though sometimes my students do need a swifter answer than I'd prefer to give. Friday afternoons usually end up my catch-up day.
I should add that I am a binge writer (and editor): so if I have the time, and I have something to write, I'll go for three or six or even nine or more hours hammering away. But when I'm in the groove like that, the distractions are easy to avoid.
Oh, and as for work on the weekends: I typically limit myself to (at most) Saturday afternoon, while the younger kids nap and the older kids rest, and Sunday evening, after the kids go to bed. That way I take most or all of the weekend off, and even if I have work to do, I take 24+ hours off from work (Sat 5pm–Sun 7pm).
TV
In many ways my worst technology habits have to do with TV. Over many years my mind and body have been trained to think of work (teaching and reading and writing) as the sort of thing I do during the day, and rest from work after dinner (or the kids go to bed) means watching television. That can be nice, either as a respite from mentally challenging labor, or as a way to spend time with my wife. But it also implies a profoundly attenuated imagination: relaxation = vegging out. Most of the last three years have been a sustained, ongoing attempt at retraining my brain to resist its vegging-out desires once the last child falls asleep. Instead, to read a novel, to catch up with my wife, to clean up, to grab drinks with friends, to get to bed early—whatever.
If my goal is less than 1 hour per day on my phone, and only as much time on my laptop as is necessary (which could be as little as 30 minutes or as much as 4+ hours), my goal is six (or fewer) hours per week of TV time. That includes sports, which as a result has gone way down, and movies (whether with the kids or my wife). Reasonable exceptions allowed: our 5-month-old often has trouble getting down early or easily, and my wife and I will put on some mindless episode of comedy—current favorite: Brooklyn 99—while taking turns holding and bouncing her to sleep. But otherwise, my current #1 goal is as little TV as possible; and if it's on, something well worth watching.
Video games
I don't have video games, and haven't played them since high school. We'll see if this re-enters our life when our kids get older.
Pedagogy
I've written elsewhere about the principles that inform my so-called Luddite pedagogy. But truly, my goal in my classes is to banish technology from the classroom, and from in front of my students' faces, as much as is within my power. The only real uses I have for it is PowerPoint presentations (for larger lecture courses to freshmen) and YouTube clips (for a certain section of my January intensive course on Christianity and Culture). Otherwise, it's faces looking at faces, ears listening to spoken words, me at the table with the students or up scribbling on the white board. For 80 minutes at a time, I want my students to know what it's like not to constantly be scratching that itch.
Spiritual disciplines
All of this is useless without spiritual disciplines encompassing, governing, and replacing the time I'd otherwise be devoting to technology. I note that here as a placeholder, since that's not what this post is about; perhaps in another post I'll discuss my devotional regimen (which makes it sound far more rigorous than my floundering attempts in fact amount to).
I have been helped so much by learning what others do in order to curb and control their relationship to technology. I hope this might be helpful to others in a similar way.
The virtues of Lewis's Space Trilogy
I've been re-reading Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra this last month (I read That Hideous Strength for the first time last year), and the former especially brought to mind why I love Lewis so much. His novelistic shortcomings are more than apparent in these early works, so in the midst of noticing those, I asked myself: What is it about these books that makes them lovable? What are the virtues that Lewis the novelist brings to bear in them that raise them to more than pleasant diversions?
Here's a short list.
1. Lewis has a knack for making the metaphysical reality that Christians confess to be true inhabitable. He makes it seem like common sense—more, he makes it seem roomy. "This is the real world, refracted through fiction" is the refrain of all his writing, not least Ransom's adventures in space. Or: "It's probably not precisely this, but it's almost certainly very like this—only better and more wondrous."
2. Apart from the beautiful economy of his prose, perhaps Lewis's greatest strength across all the genres in which he wrote is the depth of his moral-spiritual psychology. He knows what makes us tick. Both at our most virtuous and our most vicious (more on the latter in a moment), his description of the motivations, intentions, pressures (petty and glorious), goals, indecisive failures, and temptations of the will is nonpareil. Better, it is utterly recognizable. And all too often it is deeply, shamefully convicting.
3. Lewis holds up a mirror to us—in this case, through the earnest observations of sinless alien species and their angelic rulers—and reveals our undeniable fallenness, both at the individual and at the civilizational level. (In this case, the theme of his fiction is "sin is real, it's inside of all of us, and you know it's true.") His extraterrestrial creatures are constantly dumbfounded by the everyday goings-on of earthlings, and that dumbfoundedness is a cue to the reader: why aren't you similarly bothered or surprised? Our fear of death, our denial of God, our fears of one another, our indefensible mistreatment of our neighbors, the quantity of time and energy we spend on worthless matters ... it is difficult to listen to Ransom's interlocutors without turning on yourself in the somber realization that you're implicated, indicted even, by their speech.
4. Continuing that theme, Lewis has no time for the insipid platitudes of technocratic modernity. The evil men whom Ransom battles are, in the end, hollowed out by the nihilism of cultural-scientific self-preservation, while lacking any guiding principles—not even the well-being of humanity as such—that might garner qualified praise as splendid vices. Knowledge for the sake of power for the sake of perpetuation of knowledge for the sake of power for the sake of ... until kingdom come. Lewis may be guilty of nostalgia at times, but he knows the problems of his day, not at the surface, but at the root; or rather, in the sickness of soul that drives soul-denying men to seek immortality at all costs. The narrative function of beauty in "the heavens" of "space" in the Trilogy drives this home: knowledge without wonder is finally the libido dominandi, now naked yet "clothed" in society's approbation. This is the enemy to be resisted to the end.
5. Lewis's Space Trilogy works also—as so many interplanetary stories do—as an allegory or metaphor for imperialism, and although Lewis was guilty of many of the biases and prejudices of his day, he knew that colonization and domination of other peoples and cultures was an offense against God and the fruit of original sin. Moreover, closer to his literary expertise, he knew the extent to which such domination is often an expression of ignorance and impotence, the exercise of force masking the insecurity of a fearful people. Culturally this expresses itself in a parochialism both of space and of time; Lewis termed the latter "chronological snobbery." Just as the European peoples thought themselves superior to peoples from other continents, so they (and others) thought (and think) themselves superior to people from the past. The two are related and inseparable: when Ransom listens to Oyarsa, part of his instruction consists of unlearning the modern prejudice against "difference," whether found across the sea or across the ages.
6. Finally, Lewis the theologian always emerges in dialogue between (say) his former self, Ransom, and his would-be present self, the unbent creatures of Malacandra or their eldila or Oyarsa himself. I long to read these stories with my children because those dialogues will themselves be occasions for them to hear ancient spiritual truths articulated in the clearest, freshest of ways. How odd: to hear the gospel lucidly spoken by being made strange on the lips of alien beings in a fictional novel. But when we find ourselves loving C. S. Lewis's novels, that's just one of the many reasons why we love them.
Here's a short list.
1. Lewis has a knack for making the metaphysical reality that Christians confess to be true inhabitable. He makes it seem like common sense—more, he makes it seem roomy. "This is the real world, refracted through fiction" is the refrain of all his writing, not least Ransom's adventures in space. Or: "It's probably not precisely this, but it's almost certainly very like this—only better and more wondrous."
2. Apart from the beautiful economy of his prose, perhaps Lewis's greatest strength across all the genres in which he wrote is the depth of his moral-spiritual psychology. He knows what makes us tick. Both at our most virtuous and our most vicious (more on the latter in a moment), his description of the motivations, intentions, pressures (petty and glorious), goals, indecisive failures, and temptations of the will is nonpareil. Better, it is utterly recognizable. And all too often it is deeply, shamefully convicting.
3. Lewis holds up a mirror to us—in this case, through the earnest observations of sinless alien species and their angelic rulers—and reveals our undeniable fallenness, both at the individual and at the civilizational level. (In this case, the theme of his fiction is "sin is real, it's inside of all of us, and you know it's true.") His extraterrestrial creatures are constantly dumbfounded by the everyday goings-on of earthlings, and that dumbfoundedness is a cue to the reader: why aren't you similarly bothered or surprised? Our fear of death, our denial of God, our fears of one another, our indefensible mistreatment of our neighbors, the quantity of time and energy we spend on worthless matters ... it is difficult to listen to Ransom's interlocutors without turning on yourself in the somber realization that you're implicated, indicted even, by their speech.
4. Continuing that theme, Lewis has no time for the insipid platitudes of technocratic modernity. The evil men whom Ransom battles are, in the end, hollowed out by the nihilism of cultural-scientific self-preservation, while lacking any guiding principles—not even the well-being of humanity as such—that might garner qualified praise as splendid vices. Knowledge for the sake of power for the sake of perpetuation of knowledge for the sake of power for the sake of ... until kingdom come. Lewis may be guilty of nostalgia at times, but he knows the problems of his day, not at the surface, but at the root; or rather, in the sickness of soul that drives soul-denying men to seek immortality at all costs. The narrative function of beauty in "the heavens" of "space" in the Trilogy drives this home: knowledge without wonder is finally the libido dominandi, now naked yet "clothed" in society's approbation. This is the enemy to be resisted to the end.
5. Lewis's Space Trilogy works also—as so many interplanetary stories do—as an allegory or metaphor for imperialism, and although Lewis was guilty of many of the biases and prejudices of his day, he knew that colonization and domination of other peoples and cultures was an offense against God and the fruit of original sin. Moreover, closer to his literary expertise, he knew the extent to which such domination is often an expression of ignorance and impotence, the exercise of force masking the insecurity of a fearful people. Culturally this expresses itself in a parochialism both of space and of time; Lewis termed the latter "chronological snobbery." Just as the European peoples thought themselves superior to peoples from other continents, so they (and others) thought (and think) themselves superior to people from the past. The two are related and inseparable: when Ransom listens to Oyarsa, part of his instruction consists of unlearning the modern prejudice against "difference," whether found across the sea or across the ages.
6. Finally, Lewis the theologian always emerges in dialogue between (say) his former self, Ransom, and his would-be present self, the unbent creatures of Malacandra or their eldila or Oyarsa himself. I long to read these stories with my children because those dialogues will themselves be occasions for them to hear ancient spiritual truths articulated in the clearest, freshest of ways. How odd: to hear the gospel lucidly spoken by being made strange on the lips of alien beings in a fictional novel. But when we find ourselves loving C. S. Lewis's novels, that's just one of the many reasons why we love them.
New review in the latest issue of Christian Century
I've got a critical review of Craig Carter's new book, Reading Scripture with the Great Tradition, in the latest issue of The Christian Century. Here's a taste:
"The spiritual sense that [premodern] saints sought—which is to say, prayed for, delighted in, and contemplated—was not a 'stable' 'layer' of meaning 'residing' in the text. It was the in principle infinite sacramental signification of human signs divinely authored and illumined. For the res of scripture, as a whole and in each of its parts, is Christ. Just how any one particular text of scripture signifies Christ, not to mention just what Christ might use such a text to say to the believing reader under the Spirit’s guidance, is limited neither by human authors’ intentions nor by ordinary rules of grammar and syntax, nor by the capacities, desires, or convictions of readers, believing or pagan. It is determinate, but only insofar as Christ is determinate. And Christ makes himself present and known in endless ways on countless occasions: in the determinate elements of the Eucharist, in the determinate bodies of the faithful, in the determinate words of the sermon, in the determinate sufferings of the least of these. Just so, we should expect countless, indeed endless, manifestations of Christ on the sacred page."
Read the whole thing here.
"The spiritual sense that [premodern] saints sought—which is to say, prayed for, delighted in, and contemplated—was not a 'stable' 'layer' of meaning 'residing' in the text. It was the in principle infinite sacramental signification of human signs divinely authored and illumined. For the res of scripture, as a whole and in each of its parts, is Christ. Just how any one particular text of scripture signifies Christ, not to mention just what Christ might use such a text to say to the believing reader under the Spirit’s guidance, is limited neither by human authors’ intentions nor by ordinary rules of grammar and syntax, nor by the capacities, desires, or convictions of readers, believing or pagan. It is determinate, but only insofar as Christ is determinate. And Christ makes himself present and known in endless ways on countless occasions: in the determinate elements of the Eucharist, in the determinate bodies of the faithful, in the determinate words of the sermon, in the determinate sufferings of the least of these. Just so, we should expect countless, indeed endless, manifestations of Christ on the sacred page."
Read the whole thing here.
Blessed are the heretics
I have always attributed the line "blessed are the heretics" to Stanley Hauerwas, who in his typical fashion goes on to say (paraphrasing from memory) that without the heretics the church would not be instigated into growing ever more deeply into the truths of the faith. Indeed, a quick Google search found this quote, which I'm sure is a regularly repackaged line:
"In truth, we are never quite sure what we believe until someone gets it wrong. That is why those we call heretics are so blessed because without them we would not know what we believe."
There he goes on to discuss the Apollinarian heresy as an instance of the church establishing, through hard-win effort, a more rigorous christological grammar than it previously had.
Re-reading the Confessions the other day, though, I saw that St. Augustine says something similar. In Book VII, while discussing the "books of the Platonists" and their relationship to the faith, he writes first of his friend, then of himself:
"[Alypius's] move towards the Christian faith was slower. But later when he knew that this was the error of the Apollinarian heretics, he was glad to conform to the Catholic faith. For my part I admit it was some time later that I learnt, in relation to the words 'The Word was made flesh,' how Catholic truth is to be distinguished form the false opinion of Photinus."
He continues:
"The rejection of heretics brings into relief what your Church holds and what sound doctrine maintains. 'It was necessary for heresies to occur so that the approved may be made manifest' among the weak." (VII.xix.25)
I'm curious: Who first spoke this way about heretics in the tradition, and after Augustine, did it become a mainstay? My reading in medieval heresiology is vanishingly small. I suppose I'm interested less in the general sentiment (which I'm sure is common) and more in poetic or providential or even positive language about heretics and their heresies as occasions for growth in catholic truth.
"In truth, we are never quite sure what we believe until someone gets it wrong. That is why those we call heretics are so blessed because without them we would not know what we believe."
There he goes on to discuss the Apollinarian heresy as an instance of the church establishing, through hard-win effort, a more rigorous christological grammar than it previously had.
Re-reading the Confessions the other day, though, I saw that St. Augustine says something similar. In Book VII, while discussing the "books of the Platonists" and their relationship to the faith, he writes first of his friend, then of himself:
"[Alypius's] move towards the Christian faith was slower. But later when he knew that this was the error of the Apollinarian heretics, he was glad to conform to the Catholic faith. For my part I admit it was some time later that I learnt, in relation to the words 'The Word was made flesh,' how Catholic truth is to be distinguished form the false opinion of Photinus."
He continues:
"The rejection of heretics brings into relief what your Church holds and what sound doctrine maintains. 'It was necessary for heresies to occur so that the approved may be made manifest' among the weak." (VII.xix.25)
I'm curious: Who first spoke this way about heretics in the tradition, and after Augustine, did it become a mainstay? My reading in medieval heresiology is vanishingly small. I suppose I'm interested less in the general sentiment (which I'm sure is common) and more in poetic or providential or even positive language about heretics and their heresies as occasions for growth in catholic truth.
The value of keeping up with the news
If you've been paying attention the last two weeks, an ongoing controversy erupted Saturday, January 19, and is still unfolding in one of the many seemingly endless iterations such controversies generate today through social media, op-eds, and the like. Last week, in Alan Jacobs's newsletter, he wrote this:
"On Tuesday morning, January 22, I read a David Brooks column about a confrontation that happened on the National Mall during the March for Life. Until I read that column I had heard nothing about this incident because I do not have a Facebook account, have deleted my Twitter account, don’t watch TV news, and read the news about once a week. If all goes well, I won’t hear anything more about the story. I recommend this set of practices to you all."
This got me thinking about a post Paul Griffiths wrote on his blog years ago, perhaps even a decade ago (would that he kept that blog up longer!). He reflected on the ideal way of keeping up with the news—and, note well, this was before the rise of Twitter et al. as the driver of minute-by-minute "news" content. He suggested that there is no real good served in knowing what is going on day-to-day, whether that comes through the newspaper or the television. Instead, what one ought to do is slow the arrival of news to oneself so far as possible. His off-the-cuff proposal: subscribe to a handful of monthly or bimonthly publications ranging the ideological spectrum and, preferably, with a more global focus so as to avoid the parochialism not just of time but of space. Whenever the magazines or journals arrive, you devote a few hours to reading patient, time-cushioned reflection and reporting on the goings-on of the world—99% of which bears on your life not one iota—and then you continue on with your life (since, as should be self-evident to all of us, no one but a few family and friends needs to know what we think about it).
Consider how much saner your life, indeed all of our lives, would be if we did something like Griffiths' proposal. And think about how not doing it, and instead "engaging in the discourse," posting on Facebook, tweeting opinions, arguing online: how none of it does anything at all except raise blood pressure, foment discord, engender discontent, etc. Activists and advocates of local participatory democracy are fools if they think anything remotely like what we have now serves their goals. If we slowed our news intake, resisted the urge to pontificate, and paid more attention to the persons and needs and tasks before us, the world—as a whole and each of its parts—would be a much better place than it is at this moment.
"On Tuesday morning, January 22, I read a David Brooks column about a confrontation that happened on the National Mall during the March for Life. Until I read that column I had heard nothing about this incident because I do not have a Facebook account, have deleted my Twitter account, don’t watch TV news, and read the news about once a week. If all goes well, I won’t hear anything more about the story. I recommend this set of practices to you all."
This got me thinking about a post Paul Griffiths wrote on his blog years ago, perhaps even a decade ago (would that he kept that blog up longer!). He reflected on the ideal way of keeping up with the news—and, note well, this was before the rise of Twitter et al. as the driver of minute-by-minute "news" content. He suggested that there is no real good served in knowing what is going on day-to-day, whether that comes through the newspaper or the television. Instead, what one ought to do is slow the arrival of news to oneself so far as possible. His off-the-cuff proposal: subscribe to a handful of monthly or bimonthly publications ranging the ideological spectrum and, preferably, with a more global focus so as to avoid the parochialism not just of time but of space. Whenever the magazines or journals arrive, you devote a few hours to reading patient, time-cushioned reflection and reporting on the goings-on of the world—99% of which bears on your life not one iota—and then you continue on with your life (since, as should be self-evident to all of us, no one but a few family and friends needs to know what we think about it).
Consider how much saner your life, indeed all of our lives, would be if we did something like Griffiths' proposal. And think about how not doing it, and instead "engaging in the discourse," posting on Facebook, tweeting opinions, arguing online: how none of it does anything at all except raise blood pressure, foment discord, engender discontent, etc. Activists and advocates of local participatory democracy are fools if they think anything remotely like what we have now serves their goals. If we slowed our news intake, resisted the urge to pontificate, and paid more attention to the persons and needs and tasks before us, the world—as a whole and each of its parts—would be a much better place than it is at this moment.
Remembering Nama (1921–2019)
My maternal grandmother passed away this afternoon, after nearly 98 years of life on this earth. She was born in Mississippi two and a half years after the end of World War I. She lived through the Great Depression, the second World War, and every other major event you can think of from the last 75 years. She gave birth to seven children and, after losing one in childhood, raised the other six—spread across 21 years—together with her husband, who worked as a mailman. She lived to see 15 grandchildren, 31 great-grandchildren, and four great-great-grandchildren. She was widowed in her early 70s, and never remarried. She suffered the loss of her oldest son in his 70s, but no one else; she outlived the rest.
She was an extraordinary woman in the most old-fashioned of ways. A dutiful wife and stoic mother, a quiet Catholic and yellow-dog Democrat, she believed in loving your family, working hard, and doing what you can, with what you have, while you're able. She took wry pleasure in informing young women who married into the family that "we don't have no crybaby girls in this family." One of her mottoes was "you can't do everything." She loved food, especially seafood, and most of all if she was cooking it for a house full of people.
But probably her favorite thing was simply to be there, in a chair, in the midst of an overcrowded house somewhere in Mississippi (or Austin, Texas, or Dothan, Alabama), just marinading in the hot loud hustle and bustle of a family gathering: kids running to and fro, cooks in the kitchen, grandpas asleep in recliners, a baby crying somewhere, all manner of shouting and laughing, a ballgame on in the background. If you were lucky enough to be there, and you glanced her way, Nama—that's what we called her, Nama—would be still, usually quiet (unless holding court: in which case, watch out), observing, taking it all in, with a small smile on her face.
And think of it: From this one woman's life, from the decades-long outpouring of love that she made her life to be, 57 human lives (and counting) have come forth into this world. Double it for their spouses. Now quintuple it and then some for the friends and in-laws and neighbors and others who've been touched in one way or another, directly or by proxy, by this single soul.
For her part, she was wise enough to sit back, to see it for what it was—a gift you can't force and can only ask for, but when it comes, you don't question it—to say a silent prayer of thanks, and to let it wash over her. She didn't need words for any of that. Her family, just by being there and being who they were, said all that needed to be said.
For such a one, we give thanks to God for a life well lived. May she, then, our beloved Nama, rest in peace; and may she, then, by the grace and love evident in her life across a century's time, rise in glory. Amen.
She was an extraordinary woman in the most old-fashioned of ways. A dutiful wife and stoic mother, a quiet Catholic and yellow-dog Democrat, she believed in loving your family, working hard, and doing what you can, with what you have, while you're able. She took wry pleasure in informing young women who married into the family that "we don't have no crybaby girls in this family." One of her mottoes was "you can't do everything." She loved food, especially seafood, and most of all if she was cooking it for a house full of people.
But probably her favorite thing was simply to be there, in a chair, in the midst of an overcrowded house somewhere in Mississippi (or Austin, Texas, or Dothan, Alabama), just marinading in the hot loud hustle and bustle of a family gathering: kids running to and fro, cooks in the kitchen, grandpas asleep in recliners, a baby crying somewhere, all manner of shouting and laughing, a ballgame on in the background. If you were lucky enough to be there, and you glanced her way, Nama—that's what we called her, Nama—would be still, usually quiet (unless holding court: in which case, watch out), observing, taking it all in, with a small smile on her face.
And think of it: From this one woman's life, from the decades-long outpouring of love that she made her life to be, 57 human lives (and counting) have come forth into this world. Double it for their spouses. Now quintuple it and then some for the friends and in-laws and neighbors and others who've been touched in one way or another, directly or by proxy, by this single soul.
For her part, she was wise enough to sit back, to see it for what it was—a gift you can't force and can only ask for, but when it comes, you don't question it—to say a silent prayer of thanks, and to let it wash over her. She didn't need words for any of that. Her family, just by being there and being who they were, said all that needed to be said.
For such a one, we give thanks to God for a life well lived. May she, then, our beloved Nama, rest in peace; and may she, then, by the grace and love evident in her life across a century's time, rise in glory. Amen.
Exorcising theological demons
Over the last few semesters, teaching both upper-level Bible majors, most of whom plan on going into some kind of formal ministry, and freshman non-majors, who are required to take a sequence of two courses on the New Testament, I've noticed a number of assumptions shared among them. My students are by and large low-church Texans: non-denominational evangelicals, Baptists, Church of Christ-ers, and the like. They are diverse in terms of race and ethnicity and socioeconomic background, but quite similar in terms of ecclesial and theological identity and commitments.
By the end of last year I realized there were two primary "isms"—but let's call them theological demons—I was implicitly seeking to exorcise in class: biblicism and Marcionism (or supersessionism). Upon reflection, as I plan to teach some upper-level majors this semester in their one and only Theology course before graduation (it all comes down to me!), I realized I have a lot more theological demons in view. Ten, in fact. Here's a brief rundown of what this pedagogical exorcist has in his sights this spring.
(I should add, before starting, that these are specifically intellectual-theological: they aren't moral or political. So, e.g., nationalism is ripe for mention, and that comes up in a different class I teach; but it's not in view here.)
1. Biblicism
By this term I mean the view that the one and only factor for any and all matters of faith and Christian life is the Bible. Think of this as sola scriptura, only with "sola" in all caps. It isn't that the Bible is sufficient for faith and morals, or the final arbiter of church teaching and practice. It's that, in a real sense, there is nothing but the Bible. This can lean in the direction of fundamentalism, but it can also lean toward hollowed-out, seeker-sensitive non-denominationalism: if teaching X or practice Y isn't explicitly commanded/forbidden in Scripture, then not only is it automatically permissible; there is no other relevant theological factor for consideration. The market wants what the market wants.
2. Primitivism
Here I mean the idea that the ultimate goal for Christians is to approximate whatever the church looked like during the time of the apostles. Just to the extent that our worship, doctrine, or practices look different from that of the "early church" (however plausibly or implausibly reconstructed), we are departing from what God wants of us.
3. Individualism
This is in the DNA of each and every one of us, so I don't fault my students for this. Nevertheless, I do my very best, across the 15 weeks I have them, to interrogate the received notion that the individual is the locus of ultimate significance, and propose alternatively that there is a way of being in the world that gives priority, or at least equal significance, to the community. They rarely bite, but the attempt is worth it. This particular demon manifests as religious autonomy: faith is a private business between me and my God, and the church is an optional add-on that I am free to accept or reject as I see fit.
4. Subjectivism
Each of these is cumulative, and subjectivism builds on the foregoing through the implicit belief that the primary, or even sole, criterion for an action is how it affects me, or how I experience its effect on me. So, e.g., certain styles of worship are self-validating because I, or the worshipers in question, self-report a positive experience. Combined with biblicism, this becomes the working principle that everything is licit that (a) produces reportage of positivity and (b) is not expressly forbidden by the New Testament.
5. Presentism
What I mean is twofold: on the one hand, the view that what is new is prima facie superior to what is old; and, on the other hand, a widespread historical amnesia to the church's past, bordering on an active, principled ignorance about and opposition to "tradition," understood as whatever the church has believed, taught, or practiced between the death of the last apostle and the day before yesterday. The former is often explicit: innovation and creativity are chief virtues in all areas of life, including religion. The latter is almost always implicit, merely inherited from church leaders and teachers who inculcated it in them, wittingly or not. I find a great deal of success in using this latter assumption as the point of entry for introducing students to a different way of thinking about the church, faith, theology, and tradition. It's hard to overstate how receptive students are to that conversation.
6. Constructivism
Here I mean what I describe for my students as "DIY Christianity." No one fancies him or herself a proponent of the view that "Christianity is whatever I make it to be," but an astonishing number belong to churches that come very close to suggesting it. As you can tell, all six of these theological assumptions are varying forms of anti-catholicity: the church is not a living community with a rich storehouse of wisdom, knowledge, and teaching built up across the centuries; it is the sort of thing a pastor with entrepreneurial ambition can found, alone, in a local abandoned warehouse, with not a single concrete connection to either actual existing churches or the manifold saints and doctors long departed. Doctrine, statements of faith, liturgical rituals: they're built from the ground up, each and every year, each and every generation starting from scratch.
7. Anti-intellectualism
Christian faith, for most of my students, is a matter of the heart, a feeling expressed in an intimate relationship with the Lord. So far, so good. But as such, it is adamantly not a matter of the mind. Theology might be relevant to pastors—though, on the evidence, their pastors disagree—but, at best, it is optional for the laity and, at worst, is a dangerous and irrelevant abstraction. "Irrelevance" captures the heart of it: if I don't have a clear answer to the question of what I can do with a doctrine, what its practical implications for daily life are, then what could it be good for? Practicality trumps the theoretical every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
8. Marcionism
Switching gears, it is perhaps my principal goal, in every one of my classes, to exorcise my students of this ancient, wicked demon. Again, rarely consciously held, the idea is nevertheless pervasive that there is some sort of disconnect or disjunction between "the God of the Old Testament" and "the God of the New Testament." Or, the church replaces the Jews as God's people. Or, Jesus came to save us from the Law (which was, hands down, the worst). Or, God is finally loving and forgiving rather than violent and wrathful. Etc., etc. The sheer volume of times I refer to Abraham's election, or "the God of Israel," or "Jesus, the Jewish Messiah," is meant as a rhetorical corrective to what I'm sure are years of marinading in supersessionist and even at times full-on Marcionite language in their churches.
9. Gnosticism
Just as all Americans, Christian or not, are individualists, so they are Gnostics of one variety or another. In this case it manifests in one of two ways. Either none of "this" (i.e., creation, materiality, the body) "matters," since we're all going to heaven anyway (and, as I say, putting words in their mouths, nuking the earth as we depart). Or what "really" matters in Christian faith and spirituality is "the heart" or "the soul" or "the inside," not the body or what we do with the body. Fortunately, this doesn't usually lead to flat-out libertinism, though I do think there's an element of that informing behavior outside of sex. But it does inform a kind of anti-ascesis, that is, the view that spiritual disciplines are dead routines, and the notion of self-imposed (not to mention externally imposed!) periods of self-restraint in food, labor, entertainment, or sex is a conversation-stopper. It's not even intelligible as an idea.
10. Anti-ritualism
Last but not least, building on individualism, subjectivism, and Gnosticism, hostility to ritual as such rules the day. Ritual means "going through the motions," which is always and everywhere a bad thing. Hence why innovation is so important, not least in worship: what we do needs to be new lest we slip into dead routines, which we would then do "just because" rather than because "our hearts are in the right place." One's relationship with God is modeled on the early courtship or honeymoon period of young lovers: it's always summer, always sunshine, and you only spend time together—doe-eyed, deeply in love—spontaneously, because spontaneity signifies the depth of true love. (Think about contemporary Christian worship songs.) Rituals, on this picture, are what middle-aged spouses do when they schedule dates and have "talks" and even "fights." That's not what faith is like—which means we know what's happening when it starts to look routinized and ritualistic. Something's the matter.
By the end of last year I realized there were two primary "isms"—but let's call them theological demons—I was implicitly seeking to exorcise in class: biblicism and Marcionism (or supersessionism). Upon reflection, as I plan to teach some upper-level majors this semester in their one and only Theology course before graduation (it all comes down to me!), I realized I have a lot more theological demons in view. Ten, in fact. Here's a brief rundown of what this pedagogical exorcist has in his sights this spring.
(I should add, before starting, that these are specifically intellectual-theological: they aren't moral or political. So, e.g., nationalism is ripe for mention, and that comes up in a different class I teach; but it's not in view here.)
1. Biblicism
By this term I mean the view that the one and only factor for any and all matters of faith and Christian life is the Bible. Think of this as sola scriptura, only with "sola" in all caps. It isn't that the Bible is sufficient for faith and morals, or the final arbiter of church teaching and practice. It's that, in a real sense, there is nothing but the Bible. This can lean in the direction of fundamentalism, but it can also lean toward hollowed-out, seeker-sensitive non-denominationalism: if teaching X or practice Y isn't explicitly commanded/forbidden in Scripture, then not only is it automatically permissible; there is no other relevant theological factor for consideration. The market wants what the market wants.
2. Primitivism
Here I mean the idea that the ultimate goal for Christians is to approximate whatever the church looked like during the time of the apostles. Just to the extent that our worship, doctrine, or practices look different from that of the "early church" (however plausibly or implausibly reconstructed), we are departing from what God wants of us.
3. Individualism
This is in the DNA of each and every one of us, so I don't fault my students for this. Nevertheless, I do my very best, across the 15 weeks I have them, to interrogate the received notion that the individual is the locus of ultimate significance, and propose alternatively that there is a way of being in the world that gives priority, or at least equal significance, to the community. They rarely bite, but the attempt is worth it. This particular demon manifests as religious autonomy: faith is a private business between me and my God, and the church is an optional add-on that I am free to accept or reject as I see fit.
4. Subjectivism
Each of these is cumulative, and subjectivism builds on the foregoing through the implicit belief that the primary, or even sole, criterion for an action is how it affects me, or how I experience its effect on me. So, e.g., certain styles of worship are self-validating because I, or the worshipers in question, self-report a positive experience. Combined with biblicism, this becomes the working principle that everything is licit that (a) produces reportage of positivity and (b) is not expressly forbidden by the New Testament.
5. Presentism
What I mean is twofold: on the one hand, the view that what is new is prima facie superior to what is old; and, on the other hand, a widespread historical amnesia to the church's past, bordering on an active, principled ignorance about and opposition to "tradition," understood as whatever the church has believed, taught, or practiced between the death of the last apostle and the day before yesterday. The former is often explicit: innovation and creativity are chief virtues in all areas of life, including religion. The latter is almost always implicit, merely inherited from church leaders and teachers who inculcated it in them, wittingly or not. I find a great deal of success in using this latter assumption as the point of entry for introducing students to a different way of thinking about the church, faith, theology, and tradition. It's hard to overstate how receptive students are to that conversation.
6. Constructivism
Here I mean what I describe for my students as "DIY Christianity." No one fancies him or herself a proponent of the view that "Christianity is whatever I make it to be," but an astonishing number belong to churches that come very close to suggesting it. As you can tell, all six of these theological assumptions are varying forms of anti-catholicity: the church is not a living community with a rich storehouse of wisdom, knowledge, and teaching built up across the centuries; it is the sort of thing a pastor with entrepreneurial ambition can found, alone, in a local abandoned warehouse, with not a single concrete connection to either actual existing churches or the manifold saints and doctors long departed. Doctrine, statements of faith, liturgical rituals: they're built from the ground up, each and every year, each and every generation starting from scratch.
7. Anti-intellectualism
Christian faith, for most of my students, is a matter of the heart, a feeling expressed in an intimate relationship with the Lord. So far, so good. But as such, it is adamantly not a matter of the mind. Theology might be relevant to pastors—though, on the evidence, their pastors disagree—but, at best, it is optional for the laity and, at worst, is a dangerous and irrelevant abstraction. "Irrelevance" captures the heart of it: if I don't have a clear answer to the question of what I can do with a doctrine, what its practical implications for daily life are, then what could it be good for? Practicality trumps the theoretical every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
8. Marcionism
Switching gears, it is perhaps my principal goal, in every one of my classes, to exorcise my students of this ancient, wicked demon. Again, rarely consciously held, the idea is nevertheless pervasive that there is some sort of disconnect or disjunction between "the God of the Old Testament" and "the God of the New Testament." Or, the church replaces the Jews as God's people. Or, Jesus came to save us from the Law (which was, hands down, the worst). Or, God is finally loving and forgiving rather than violent and wrathful. Etc., etc. The sheer volume of times I refer to Abraham's election, or "the God of Israel," or "Jesus, the Jewish Messiah," is meant as a rhetorical corrective to what I'm sure are years of marinading in supersessionist and even at times full-on Marcionite language in their churches.
9. Gnosticism
Just as all Americans, Christian or not, are individualists, so they are Gnostics of one variety or another. In this case it manifests in one of two ways. Either none of "this" (i.e., creation, materiality, the body) "matters," since we're all going to heaven anyway (and, as I say, putting words in their mouths, nuking the earth as we depart). Or what "really" matters in Christian faith and spirituality is "the heart" or "the soul" or "the inside," not the body or what we do with the body. Fortunately, this doesn't usually lead to flat-out libertinism, though I do think there's an element of that informing behavior outside of sex. But it does inform a kind of anti-ascesis, that is, the view that spiritual disciplines are dead routines, and the notion of self-imposed (not to mention externally imposed!) periods of self-restraint in food, labor, entertainment, or sex is a conversation-stopper. It's not even intelligible as an idea.
10. Anti-ritualism
Last but not least, building on individualism, subjectivism, and Gnosticism, hostility to ritual as such rules the day. Ritual means "going through the motions," which is always and everywhere a bad thing. Hence why innovation is so important, not least in worship: what we do needs to be new lest we slip into dead routines, which we would then do "just because" rather than because "our hearts are in the right place." One's relationship with God is modeled on the early courtship or honeymoon period of young lovers: it's always summer, always sunshine, and you only spend time together—doe-eyed, deeply in love—spontaneously, because spontaneity signifies the depth of true love. (Think about contemporary Christian worship songs.) Rituals, on this picture, are what middle-aged spouses do when they schedule dates and have "talks" and even "fights." That's not what faith is like—which means we know what's happening when it starts to look routinized and ritualistic. Something's the matter.
New essay published at Comment: "The Church and the Common Good"
I've got an essay up at Comment today titled "The Church and the Common Good." Go check it out.
Writers who read their mentions
There may be nothing more poisonous for the quality of a writer's work than "reading your mentions." You can tell immediately when reading or listening to someone (say, in an interview or podcast). Everything is couched, defensive, anticipating the inevitable "ur the wurst" tweet-reply or comment at the end of the article. It doesn't matter the style of writing, or the subject. It's present in politics as much as in sports journalism. I suppose in certain sub-cultures of theology, it might actually be muted, because while the rabies theologorum is a vast, multi-headed beast, it feasts on numbers and passion. So you find it in evangelical arguments and intra-Catholic skirmishes—both of which communities are large enough to have sizeable Extremely Online contingents.
But academic theologians? Now that's a small group of folks. And surprisingly friendly online, at least in the corners I frequent.
Regardless, though, we're all susceptible to it. And by far the best writers, whatever their expertise, whatever their genre, whatever their politics or ideas, are those who write simultaneously for an imagined audience—you can't write for no one—yet an audience in no way represented by the writer's experience on social media. An audience of readers who aren't likely to tweet or comment, but who are there nonetheless, reading and thinking with the author.
They exist. Write for them. Don't read your mentions.
But academic theologians? Now that's a small group of folks. And surprisingly friendly online, at least in the corners I frequent.
Regardless, though, we're all susceptible to it. And by far the best writers, whatever their expertise, whatever their genre, whatever their politics or ideas, are those who write simultaneously for an imagined audience—you can't write for no one—yet an audience in no way represented by the writer's experience on social media. An audience of readers who aren't likely to tweet or comment, but who are there nonetheless, reading and thinking with the author.
They exist. Write for them. Don't read your mentions.
The coronation of Jesus
Sitting in church yesterday, listening to an account of Jesus's baptism, it occurred to me that there is a good analogy that works against the adoptionist overtones historically seized upon both by critics and by heretics (but I...). All agree that the use of Psalm 2 paints the scene in royal colors: this is a coronation. The adoptionist reads this in line with Israel's long-standing practice of suggesting that, in some important but mysterious sense, the king of Israel is or becomes God's son upon succession, for to be the human king under the divine king implies a relationship of intimacy and representation analogous to human paternity and generation. The anti-adoptionist reads the scene as both the fulfillment and the archetype of such a practice, for Jesus is uniquely God's Son, naturally and from all eternity. The Gospels (not least Mark) all bear out this distinct status and relationship, from which derive all that Jesus is, says, and does.
How, then, to explain the scene as one of confirmation rather than adoption? By analogizing the event, not with prior coronations in Israel, however similar, but to ordinary coronations. For what happens when the son of a king is himself made king? Does he thereby "become" the king's son, having not been so prior to that point? No. The prince is always the king's son; what remains is for the prince to be crowned king, like his father.
In the same way, the antecedent and eternal Sonship of Jesus is revealed, not bestowed, at his baptism by John in the Jordan. The one and only Son of YHWH is manifested as what he is, not as what he may or could or does become.
Now, does that mean Jesus was not King prior to his baptism? No and yes. No, in the sense that the divine Son, incarnate in and as Jesus, has, as true God from true God, from all eternity, reigned as Lord. But yes, too, in the sense that the human life of Jesus enacts in time what is true beyond and apart from time. Jesus's baptism-coronation crowns him King in the same way and to the same degree that, at the beginning of his life, the Magi pay his royalty homage and, at the end of his earthly career, he is garlanded with crowns and, after being raised from the dead, he ascends to the right hand of the Father in glorious power. Each is a temporal moment in the one revelatory sweep of the royal Son's fleshly rule in and over all creation, precisely as a fellow creature (better: through assumed creaturely nature). None of the moments "make" the Son king; yet without any of them he would not be the incarnate King he is.
Such is the mystery of the economy of the sovereign incarnate Son of God.
How, then, to explain the scene as one of confirmation rather than adoption? By analogizing the event, not with prior coronations in Israel, however similar, but to ordinary coronations. For what happens when the son of a king is himself made king? Does he thereby "become" the king's son, having not been so prior to that point? No. The prince is always the king's son; what remains is for the prince to be crowned king, like his father.
In the same way, the antecedent and eternal Sonship of Jesus is revealed, not bestowed, at his baptism by John in the Jordan. The one and only Son of YHWH is manifested as what he is, not as what he may or could or does become.
Now, does that mean Jesus was not King prior to his baptism? No and yes. No, in the sense that the divine Son, incarnate in and as Jesus, has, as true God from true God, from all eternity, reigned as Lord. But yes, too, in the sense that the human life of Jesus enacts in time what is true beyond and apart from time. Jesus's baptism-coronation crowns him King in the same way and to the same degree that, at the beginning of his life, the Magi pay his royalty homage and, at the end of his earthly career, he is garlanded with crowns and, after being raised from the dead, he ascends to the right hand of the Father in glorious power. Each is a temporal moment in the one revelatory sweep of the royal Son's fleshly rule in and over all creation, precisely as a fellow creature (better: through assumed creaturely nature). None of the moments "make" the Son king; yet without any of them he would not be the incarnate King he is.
Such is the mystery of the economy of the sovereign incarnate Son of God.
Audience age for Star Wars films
Over the last year or so I've re-watched nearly every Star Wars film. My sons (6 and nearly 5) have been making their slow initial journey through the Original Trilogy and into the prequels. (We're currently paused between Episodes II and III. The former is even worse than you remember.)
Reflecting on these repeat viewings in conjunction with the recent new entries and the conversation surrounding them (not to say controversy, though whether that term calls for scare quotes is an open question, given the heavy doses of bad faith and trolling involved)—anyway, upon reflection, I've noticed one way to slice up all ten films: by the implicit age of the film's target audience. Let me show you what I mean:
IV: All ages
V: Adults
VI: Children
I: All ages
II: Children
III: Adults
VII: All ages
RO: Adults
VIII: Adults
Solo: Adults
These designations are arguable, obviously. And audience age doesn't in itself correlate with quality (though I suppose that's arguable, too): Solo is middling affair, though aimed at adults, while both IV (all ages) and VI (children) are superior films.
But disaggregating the SW series in this manner is helpful in a few ways, I think.
First of all, it can clarify some of the arguments about which films are "best" (or one's "favorite"). Most kids who grew up with the OT on VHS or DVD have VI as their favorite, for example. Why? It's the only one exclusively aimed at them! They don't mind the silliness and character flatness and narrative problems that bother adults; they ignore such things, focusing on what's fun; and since there's a lot of fun to be had in VI, it's their favorite. (Kids also love series' conclusions, so there's that, too.) My boys also enjoyed II, which is a categorically awful film, and at least part of the explanation is that it, too, is aimed squarely at them.
Whereas many adults have plausible arguments about which they prefer most, IV vs. V and/or VII vs. VIII (or even opposing one of the latter group to the former). At least part of what that's about, in my view, is whether one is judging the film simply as a species of the genre film, or instead as a species of the sub-genre universal myth/hero's journey/space opera (or even the smaller sub-sub-genre, Star Wars film). Part of the appeal of the latter two sub-genres is precisely their catholic appeal, uniting people from a variety of backgrounds, ages, cultures, etc., in affection and appreciation of George Lucas's far-away galaxy, which sweeps along all who give themselves to it. But neither Empire nor Last Jedi has this sort of appeal, not (as the erroneous opinion has it) because they are inferior films, but rather because they lack the universality of the originals to which they are sequels. They are relatively stand-alone (ironic, given their in-the-middle status), subtly crafted works of visual art aimed at adults who appreciate the formal as well as the material aspects of the medium. Even if one's opinion of either V or VIII is lower than this high judgment, the thoughtfulness and craftsmanship behind both are undeniable. (They are together, by the way, the only films out of the 10 to feature a more than superficial relationship between a male and a female character, romantic or otherwise.)
The fact that VII is very nearly a remake of IV, by the way, also suggests why some people prefer it to VIII or any of the other new films, even when they grant its redundant qualities: catholicity in blockbuster fun covers over a multitude of sins.
(I should also add that there's a good argument to be made that Phantom Menace is a children's film, and I would have agreed until I re-watched it. Jake Lloyd and Jar Jar Binks certainly bend it that direction. But I was shocked by how well directed, how well acted—at least, that is, by McGregor and especially Neeson—and how thematically adult and not-stupid it was. Subtract child-Anakin, JJB, Midi-Chlorians, the casual racism, the stiff acting by others ... okay, that's a lot ... but still, the themes of decadence, self-mastery, obedience, elite insouciance—plus the surprisingly lovely compositions by Lucas—and it could have added up to something good. All of which is to say, Lucas was aiming for all ages, old and young alike. He failed, but his failure was laudable in a way that Attack of the Clones manifestly was not.)
Finally, the fact that all four of the recent SW films have been aimed at either all ages or adults helps to explain why none of them has been panned critically or bombed commercially (reports of the contrary being false in both cases). No one hated Solo, though it was simply fine, and Last Jedi was an enormous success with critics and audiences, even if a small segment of fans didn't care for it. Now why is that? One possibility is that none of the four is a kids movie. This reminds me of Ta-Nehisi Coates' remark, after VII was released, in response to Ross Douthat's confusion about the film's positive reception: that The Force Awakens was, at long last, an actual, bona fide movie, unlike the prequels. Expanding that point, I think people, critics included, appreciate going to a SW film and not being treated like children; not being condescended to cinematically, that is. (No Ewoks—yet!) Even when the results aren't A-level (as with VII's plot replays, Rogue One's script issues, and Solo's shrug-inducing, unimaginative checklist of greatest hits), they're not meant for 7-year olds. Movies made for adults can be mediocre, or just good, or controversial. But they're still for adults, or at least for adults and kids.
So my theory goes, at least. Let's just hope J. J. Abrams keeps it in mind for Episode IX.
Reflecting on these repeat viewings in conjunction with the recent new entries and the conversation surrounding them (not to say controversy, though whether that term calls for scare quotes is an open question, given the heavy doses of bad faith and trolling involved)—anyway, upon reflection, I've noticed one way to slice up all ten films: by the implicit age of the film's target audience. Let me show you what I mean:
IV: All ages
V: Adults
VI: Children
I: All ages
II: Children
III: Adults
VII: All ages
RO: Adults
VIII: Adults
Solo: Adults
These designations are arguable, obviously. And audience age doesn't in itself correlate with quality (though I suppose that's arguable, too): Solo is middling affair, though aimed at adults, while both IV (all ages) and VI (children) are superior films.
But disaggregating the SW series in this manner is helpful in a few ways, I think.
First of all, it can clarify some of the arguments about which films are "best" (or one's "favorite"). Most kids who grew up with the OT on VHS or DVD have VI as their favorite, for example. Why? It's the only one exclusively aimed at them! They don't mind the silliness and character flatness and narrative problems that bother adults; they ignore such things, focusing on what's fun; and since there's a lot of fun to be had in VI, it's their favorite. (Kids also love series' conclusions, so there's that, too.) My boys also enjoyed II, which is a categorically awful film, and at least part of the explanation is that it, too, is aimed squarely at them.
Whereas many adults have plausible arguments about which they prefer most, IV vs. V and/or VII vs. VIII (or even opposing one of the latter group to the former). At least part of what that's about, in my view, is whether one is judging the film simply as a species of the genre film, or instead as a species of the sub-genre universal myth/hero's journey/space opera (or even the smaller sub-sub-genre, Star Wars film). Part of the appeal of the latter two sub-genres is precisely their catholic appeal, uniting people from a variety of backgrounds, ages, cultures, etc., in affection and appreciation of George Lucas's far-away galaxy, which sweeps along all who give themselves to it. But neither Empire nor Last Jedi has this sort of appeal, not (as the erroneous opinion has it) because they are inferior films, but rather because they lack the universality of the originals to which they are sequels. They are relatively stand-alone (ironic, given their in-the-middle status), subtly crafted works of visual art aimed at adults who appreciate the formal as well as the material aspects of the medium. Even if one's opinion of either V or VIII is lower than this high judgment, the thoughtfulness and craftsmanship behind both are undeniable. (They are together, by the way, the only films out of the 10 to feature a more than superficial relationship between a male and a female character, romantic or otherwise.)
The fact that VII is very nearly a remake of IV, by the way, also suggests why some people prefer it to VIII or any of the other new films, even when they grant its redundant qualities: catholicity in blockbuster fun covers over a multitude of sins.
(I should also add that there's a good argument to be made that Phantom Menace is a children's film, and I would have agreed until I re-watched it. Jake Lloyd and Jar Jar Binks certainly bend it that direction. But I was shocked by how well directed, how well acted—at least, that is, by McGregor and especially Neeson—and how thematically adult and not-stupid it was. Subtract child-Anakin, JJB, Midi-Chlorians, the casual racism, the stiff acting by others ... okay, that's a lot ... but still, the themes of decadence, self-mastery, obedience, elite insouciance—plus the surprisingly lovely compositions by Lucas—and it could have added up to something good. All of which is to say, Lucas was aiming for all ages, old and young alike. He failed, but his failure was laudable in a way that Attack of the Clones manifestly was not.)
Finally, the fact that all four of the recent SW films have been aimed at either all ages or adults helps to explain why none of them has been panned critically or bombed commercially (reports of the contrary being false in both cases). No one hated Solo, though it was simply fine, and Last Jedi was an enormous success with critics and audiences, even if a small segment of fans didn't care for it. Now why is that? One possibility is that none of the four is a kids movie. This reminds me of Ta-Nehisi Coates' remark, after VII was released, in response to Ross Douthat's confusion about the film's positive reception: that The Force Awakens was, at long last, an actual, bona fide movie, unlike the prequels. Expanding that point, I think people, critics included, appreciate going to a SW film and not being treated like children; not being condescended to cinematically, that is. (No Ewoks—yet!) Even when the results aren't A-level (as with VII's plot replays, Rogue One's script issues, and Solo's shrug-inducing, unimaginative checklist of greatest hits), they're not meant for 7-year olds. Movies made for adults can be mediocre, or just good, or controversial. But they're still for adults, or at least for adults and kids.
So my theory goes, at least. Let's just hope J. J. Abrams keeps it in mind for Episode IX.
Party spirit distorts vision
This is an old story, but it's one worth reiterating nonetheless. Partisanship mitigates the analytical clarity necessary for deep understanding, of oneself, of the situation (whatever that may be), of those one disagrees with, of strategic action. That is, the drive to win itself becomes the obstacle to winning. But even if that were not the case, winning is not understanding; practice is not theory. And time and again one sees would-be analysts—thinkers, whether in the political-cultural sphere or the academy—blinded by their all-consuming focus on defeating their opponents, to the point that they simply cannot offer a plausible account of the situation beyond "they're bad, we're good, Must Vanquish All Enemies."
A good recent, and ongoing, example of this is the NYT podcast The Argument, co-hosted by David Leonhardt, Michelle Goldberg, and Ross Douthat. Listen to any episode in which Goldberg and Douthat talk to each other directly, not about a normative ethical or policy matter, but about what's going on in the world, in U.S. politics, in American culture, whatever. More often than not, Goldberg's "analysis" consists of value-laden, normative, typically denunciatory rhetoric. Which is to say, she offers judgments about what ought to be the case, and the extent to which the status quo fails to measure up. A perfectly fine and laudable thing to do, but not, alas, analysis. Whereas Douthat prescinds—again, as a matter of understanding what's going on—from constantly offering thumbs up or thumbs down, and seeks instead to engage in a bird's-eye view of whatever latest crisis or question has arisen, noting the landscape and what has happened or is likely to happen given a range of factors. To which Goldberg usually responds with a very eloquent, passionately argued, "But—bad!"
One sees this in the academy no less than in politics. I was once part of a group of junior scholars considering a recent book by a senior theologian. Most everyone in the group was socially and politically progressive; if we were assigning gradations of Leftness, they'd range from L5 to L10. The theologian in question is probably, on this made-up scale, L3ish. But instead of discussing the content of the book—some of which I agreed with, some of which I did not, but all of which I kept trying to get the group to consider—the entire time was spent hashing out the not-progressive-enough-ness of the theologian. Some in the room voiced their suspicions that the theologian probably wasn't left of center at all; perhaps he was moderate or even (horror of horrors) an R1 or R2. None of this, naturally, arose from a close reading of the text. The text might as well have not been in the room (in each of our hands, actually). There was a right team to be on; the thinker in question wasn't as committed as one ought to be to that team (if he was on it in the first place: enthusiasm as sign of true membership); what matters is the right team winning, understanding be damned; thus, no need to read what one already knows to be wrong, since it's (probably) from the wrong team anyway.
When winning trumps all, might makes right, and understanding—true, perceptive knowledge, as much of others as of oneself and one's ideas—falls by the wayside. Partisanship has its times and its uses, but it is poison for the mind.
A good recent, and ongoing, example of this is the NYT podcast The Argument, co-hosted by David Leonhardt, Michelle Goldberg, and Ross Douthat. Listen to any episode in which Goldberg and Douthat talk to each other directly, not about a normative ethical or policy matter, but about what's going on in the world, in U.S. politics, in American culture, whatever. More often than not, Goldberg's "analysis" consists of value-laden, normative, typically denunciatory rhetoric. Which is to say, she offers judgments about what ought to be the case, and the extent to which the status quo fails to measure up. A perfectly fine and laudable thing to do, but not, alas, analysis. Whereas Douthat prescinds—again, as a matter of understanding what's going on—from constantly offering thumbs up or thumbs down, and seeks instead to engage in a bird's-eye view of whatever latest crisis or question has arisen, noting the landscape and what has happened or is likely to happen given a range of factors. To which Goldberg usually responds with a very eloquent, passionately argued, "But—bad!"
One sees this in the academy no less than in politics. I was once part of a group of junior scholars considering a recent book by a senior theologian. Most everyone in the group was socially and politically progressive; if we were assigning gradations of Leftness, they'd range from L5 to L10. The theologian in question is probably, on this made-up scale, L3ish. But instead of discussing the content of the book—some of which I agreed with, some of which I did not, but all of which I kept trying to get the group to consider—the entire time was spent hashing out the not-progressive-enough-ness of the theologian. Some in the room voiced their suspicions that the theologian probably wasn't left of center at all; perhaps he was moderate or even (horror of horrors) an R1 or R2. None of this, naturally, arose from a close reading of the text. The text might as well have not been in the room (in each of our hands, actually). There was a right team to be on; the thinker in question wasn't as committed as one ought to be to that team (if he was on it in the first place: enthusiasm as sign of true membership); what matters is the right team winning, understanding be damned; thus, no need to read what one already knows to be wrong, since it's (probably) from the wrong team anyway.
When winning trumps all, might makes right, and understanding—true, perceptive knowledge, as much of others as of oneself and one's ideas—falls by the wayside. Partisanship has its times and its uses, but it is poison for the mind.
Blogging in 2019
It has been a slow—and I mean slow—year on the blog. In the last seven months of the year, I think I wrote a single "real" post, by which I mean a post that wasn't a list or a quote. I wrote nine similarly "real" posts in the first five months of the year. Oof.
I did write "real" things for other venues (more on those here in the next few days), but that is not what I'd been hoping for or planning when I revived this blog in a new form two summers ago. Teaching 10 courses in 12 months and welcoming our fourth child into the world had a lot to do with that; I very much doubt I had the time to give to writing the occasional post on here, much less a couple posts per week.
But in 2019, I'd like to get back into the habit—especially of the 2-3-paragraph, bloggy sort of reflection that this venue's made for. I'm prolix in writing and talking both, and drafting a blog post always sounds time consuming, even if in reality it would take fewer than 15 minutes.
So here's one resolution of many for the coming year: less deferring and time-wasting, more mezzo-blogging (somewhere in between lengthy posts and micro-blogging). As always, thanks for reading.
I did write "real" things for other venues (more on those here in the next few days), but that is not what I'd been hoping for or planning when I revived this blog in a new form two summers ago. Teaching 10 courses in 12 months and welcoming our fourth child into the world had a lot to do with that; I very much doubt I had the time to give to writing the occasional post on here, much less a couple posts per week.
But in 2019, I'd like to get back into the habit—especially of the 2-3-paragraph, bloggy sort of reflection that this venue's made for. I'm prolix in writing and talking both, and drafting a blog post always sounds time consuming, even if in reality it would take fewer than 15 minutes.
So here's one resolution of many for the coming year: less deferring and time-wasting, more mezzo-blogging (somewhere in between lengthy posts and micro-blogging). As always, thanks for reading.
Scialabba, Jacobs, and God's existence: where the real problem lies
Alan Jacobs is right about George Scialabba's latest review essay, in this case of John Gray's new book, Seven Types of Atheism, for The New Republic. Scialabba is always great, but his theological instincts fail him here. As Jacobs observes, Scialabba wants to speak up for nonbelievers who wish God—if he does in fact exist—would simply make himself known in some inarguably clear way. But since, apparently, he does not and has not, that in itself is evidence that no such thing as an all-wise, all-good, all-powerful deity exists; or that, if he does, our knowledge or beliefs about or relationship with God is a negligible matter, and all will be sorted out in the hereafter.
Jacobs takes Scialabba to task for both the unthinking glibness on display (frivolous speculation about our ancient ancestors; writing contemporary mystics and charismatics out of the picture; etc.) and the more serious inattentiveness to what a truly incontrovertible divine self-revelation would mean. Jacobs uses the work of David Bentley Hart to remind us just what we mean, or rather do not mean, when we use the word "God," and how Scialabba is functionally reverting to a mythical picture of god-as-super-creature who yet inexplicably remains opaque to us here below. Jacobs then (being Jacobs) draws us to a speech of Satan's in Paradise Lost, bringing the existential point home.
Let me piggy-back on Jacobs' critique and suggest an even deeper problem with Scialabba's musings, one I've reflected on before at some length. The problem is twofold.
On the one hand, it cannot be emphasized enough that the kind of skeptical atheism that Scialabba sees himself standing up for here is vanishingly small in human history, both past and present. So far as we can tell, nearly all human beings who have ever lived have taken it for granted that reality is more than the empiricists suggest; that there is some Power or Goodness or Being that transcends the visible and tangible, preceding and encompassing it; that human life, though brief and sometimes terribly burdened, carries more weight and has more depth than those features would suggest on their face, and that it may or will in one way or another outlast its short span on this earth. Even today, the overwhelming majority of people on this globe "believe" in what we in the West call divinity or practice what we in the West call religion. The anxious queries of skeptical atheists, while worth taking seriously at an intellectual and emotional level, could not be less representative of humanity in general's relationship with "the God question."
In short, the sort of defeaters Scialabba offers as evidence of God's lack of self-revelation bear little to no relation to the average person's thoughts or experience regarding God's existence. Most people don't need God to write his name on the sun. In a sense, he already has.
Such a response doesn't go very far, though, in responding to Scialabba's true concern. Perhaps most human beings, past and present, are just not philosophically rigorous or serious enough to ask the tough questions that inexorably lead to atheism. Or perhaps it's not "religious belief" in general but the challenge of revelational certainty, i.e., which religion/deity to believe in, that's at issue. Here's what's most deeply wrong with his argument then.
The Christian tradition does not teach, nor has it ever taught, that the most important thing to do is believe that God exists, or even that the Christian God exists. Instead, the most important thing is to love this God with all one's heart, soul, mind, and strength. What God wants from you—demands, in fact—is not affirmation of a proposition about himself or mental assent to the facticity of his being. Rather, it is the totality of your being, the absolute and unconditional lifelong allegiance of your very self. What God wants is faithfulness.
And it turns out, according to the painfully consistent testimony of Holy Scripture, that faithfulness is a lot harder than faith. By which I mean: total devotion to God is far more difficult than belief that God exists. As the epistle of James says, the demons believe that God is one—and shudder. Israel at Sinai doesn't lack the belief that YHWH exists; there's evidence aplenty for that: lightning and thunder and a great cloud and the divine voice and Lord's glory; everything Scialabba wants from God! But what do the Israelites do? They make a golden calf and worship a false god. In doing so, they do not subtract belief in YHWH; they add to that belief "belief" in other gods. Which is to say, they add to worship of the one God the worship of that which is not God.
Our problem, therefore, isn't belief that God exists in the face of a thousand reasonable doubts. Our problem is idolatry. When the one true God comes near to human beings, when they hear his voice and see his face, they know it to be true—and they turn away. They know God—and sin. They believe "in" God—and disobey him. They lack doubt—and hurt others.
For Christians, this problem is illustrated most of all in the Gospels. Time and again the apostles see with their own eyes the identity and deeds of the incarnate Son of God, and time and again they misunderstand, mis-hear, mis-speak, fall away, to the point of deserting him in his hour of need and even denying ever knowing him.
Scialabba wants God to make it impossible to disbelieve in his existence. But even if God were to do that, it wouldn't change the fundamental problem—our sinful, wicked hearts, prone to evil and violence from birth and a veritable factory of idols—one bit. Or rather, what we would need is the kind of belief, the sort of knowledge, that went to the root of that problem, transforming us from the inside out. Making true worship possible; ridding us of idolatry; supplying us the power to do what we could never do for ourselves; making faithfulness a reality, that we might finally and wholeheartedly love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.
Christians believe God has done just this for the world in and through Christ. No dispositive evidence will persuade a Scialabba that this is the case. But the gospel isn't meant to answer such a request. Contained within the solution it offers is an entirely different diagnosis of our situation and thus of our greatest need. If the gospel and the faith it proclaims are to be rejected, those are the terms on which to do so.
Jacobs takes Scialabba to task for both the unthinking glibness on display (frivolous speculation about our ancient ancestors; writing contemporary mystics and charismatics out of the picture; etc.) and the more serious inattentiveness to what a truly incontrovertible divine self-revelation would mean. Jacobs uses the work of David Bentley Hart to remind us just what we mean, or rather do not mean, when we use the word "God," and how Scialabba is functionally reverting to a mythical picture of god-as-super-creature who yet inexplicably remains opaque to us here below. Jacobs then (being Jacobs) draws us to a speech of Satan's in Paradise Lost, bringing the existential point home.
Let me piggy-back on Jacobs' critique and suggest an even deeper problem with Scialabba's musings, one I've reflected on before at some length. The problem is twofold.
On the one hand, it cannot be emphasized enough that the kind of skeptical atheism that Scialabba sees himself standing up for here is vanishingly small in human history, both past and present. So far as we can tell, nearly all human beings who have ever lived have taken it for granted that reality is more than the empiricists suggest; that there is some Power or Goodness or Being that transcends the visible and tangible, preceding and encompassing it; that human life, though brief and sometimes terribly burdened, carries more weight and has more depth than those features would suggest on their face, and that it may or will in one way or another outlast its short span on this earth. Even today, the overwhelming majority of people on this globe "believe" in what we in the West call divinity or practice what we in the West call religion. The anxious queries of skeptical atheists, while worth taking seriously at an intellectual and emotional level, could not be less representative of humanity in general's relationship with "the God question."
In short, the sort of defeaters Scialabba offers as evidence of God's lack of self-revelation bear little to no relation to the average person's thoughts or experience regarding God's existence. Most people don't need God to write his name on the sun. In a sense, he already has.
Such a response doesn't go very far, though, in responding to Scialabba's true concern. Perhaps most human beings, past and present, are just not philosophically rigorous or serious enough to ask the tough questions that inexorably lead to atheism. Or perhaps it's not "religious belief" in general but the challenge of revelational certainty, i.e., which religion/deity to believe in, that's at issue. Here's what's most deeply wrong with his argument then.
The Christian tradition does not teach, nor has it ever taught, that the most important thing to do is believe that God exists, or even that the Christian God exists. Instead, the most important thing is to love this God with all one's heart, soul, mind, and strength. What God wants from you—demands, in fact—is not affirmation of a proposition about himself or mental assent to the facticity of his being. Rather, it is the totality of your being, the absolute and unconditional lifelong allegiance of your very self. What God wants is faithfulness.
And it turns out, according to the painfully consistent testimony of Holy Scripture, that faithfulness is a lot harder than faith. By which I mean: total devotion to God is far more difficult than belief that God exists. As the epistle of James says, the demons believe that God is one—and shudder. Israel at Sinai doesn't lack the belief that YHWH exists; there's evidence aplenty for that: lightning and thunder and a great cloud and the divine voice and Lord's glory; everything Scialabba wants from God! But what do the Israelites do? They make a golden calf and worship a false god. In doing so, they do not subtract belief in YHWH; they add to that belief "belief" in other gods. Which is to say, they add to worship of the one God the worship of that which is not God.
Our problem, therefore, isn't belief that God exists in the face of a thousand reasonable doubts. Our problem is idolatry. When the one true God comes near to human beings, when they hear his voice and see his face, they know it to be true—and they turn away. They know God—and sin. They believe "in" God—and disobey him. They lack doubt—and hurt others.
For Christians, this problem is illustrated most of all in the Gospels. Time and again the apostles see with their own eyes the identity and deeds of the incarnate Son of God, and time and again they misunderstand, mis-hear, mis-speak, fall away, to the point of deserting him in his hour of need and even denying ever knowing him.
Scialabba wants God to make it impossible to disbelieve in his existence. But even if God were to do that, it wouldn't change the fundamental problem—our sinful, wicked hearts, prone to evil and violence from birth and a veritable factory of idols—one bit. Or rather, what we would need is the kind of belief, the sort of knowledge, that went to the root of that problem, transforming us from the inside out. Making true worship possible; ridding us of idolatry; supplying us the power to do what we could never do for ourselves; making faithfulness a reality, that we might finally and wholeheartedly love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.
Christians believe God has done just this for the world in and through Christ. No dispositive evidence will persuade a Scialabba that this is the case. But the gospel isn't meant to answer such a request. Contained within the solution it offers is an entirely different diagnosis of our situation and thus of our greatest need. If the gospel and the faith it proclaims are to be rejected, those are the terms on which to do so.
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.
—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.
Ian McFarland on the doctrine of creation from nothing
"In short, if the doctrine of creation from nothing means ... that even prior to being created, creatures are not absolutely nothing insofar as they are grounded in the Word, it also implies that creatures, as created, are absolutely nothing apart from God. The richness of divinity not only lies behind creation's diversity as its presupposition (nothing but God), but also is an active presence that underlies and sustains every feature of that diversity at every moment of its existence (nothing apart from God). Not can this perspective be charged with compromising the integrity of creatures' relationship with God, as though that which has absolutely no existence part from God is reduced to the status of a puppet. Once again, the Trinitarian framework of the Christian doctrine of creation is crucial here, since the existence of creatures is rooted in the Word, whose very being establishes, within the divine life itself, a set of relationships whose constituent terms (viz., Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) also have no existence apart from God. From this perspective, the idea that ontological independence from God is a necessary condition of genuine relationship (and more particularly, of love) fails to reckon with the character of God's own being as relationship."
—Ian A. McFarland, From Nothing: A Theology of Creation (WJK Press, 2014), p. 94
—Ian A. McFarland, From Nothing: A Theology of Creation (WJK Press, 2014), p. 94
The most stimulating works of systematic theology from the last 20 years
On Twitter yesterday I made an observation followed by a question. I said that Paul Griffiths' Decreation is, in my view, the most thought-provoking,
stimulating, exhilarating work of systematic theology written since the
first volume of Robert Jenson's systematics was published in 1997.
Then I asked: What are other plausible candidates from, say, the last two decades?
I thought of half a dozen off the top of my head, then started adding others' replies to the list. See the (lightly curated) resulting list below.
A few preliminary comments, though. First, everything on the list was published (for the first time) in 1998 or later. That's arbitrary, but then, all lists are; that's what makes them fun.
Second, your mileage may vary, as mine does; I think some of these books are in a league of their own compared so some of the others. But I've tried to be broader than just my own preferences.
Third, candidates for this list are works of Christian systematic theology. As ever, the genre is loose enough that you know it when you see it. But I had to make some choices. So comparative theology is out, as is moral theology—excellent examples of the latter might be Cavanaugh's Torture and Eucharist and Herdt's Putting on Virtue. The same goes for historical theology: Ayres's Nicaea and Its Legacy, though laudably normative in many of its proposals, and arguably one of the handful of most important theological books in recent decades, is not itself an instance of systematic theology. I've similarly ruled out works of theology primarily interpreting a single theologian, past or present; so books with Augustine or Barth or whomever in the title are excluded. (I imagine this is the most contestable of the criteria. I'm only half persuaded myself, as evidenced by the exception I allowed.) Works of practical or popular or narrative theology are out too; whereas Cone's God of the Oppressed is certainly systematic theology at its most bracing, The Cross and the Lynching Tree belongs to a different genre (which, lest I be misunderstood, is not a judgment of value). Biblical scholarship is excluded from consideration as well; N. T. Wright and Richard Hays and John Barclay and Paula Fredriksen are brilliant and theologically stimulating writers, but their work is not systematic theology. Oh, and I suppose I should add: I'm limiting this to works originally written in English, if only to narrow the purview of the list (while lessening its potential hubris).
Fourth, this is not intended as a list of the "best books" from the last two decades. My words about Decreation were sharp and specific: it's a knock-your-socks-off kind of book, the sort of work you can't put down, that leads to compulsive reading, that changes your mind 10 times in as many pages, and makes you rethink, or refortify, what you always thought about this or that major topic. A book on this list should not be boring, in other words; and there are good works of scholarship that are undeniably boring. Such works are not included here.
Fifth, some might quibble with the choice of book for a given author. Should Tanner's book be Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity or Christ the Key? Should Rowan Williams's be On Christian Theology or The Edge of Words? John Webster's Holy Scripture or God Without Measure? I've opted for my own idiosyncratic preference or gut sense for what made a bigger "splash" at the time of its publication. Again: your mileage may vary.
Without further ado (ordered alphabetically):
I thought of half a dozen off the top of my head, then started adding others' replies to the list. See the (lightly curated) resulting list below.
A few preliminary comments, though. First, everything on the list was published (for the first time) in 1998 or later. That's arbitrary, but then, all lists are; that's what makes them fun.
Second, your mileage may vary, as mine does; I think some of these books are in a league of their own compared so some of the others. But I've tried to be broader than just my own preferences.
Third, candidates for this list are works of Christian systematic theology. As ever, the genre is loose enough that you know it when you see it. But I had to make some choices. So comparative theology is out, as is moral theology—excellent examples of the latter might be Cavanaugh's Torture and Eucharist and Herdt's Putting on Virtue. The same goes for historical theology: Ayres's Nicaea and Its Legacy, though laudably normative in many of its proposals, and arguably one of the handful of most important theological books in recent decades, is not itself an instance of systematic theology. I've similarly ruled out works of theology primarily interpreting a single theologian, past or present; so books with Augustine or Barth or whomever in the title are excluded. (I imagine this is the most contestable of the criteria. I'm only half persuaded myself, as evidenced by the exception I allowed.) Works of practical or popular or narrative theology are out too; whereas Cone's God of the Oppressed is certainly systematic theology at its most bracing, The Cross and the Lynching Tree belongs to a different genre (which, lest I be misunderstood, is not a judgment of value). Biblical scholarship is excluded from consideration as well; N. T. Wright and Richard Hays and John Barclay and Paula Fredriksen are brilliant and theologically stimulating writers, but their work is not systematic theology. Oh, and I suppose I should add: I'm limiting this to works originally written in English, if only to narrow the purview of the list (while lessening its potential hubris).
Fourth, this is not intended as a list of the "best books" from the last two decades. My words about Decreation were sharp and specific: it's a knock-your-socks-off kind of book, the sort of work you can't put down, that leads to compulsive reading, that changes your mind 10 times in as many pages, and makes you rethink, or refortify, what you always thought about this or that major topic. A book on this list should not be boring, in other words; and there are good works of scholarship that are undeniably boring. Such works are not included here.
Fifth, some might quibble with the choice of book for a given author. Should Tanner's book be Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity or Christ the Key? Should Rowan Williams's be On Christian Theology or The Edge of Words? John Webster's Holy Scripture or God Without Measure? I've opted for my own idiosyncratic preference or gut sense for what made a bigger "splash" at the time of its publication. Again: your mileage may vary.
Without further ado (ordered alphabetically):
- Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (2006)
- John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (2006)
- J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (2008)
- Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender (2002)
- Paul J. Griffiths, Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures (2014)
- David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (2003)
- Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (2010)
- David H. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology (2009)
- Matthew Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology (2004)
- Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (2003)
- Bruce D. Marshall, Trinity and Truth (1999)
- Eugene F. Rogers Jr., Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way Into the Triune God (1999)
- Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (2015)
- Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology: Volume 1, The Doctrine of God (2015)
- Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (2001)
- Linn Marie Tonstad, God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude (2016)
- Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (2010)
- John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (2003)
- Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (2014)
- Frances Young, God's Presence: A Contemporary Recapitulation of Early Christianity (2013)
Genre lists: the best science fiction authors and series
All right. I've written about my crime fiction list and my fantasy list; here, rounding out the genres (at least those in which I'm interested), is my chronological list of the authors and series in science fiction that I have read or aim to read. Far from exhaustive, and not aiming to be "completist." I want to read the best. What should I add to it? [NB: The list has now been expanded with suggestions.]
- H. G. Wells, Time Machine + Invisible Man + War of the Worlds (1895–98)
- Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (1917)
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
- C. S. Lewis, Space Trilogy (1938–45)
- George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
- Ray Bradbury, Martian Chronicles (1950) + Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
- Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy (1951–53)
- Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (1953) + 2001 (1968)
- Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (1954)
- Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination (1957)
- Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
- Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961)
- Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) + The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966)
- Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962)
- Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)
- J. G. Ballard, The Crystal World (1966)
- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) + The Dispossessed (1974)
- Joe Haldeman, The Forever War (1974)
- Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God's Eye (1974)
- Alice Sheldon (as James Tiptree Jr.), The Girl Who Was Plugged In (1974)
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
- Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun (1980–83)
- William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
- Connie Willis, Fire Watch (1984) + Doomsday Book (1992)
- Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game (1985) + Speaker for the Dead (1986) + Ender’s Shadow (1999)
- Michael Crichton, Sphere (1987) + Jurassic Park (1990) + Timeline (1999)
- Iain M. Banks, The Culture Series (1987–2012)
- Dan Simmons, Hyperion (1989)
- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992) + Anantham (2008)
- Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993) + Parable of the Talents (1998)
- Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Trilogy (1993–96)
- Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (1996) + Children of God (1998)
- Ted Chiang, Story of Your Life (1998/2002)
- Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam Trilogy (2003–13)
- Theodore Judson, Fitzpatrick's War (2004)
- Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)
- John Scalzi, Old Man's War Series (2005–2015)
- Liu Cixin, Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy (2008–10)
- Max Brooks, World War Z (2006)
- Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 (2010)
- Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers (2011)
- China Miéville, Embassytown (2011)
- Ann Leckie, Imperial Radch Trilogy (2013–15)
- Pierce Brown, Red Rising (2014–)
- Jeff Vandermeer, The Southern Reach Trilogy (2014)
- Adam Roberts, The Thing Itself (2015)