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The question for Silicon Valley
A single question has lingered over Mike Judge's Silicon Valley from the beginning. That question is whether he and his writing team—call them "the show"—believe that Richard and his unlikely crew of can-do programming losers not only can but ought to "win," and that such a win could be genuinely transformative and good for the world, or whether the system and culture of Silicon Valley are so fundamentally corrupted that even to win is to lose.
This dynamic has made the show worth watching till the end, but frustrating at times as well. It's not just whether Richard or his friends might "break bad," which the show entertained for a while. It's whether we, the audience, ought to cheer on Richard when he triumphs over the big bads of Google and Twitter and Facebook (or their stand-in "Hooli"), with his dream of a "free internet," or whether we ought to see through the self-serving rhetoric that attends every such dream.
Judge et al have given enough hints and plot turns to suggest that they know where they're headed and that the destination will be just as dark and pessimistic as the show's heart has proven to be throughout. But going on sixty hours of watching Richard blunder his way, with occasional eloquence, through one obstacle after another also suggests that the show might fall victim to the trap all TV writers fall into: coming to love their characters too much to let them lose. How can you give viewers lack of resolution, a sad and humiliating conclusion to spending time with "their friends" for so long?
I hope Judge sticks to his guns and (to mix metaphors) sticks the landing. Silicon Valley needs an ending fitting to Silicon Valley IRL. That ending should be pitch black. There is no saving it. To win is to lose. The internet is doomed: no algorithm or digital wizardry can redeem it.
Richard represents all those tech gurus who came before, a true believer before the windfall comes. Let the curtain descend on this once-idealistic CEO, awash in fame and money, sitting on the throne of an empire that continues to tyrannize us all. Whether he is smiling or weeping, that's the only honest end to this tech-start-up story, because the story is the same for all of them. Begin with hope, run the race, keep the faith—and finish with despair.
This dynamic has made the show worth watching till the end, but frustrating at times as well. It's not just whether Richard or his friends might "break bad," which the show entertained for a while. It's whether we, the audience, ought to cheer on Richard when he triumphs over the big bads of Google and Twitter and Facebook (or their stand-in "Hooli"), with his dream of a "free internet," or whether we ought to see through the self-serving rhetoric that attends every such dream.
Judge et al have given enough hints and plot turns to suggest that they know where they're headed and that the destination will be just as dark and pessimistic as the show's heart has proven to be throughout. But going on sixty hours of watching Richard blunder his way, with occasional eloquence, through one obstacle after another also suggests that the show might fall victim to the trap all TV writers fall into: coming to love their characters too much to let them lose. How can you give viewers lack of resolution, a sad and humiliating conclusion to spending time with "their friends" for so long?
I hope Judge sticks to his guns and (to mix metaphors) sticks the landing. Silicon Valley needs an ending fitting to Silicon Valley IRL. That ending should be pitch black. There is no saving it. To win is to lose. The internet is doomed: no algorithm or digital wizardry can redeem it.
Richard represents all those tech gurus who came before, a true believer before the windfall comes. Let the curtain descend on this once-idealistic CEO, awash in fame and money, sitting on the throne of an empire that continues to tyrannize us all. Whether he is smiling or weeping, that's the only honest end to this tech-start-up story, because the story is the same for all of them. Begin with hope, run the race, keep the faith—and finish with despair.
On blissful ignorance of Twitter trends, controversies, beefs, and general goings-on
Being off Twitter continues to be good for my soul as well as my mind, and one of the benefits I'm realizing is the ignorance that comes as a byproduct. By which I mean, ignorance not in general or of good things but of that which it is not beneficial to know.
When you're on Twitter, you notice what is "trending." This micro-targeted algorithmic function shapes your experience of the website, the news, the culture, and the world. Even if it were simply a reflection of what people were tweeting about the most, it would still be random, passing, and mass-generated. Who cares what is trending at any one moment?
More important, based on the accounts one follows, there is always some tempest in a teacup brewing somewhere or other. A controversy, an argument, a flame war, a personal beef: whatever its nature, the brouhaha exerts a kind of gravitational pull, sucking us poor online plebs into its orbit. And because Twitter is the id unvarnished, the kerfuffle in question is usually nasty, brutish, and unedifying. Worst of all, this tiny little momentary conflict warps one's mind, as if anyone cares except the smallest of online sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-"communities." For writers, journalists and academics above all, these Twitter battles start to take up residence in the skull, as if they were not only real but vital and important. Articles and essays are written about them; sometimes they are deployed (with earnest soberness) as a synecdoche for cultural skirmishes to which they bear only the most tangential, and certainly no causal, relationship.
As it turns out, when you are ignorant of such things, they cease in any way to weigh down one's mind, because they might as well not have happened. (If a tweet is dunked on but no one sees it, did the dunking really occur?) And this is all to the good, because 99.9% of the time, what happens on Twitter (a) stays on Twitter and (b) has no consequences—at least for us ordinary folks—in the real world. Naturally, I'm excluding e.g. tweets by the President or e.g. tweets that will get one fired. (Though those examples are just more reasons not to be on Twitter: I suppose if all such reasons were written down even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.) What I mean is: The kind of seemingly intellectually interesting tweet-threads and Twitter-arguments are almost never (possibly never-never) worth attending to in the moment.
Why? First, because they're usually stillborn: best not to have read them in the first place; there is always a better use of one's time. Second, because, although they feel like they are setting the terms of this or that debate, they are typically divorced from said debate, or merely symptoms of it, or just reflections of it: but in most cases, not where the real action is happening. Third, because if they're interesting enough—possibly even debate-setting enough—their author will publish them in an article or suchlike that will render redundant the original source of the haphazard thoughts that are now well organized and digestible in an orderly sequence of thought. Fourth and finally, because if a tweet or thread is significant enough (this is the .01% leftover from above), someone will publish about it and make known to the rest of us why it is (or, as the case may be, is actually not) important. In this last case, there is a minor justification for journalists not to delete their Twitter accounts; though the reasons for deletion are still strong, they can justify their use of the evil website (or at least spending time on it: one can read tweets without an account). For the rest of us, we can find out what happened on the hellscape that is Twitter in the same way we get the rest of our news: from reputable, established outlets. And not by what's trending at any one moment.
For writers and academics, the resulting rewards are incomparable. The time-honored and irrefutable wisdom not to read one's mentions—corrupting the mind, as it does, and sabotaging good writing—turns out to have broader application. Don't just avoid reading your mentions. Don't have mentions to read in the first place.
When you're on Twitter, you notice what is "trending." This micro-targeted algorithmic function shapes your experience of the website, the news, the culture, and the world. Even if it were simply a reflection of what people were tweeting about the most, it would still be random, passing, and mass-generated. Who cares what is trending at any one moment?
More important, based on the accounts one follows, there is always some tempest in a teacup brewing somewhere or other. A controversy, an argument, a flame war, a personal beef: whatever its nature, the brouhaha exerts a kind of gravitational pull, sucking us poor online plebs into its orbit. And because Twitter is the id unvarnished, the kerfuffle in question is usually nasty, brutish, and unedifying. Worst of all, this tiny little momentary conflict warps one's mind, as if anyone cares except the smallest of online sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-"communities." For writers, journalists and academics above all, these Twitter battles start to take up residence in the skull, as if they were not only real but vital and important. Articles and essays are written about them; sometimes they are deployed (with earnest soberness) as a synecdoche for cultural skirmishes to which they bear only the most tangential, and certainly no causal, relationship.
As it turns out, when you are ignorant of such things, they cease in any way to weigh down one's mind, because they might as well not have happened. (If a tweet is dunked on but no one sees it, did the dunking really occur?) And this is all to the good, because 99.9% of the time, what happens on Twitter (a) stays on Twitter and (b) has no consequences—at least for us ordinary folks—in the real world. Naturally, I'm excluding e.g. tweets by the President or e.g. tweets that will get one fired. (Though those examples are just more reasons not to be on Twitter: I suppose if all such reasons were written down even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.) What I mean is: The kind of seemingly intellectually interesting tweet-threads and Twitter-arguments are almost never (possibly never-never) worth attending to in the moment.
Why? First, because they're usually stillborn: best not to have read them in the first place; there is always a better use of one's time. Second, because, although they feel like they are setting the terms of this or that debate, they are typically divorced from said debate, or merely symptoms of it, or just reflections of it: but in most cases, not where the real action is happening. Third, because if they're interesting enough—possibly even debate-setting enough—their author will publish them in an article or suchlike that will render redundant the original source of the haphazard thoughts that are now well organized and digestible in an orderly sequence of thought. Fourth and finally, because if a tweet or thread is significant enough (this is the .01% leftover from above), someone will publish about it and make known to the rest of us why it is (or, as the case may be, is actually not) important. In this last case, there is a minor justification for journalists not to delete their Twitter accounts; though the reasons for deletion are still strong, they can justify their use of the evil website (or at least spending time on it: one can read tweets without an account). For the rest of us, we can find out what happened on the hellscape that is Twitter in the same way we get the rest of our news: from reputable, established outlets. And not by what's trending at any one moment.
For writers and academics, the resulting rewards are incomparable. The time-honored and irrefutable wisdom not to read one's mentions—corrupting the mind, as it does, and sabotaging good writing—turns out to have broader application. Don't just avoid reading your mentions. Don't have mentions to read in the first place.
A comprehensive list of undefeated teams in the NBA
Denver Nuggets, Minnesota Timberwolves, Philadelphia 76ers, San Antonio Spurs.
Just sayin'.
Just sayin'.
Must theologians be faithful? A question for Volf and Croasmun
In their new book, For the Life of the World: Theology That Makes a Difference (Brazos Press, 2019), Miroslav Volf and Matthew Croasmun make the argument that the lives of theologians matter for the writing and evaluation of theological proposals. Reading through chapter 5, though, where they make the argument, I was left unsure about what exactly they were claiming. Let me offer a sample of quotations and then offer a range of interpretations of the claim or claims they are wanting to make.(Full disclosure: Miroslav and Matthew are at Yale, and were there when I earned my doctorate; the former was a teacher, the latter a fellow student and friend. Take that for what it's worth. Here on out I'll call them V&C.)
Consider the following quotes (bolded emphases all mine):
- "execution of the central theological task requires a certain kind of affinity between the life the theologian seeks to articulate and the life the theologian seeks to lead." (118)
- "an affinity between theologians' lives and the basic vision of the true life that they seek to articulate is a condition of the adequacy of their thought." (119)
- "It would be incongruous for theologians to articulate and commend as true a life that they themselves had no aspiration of embracing. They would then be a bit like a nutritionist who won't eat her fruits and vegetables while urging her patients to do so." (120)
- "Misalignment between lives and visions ... is prone to undermine the veracity of [theologians'] work because it hinders their ability to adequately perceive and articulate these vision." (120)
- "living a certain kind of life doesn't determine the perception and articulation of visions, but only exerts significant pressure on them." (120)
- "Just as reasons, though important, don't suffice to embrace a vision of the good life, so reasons, though even more important, don't suffice to discern how to live it out. Our contention is that an abiding aspirational alignment of the self with the vision and its values is essential as well." (122)
- "[it is a requirement] that there be affinity between the kind of life theologians aspire to live and the primary vision they seek to articulate." (122)
- "Only those who are and continue to be 'spiritual' can ... perceive 'spiritual things.'" (125)
- "[An ideal but impossible claim would be] that only the saints can potentially be true theologians." (129)
- "Consequently, we argue for an affinity, rather than a strict homomorphy, of theologians' lives with the primary Christian vision of flourishing (always, of course, an affinity with the primary vision as they understand it)." (129)
- "Imperfect lives, imperfect articulations of the true life—yet lives that strive to align themselves with Christ's—and articulation that, rooted in this transformative striving, seek to serve Christ's mission to make the world God's home: this sort of affinity of life with the true life is what's needed for theologians to do their work well." (134)
- "Truth seeking is a constitutive dimension of living the true life; and living the true life—always proleptically and therefore aspirationally—is a condition of the search for its truthful articulation." (137)
- The best theologian will be a saint, i.e., a baptized believer whose life is maximally faithful to Christ.
- All theologians ought to strive to be saints.
- All theologians ought to strive to align their lives with their articulated vision of faithfulness to Christ.
- Saints are likelier to be better theologians than those who are not.
- A necessary but not sufficient condition of faithful theology is sainthood, that is, faithfulness to Christ.
- A necessary but not sufficient condition of faithful theology is imperfect but real alignment between the life of a theologian and his or her articulation of faithfulness to Christ.
- One of the criteria for evaluating a theologian's proposals and arguments is the lived faithfulness to Christ on the part of the theologian in question.
- One of the criteria for evaluating a theologian's proposals and arguments is the alignment between that theologian's life with his or her articulation of faithfulness to Christ.
Is it truly a condition of theology done well that the person making the theological proposals be herself (even somewhat) faithful either to Christ or to her understanding of Christ's will? Is such faithfulness, moreover, a legitimate criterion for evaluating said proposals—so that, if we knew of the theologian's utter unfaithfulness (even attempted), such knowledge would thereby falsify or disqualify her proposals outright?
I remain unpersuaded either that V&C really mean to make either of these claims or that either of them is a good idea.
It seems to me that V&C are making a materially prescriptive argument—"this is how theology ought to be done and how theologians ought to understand their work"—underwritten by a generically descriptive argument—"the sort of practice theology is and the sort of subject it is about means necessarily that it is self-involving in a manner different from algebra or astronomy"—but not anything more. We should not, I repeat not, include our judgments of the character of theologians' lives in our evaluation of their ideas, proposals, and arguments. If a serial adulterer were to write an essay against adultery, and meant it (i.e., it was not an exercise in deception), the thesis, the reasons offered in support, and the argument as a whole would not be correctly evaluated in connection with the author's sins. They would stand or fall on the merits. Such an author is precisely analogous to the comparison V&C make to the nutritionist: she is not wrong to recommend fruits and vegetables; she is merely a hypocrite.
And here's the kicker: All theologians are hypocrites. That's what makes them uniformly unsaintly, even those canonized after the fact. For saints are recognized postmortem, not in their lifetime. And that for good reason.
(I should add: It's even odder, in my view, to say that theologians' work should be judged in accordance with the affinity between their lives and their ideas, rather than their lives and the gospel as such. Barth and Tillich and Yoder, for example, all offered ample justification in their work for their misdeeds. Properly understood, however, their actions were wrong and unjustifiable regardless of the reasons they offered, precisely because they are and ought to be measured against that which is objective—the moral law, the will of God—not their own subjective understanding of it or their rationalization in the face of its challenge.)
So it is true that there should be an affinity between theologian's lives and ideas. Theologians of Christ should imitate Christ in their lives. And it is plausible to believe that their theology might improve as a result: that their vision into the things of God might prove clearer as a consequence.
But the unfaithful write good and true theology, too, and have done so since time immemorial. We ought to consider such theology in exactly the way we do all theology. For it is up to us to judge the theology only. God will judge the theologian.
About that Episode IX trailer
Everything I wrote here stands, but man alive is that a beautiful trailer.
It's a reminder of what Abrams gets: emotion, character, rapport, scale, energy, world-building, and—as this trailer not-misleadingly reminds us—composition and cinematography.
It's a reminder of what Abrams gets: emotion, character, rapport, scale, energy, world-building, and—as this trailer not-misleadingly reminds us—composition and cinematography.
I'm not optimistic, but it's not hopeless just yet. No matter what, it will be an experience. The only question is whether he'll be able to stick the landing.
A few comments and predictions while we're at it.1. I genuinely appreciate how much Abrams has withheld from us. I only wish he'd kept that shot of faux-dark Rey from us.
2. Rey will not "go dark." That brief glimpse is a Force vision (false or future), a clone, her under control, or her under cover. No other alternatives.
3. I appreciate that Abrams is giving us—at least suggesting he is giving us—some follow-up and resolution to the Finn–Rey relationship. Given their separation in VIII, it will be interesting to see how immediate and intimate the quality of their rapport is in IX.
4. The movie will be beautiful, epic, and capital-F Fun.
5. I've stayed away from spoilers (I know nothing but what's in the three trailers), but my guess is that Rey and Ren team up for some reason or purpose for at least part of the film, and that during that team-up Rey submits to being trained by Ren. One idea: they both realize the Emperor's plan and/or learn of some MacGuffin that is crucial to it and agree that it is better to join against him/it than lose divided. Perhaps either she or he deceives the other to induce the alliance; perhaps not.
6. I'm left wondering how Abrams will fit the preexisting footage of Leia into the narrative. If VII was Han's goodbye and VIII was Luke's, IX was going to be Leia's: first the father, then the uncle, then the mother. (Perhaps that is how Rey persuades Ren to join her? To follow her to the ruins of the second Death Star to discover what she sought there?)
7. A final prediction: The climactic scene of Rey before Palpatine will feature a sort of Jedi cloud of witnesses: Force ghosts from all the previous 8 movies combined, present and bearing witness to Rey and/or Ren's final showdown with the Great Sith Evil who has haunted all nine movies—the Skywalker Saga from start to finish. That means Qui-Gonn, (Mace?), Obi-Wan, Yoda, Anakin, (Han?), Luke, Leia: I bet we see all of them, and a few more. Perhaps them in front, and hosts upon hosts behind them. Take it to the bank, y'all.
8. A final final prediction: The make-or-break derivative-or-break-the-cycle question is whether Abrams will have Ren break good right at the end, exactly the way his father did. I'm more concerned with the story playing out beat for beat in imitation of VI than whether Abrams ret-cons Rey's identity or some such thing. I would say, "Surely he knows better," except he's the one who thought remaking IV with a new MOAR BIG Death Star was a great idea ... so who knows.
Just 56 days. Oh, and I'm bringing my oldest: his first Star Wars movie in the theater. Come on, J.J. old buddy, don't let me down: you're my only hope.
A clarification on the NBA, China, and free speech
"Free speech" is a legal concept: whether the state in any way muzzles one's ability to speak or whether it responds punitively based on the content of one's speech.
Within civil society, an organization (for profit or not) is not a "player" in the realm of free speech. Organizations place all kinds of controls on one's speech within the workplace and, in certain respects, outside of it. These can be reasonable or unreasonable; they can fairly or unfairly applied. But they are run of the mill, and have no bearing on "free speech."
Whether or not Daryl Morey is disciplined or even fired by the NBA for his tweet in support of Hong Kong has nothing to do with free speech. This isn't a free-market point, along the lines of "the NBA is free to do whatever it likes; it's a business, and Morey is an employee." That's technically true, but not my point.
Let me put it this way. To respond to the crisis elicited by Morey's tweet with the claim either that the NBA is mitigating his free speech by apologizing to China or that the NBA would be suppressing his free speech if it disciplined or fired him is a non sequitur. The legal freedom of expression accorded to Morey as an American citizen is untouched by the NBA's response to him.
But more important, the NBA and the entire ecology of fans, writers, and commentary that surrounds it wants the NBA to retain the ability to discipline its employees for certain kinds of speech. Five years ago Adam Silver terminated Donald Sterling's ownership of the Los Angeles Clippers based on a recording of something he said privately to another person. What he said was in no way illegal. What it was, rather, was immoral. And the NBA ecosystem responded, rightly, by calling for his removal from the league. That was a good and necessary thing to do. But it, too, was not an infringement upon Sterling's freedom of speech, even as it was a direct disciplinary response to private speech, offered freely, subsequently made public.
If an owner or a player were to tweet or write or say aloud something similar to Sterling's racist comments, I have no doubt that (a) he would be disciplined and (b) the NBA "community" would applaud the disciplinary act. Which means not only that the NBA has this power and that this power bears no relationship to free speech. Above all, it means nobody wants the NBA to lack this power.
The issue in the Morey–China Kerfuffle, then, is a matter, not of free speech, but of ethics. It's a moral question. And the political is contained within the moral.
The moral question is whether it is right for the NBA to muzzle the public speech of one of its employees regarding an international situation wherein there is a clear morally correct position, when to affirm that position will entail loss of revenue for the league in the millions or billions of dollars.
The related political question is whether the NBA is being consistent—in moral terms, hypocritical—in encouraging its employees to engage in public speech regarding domestic issues that are highly controversial within the nation, when such speech is unlikely to cost the league any loss of revenue while also discouraging the aforementioned revenue-losing political speech.
The question beneath that last political question is an interesting one, and it's less related either to ethics or to capital. That question is: What is the range of acceptable political positions the NBA or any similar organization is willing to permit to be expressed publicly without disciplinary response? Accordingly, what are those concrete political positions the public expression of which would (rightly or wrongly) call forth censure, financial penalty, suspension, or termination?
I anticipate that the next battle along these lines will be closer to home, both literally and figuratively, manifesting just outside of the League's particular Overton Window; and that that battle, though it will involve less money, will be far more bitter than the present one.
Within civil society, an organization (for profit or not) is not a "player" in the realm of free speech. Organizations place all kinds of controls on one's speech within the workplace and, in certain respects, outside of it. These can be reasonable or unreasonable; they can fairly or unfairly applied. But they are run of the mill, and have no bearing on "free speech."
Whether or not Daryl Morey is disciplined or even fired by the NBA for his tweet in support of Hong Kong has nothing to do with free speech. This isn't a free-market point, along the lines of "the NBA is free to do whatever it likes; it's a business, and Morey is an employee." That's technically true, but not my point.
Let me put it this way. To respond to the crisis elicited by Morey's tweet with the claim either that the NBA is mitigating his free speech by apologizing to China or that the NBA would be suppressing his free speech if it disciplined or fired him is a non sequitur. The legal freedom of expression accorded to Morey as an American citizen is untouched by the NBA's response to him.
But more important, the NBA and the entire ecology of fans, writers, and commentary that surrounds it wants the NBA to retain the ability to discipline its employees for certain kinds of speech. Five years ago Adam Silver terminated Donald Sterling's ownership of the Los Angeles Clippers based on a recording of something he said privately to another person. What he said was in no way illegal. What it was, rather, was immoral. And the NBA ecosystem responded, rightly, by calling for his removal from the league. That was a good and necessary thing to do. But it, too, was not an infringement upon Sterling's freedom of speech, even as it was a direct disciplinary response to private speech, offered freely, subsequently made public.
If an owner or a player were to tweet or write or say aloud something similar to Sterling's racist comments, I have no doubt that (a) he would be disciplined and (b) the NBA "community" would applaud the disciplinary act. Which means not only that the NBA has this power and that this power bears no relationship to free speech. Above all, it means nobody wants the NBA to lack this power.
The issue in the Morey–China Kerfuffle, then, is a matter, not of free speech, but of ethics. It's a moral question. And the political is contained within the moral.
The moral question is whether it is right for the NBA to muzzle the public speech of one of its employees regarding an international situation wherein there is a clear morally correct position, when to affirm that position will entail loss of revenue for the league in the millions or billions of dollars.
The related political question is whether the NBA is being consistent—in moral terms, hypocritical—in encouraging its employees to engage in public speech regarding domestic issues that are highly controversial within the nation, when such speech is unlikely to cost the league any loss of revenue while also discouraging the aforementioned revenue-losing political speech.
The question beneath that last political question is an interesting one, and it's less related either to ethics or to capital. That question is: What is the range of acceptable political positions the NBA or any similar organization is willing to permit to be expressed publicly without disciplinary response? Accordingly, what are those concrete political positions the public expression of which would (rightly or wrongly) call forth censure, financial penalty, suspension, or termination?
I anticipate that the next battle along these lines will be closer to home, both literally and figuratively, manifesting just outside of the League's particular Overton Window; and that that battle, though it will involve less money, will be far more bitter than the present one.
Meghan O'Gieblyn on the church's market-based failures
"Despite all the affected teenage rebellion, I continued to call myself a
Christian into my early twenties. When I finally stopped, it wasn’t
because being a believer made me uncool or outdated or freakish. It was
because being a Christian no longer meant anything. It was a label to
slap on my Facebook page, next to my music preferences. The gospel
became just another product someone was trying to sell me, and a paltry
one at that because the church isn’t Viacom: it doesn’t have a
Department of Brand Strategy and Planning. Staying relevant in late
consumer capitalism requires highly sophisticated resources and the
willingness to tailor your values to whatever your audience wants. In
trying to compete in this market, the church has forfeited the one
advantage it had in the game to attract disillusioned youth:
authenticity. When it comes to intransigent values, the profit-driven
world has zilch to offer. If Christian leaders weren’t so ashamed of
those unvarnished values, they might have something more attractive than
anything on today’s bleak moral market. In the meantime, they’ve lost
one more kid to the competition."
—Meghan O'Gieblyn, "Sniffing Glue," originally published in Guernica (2011), now collected in Interior States: Essays (2018)
—Meghan O'Gieblyn, "Sniffing Glue," originally published in Guernica (2011), now collected in Interior States: Essays (2018)
Seven thoughts on life without Twitter
1. It's very nice. Today's day five, and while I still have the impulse to tweet, I can feel it lessening by the hour.
2. It's less cluttered. Twitter is a sinkhole for time, a place to go and get lost, even for 15 minutes. Without that reliable time-suck, I've been doing more life-giving things, or even just plain productive activities—or just letting myself be bored. That, too, is better than the infinite scroll.
3. Twitter, it turns out, is ubiquitous. I encounter disembedded—or rather, embedded—tweets in a variety of forms: through a simple Google search, through shared links, through articles, through newsletters, through news reporting, etc. It's a healthy reminder of how entangled Twitter is with our national discourse, and actually suggests that Twitter plays a more central role in folks' daily intake (however passive) than raw counts of profiles and time on the platform itself would suggest. (Though that role would have more to do with Twitter as a medium and less to do with the culture of the Extremely Online who inhabit it continuously.)
4. The strongest urge I have to resist is "seeing what people are saying about X." Occasionally that might be edifying. But nine times out of ten it would not. Existing outside the loop, or arriving late to some bit of news, commentary, or piece of writing, is a perfectly healthy state of being. Compulsively attempting to avoid it at all costs is decidedly unhealthy.
5. I do miss using Twitter as an RSS feed. I'm sure a few articles have slipped through the cracks this week. Oh well. The dozen or so websites I visit each day on top of the newsletters that deliver recommended reading should mostly do the job. And even here, I remind myself: four out of five articles I see recommended I save to InstaPaper and never find the time to read. There's just too much out there. Might as well lessen the flow of the spigot anyway.
6. I wrote something on Monday that I realized I could not then and there, on my self-assigned rules, tweet out to folks. I think this Saturday I will amend my rules to permit tweeting out a link without being "on" Twitter. Fortunately this blog has a Twitter icon that will automatically tweet the URL out on one's feed without even having to go to Twitter's website oneself. I'll start doing that next week.
7. I'm already a prolix monologuer prone to soapboxes—I'm in the classroom 12 hours a week, for goodness' sake; I've got to have something to say!—and Twitter does not aid in mitigating that tendency. It's cotton candy for People With Thoughts. And this week, I've had thoughts on a bunch of random stuff, not least, e.g., the NBA-China debacle. But as it turns out, those thoughts are (at least at the moment) only tweet-size. They're candy bars of thought. Mostly brief commentary, studded with righteous condemnation and varied attempts at humor. For whose benefit would I offer such empty calories? Not mine. Not others. Not the topic itself. Is the goal to go viral? No. To turn up the volume on the noise? No. To start a conversation? Maybe. But why not have that conversation face to face, or via email, rather than "in public"—saddled with the dopamine-inducing gambling tricks of Silicon Valley? No thanks. I'm just not that important, or interesting. Which is what Twitter et al want to hide from us at all costs. But it's true, and the sooner we all learn to live with that fact, the sooner we'll be at peace.
2. It's less cluttered. Twitter is a sinkhole for time, a place to go and get lost, even for 15 minutes. Without that reliable time-suck, I've been doing more life-giving things, or even just plain productive activities—or just letting myself be bored. That, too, is better than the infinite scroll.
3. Twitter, it turns out, is ubiquitous. I encounter disembedded—or rather, embedded—tweets in a variety of forms: through a simple Google search, through shared links, through articles, through newsletters, through news reporting, etc. It's a healthy reminder of how entangled Twitter is with our national discourse, and actually suggests that Twitter plays a more central role in folks' daily intake (however passive) than raw counts of profiles and time on the platform itself would suggest. (Though that role would have more to do with Twitter as a medium and less to do with the culture of the Extremely Online who inhabit it continuously.)
4. The strongest urge I have to resist is "seeing what people are saying about X." Occasionally that might be edifying. But nine times out of ten it would not. Existing outside the loop, or arriving late to some bit of news, commentary, or piece of writing, is a perfectly healthy state of being. Compulsively attempting to avoid it at all costs is decidedly unhealthy.
5. I do miss using Twitter as an RSS feed. I'm sure a few articles have slipped through the cracks this week. Oh well. The dozen or so websites I visit each day on top of the newsletters that deliver recommended reading should mostly do the job. And even here, I remind myself: four out of five articles I see recommended I save to InstaPaper and never find the time to read. There's just too much out there. Might as well lessen the flow of the spigot anyway.
6. I wrote something on Monday that I realized I could not then and there, on my self-assigned rules, tweet out to folks. I think this Saturday I will amend my rules to permit tweeting out a link without being "on" Twitter. Fortunately this blog has a Twitter icon that will automatically tweet the URL out on one's feed without even having to go to Twitter's website oneself. I'll start doing that next week.
7. I'm already a prolix monologuer prone to soapboxes—I'm in the classroom 12 hours a week, for goodness' sake; I've got to have something to say!—and Twitter does not aid in mitigating that tendency. It's cotton candy for People With Thoughts. And this week, I've had thoughts on a bunch of random stuff, not least, e.g., the NBA-China debacle. But as it turns out, those thoughts are (at least at the moment) only tweet-size. They're candy bars of thought. Mostly brief commentary, studded with righteous condemnation and varied attempts at humor. For whose benefit would I offer such empty calories? Not mine. Not others. Not the topic itself. Is the goal to go viral? No. To turn up the volume on the noise? No. To start a conversation? Maybe. But why not have that conversation face to face, or via email, rather than "in public"—saddled with the dopamine-inducing gambling tricks of Silicon Valley? No thanks. I'm just not that important, or interesting. Which is what Twitter et al want to hide from us at all costs. But it's true, and the sooner we all learn to live with that fact, the sooner we'll be at peace.
Sorting nationalism and patriotism with John Lukacs
One of the most curious things in the last few years has been the reinvigoration of the term "nationalism" as a political signifier and "nationalist" as a self-identification. In both scholarly and popular Christian discourse, at least, this is curious especially because, so far as I can tell, "nationalism" became in the last few decades a consensus word for the extreme, blasphemous, and/or heretical corruption of the virtue of patriotism. I have books on my shelf—one for college freshmen, another for graduate students, another for the broader reading public, another for fellow academics—all of which trade on this settled usage.
Now "nationalism" is back, not just as a historical-political force but as a terminological boundary marker. Unfortunately, though, its political associations as well as its function as a football in ideological disputes have contributed to something less than clarity. So that, e.g., to be nationalist is to be for "America first," or in less loaded terms, to be committed to one's fellow citizens and immediate neighbors in lieu of foreign adventurism and nation-building abroad. Or, e.g., to affirm that Christians can be nationalists means little more than that Christians can affirm the modern project of the nation-state, the regional boundaries within which such a state exists, and the groups and goods and cultural endeavors internal to that state. Or, e.g., even just to be happy in one's given national context and to be proud of its accomplishments and civic life.
That's quite the range. It seems to me that "patriotism" is a perfectly fine term for the last example. And the second-to-last example does not make one a nationalist in the prescriptive sense; it merely means that one accepts and/or approves of there being nations (of this sort) at all. It seems to me that "nationalism" should retain the stronger—not to say (yet) the inherently pejorative—terminological definition and concomitant evocations and allusions. Or else we're just going to be loose in our language and keep talking past one another.
There is no better thinker from whom to learn about nationalism defined in strict terms than John Lukacs, the Jewish-Catholic Hungarian-American immigrant and historian who died earlier this year at the age of 95. His 2005 book Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred is one of the crucial texts for understanding our moment. A helpful byproduct is lucidity regarding terms, their histories, and their political uses and connotations.
Let me close with a sample set of quotations on the topic of nationalism. I commend the book along with Lukacs's voluminous output to any and all who find themselves interested by this (pp. 35-36, 71-73; my bold print, for emphasis):
"Soon after 1870 there appeared something else: a phenomenon whose evidences, here and there, were there earlier, but the breadth and the substance and the character of which began to change. This was modern and populist nationalism. Yet 'nationalisme' and 'nationaliste' became French words only after 1880; in Britain, too, they had appeared not much earlier. The reason for this relatively late gestation of the nationalist word was that 'patriot' and 'patriotism' already existed; and, at least for a while, it seemed that the meaning of the latter was sufficient. When, a century earlier, Samuel Johnson uttered his famous (and perhaps forever valid) dictum that Patriotism Is The Last Refuge Of A Scoundrel, he meant nationalism, even though that word did not yet exist. One of the reasons why there exists no first-rate book about the history of nationalism is that it is not easy to separate it from old-fashioned patriotism. And these two inclinations, patriotism and nationalism, divergent as they may be, still often overlap in people's minds. (When, for example, Americans criticize a 'superpatriot,' what they really mean is an extreme nationalist.) Nonetheless, the very appearance of a new word is always evidence that some people sense the need to distinguish it from the older word's meaning: that a nationalist is someone different from a patriot.
"Patriotism is defensive; nationalism is aggressive. Patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a 'people,' justifying many things, a political and ideological substitute for religion. Patriotism is old-fashioned (and, at times and in some places, aristocratic); nationalism is modern and populist. In one sense patriotic and national consciousness may be similar; but in another sense, more and more apparent after 1870, national consciousness began to affect more and more people who, generally, had been immune to that before—as, for example, many people within the multinational empire of Austria-Hungary. It went deeper than class consciousness. Here and there it superseded religious affiliations, too.
"After 1870 nationalism, almost always, turned antiliberal, especially where liberalism was no longer principally nationalist. ...
"The state was one of the creations of the Modern Age. Its powers grew; here and there, sooner or later, it became monstrously bureaucratic. Yet—and few people see this, very much including those who prattle about 'totalitarianism'—the power of the state has been weakening, at the same time the attraction of nationalism has not.
"Hitler knew that: I have, more than once, cited his sentence from Mein Kampf recalling his youth: 'I was a nationalist; but I was not a patriot.' Again it is telling that in Austria 'national' and 'nationalist' meant pro-German, and not only during the multinational Habsburg monarchy and state. Well before the Second World War an Austrian 'nationalist' wanted some kind of union with Germany, at the expense of an independent Austrian state. This was also true in such diverse places as Norway or Hungary or other states during the Second World War: 'national' and 'nationalist' often meant pro-German.
"Nationalism, rather than patriotism; the nation rather than the state; populism rather than liberal democracy, to be sure. We have examples of that even among the extremist groups in the United States, too, with their hatred of 'government'—that is, of the state. We have seen that while true patriotism is defensive, nationalism is aggressive; patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a 'people,' justifying everything, a political and ideological substitute for religion; both modern and populist. An aristocratic nationalism is an oxymoron, since at least after the late seventeenth century most European aristocracies were cosmopolitan as well as national. Democratic nationalism is a later phenomenon. For a while there was nothing very wrong with that. It won great revolutions and battles, it produced some fine examples of national cohesion. One hundred and fifty years ago a distinction between nationalism and patriotism would have been labored, it would have not made much sense. Even now nationalism and patriotism often overlap within the minds and hearts of many people. Yet we must be aware of their differences—because of the phenomenon of populism which, unlike old-fashioned patriotism, is inseparable from the myth of a people. Populism is folkish, patriotism is not. One can be a patriot and cosmopolitan (certainly culturally so). But a populist is inevitably a nationalist of sorts. Patriotism is less racist than is populism. A patriot will not exclude a person of another nationality from a community where they have lived side by side and whom he has known for many years; but a populist will always be suspicious of someone who does not seem to belong to his tribe.
"A patriot is not necessarily a conservative; he may even be a liberal—of sorts, though not an abstract one. In the twentieth century a nationalist could hardly be a liberal. The nineteenth century was full of liberal nationalists, some of them inspiring and noble figures. The accepted view is that liberalism faded and declined because of the appearance of socialism, that the liberals who originally had reservations about exaggerated democracy became democrats and then socialists, accepting the progressive ideas of state intervention in the economy, education, welfare. This is true but not true enough. It is nationalism, not socialism, that killed the liberal appeal. The ground slipped out from under the liberals not because they were not sufficiently socialist but because they were (or at least seemed to be) insufficiently nationalist.
"Since it appeals to tribal and racial bonds, nationalism seems to be deeply and atavistically natural and human. Yet the trouble with it is not only that nationalism can be antihumanist and often inhuman but that it also proceeds from one abstract assumption about human nature itself. The love for one's people is natural, but it is also categorical; it is less charitable and less deeply human than the love for one's country, a love that flows from traditions, at least akin to a love of one's family. Nationalism is both self-centered and selfish—because human love is not the love of oneself; it is the love of another. (A convinced nationalist is suspicious not only of people he sees as aliens; he may be even more suspicious of people of his own ilk and ready to denounce them as 'traitors'—that is, people who disagree with his nationalist beliefs.) Patriotism is always more than merely biological—because charitable love is human and not merely 'natural.' Nature has, and shows, no charity."
Now "nationalism" is back, not just as a historical-political force but as a terminological boundary marker. Unfortunately, though, its political associations as well as its function as a football in ideological disputes have contributed to something less than clarity. So that, e.g., to be nationalist is to be for "America first," or in less loaded terms, to be committed to one's fellow citizens and immediate neighbors in lieu of foreign adventurism and nation-building abroad. Or, e.g., to affirm that Christians can be nationalists means little more than that Christians can affirm the modern project of the nation-state, the regional boundaries within which such a state exists, and the groups and goods and cultural endeavors internal to that state. Or, e.g., even just to be happy in one's given national context and to be proud of its accomplishments and civic life.
That's quite the range. It seems to me that "patriotism" is a perfectly fine term for the last example. And the second-to-last example does not make one a nationalist in the prescriptive sense; it merely means that one accepts and/or approves of there being nations (of this sort) at all. It seems to me that "nationalism" should retain the stronger—not to say (yet) the inherently pejorative—terminological definition and concomitant evocations and allusions. Or else we're just going to be loose in our language and keep talking past one another.
There is no better thinker from whom to learn about nationalism defined in strict terms than John Lukacs, the Jewish-Catholic Hungarian-American immigrant and historian who died earlier this year at the age of 95. His 2005 book Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred is one of the crucial texts for understanding our moment. A helpful byproduct is lucidity regarding terms, their histories, and their political uses and connotations.
Let me close with a sample set of quotations on the topic of nationalism. I commend the book along with Lukacs's voluminous output to any and all who find themselves interested by this (pp. 35-36, 71-73; my bold print, for emphasis):
"Soon after 1870 there appeared something else: a phenomenon whose evidences, here and there, were there earlier, but the breadth and the substance and the character of which began to change. This was modern and populist nationalism. Yet 'nationalisme' and 'nationaliste' became French words only after 1880; in Britain, too, they had appeared not much earlier. The reason for this relatively late gestation of the nationalist word was that 'patriot' and 'patriotism' already existed; and, at least for a while, it seemed that the meaning of the latter was sufficient. When, a century earlier, Samuel Johnson uttered his famous (and perhaps forever valid) dictum that Patriotism Is The Last Refuge Of A Scoundrel, he meant nationalism, even though that word did not yet exist. One of the reasons why there exists no first-rate book about the history of nationalism is that it is not easy to separate it from old-fashioned patriotism. And these two inclinations, patriotism and nationalism, divergent as they may be, still often overlap in people's minds. (When, for example, Americans criticize a 'superpatriot,' what they really mean is an extreme nationalist.) Nonetheless, the very appearance of a new word is always evidence that some people sense the need to distinguish it from the older word's meaning: that a nationalist is someone different from a patriot.
"Patriotism is defensive; nationalism is aggressive. Patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a 'people,' justifying many things, a political and ideological substitute for religion. Patriotism is old-fashioned (and, at times and in some places, aristocratic); nationalism is modern and populist. In one sense patriotic and national consciousness may be similar; but in another sense, more and more apparent after 1870, national consciousness began to affect more and more people who, generally, had been immune to that before—as, for example, many people within the multinational empire of Austria-Hungary. It went deeper than class consciousness. Here and there it superseded religious affiliations, too.
"After 1870 nationalism, almost always, turned antiliberal, especially where liberalism was no longer principally nationalist. ...
"The state was one of the creations of the Modern Age. Its powers grew; here and there, sooner or later, it became monstrously bureaucratic. Yet—and few people see this, very much including those who prattle about 'totalitarianism'—the power of the state has been weakening, at the same time the attraction of nationalism has not.
"Hitler knew that: I have, more than once, cited his sentence from Mein Kampf recalling his youth: 'I was a nationalist; but I was not a patriot.' Again it is telling that in Austria 'national' and 'nationalist' meant pro-German, and not only during the multinational Habsburg monarchy and state. Well before the Second World War an Austrian 'nationalist' wanted some kind of union with Germany, at the expense of an independent Austrian state. This was also true in such diverse places as Norway or Hungary or other states during the Second World War: 'national' and 'nationalist' often meant pro-German.
"Nationalism, rather than patriotism; the nation rather than the state; populism rather than liberal democracy, to be sure. We have examples of that even among the extremist groups in the United States, too, with their hatred of 'government'—that is, of the state. We have seen that while true patriotism is defensive, nationalism is aggressive; patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a 'people,' justifying everything, a political and ideological substitute for religion; both modern and populist. An aristocratic nationalism is an oxymoron, since at least after the late seventeenth century most European aristocracies were cosmopolitan as well as national. Democratic nationalism is a later phenomenon. For a while there was nothing very wrong with that. It won great revolutions and battles, it produced some fine examples of national cohesion. One hundred and fifty years ago a distinction between nationalism and patriotism would have been labored, it would have not made much sense. Even now nationalism and patriotism often overlap within the minds and hearts of many people. Yet we must be aware of their differences—because of the phenomenon of populism which, unlike old-fashioned patriotism, is inseparable from the myth of a people. Populism is folkish, patriotism is not. One can be a patriot and cosmopolitan (certainly culturally so). But a populist is inevitably a nationalist of sorts. Patriotism is less racist than is populism. A patriot will not exclude a person of another nationality from a community where they have lived side by side and whom he has known for many years; but a populist will always be suspicious of someone who does not seem to belong to his tribe.
"A patriot is not necessarily a conservative; he may even be a liberal—of sorts, though not an abstract one. In the twentieth century a nationalist could hardly be a liberal. The nineteenth century was full of liberal nationalists, some of them inspiring and noble figures. The accepted view is that liberalism faded and declined because of the appearance of socialism, that the liberals who originally had reservations about exaggerated democracy became democrats and then socialists, accepting the progressive ideas of state intervention in the economy, education, welfare. This is true but not true enough. It is nationalism, not socialism, that killed the liberal appeal. The ground slipped out from under the liberals not because they were not sufficiently socialist but because they were (or at least seemed to be) insufficiently nationalist.
"Since it appeals to tribal and racial bonds, nationalism seems to be deeply and atavistically natural and human. Yet the trouble with it is not only that nationalism can be antihumanist and often inhuman but that it also proceeds from one abstract assumption about human nature itself. The love for one's people is natural, but it is also categorical; it is less charitable and less deeply human than the love for one's country, a love that flows from traditions, at least akin to a love of one's family. Nationalism is both self-centered and selfish—because human love is not the love of oneself; it is the love of another. (A convinced nationalist is suspicious not only of people he sees as aliens; he may be even more suspicious of people of his own ilk and ready to denounce them as 'traitors'—that is, people who disagree with his nationalist beliefs.) Patriotism is always more than merely biological—because charitable love is human and not merely 'natural.' Nature has, and shows, no charity."
A Twitter trial
I'm reconsidering my presence on Twitter. I wrote earlier this year about why, for the time being, I was still on the platform. But as I said (via tweet) yesterday, I'm not long for that website. Let me lay out, briefly, why that is, and the experiment I'm going to undertake in the coming weeks.
1. Even with the comparatively limited time I spend on Twitter, I find during working and non-online hours that it burrows too deeply into my skull. I have a thought or read a great line and think, "I should tweet that out." Or I do tweet something out, and 40 minutes later I think, "I should put down this book and see if anyone's responded." That's crazy and unhealthy. Best to be off entirely.
2. Even having removed Twitter from my phone, even blocking access to it on my laptop for long stretches using Freedom, I still open up my computer too often wanting to "check in," and more often than not I end up getting sucked in for 10 minutes instead of 5, 20 minutes instead of 10, and so on. No más, por favor.
3. I'm persuaded that Twitter is bad for writers. Though it is good for connecting writers to one another and to editors and publications—I've certainly benefited from that—it is a terrible wastrel of a parasite on the writing mind and the writing process. It sucks blood from the writer's intelligence, wit, and courage. It also encourages a kind of anticipatory conformity and fear. I'm tired of seeing that in other writers, and I'm tired of resisting it in myself.
4. The effect on writers is a function of the larger Twitter Brain problem, according to which the Extremely Online mistake Twitter for real life, both in terms of the prevalence of certain views and in terms of their importance. But Twitter is not representative, nor is what the Twitterati considers important actually so. More often than not, it's a tempest in a teapot. And that, too, warps the mind as well as one's affections. No more.
5. Tech critics like Postman have convinced me of the power of form over content. The form is not neutral; Twitter is not a delivery system for otherwise untouched or unshaped material. And in this case, the medium intrinsically and necessarily distorts the message beyond repair. The infinite scroll of the timeline flattens out, de-contextualizes, and thereby trivializes everything that passes through it. All becomes meme. What is important becomes a football for play, and what is unimportant generates rage, mockery, hatred, and division. Twitter is a hothouse for the formation of vice; it detests, slanders, and butchers virtue wherever it is found. Nothing good can come from a means of communication that sets cat memes next to articles investigating child abuse next to sports GIFs next to the brother of a murder victim forgiving his murderer next to a spit-flecked thread arguing over the existence of eternal conscious torment next to a recipe for gluten-free lasagna next to a GoFundMe for a child with severe brain trauma next to a tweet about impeachment by the President. I repeat: Nothing good.
6. Not to mention that people are getting harassed or losing their jobs over their activity on public (and "private") social media. Why take the risk?
7. Add do that how companies like Twitter (and Facebook, my account on which I have deleted; and Google, my account on which I have not—that will be next in these tech-wise reflections) are profiting off our data in ways legal and only semi-legal but certainly immoral, harmful, and deceptive. That is what makes them "free": we are selling ourselves to be online, engaging in activities that are bad for ourselves and bad for others. There's a word for that, y'all.
8. Perhaps there is no healthy future for life online, but I am certain that there is no healthy future for life online that includes Twitter and Facebook. And if I think that, why prop it up? My exit won't make a difference, true. But if these companies are a brothel and we're paying the lease with our time, I'll spend my time somewhere else, thank you very much.
So here's what I'm going to try, in lieu of immediately (rashly?) deleting my account for good:
1. I will remain signed out of Twitter all week except for Saturday.
2. I will sign in to Twitter and "be" on there for a maximum of 30 minutes on Saturday.
3. When signed in, I will not retweet, like, or reply to other tweets.
4. When signed in, I will not tweet "thoughts" or the like. I will, instead, do one of two things. I will tweet out links either to things I have written or to things I have read and are worth sharing with others.
And the following are matters I'm still deliberating about:
5. Whether or not to delete all past tweets, so as to re-shape my Twitter profile into a kind of static "online hub" for folks to find me, discover who I am, see what I've written, and to follow links there either to my blog, to my Academia.edu page, or to my contact info so as to get in touch directly.
6. Whether or not to communicate via DMs or to make my email address clear enough for folks who'd like to contact me that way.
7. Whether or not, during the week, while signed out, to treat a handful of Twitter profiles as if they are RSS feeds meant to share links of pieces worth reading. I can imagine this being a healthy way of using Twitter against its wishes. But we'll see, since the whole point is to be off Twitter entirely during the week. And I wouldn't want to compulsively check Profile X throughout the day. For now I think I'll limit it to Saturdays, with the exception of one or two profiles (maybe, maybe, maybe).
As you can tell, I'm still in the middle of this. My mind's not quite made up yet. I may end up deleting my account entirely by year's end. Or I may discover some other mode of minimal-to-no usage. We shall see. I'll report back here later, as I always do.
1. Even with the comparatively limited time I spend on Twitter, I find during working and non-online hours that it burrows too deeply into my skull. I have a thought or read a great line and think, "I should tweet that out." Or I do tweet something out, and 40 minutes later I think, "I should put down this book and see if anyone's responded." That's crazy and unhealthy. Best to be off entirely.
2. Even having removed Twitter from my phone, even blocking access to it on my laptop for long stretches using Freedom, I still open up my computer too often wanting to "check in," and more often than not I end up getting sucked in for 10 minutes instead of 5, 20 minutes instead of 10, and so on. No más, por favor.
3. I'm persuaded that Twitter is bad for writers. Though it is good for connecting writers to one another and to editors and publications—I've certainly benefited from that—it is a terrible wastrel of a parasite on the writing mind and the writing process. It sucks blood from the writer's intelligence, wit, and courage. It also encourages a kind of anticipatory conformity and fear. I'm tired of seeing that in other writers, and I'm tired of resisting it in myself.
4. The effect on writers is a function of the larger Twitter Brain problem, according to which the Extremely Online mistake Twitter for real life, both in terms of the prevalence of certain views and in terms of their importance. But Twitter is not representative, nor is what the Twitterati considers important actually so. More often than not, it's a tempest in a teapot. And that, too, warps the mind as well as one's affections. No more.
5. Tech critics like Postman have convinced me of the power of form over content. The form is not neutral; Twitter is not a delivery system for otherwise untouched or unshaped material. And in this case, the medium intrinsically and necessarily distorts the message beyond repair. The infinite scroll of the timeline flattens out, de-contextualizes, and thereby trivializes everything that passes through it. All becomes meme. What is important becomes a football for play, and what is unimportant generates rage, mockery, hatred, and division. Twitter is a hothouse for the formation of vice; it detests, slanders, and butchers virtue wherever it is found. Nothing good can come from a means of communication that sets cat memes next to articles investigating child abuse next to sports GIFs next to the brother of a murder victim forgiving his murderer next to a spit-flecked thread arguing over the existence of eternal conscious torment next to a recipe for gluten-free lasagna next to a GoFundMe for a child with severe brain trauma next to a tweet about impeachment by the President. I repeat: Nothing good.
6. Not to mention that people are getting harassed or losing their jobs over their activity on public (and "private") social media. Why take the risk?
7. Add do that how companies like Twitter (and Facebook, my account on which I have deleted; and Google, my account on which I have not—that will be next in these tech-wise reflections) are profiting off our data in ways legal and only semi-legal but certainly immoral, harmful, and deceptive. That is what makes them "free": we are selling ourselves to be online, engaging in activities that are bad for ourselves and bad for others. There's a word for that, y'all.
8. Perhaps there is no healthy future for life online, but I am certain that there is no healthy future for life online that includes Twitter and Facebook. And if I think that, why prop it up? My exit won't make a difference, true. But if these companies are a brothel and we're paying the lease with our time, I'll spend my time somewhere else, thank you very much.
So here's what I'm going to try, in lieu of immediately (rashly?) deleting my account for good:
1. I will remain signed out of Twitter all week except for Saturday.
2. I will sign in to Twitter and "be" on there for a maximum of 30 minutes on Saturday.
3. When signed in, I will not retweet, like, or reply to other tweets.
4. When signed in, I will not tweet "thoughts" or the like. I will, instead, do one of two things. I will tweet out links either to things I have written or to things I have read and are worth sharing with others.
And the following are matters I'm still deliberating about:
5. Whether or not to delete all past tweets, so as to re-shape my Twitter profile into a kind of static "online hub" for folks to find me, discover who I am, see what I've written, and to follow links there either to my blog, to my Academia.edu page, or to my contact info so as to get in touch directly.
6. Whether or not to communicate via DMs or to make my email address clear enough for folks who'd like to contact me that way.
7. Whether or not, during the week, while signed out, to treat a handful of Twitter profiles as if they are RSS feeds meant to share links of pieces worth reading. I can imagine this being a healthy way of using Twitter against its wishes. But we'll see, since the whole point is to be off Twitter entirely during the week. And I wouldn't want to compulsively check Profile X throughout the day. For now I think I'll limit it to Saturdays, with the exception of one or two profiles (maybe, maybe, maybe).
As you can tell, I'm still in the middle of this. My mind's not quite made up yet. I may end up deleting my account entirely by year's end. Or I may discover some other mode of minimal-to-no usage. We shall see. I'll report back here later, as I always do.
An atonement typology
This post grew out of a brief handout I drew up quickly for a class I was teaching on the atonement, which I then shared on Twitter. I thought I would expand it here with some initial definition and reflections.
Let me note two things at the outset. First, I took initial inspiration from Ben Myers' lovely patristic-flavored post on atonement theories from a few years back. Second, it seems to me that atonement is a particularly resonant English word that is very nearly interchangeable with salvation. To ask what atonement consists in, it seems to me, is to ask how Jesus saves. Or at least so I have assumed in what follows. Third, atonement is not one of my pet doctrines; I haven't read widely and deeply in it the way some of my friends and colleagues have. I'm sure that, somewhere below, I have left something out or inexpertly explained this or that theory. Pardons in advance.
Without further ado, my sixfold (really, 6 x 5) typology of the atonement.
I. Royal Conquest
1. Ransom
Through the death of Jesus, the Messiah, God "ransoms" or buys back his elect people from their slavery to sin and death; this is the new and final Exodus, in which the Lord once and for all delivers his people from the Pharaoh-like Satan.
2. Christus victor
Jesus submits to death, the wages of sinful humanity, and in doing so puts death to death and triumphs over it in his resurrection from the dead, now eternally free from death in the life of God, never to die again.
3. Harrowing of hell
Jesus the King descends to the realm of the dead and claims what is his own: all the saints of old, awaiting the proclamation of good news to those who died in hope of his coming. The gates of hell tremble at the sound of his feet, and crack open as he takes his own with him into everlasting life: he, the Living One, in whose hands are now the keys to Death and Hades (Rev 1:18).
4. Exaltation
Jesus Christ is risen from the dead: and not only risen, but raised to glory eternal, the glory he had with the Father before the ages. Only now, it is in and as the human nature he assumed in Mary's womb that he is raised, glorified, ascended, enthroned at the right hand of the Father in the power of the Spirit, whence he rules and judges the affairs of earth until he returns again.
5. Citizenship
Having inaugurated his reign over creation, Christ extends the gift of heavenly citizenship to all who accept his rule. To live subject to the wise, just, and merciful kingship of Christ in between his two advents means to anticipate, even now, the glories of the kingdom of heaven that will be made manifest at his appearing, though they remain hidden as the church sojourns in the world.
II. Holy Justice
1. Suffering
This one little word, "suffered," serves in the New Testament as a euphemism or précis for the whole work of Christ. Why is that? "Christ also suffered for sins once for all" (1 Pet 3:18); "Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood" (Heb 13:12): we could multiply examples. There is a mystery here. First, Jesus shares in the human condition, under the weight of sin, evil, and death. His solidarity is complete. "For because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted" (Heb 2:18). Moreover, his suffering is salvific: the victim bleeds, the substitute is scourged, the one pronounced guilty is mocked and spat upon. We see, we feel, we intuit the depths of the mystery here—even if we cannot finds words adequate to it—that the eternal and impassible One has willed to undergo this passion simply because "he loved me" (Gal 2:20). It was necessary that the Lord's servant suffer rejection at the hands of both those under and those outside the Law: this very thing happened in our midst, for us and for our salvation.
2. Sacrifice
God is holy, and wills that his people be holy likewise. In old Israel, God graciously provided for the people to be cleansed of their sins through the shedding of blood, that is, through ritual sacrifices that sanctified them, in love, so that they might worship the Lord in his presence with a pure body and a clean conscience. Jesus Christ is the final sacrifice, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, that to which all prior sacrifices pointed and in which they participated (and, mutatis mutandis, so ever since, whether in praise, in illness, in martyrdom, or in the Eucharist). Jesus, the spotless victim, without blemish, offered himself upon the cross, a perfect and pleasing sacrifice to the God of Israel, thus cleansing, purifying, and sanctifying his beloved people, and effecting, once and for all, the forgiveness of sins.
3. Justification
God is righteous and just, the only good and wise Judge. Human righteousness consists in obedience to his commands, which is to live in accordance with the divine will. Humans, though, individually and collectively, are law-breakers, transgressors, guilty before the court of divine justice. We deserve condemnation, and indeed, guilty of sin and subject to death, we stand condemned, dead in our trespasses. But God in his mercy justifies the ungodly, offering pardon in the name of Christ to all who cast themselves in faith on him, the Crucified. He, the righteous one, stands in the dock, and our sentence becomes his—do not Pilate and the people sentence Jesus to a death reserved for the guilty?—while his status—do not Pilate and the Centurion recognize Jesus's just innocence?—becomes ours. Barabbas figures the believer who, through no merit of his own, is released, while Jesus does not resist taking his place. In short, the triune God delivers the final verdict, and though we have broken God's law, we are absolved, pardoned, pronounced innocent for the sake of Christ. Now therefore there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom 8:1).
4. Substitution
Jesus Christ, the one true and fully human man, takes our place. He lives and dies for us, on our behalf, for our sake. He is utterly and without reservation pro nobis, and he stands in our stead, so that we might stand in his. What was due us, comes to him; what is due him, comes to us. What is ours becomes his, and what is his becomes ours. All that he does, he does with us in mind, for our benefit. Whatever justice demands, he, the God-man, both exacts and accepts it. In him, we see our fate overturned, not by a miscarriage of justice, but by the mercy of the Just One offering himself in our place.
5. Satisfaction
What does humanity owe God our creator? Everything, as it turns out. It is a debt we owe simply in virtue of being the creatures we are, made from nothing and sustained in existence for no good reason other than the divine good pleasure. But we do not give God what is his due. We do not render obedience. We do not love him with our whole hearts; we do not love our neighbor as ourselves (as he commands). We do not live in constant, grateful dependence upon him. If we are to be restored to fellowship with the God who alone is just, good, and right, how are we to rectify the relationship we have broken (from our side)? Not by our own efforts, themselves already corrupt and corrupting. Only the offering of a fully human life perfect from start to finish could be thus acceptable. Thus does Jesus, the God-man, offer his own life to make satisfaction for all humanity, to "pay the debt we could not pay." By his death, he gives infinitely beyond what we ever could, and in rising from the dead and pouring out his Spirit, he gives with abandon what he does not need and what was always already his by nature, not only making restitution but gratuitously sharing gifts both beyond nature and beyond measure.
III. Israel's Fulfillment
1. Abraham's seed
The promise of the Lord to Abraham was that his seed would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, and that in his seed all the nations would be blessed (Gen 12:1-3; 22:17). Thus the New Testament begins by telling us that Jesus is the son of Abraham (Matt 1:1), and Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians that the seed (singular, not plural) of which the Lord spoke was Christ himself (3:16)—through him the nations have come to the Lord for blessing, by the selfsame faith with which Abraham believed the Lord's promise (Rom 4:23-25).
2. Torah's telos
The Law of Moses was a gracious provision for God's people Israel, to set them apart from the nations, to sanctify them as his treasured possession, to render them fit to be his servant, the light to the nations. It was, in this sense, a means to an end. And as Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, "Christ is the end of the law" (10:4), which is to say, the telos of the Torah is the Messiah. Moses had a target, an aim, a goal, and it is fulfilled in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Both the work he accomplishes—sanctifying Israel, effecting forgiveness of sins, bringing near the reign of God—and the perfect obedience he offers—obedience to the Torah's literal commands but also to its heart, which is the revealed heart of the Lord God—bring to glorious fulfillment the purpose and meaning of Moses's Law: the law of love, the law of Christ.
3. Shekinah embodied
Jesus is Immanuel, God with us—but the Lord's presence in, with, among, and to Israel is not a novelty. Israel's scriptures are nothing but one long story of the Lord's passionate will to be present to and for his people: wrestling with Jacob, the fire by night and cloud by day, the tabernacle, the ark, the temple. The God of Israel is an indwelling God, a particular God (not deity in general) of a particular land and people (Abraham's children) who can be found, in Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod's memorable phrase, at One Temple Avenue, Jerusalem. But these are the foretaste and promise, not the reality or fulfillment. That came in the person of Mary's son, who took on flesh in her womb and was born and lived a man, that is, a fully human life lived by YHWH. He, Yeshua bar-Yehosef, is the Shekinah enfleshed, the fullness of the Godhead dwelling bodily amidst his people. And so he will dwell, forever, when heaven comes to earth on the last day.
4. Priesthood
The work of the priest is to stand between God and the people, mediating in both directions: representing God to the people, and representing the people to God. In love, the Lord established the priesthood in Israel through Aaron's line and the tribe of Levi. The principal work of the priest was to offer sacrifices before the Lord. Jesus was not a Levite, but he was a priest (according to the book of Hebrews) in the order of Melchizedek. Not only a priest, he is "a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God" (2:17), who offered once and for all his own life as a sacrifice for all the people—a perfect offering, because he, a priest without sin, offered not for himself but for others what they, not he, needed. And so this eternal priest makes offering in the heavenly sanctuary not made with human hands, Jesus the mediator between God and man, interceding for us before God the Father, an advocate and aid to all who seek the help of heaven.
5. Ingrafting
The seed of Abraham is the chosen people of God, and as Paul writes, the root of the tree of Israel is irreducibly and immutably Jewish (Rom 11:16-18). But the miraculous and unexpected work of the Messiah is so to accomplish salvation "apart from law"—"although the law and the prophets bear witness to it" (3:21)—that it applies not only to Jews, branches of Israel's tree by nature, but also to gentiles, a wild olive shoot ("contrary to nature" [11:24]). So that, through baptism and faith in the Messiah, both the natural and the wild branches belong to one and the same tree, the latter grafted in through the gracious hands of the Lord, who is God not only of the Jews but also of the gentiles (3:29).
IV. Natural Restoration
1. Knowledge
Humanity was created to know God, and in disobeying the command of God by seeking after forbidden knowledge, humanity fell away from the knowledge of God. Through Christ, however, the knowledge of God is restored, both in his own person, as a fully human being, and in those united to him by faith through baptism. As Colossians 3:9-10 states, believers have put off the old, fallen nature and been clothed in the new, regenerate nature—redeemed and remade in Christ—"which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator." Moreover, Christ came teaching, and in the Spirit and through Scripture, he remains our teacher, drawing us into true and saving knowledge of the Father.
2. Image
Humanity was and is created in the image of God, but through the Fall that image is tarnished, damaged, neither whole nor expressive, as it ought to be, of who human beings are and what they were made to be within the wider created order. Christ, though, as God from God and Light from Light, is neither made nor "in" the image of God: he is the image itself, from everlasting to everlasting. And so, in becoming human, he restores the imago Dei in human nature; all those in him share in that restored image, which will be theirs in full upon his return in glory—at which point they will finally take up their calling as image-bearing creatures among and for the sake of all other creatures.
3. Second Adam
Adam, the first man, fell; and in him all humanity fell, too. That is to say, all human beings share in the condition of our first parents: we are all "in Adam." But Jesus Christ is the new man, the Second Adam, and to be "in" Christ is to be incorporated into the life and body of this sinless one triumphant over death. Our sin died with him on the cross, and in his resurrection, he lives to God the super-abundant life of the Spirit, whom, in pouring him out on the church, he makes available to all those who draw near to him in faith. And in the End, when God is all in all, this Adam will not, can never fall; and the same is true of those he brings with him.
4. Healing
Fallenness means sickness, sickness of the soul and of the body. Christ is our healer, the great physician. He came healing, and those who asked him to be made whole had their petitions granted: "If you will... I will" (Mark 1:40-41). He also sent his disciples out with the same charge, and they healed in his name both before and after his crucifixion and resurrection. Never has a generation passed since then when some number of those who have asked him or his servants for healing have not borne witness to the Lord's healing in their mortal bodies. But no healing lasts in this life; the final healing will come with his second coming, when no disease or sickness will outlast his cleansing presence.
5. Life-giver
To be a creature is to be given existence, and to be created human is to be given the unsurpassably beautiful gift of life: the breath of life in our lungs, breathed in us by God himself (Gen 2:7). Death is the final enemy to be defeated (1 Cor 15:26), and as the wages of sin, death is bound up with opposition to God's good will for living creatures. By contrast, Christ is "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6); indeed, he is "the resurrection and the life" (11:25). He comes to bring us death-bound creatures life abundant (10:10), and from his heart rivers of life spring forth to nourish us (7:38). Even now, through his Spirit, we have a taste of "the eternal life which was with the Father" (1 John 1:2), the fullness of which will arrive at his appearing.
V. Perfected Relationship
1. Slavery
The Lord Jesus is the great deliverer, liberating his people from the chains of slavery: first from Egypt and the power of Pharaoh, finally from sin, death, and the power of Satan. Thus he assumed our nature that "through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage" (Heb 2:14-15). But as both Exodus and Romans testify, those once enslaved are not set free "for" anything at all; they are set free to be servants and worshipers of God. There is, in this sense, a transfer of masters, not a denial of life under lordship: though, in this case, a transfer not in degree but in kind—from the cruelty of unjust fellow creatures to the blessing of the only just and sovereign Master. And so, in this sense, what Jesus accomplishes in his life, death, and resurrection is the liberation of all peoples from servitude and subjection to any and all worldly masters, making us instead "slaves of righteousness" (Rom 6:8), that is to say, "slaves of Christ" (1 Cor 7:22).
2. Friendship
Having said that, we turn to 1 John: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love" (4:18). Indeed, as Jesus says in his final words to the disciples in the Gospel of John, "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You are my friends if you do what I command you" (15:15, 14). Thus, although it is proper to say that we are slaves of Christ, at least here below, this claim is subordinate and secondary to the theologically primary claim, that in the incarnation God befriends us, elevating us to friendship with himself. The work of Christ, simply put, is to make us his friends. And so he has, because his word and his life are true and efficacious. Nothing is so beautiful to imagine as beatitude experienced as everlasting friendship with the Holy Trinity.
3. Covenant Membership
There is no relationship with the God of Israel outside of covenant; YHWH is the God of covenant. Covenant is the gracious means by which the Lord establishes relations—saving, loving, lasting—with human women and men. It is, furthermore, the means by which he establishes them as more than isolated individuals or tribal clans or nations at odds, but as a community, a single people defined by relationship with God, the creator of all. Thus, Jesus saves not individuals but a people, the covenant people of God. But in doing so he fulfills the old covenant by creating a new covenant in his blood, sealed on the cross. To be redeemed, to be touched by the atoning love of Christ, is nothing other than to be included in this covenant, to be made a member of God's covenant family. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus: indeed, for outside the church there is no covenant, and to belong to the covenant is to belong to Christ himself, our savior, redeemer, and friend.
4. Feast
God saves by feeding; his salvation is a feast. The Passover meal, the manna and quail in the wilderness, the feasts and festivals at the temple: bread and meat to eat and wine and water to drink are the telltale signs of the Lord at work to deliver from bondage and atone for sin. So in the ministry of Jesus, whose first sign changes water to wine at a wedding feast (John 2:1-11) and whose reputation for partying was so renowned that he was slandered as a glutton and a drunkard (Matt 11:19)! No surprise, then, that the central practice of the church instituted by Jesus himself is a meal of bread and wine—elements that signify and mediate the bodily presence of the risen and ascended Lord himself—which meal itself figures the final marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:7-10). The heavenly banquet is prepared, and Christ invites us now, even as he did on earth, to partake of this saving food and drink, that is, his own body and blood (John 6:53-58).
5. Marriage
As Israel is the bride of YHWH, so the church is the bride of the Messiah. "'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church" (Eph 5:31-21). This is true at the communal as well as the individual level, since Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that, just as a united to a woman become one flesh with her, so a person "united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him" (6:16-17). In the end, when God creates new heavens and new earth, the marriage of the Lord and his covenant people will be consummated, and God and Abraham's children will be eternally one, for God is one, and he will be all in all (15:28).
VI. Supernatural Elevation
1. Forerunner
Christ not only takes our place and lives a truly human life on our behalf. He blazes the trail of salvation, in whose wake we have but to follow. He charts the path to God, a path from conception and birth through growth and life to death, descent, resurrection, and ascension. Our lives are but imitations of his, the journey of the One who went before, the forerunner, the archegos (Heb 12:2). Where our nature has gone with him, so we will and may go—including into heaven (Eph 2:5-6), before the presence of God almighty. And along the way, all of Christ's action is our instruction (an axiom of St. Thomas Aquinas). We are followers in the Way and learners in his school, until we see him face to face.
2. Adoption
Jesus Christ is the eternal, unique, only-begotten Son of God, incarnate in and as a human being. But precisely in his becoming flesh and blood, existing in every way like us apart from sin, he extends his Sonship to us through baptism in his Spirit, the Spirit of Sonship, which is to say, the Spirit of adoption (Rom 8:15, 23). We thus become the sisters and brothers of Christ, and therefore, one and all, the children of God by adoption. Just as gentiles are adopted through Abraham's seed to be, by faith, the children of Abraham, so both Jews and gentiles are adopted through God's only Son to be, through the gift of the Spirit in baptism, the sons and daughters of God.
3. Spirit-sender
The external operations of the Holy Trinity are indivisible, both in creation and in salvation. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are alike and equally Creator and Savior. Thus the Spirit is present and active at every moment of the incarnation and career and saving work of the Son. Jesus is conceived by the Spirit, filled with the Spirit, empowered by the Spirit, drawn by the Spirit, nourished by the Spirit, raised in the power of the Spirit—and when he ascends to heaven, Jesus pours our the Spirit he bore in his earthly life upon the apostles and, through them, all the baptized henceforth and forevermore. In sending the Spirit he sent the church, not alone, but filled by his presence, that is, the Spirit who makes him present in power, love, and peace. The Spirit gives life, and Jesus breathes the Spirit on us with unstinting grace (John 20:22).
4. Great exchange
Jesus not only substitutes himself as a man in our place; in his very being, in the hypostatic union that constitutes the eternal Son to be a man—perfect in divinity, perfect in humanity—he enacts the great, the beautiful, the happy exchange: he takes on our nature that he might gives us his. He assumes finitude, creatureliness, mortality; we receive the fullness of what it means to be the Spirit-filled Son of God the Father. The realities and shortcomings of humanity are his; the benefits and blessings of divinity are ours. The exchange happens in his own person, in the communication of properties between his two natures; and what happens there, in that one man, redounds to all women and men who share his human nature.
5. Theosis
Truly, in Christ, we "become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Pet 1:4). In the words of St. Athanasius, he became human that we might become divine. Or in C. S. Lewis's phrasing, the final end of the work of Christ is to make little Christs of all of us. And if Christ is God, then we are gods. Not, that is, that our nature is changed from human to divine. We remain human, as Christ remains human. Rather, our humanity is divinized, saturated with the divine glory and presence and consequently elevated to fellowship in the eternal communion of love that is the inexhaustible life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Spirit inserts us through the human nature of the glorified Son, Jesus, into this perfect circle of giving, sharing, and endless, enraptured happiness. We will see God, in the last, and to see God is to be conformed to himself, that is, to his image. And so we are, and so we will be. Soli Deo gloria.
Let me note two things at the outset. First, I took initial inspiration from Ben Myers' lovely patristic-flavored post on atonement theories from a few years back. Second, it seems to me that atonement is a particularly resonant English word that is very nearly interchangeable with salvation. To ask what atonement consists in, it seems to me, is to ask how Jesus saves. Or at least so I have assumed in what follows. Third, atonement is not one of my pet doctrines; I haven't read widely and deeply in it the way some of my friends and colleagues have. I'm sure that, somewhere below, I have left something out or inexpertly explained this or that theory. Pardons in advance.
Without further ado, my sixfold (really, 6 x 5) typology of the atonement.
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I. Royal Conquest
1. Ransom
Through the death of Jesus, the Messiah, God "ransoms" or buys back his elect people from their slavery to sin and death; this is the new and final Exodus, in which the Lord once and for all delivers his people from the Pharaoh-like Satan.
2. Christus victor
Jesus submits to death, the wages of sinful humanity, and in doing so puts death to death and triumphs over it in his resurrection from the dead, now eternally free from death in the life of God, never to die again.
3. Harrowing of hell
Jesus the King descends to the realm of the dead and claims what is his own: all the saints of old, awaiting the proclamation of good news to those who died in hope of his coming. The gates of hell tremble at the sound of his feet, and crack open as he takes his own with him into everlasting life: he, the Living One, in whose hands are now the keys to Death and Hades (Rev 1:18).
4. Exaltation
Jesus Christ is risen from the dead: and not only risen, but raised to glory eternal, the glory he had with the Father before the ages. Only now, it is in and as the human nature he assumed in Mary's womb that he is raised, glorified, ascended, enthroned at the right hand of the Father in the power of the Spirit, whence he rules and judges the affairs of earth until he returns again.
5. Citizenship
Having inaugurated his reign over creation, Christ extends the gift of heavenly citizenship to all who accept his rule. To live subject to the wise, just, and merciful kingship of Christ in between his two advents means to anticipate, even now, the glories of the kingdom of heaven that will be made manifest at his appearing, though they remain hidden as the church sojourns in the world.
II. Holy Justice
1. Suffering
This one little word, "suffered," serves in the New Testament as a euphemism or précis for the whole work of Christ. Why is that? "Christ also suffered for sins once for all" (1 Pet 3:18); "Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood" (Heb 13:12): we could multiply examples. There is a mystery here. First, Jesus shares in the human condition, under the weight of sin, evil, and death. His solidarity is complete. "For because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted" (Heb 2:18). Moreover, his suffering is salvific: the victim bleeds, the substitute is scourged, the one pronounced guilty is mocked and spat upon. We see, we feel, we intuit the depths of the mystery here—even if we cannot finds words adequate to it—that the eternal and impassible One has willed to undergo this passion simply because "he loved me" (Gal 2:20). It was necessary that the Lord's servant suffer rejection at the hands of both those under and those outside the Law: this very thing happened in our midst, for us and for our salvation.
2. Sacrifice
God is holy, and wills that his people be holy likewise. In old Israel, God graciously provided for the people to be cleansed of their sins through the shedding of blood, that is, through ritual sacrifices that sanctified them, in love, so that they might worship the Lord in his presence with a pure body and a clean conscience. Jesus Christ is the final sacrifice, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, that to which all prior sacrifices pointed and in which they participated (and, mutatis mutandis, so ever since, whether in praise, in illness, in martyrdom, or in the Eucharist). Jesus, the spotless victim, without blemish, offered himself upon the cross, a perfect and pleasing sacrifice to the God of Israel, thus cleansing, purifying, and sanctifying his beloved people, and effecting, once and for all, the forgiveness of sins.
3. Justification
God is righteous and just, the only good and wise Judge. Human righteousness consists in obedience to his commands, which is to live in accordance with the divine will. Humans, though, individually and collectively, are law-breakers, transgressors, guilty before the court of divine justice. We deserve condemnation, and indeed, guilty of sin and subject to death, we stand condemned, dead in our trespasses. But God in his mercy justifies the ungodly, offering pardon in the name of Christ to all who cast themselves in faith on him, the Crucified. He, the righteous one, stands in the dock, and our sentence becomes his—do not Pilate and the people sentence Jesus to a death reserved for the guilty?—while his status—do not Pilate and the Centurion recognize Jesus's just innocence?—becomes ours. Barabbas figures the believer who, through no merit of his own, is released, while Jesus does not resist taking his place. In short, the triune God delivers the final verdict, and though we have broken God's law, we are absolved, pardoned, pronounced innocent for the sake of Christ. Now therefore there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom 8:1).
4. Substitution
Jesus Christ, the one true and fully human man, takes our place. He lives and dies for us, on our behalf, for our sake. He is utterly and without reservation pro nobis, and he stands in our stead, so that we might stand in his. What was due us, comes to him; what is due him, comes to us. What is ours becomes his, and what is his becomes ours. All that he does, he does with us in mind, for our benefit. Whatever justice demands, he, the God-man, both exacts and accepts it. In him, we see our fate overturned, not by a miscarriage of justice, but by the mercy of the Just One offering himself in our place.
5. Satisfaction
What does humanity owe God our creator? Everything, as it turns out. It is a debt we owe simply in virtue of being the creatures we are, made from nothing and sustained in existence for no good reason other than the divine good pleasure. But we do not give God what is his due. We do not render obedience. We do not love him with our whole hearts; we do not love our neighbor as ourselves (as he commands). We do not live in constant, grateful dependence upon him. If we are to be restored to fellowship with the God who alone is just, good, and right, how are we to rectify the relationship we have broken (from our side)? Not by our own efforts, themselves already corrupt and corrupting. Only the offering of a fully human life perfect from start to finish could be thus acceptable. Thus does Jesus, the God-man, offer his own life to make satisfaction for all humanity, to "pay the debt we could not pay." By his death, he gives infinitely beyond what we ever could, and in rising from the dead and pouring out his Spirit, he gives with abandon what he does not need and what was always already his by nature, not only making restitution but gratuitously sharing gifts both beyond nature and beyond measure.
III. Israel's Fulfillment
1. Abraham's seed
The promise of the Lord to Abraham was that his seed would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, and that in his seed all the nations would be blessed (Gen 12:1-3; 22:17). Thus the New Testament begins by telling us that Jesus is the son of Abraham (Matt 1:1), and Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians that the seed (singular, not plural) of which the Lord spoke was Christ himself (3:16)—through him the nations have come to the Lord for blessing, by the selfsame faith with which Abraham believed the Lord's promise (Rom 4:23-25).
2. Torah's telos
The Law of Moses was a gracious provision for God's people Israel, to set them apart from the nations, to sanctify them as his treasured possession, to render them fit to be his servant, the light to the nations. It was, in this sense, a means to an end. And as Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, "Christ is the end of the law" (10:4), which is to say, the telos of the Torah is the Messiah. Moses had a target, an aim, a goal, and it is fulfilled in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Both the work he accomplishes—sanctifying Israel, effecting forgiveness of sins, bringing near the reign of God—and the perfect obedience he offers—obedience to the Torah's literal commands but also to its heart, which is the revealed heart of the Lord God—bring to glorious fulfillment the purpose and meaning of Moses's Law: the law of love, the law of Christ.
3. Shekinah embodied
Jesus is Immanuel, God with us—but the Lord's presence in, with, among, and to Israel is not a novelty. Israel's scriptures are nothing but one long story of the Lord's passionate will to be present to and for his people: wrestling with Jacob, the fire by night and cloud by day, the tabernacle, the ark, the temple. The God of Israel is an indwelling God, a particular God (not deity in general) of a particular land and people (Abraham's children) who can be found, in Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod's memorable phrase, at One Temple Avenue, Jerusalem. But these are the foretaste and promise, not the reality or fulfillment. That came in the person of Mary's son, who took on flesh in her womb and was born and lived a man, that is, a fully human life lived by YHWH. He, Yeshua bar-Yehosef, is the Shekinah enfleshed, the fullness of the Godhead dwelling bodily amidst his people. And so he will dwell, forever, when heaven comes to earth on the last day.
4. Priesthood
The work of the priest is to stand between God and the people, mediating in both directions: representing God to the people, and representing the people to God. In love, the Lord established the priesthood in Israel through Aaron's line and the tribe of Levi. The principal work of the priest was to offer sacrifices before the Lord. Jesus was not a Levite, but he was a priest (according to the book of Hebrews) in the order of Melchizedek. Not only a priest, he is "a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God" (2:17), who offered once and for all his own life as a sacrifice for all the people—a perfect offering, because he, a priest without sin, offered not for himself but for others what they, not he, needed. And so this eternal priest makes offering in the heavenly sanctuary not made with human hands, Jesus the mediator between God and man, interceding for us before God the Father, an advocate and aid to all who seek the help of heaven.
5. Ingrafting
The seed of Abraham is the chosen people of God, and as Paul writes, the root of the tree of Israel is irreducibly and immutably Jewish (Rom 11:16-18). But the miraculous and unexpected work of the Messiah is so to accomplish salvation "apart from law"—"although the law and the prophets bear witness to it" (3:21)—that it applies not only to Jews, branches of Israel's tree by nature, but also to gentiles, a wild olive shoot ("contrary to nature" [11:24]). So that, through baptism and faith in the Messiah, both the natural and the wild branches belong to one and the same tree, the latter grafted in through the gracious hands of the Lord, who is God not only of the Jews but also of the gentiles (3:29).
IV. Natural Restoration
1. Knowledge
Humanity was created to know God, and in disobeying the command of God by seeking after forbidden knowledge, humanity fell away from the knowledge of God. Through Christ, however, the knowledge of God is restored, both in his own person, as a fully human being, and in those united to him by faith through baptism. As Colossians 3:9-10 states, believers have put off the old, fallen nature and been clothed in the new, regenerate nature—redeemed and remade in Christ—"which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator." Moreover, Christ came teaching, and in the Spirit and through Scripture, he remains our teacher, drawing us into true and saving knowledge of the Father.
2. Image
Humanity was and is created in the image of God, but through the Fall that image is tarnished, damaged, neither whole nor expressive, as it ought to be, of who human beings are and what they were made to be within the wider created order. Christ, though, as God from God and Light from Light, is neither made nor "in" the image of God: he is the image itself, from everlasting to everlasting. And so, in becoming human, he restores the imago Dei in human nature; all those in him share in that restored image, which will be theirs in full upon his return in glory—at which point they will finally take up their calling as image-bearing creatures among and for the sake of all other creatures.
3. Second Adam
Adam, the first man, fell; and in him all humanity fell, too. That is to say, all human beings share in the condition of our first parents: we are all "in Adam." But Jesus Christ is the new man, the Second Adam, and to be "in" Christ is to be incorporated into the life and body of this sinless one triumphant over death. Our sin died with him on the cross, and in his resurrection, he lives to God the super-abundant life of the Spirit, whom, in pouring him out on the church, he makes available to all those who draw near to him in faith. And in the End, when God is all in all, this Adam will not, can never fall; and the same is true of those he brings with him.
4. Healing
Fallenness means sickness, sickness of the soul and of the body. Christ is our healer, the great physician. He came healing, and those who asked him to be made whole had their petitions granted: "If you will... I will" (Mark 1:40-41). He also sent his disciples out with the same charge, and they healed in his name both before and after his crucifixion and resurrection. Never has a generation passed since then when some number of those who have asked him or his servants for healing have not borne witness to the Lord's healing in their mortal bodies. But no healing lasts in this life; the final healing will come with his second coming, when no disease or sickness will outlast his cleansing presence.
5. Life-giver
To be a creature is to be given existence, and to be created human is to be given the unsurpassably beautiful gift of life: the breath of life in our lungs, breathed in us by God himself (Gen 2:7). Death is the final enemy to be defeated (1 Cor 15:26), and as the wages of sin, death is bound up with opposition to God's good will for living creatures. By contrast, Christ is "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6); indeed, he is "the resurrection and the life" (11:25). He comes to bring us death-bound creatures life abundant (10:10), and from his heart rivers of life spring forth to nourish us (7:38). Even now, through his Spirit, we have a taste of "the eternal life which was with the Father" (1 John 1:2), the fullness of which will arrive at his appearing.
V. Perfected Relationship
1. Slavery
The Lord Jesus is the great deliverer, liberating his people from the chains of slavery: first from Egypt and the power of Pharaoh, finally from sin, death, and the power of Satan. Thus he assumed our nature that "through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage" (Heb 2:14-15). But as both Exodus and Romans testify, those once enslaved are not set free "for" anything at all; they are set free to be servants and worshipers of God. There is, in this sense, a transfer of masters, not a denial of life under lordship: though, in this case, a transfer not in degree but in kind—from the cruelty of unjust fellow creatures to the blessing of the only just and sovereign Master. And so, in this sense, what Jesus accomplishes in his life, death, and resurrection is the liberation of all peoples from servitude and subjection to any and all worldly masters, making us instead "slaves of righteousness" (Rom 6:8), that is to say, "slaves of Christ" (1 Cor 7:22).
2. Friendship
Having said that, we turn to 1 John: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love" (4:18). Indeed, as Jesus says in his final words to the disciples in the Gospel of John, "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You are my friends if you do what I command you" (15:15, 14). Thus, although it is proper to say that we are slaves of Christ, at least here below, this claim is subordinate and secondary to the theologically primary claim, that in the incarnation God befriends us, elevating us to friendship with himself. The work of Christ, simply put, is to make us his friends. And so he has, because his word and his life are true and efficacious. Nothing is so beautiful to imagine as beatitude experienced as everlasting friendship with the Holy Trinity.
3. Covenant Membership
There is no relationship with the God of Israel outside of covenant; YHWH is the God of covenant. Covenant is the gracious means by which the Lord establishes relations—saving, loving, lasting—with human women and men. It is, furthermore, the means by which he establishes them as more than isolated individuals or tribal clans or nations at odds, but as a community, a single people defined by relationship with God, the creator of all. Thus, Jesus saves not individuals but a people, the covenant people of God. But in doing so he fulfills the old covenant by creating a new covenant in his blood, sealed on the cross. To be redeemed, to be touched by the atoning love of Christ, is nothing other than to be included in this covenant, to be made a member of God's covenant family. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus: indeed, for outside the church there is no covenant, and to belong to the covenant is to belong to Christ himself, our savior, redeemer, and friend.
4. Feast
God saves by feeding; his salvation is a feast. The Passover meal, the manna and quail in the wilderness, the feasts and festivals at the temple: bread and meat to eat and wine and water to drink are the telltale signs of the Lord at work to deliver from bondage and atone for sin. So in the ministry of Jesus, whose first sign changes water to wine at a wedding feast (John 2:1-11) and whose reputation for partying was so renowned that he was slandered as a glutton and a drunkard (Matt 11:19)! No surprise, then, that the central practice of the church instituted by Jesus himself is a meal of bread and wine—elements that signify and mediate the bodily presence of the risen and ascended Lord himself—which meal itself figures the final marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:7-10). The heavenly banquet is prepared, and Christ invites us now, even as he did on earth, to partake of this saving food and drink, that is, his own body and blood (John 6:53-58).
5. Marriage
As Israel is the bride of YHWH, so the church is the bride of the Messiah. "'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church" (Eph 5:31-21). This is true at the communal as well as the individual level, since Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that, just as a united to a woman become one flesh with her, so a person "united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him" (6:16-17). In the end, when God creates new heavens and new earth, the marriage of the Lord and his covenant people will be consummated, and God and Abraham's children will be eternally one, for God is one, and he will be all in all (15:28).
VI. Supernatural Elevation
1. Forerunner
Christ not only takes our place and lives a truly human life on our behalf. He blazes the trail of salvation, in whose wake we have but to follow. He charts the path to God, a path from conception and birth through growth and life to death, descent, resurrection, and ascension. Our lives are but imitations of his, the journey of the One who went before, the forerunner, the archegos (Heb 12:2). Where our nature has gone with him, so we will and may go—including into heaven (Eph 2:5-6), before the presence of God almighty. And along the way, all of Christ's action is our instruction (an axiom of St. Thomas Aquinas). We are followers in the Way and learners in his school, until we see him face to face.
2. Adoption
Jesus Christ is the eternal, unique, only-begotten Son of God, incarnate in and as a human being. But precisely in his becoming flesh and blood, existing in every way like us apart from sin, he extends his Sonship to us through baptism in his Spirit, the Spirit of Sonship, which is to say, the Spirit of adoption (Rom 8:15, 23). We thus become the sisters and brothers of Christ, and therefore, one and all, the children of God by adoption. Just as gentiles are adopted through Abraham's seed to be, by faith, the children of Abraham, so both Jews and gentiles are adopted through God's only Son to be, through the gift of the Spirit in baptism, the sons and daughters of God.
3. Spirit-sender
The external operations of the Holy Trinity are indivisible, both in creation and in salvation. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are alike and equally Creator and Savior. Thus the Spirit is present and active at every moment of the incarnation and career and saving work of the Son. Jesus is conceived by the Spirit, filled with the Spirit, empowered by the Spirit, drawn by the Spirit, nourished by the Spirit, raised in the power of the Spirit—and when he ascends to heaven, Jesus pours our the Spirit he bore in his earthly life upon the apostles and, through them, all the baptized henceforth and forevermore. In sending the Spirit he sent the church, not alone, but filled by his presence, that is, the Spirit who makes him present in power, love, and peace. The Spirit gives life, and Jesus breathes the Spirit on us with unstinting grace (John 20:22).
4. Great exchange
Jesus not only substitutes himself as a man in our place; in his very being, in the hypostatic union that constitutes the eternal Son to be a man—perfect in divinity, perfect in humanity—he enacts the great, the beautiful, the happy exchange: he takes on our nature that he might gives us his. He assumes finitude, creatureliness, mortality; we receive the fullness of what it means to be the Spirit-filled Son of God the Father. The realities and shortcomings of humanity are his; the benefits and blessings of divinity are ours. The exchange happens in his own person, in the communication of properties between his two natures; and what happens there, in that one man, redounds to all women and men who share his human nature.
5. Theosis
Truly, in Christ, we "become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Pet 1:4). In the words of St. Athanasius, he became human that we might become divine. Or in C. S. Lewis's phrasing, the final end of the work of Christ is to make little Christs of all of us. And if Christ is God, then we are gods. Not, that is, that our nature is changed from human to divine. We remain human, as Christ remains human. Rather, our humanity is divinized, saturated with the divine glory and presence and consequently elevated to fellowship in the eternal communion of love that is the inexhaustible life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Spirit inserts us through the human nature of the glorified Son, Jesus, into this perfect circle of giving, sharing, and endless, enraptured happiness. We will see God, in the last, and to see God is to be conformed to himself, that is, to his image. And so we are, and so we will be. Soli Deo gloria.
What does holiness look like?
The Protestant account of vocation smooths out the hierarchies of office (the priesthood of all believers) and of holy living (monastic life is no "better" than life working a farm). From one point of view, this is a good thing: no special religious caste; it flattens out "quality" of life: God calls each to his or her own station in life; holiness is democratized. From another point of view, this is a problem: it treats everything and everyone "the same," thus losing all differentiation; it lacks honesty, since in fact church ministry or serving the poor are, and will be treated as, more important than, say, working as a notary or drilling for oil; and worst of all, it loses the eschatological dimension of Christ's call, draining it of radical disorientation through the cross and resurrection and replacing it with the simple pleasures of local, family, and/or bourgeois life.
One way to frame the disjunction is to ask the question: Is the good life—that is, the faithful life of discipleship to Christ—taught by and embodied in a particular church tradition best exemplified by (1) the philosophy of Aristotle, (2) the Book of Proverbs, or (3) the Sermon on the Mount?
It seems to me that there is a problem if the answer, more or less full-stop, is (2).
My older, more Anabaptist self thought the answer, more or less full-stop, should be (3). And that's still true, in one sense.
But I find myself increasingly drawn to the long-standing catholic answer, which I would formulate this way: In terms of what we may reasonably expect and ordinarily teach, the common good ought to be ordered to (1); the average believer ought to be ordered (at a minimum) to (2); while the church as such, particularly in the form of its saints and martyrs (past), ordained and religious (present), ought to be ordered to (3). So that, even if those grouped in (2) never move from natural sapience to supernatural Chokmah—from the way of things to the Way of Wisdom Incarnate—the latter is held before their eyes as their eventual destination, not only the Way but the End, where all roads lead: to Christ, crucified, risen, glorified, and his Kingdom of little Christs. And in the process, perhaps those of us lesser saints, baptized as we are, will in fact move beyond our bourgeois comforts to the higher paths of harder, but better, living.
I'm mostly thinking out loud. And thinking in the midst of having my mind changed, or realizing it has changed. What I am convinced about is that, e.g., the moral vision of Wendell Berry is both good and beautiful and not sufficiently converted to the gospel. And if some forms of Christian political theology don't recognize that, then so much the worse for them.
One way to frame the disjunction is to ask the question: Is the good life—that is, the faithful life of discipleship to Christ—taught by and embodied in a particular church tradition best exemplified by (1) the philosophy of Aristotle, (2) the Book of Proverbs, or (3) the Sermon on the Mount?
It seems to me that there is a problem if the answer, more or less full-stop, is (2).
My older, more Anabaptist self thought the answer, more or less full-stop, should be (3). And that's still true, in one sense.
But I find myself increasingly drawn to the long-standing catholic answer, which I would formulate this way: In terms of what we may reasonably expect and ordinarily teach, the common good ought to be ordered to (1); the average believer ought to be ordered (at a minimum) to (2); while the church as such, particularly in the form of its saints and martyrs (past), ordained and religious (present), ought to be ordered to (3). So that, even if those grouped in (2) never move from natural sapience to supernatural Chokmah—from the way of things to the Way of Wisdom Incarnate—the latter is held before their eyes as their eventual destination, not only the Way but the End, where all roads lead: to Christ, crucified, risen, glorified, and his Kingdom of little Christs. And in the process, perhaps those of us lesser saints, baptized as we are, will in fact move beyond our bourgeois comforts to the higher paths of harder, but better, living.
I'm mostly thinking out loud. And thinking in the midst of having my mind changed, or realizing it has changed. What I am convinced about is that, e.g., the moral vision of Wendell Berry is both good and beautiful and not sufficiently converted to the gospel. And if some forms of Christian political theology don't recognize that, then so much the worse for them.
On Episode IX and J.J. Abrams
In 16 weeks, Episode IX—the conclusion to the final trilogy in the trilogy of trilogies that the Star Wars saga has become, not to mention the other stand-alone films and the new live-action TV show—will be released. The new teaser made available earlier this week generated a lot of discussion and speculation about plot lines and, above all, the direction the script will take and, ultimately, how it will wrap up the story.
Up till now I've tried to be realistic but hopeful about the possibility that J. J. Abrams might actually stick the landing, if not perfectly, than satisfactorily. What he did in VII was a combination of good and bad, but Rian Johnson took the hand he'd been dealt and did something masterful with it in VIII. Could Abrams have something equally excellent up his sleeve? Could he surprise us all by finally overcoming his worst tendencies and producing truly original, brilliant work?
The truth is that we have no reason to think so.
Consider the other films Abrams has written and/or directed in the last 15 years: Mission: Impossible III, Star Trek, Super 8, Star Trek Into Darkness, and The Force Awakens. The Rise of Skywalker is only the sixth film he has directed—and, if you begin in 1998 when he began to "be" J.J. Abrams (i.e., with the release of Armageddon and the premiere of Felicity), he's also only written six films.
Of those he has directed, only one was an original property, and only two, strictly speaking, were not a sequel. Three were expansions of TV shows. And as for each considered individually:
–M:I:3 is a polished 2-hour TV movie that is clearly a "first film."
–Star Trek is a retelling of the original Star Wars in Gene Roddenberry's universe, with an altered timeline and some yadda-yadda-ing of plot to get the Right Characters in the Right Place sooner rather than later.
–Super 8 is E.T. for millennials, with CGI.
–Star Trek Into Darkness is—as you know—a semi-remake of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The less said about this one the better.
–And then there's Episode VII, which simultaneously re-launched Star Wars for a new generation and, in the structure of the whole film but especially in the final act, came close to being a beat-for-beat remake of Episode IV. A reboot that's also a sequel, somehow.
And now we come to Episode IX, which features the return of Lando Calrissian and, inexplicably, Emperor Palpatine. What could go wrong?
* * *
Now, I'm underselling Abrams' talents in the way I've presented his work. He has real strengths. He may be second only to Spielberg in his ability to cast, both knowns and unknowns. His direction of actors draws out the best of them. He can write and direct both dialogue and rapport with the best of them. And his films move: for all the flaws of the rest of the film, the opening 45 minutes of The Force Awakens is blockbuster filmmaking nonpareil. Oh, and his actual technique, in terms of frame and composition and color and so on, is underrated. Each of his films has improved substantially in that respect.
But Abrams' chief vice, his fatal shortcoming, undermines each and every one of these virtues: namely, his affinity for nostalgia, for telling and re-telling the stories he grew up with and whose essential beats, he knows, his audience yearns to see in only slightly dressed-up form.
Had he made only one or two different decisions in VII—say, having Starkiller Base fail in its attempt to destroy the New Republic, or having the Resistance's attempt to disable and destroy the Base fail, thus resulting in a lack of catharsis and non-replay of IV—things could have gone differently there, because it's clear that Abrams was trying to comment on his own, which is to say his generation's, inability to move beyond the past, to play dress-up in Boomer Glory even as a decadent empire falls apart. Kylo Ren is, in that respect, a perfect pop culture creation.
But he didn't have the courage or the imagination or the awareness or the studio support to go fully revisionary in his Star Wars entry, and thus here we are.
* * *
So: Might Episode IX be good?
In fact, that's not the right question, because it will without a doubt be good, because Abrams doesn't make bad movies. The problem, rather, is that he may only make Good Movies.
Rephrasing, then: Will Episode IX be more than good? Will Abrams upset our expectations beyond the mystery box and a couple "shocking" surprises?
The answer, unfortunately, is no. Every sign points to it. There will be funny rapport and lovely images and stirring character beats and some fantastic action. But Abrams won't be able to resist the siren song of nostalgia. The nods and winks to the prequels and original trilogy, the recycling of old themes and narrative devices and literal resurrected characters: they're all going to be there, in full, without apology. And that'll be the end of that. Best to accept it now rather than manufacture unfounded expectations for a writer-director who has been nothing if not consistent for two decades of TV and film work.
That'll be the end of the Skywalker saga, and if we're lucky, the end of Abrams' involvement with Star Wars, too—for good.
Up till now I've tried to be realistic but hopeful about the possibility that J. J. Abrams might actually stick the landing, if not perfectly, than satisfactorily. What he did in VII was a combination of good and bad, but Rian Johnson took the hand he'd been dealt and did something masterful with it in VIII. Could Abrams have something equally excellent up his sleeve? Could he surprise us all by finally overcoming his worst tendencies and producing truly original, brilliant work?
The truth is that we have no reason to think so.
Consider the other films Abrams has written and/or directed in the last 15 years: Mission: Impossible III, Star Trek, Super 8, Star Trek Into Darkness, and The Force Awakens. The Rise of Skywalker is only the sixth film he has directed—and, if you begin in 1998 when he began to "be" J.J. Abrams (i.e., with the release of Armageddon and the premiere of Felicity), he's also only written six films.
Of those he has directed, only one was an original property, and only two, strictly speaking, were not a sequel. Three were expansions of TV shows. And as for each considered individually:
–M:I:3 is a polished 2-hour TV movie that is clearly a "first film."
–Star Trek is a retelling of the original Star Wars in Gene Roddenberry's universe, with an altered timeline and some yadda-yadda-ing of plot to get the Right Characters in the Right Place sooner rather than later.
–Super 8 is E.T. for millennials, with CGI.
–Star Trek Into Darkness is—as you know—a semi-remake of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The less said about this one the better.
–And then there's Episode VII, which simultaneously re-launched Star Wars for a new generation and, in the structure of the whole film but especially in the final act, came close to being a beat-for-beat remake of Episode IV. A reboot that's also a sequel, somehow.
And now we come to Episode IX, which features the return of Lando Calrissian and, inexplicably, Emperor Palpatine. What could go wrong?
* * *
Now, I'm underselling Abrams' talents in the way I've presented his work. He has real strengths. He may be second only to Spielberg in his ability to cast, both knowns and unknowns. His direction of actors draws out the best of them. He can write and direct both dialogue and rapport with the best of them. And his films move: for all the flaws of the rest of the film, the opening 45 minutes of The Force Awakens is blockbuster filmmaking nonpareil. Oh, and his actual technique, in terms of frame and composition and color and so on, is underrated. Each of his films has improved substantially in that respect.
But Abrams' chief vice, his fatal shortcoming, undermines each and every one of these virtues: namely, his affinity for nostalgia, for telling and re-telling the stories he grew up with and whose essential beats, he knows, his audience yearns to see in only slightly dressed-up form.
Had he made only one or two different decisions in VII—say, having Starkiller Base fail in its attempt to destroy the New Republic, or having the Resistance's attempt to disable and destroy the Base fail, thus resulting in a lack of catharsis and non-replay of IV—things could have gone differently there, because it's clear that Abrams was trying to comment on his own, which is to say his generation's, inability to move beyond the past, to play dress-up in Boomer Glory even as a decadent empire falls apart. Kylo Ren is, in that respect, a perfect pop culture creation.
But he didn't have the courage or the imagination or the awareness or the studio support to go fully revisionary in his Star Wars entry, and thus here we are.
* * *
So: Might Episode IX be good?
In fact, that's not the right question, because it will without a doubt be good, because Abrams doesn't make bad movies. The problem, rather, is that he may only make Good Movies.
Rephrasing, then: Will Episode IX be more than good? Will Abrams upset our expectations beyond the mystery box and a couple "shocking" surprises?
The answer, unfortunately, is no. Every sign points to it. There will be funny rapport and lovely images and stirring character beats and some fantastic action. But Abrams won't be able to resist the siren song of nostalgia. The nods and winks to the prequels and original trilogy, the recycling of old themes and narrative devices and literal resurrected characters: they're all going to be there, in full, without apology. And that'll be the end of that. Best to accept it now rather than manufacture unfounded expectations for a writer-director who has been nothing if not consistent for two decades of TV and film work.
That'll be the end of the Skywalker saga, and if we're lucky, the end of Abrams' involvement with Star Wars, too—for good.
Anonymous Americans
Perhaps someone else has made this connection before, but it seems to me that there is a secularized form of Rahner's so-called "anonymous Christians" at work in American political discourse. It has right and left variations, but the theme is the same: In principle, the world is always already America; persons from other places, citizens of other nations, are Americans in embryo: the potential merely needs to be made actual. In this way non-Americans are in fact anonymous Americans, Americans without knowing it, Americans of the heart: related to and defined by America simply in virtue of who they are and how they live. And though they may lack this knowledge, we Americans, we explicit, public Americans—we know it on their behalf.
On the right, this takes the form of speaking as if other countries are good places to live just to the extent that they approximate the American way of life; so that any person or family beyond America's borders would, if given the chance to become American (without cost, risk, etc.), take the opportunity in a heartbeat. The American polity lies at the end of history, toward which horizon all the nations stream to receive instruction and pay homage.
On the left, this takes the form of speaking as if people from other countries are, in an almost metaphysical sense, already American, and thus owed, indeed entitled, to all the civic, social, legal, and other rights and privileges bestowed upon "official" Americans. If segments of the right envision open borders for the sake of freer movement of ideas and capital, segments of the left imagine open borders nominally as the elimination of the divisions enacted in the nation-state system, but effectively as the Americanization of the world: all are Americans, proleptically speaking; it just so happens that only a small portion of them have formal documentation to prove it at the moment.
No wonder that Americanists right and left so often unite in foreign adventurism, whether of the imperial or the humanitarian variety. Anonymous Americans around the world are living under conditions of great deprivation, definitionally speaking: they are expats of an ontological variety, exiled in advance of the great homecoming. No wonder, too, that the adventurism takes on the veneer of the Great Commission. Not only evangelization but eschatological in-gathering is the driving vision, the basis and the motivation for actions abroad rooted in faith, that is, the substance of things hoped for, the knowledge of things unseen.
On the last day, the great sorting will occur. But instead of Matthew 25, more often it is Isaiah 2, Micah 4, and Revelation 22 that fill out the picture of the End. The dazzling light of final freedom will disclose the hearts of the people, and the people's hearts will be, to a person, American. Even if—especially if—they never had a clue.
On the right, this takes the form of speaking as if other countries are good places to live just to the extent that they approximate the American way of life; so that any person or family beyond America's borders would, if given the chance to become American (without cost, risk, etc.), take the opportunity in a heartbeat. The American polity lies at the end of history, toward which horizon all the nations stream to receive instruction and pay homage.
On the left, this takes the form of speaking as if people from other countries are, in an almost metaphysical sense, already American, and thus owed, indeed entitled, to all the civic, social, legal, and other rights and privileges bestowed upon "official" Americans. If segments of the right envision open borders for the sake of freer movement of ideas and capital, segments of the left imagine open borders nominally as the elimination of the divisions enacted in the nation-state system, but effectively as the Americanization of the world: all are Americans, proleptically speaking; it just so happens that only a small portion of them have formal documentation to prove it at the moment.
No wonder that Americanists right and left so often unite in foreign adventurism, whether of the imperial or the humanitarian variety. Anonymous Americans around the world are living under conditions of great deprivation, definitionally speaking: they are expats of an ontological variety, exiled in advance of the great homecoming. No wonder, too, that the adventurism takes on the veneer of the Great Commission. Not only evangelization but eschatological in-gathering is the driving vision, the basis and the motivation for actions abroad rooted in faith, that is, the substance of things hoped for, the knowledge of things unseen.
On the last day, the great sorting will occur. But instead of Matthew 25, more often it is Isaiah 2, Micah 4, and Revelation 22 that fill out the picture of the End. The dazzling light of final freedom will disclose the hearts of the people, and the people's hearts will be, to a person, American. Even if—especially if—they never had a clue.
Political spectrums
I live deep in the heart of red state Texas, which means I regularly find myself trying to expand the political imaginations of my students. Not, that is, to switch their allegiances from one color to another, but to redraw the map they've inherited; to place a question mark next to its self-evident obviousness, which they treat as if it were the periodic table of elements (with only two to choose from!).
So I've come up with a heuristic that is meant to help students in my context. Mostly I want them to see the array of combinations, both of political first principles and concrete policy convictions, beyond lining up the GOP's national platform versus the DNC's. So, e.g., I want them to be introduced to (the concept of) Catholic Communists and Pro-Life Progressives and Democratic Socialists and Communitarian Conservatives and so on.
What follows is the set of spectrums, eight in all, that I've conjured up in order to help them in this process. I would be very interested in learning about other examples of this sort of thing, either in print or in the classroom. Here's mine, with brief of explanations for each, mostly in the form of questions.
1. Secular———————Religious
The question here is not whether one is individually religious. It is whether and to what extent one believes the governing authorities ought to be religious in character. The extremes here would be laïcité versus integralism; less extreme: separation of church and state versus established religion. Appeal to common faith or to Scripture as public norms, or practices like prayer in public schools, are litmus tests for where one stands on this spectrum.
2. Individualist—————Communitarian
Is the fundamental unit of society the individual, the family, the extended kin network, the neighborhood, the town, the city, or other? What is privileged in law and social mores? Is it plausible to treat groups as units irreducible to the individual—or no? Why or why not? Can such units be neither familial nor racial but, e.g., religious? This spectrum helps to answer such questions.
3. Democratic—————Aristocratic
How should the policies that govern and order society be decided and enacted? Who has authority to say so and power to make it so? Should any and all laws be put up to a direct vote by "the people"? Should adults be legally required to vote? Should one's vote ever be taken away? Should any processes of policy deliberation and creation be delegated to representatives? If so, ought those representatives to do what they deem the wisest course, or ought they to do whatever (the majority of) their voters say they want? Does society inevitably have a "ruling class" of "elites"? If it does, should this tendency be curtailed, indeed resisted, or should it be cultivated toward the common good? How "mixed" should government be, and what norms or laws, if any, militate against 50.1% majoritarian rule?
4. Liberal———————Illiberal*
What is "freedom," and how should it be protected or encouraged by the governing authorities? Does freedom pertain to individuals or communities? Is it purely negative (i.e., freedom from interference) or also positive (i.e., freedom to do, be, or say X or Y)? What may or must society "enforce" in the lives of its citizens? Are there moral or legal norms beyond the harm principle? How may they be adjudicated? Are the liberties properly sought or secured in society a creation of said society, or do they antedate their own formal recognition? What is their metaphysical status, in other words? Are they necessarily connected with "rights," or are "rights" as a concept unnecessary in a free polity? Are there "freedoms" or "rights" it is better not to permit, legally or otherwise, given the consequences for the common good? What are they, how can they be identified, and by what measure are they judged good or bad for society?
(*Initially I had "authoritarian" here, which would appear to load the deck. If someone has a nice neutral alternative term here, I'm all ears.)
5. Socialist———————Libertarian
What is the ideal, most practicable, or most preferable political economy? One in which private property is abolished or protected? Should workers own the means of production? Is the accumulation of enormous quantities of capital permissible? If permissible, is it encouraged or discouraged? Should the governing authorities have the authority to bestow or remove money or property to or from individuals or communities? If so, under what circumstances and for what reasons may it do so? To what extent should markets predominate in society, and to what extent, if any, should the governing authorities be able and willing to intervene in or to regulate those markets? Is political economy a matter of first principles, universal in scope and applicable to all contexts, or is it a pragmatic or prudential matter, local in scope and differentiated in application? What level of inequity is tolerable in society—if any at all?
6. Progressive——————Conservative
What is the proper stance toward the past? Should it be received as a gift to treasure and pass on to the next generation? Or is it primarily a legacy of oppression and suffering to reject and/or transform in the present, for the sake of a more just future? Where do the dangers lie—in an undue pessimism about our ability to improve our lot and the lot of our neighbors, or in an overly optimistic confidence in our capacity for radical change for the better? What is the status of moral and social mores and traditions? Are they wise, hard-earned advice handed on by the democracy of the dead? Or are they stultifying, lifeless customs holding us in the grip of a past from which we need liberation? Must social practices by "rationally" justified in order to approve of them or incentivize them in others? What is the weight of convention? What authority, if any, do parents, families, neighbors, pastors, civic leaders possess, and to what extent, if any, should deference be paid to them?
7. Internationalist————Nationalist
To what or to whom are one's loyalties properly due? Is patriotism a virtue? Is it a moral obligation? Are "nations" the fundamental macro-corporate political unit? Should they be? (What of supra-national entities? What of empires?) To what extent, if any, does one owe one's fellow citizens of a nation affection, affinity, or service beyond what one owes to persons from other nations? Does one owe "allegiance" to one's nation? Is allegiance different than love, and if so, how? Would the world be improved if nations were dissolved, or at least, if national identities were softened substantially? Is one's national identity an essential part of oneself? Should it be?
8. Globalist———————Localist
Though similar to the previous spectrum, this one asks a different kind of question: What is the proper scope or extent of the polity to which one belongs and to which one owes service? Hypothetically one could be an internationalist localist: caring little for the nation as such, but finding life beyond the "local"—defined, let us say, as the concentric circles of household, neighborhood, and town, populated at the outer limit in the tens of thousands, but smaller than a full-blown city—too large for thick membership. The localist knows the names of her neighbors, streets, rivers, trees, native fauna, seasonal weather, and so on. The "globe" is an abstraction, and "global citizen" a contradiction in terms. Whereas the globalist thinks the localist backwards, parochial, nostalgic, or doomed for extinction in the near future. Politics is top-down, and while local town councils might seem to get stuff down, the forces that determine life in the 21st century, even the lives of farming and ranching communities in rural contexts, are as macro-global as can be. Best to recognize the fact and live accordingly rather than head for the bunker, hoping for the clock to turn back a few centuries.
/ / / / / / /
So much, anyway, for the heuristic I've come up with. For my students, as I say, what I want them to see beyond is both the GOP/DNC binary and the Right/Left master-filter. There are illiberal conservative socialists, and progressive nationalists, and secular aristocrats, and libertarian democrats, and communitarian liberals, and religious globalists, and on and on. (We'll leave aside the anarcho-syndicalists for the moment.)
Hopefully my students are enabled to reflect on the complexity of their own political commitments as well as learn a less reductive lens for interpreting the commitments of others. At the very least, my hope is to engender a more productive conversation in the classroom.
So I've come up with a heuristic that is meant to help students in my context. Mostly I want them to see the array of combinations, both of political first principles and concrete policy convictions, beyond lining up the GOP's national platform versus the DNC's. So, e.g., I want them to be introduced to (the concept of) Catholic Communists and Pro-Life Progressives and Democratic Socialists and Communitarian Conservatives and so on.
What follows is the set of spectrums, eight in all, that I've conjured up in order to help them in this process. I would be very interested in learning about other examples of this sort of thing, either in print or in the classroom. Here's mine, with brief of explanations for each, mostly in the form of questions.
1. Secular———————Religious
The question here is not whether one is individually religious. It is whether and to what extent one believes the governing authorities ought to be religious in character. The extremes here would be laïcité versus integralism; less extreme: separation of church and state versus established religion. Appeal to common faith or to Scripture as public norms, or practices like prayer in public schools, are litmus tests for where one stands on this spectrum.
2. Individualist—————Communitarian
Is the fundamental unit of society the individual, the family, the extended kin network, the neighborhood, the town, the city, or other? What is privileged in law and social mores? Is it plausible to treat groups as units irreducible to the individual—or no? Why or why not? Can such units be neither familial nor racial but, e.g., religious? This spectrum helps to answer such questions.
3. Democratic—————Aristocratic
How should the policies that govern and order society be decided and enacted? Who has authority to say so and power to make it so? Should any and all laws be put up to a direct vote by "the people"? Should adults be legally required to vote? Should one's vote ever be taken away? Should any processes of policy deliberation and creation be delegated to representatives? If so, ought those representatives to do what they deem the wisest course, or ought they to do whatever (the majority of) their voters say they want? Does society inevitably have a "ruling class" of "elites"? If it does, should this tendency be curtailed, indeed resisted, or should it be cultivated toward the common good? How "mixed" should government be, and what norms or laws, if any, militate against 50.1% majoritarian rule?
4. Liberal———————Illiberal*
What is "freedom," and how should it be protected or encouraged by the governing authorities? Does freedom pertain to individuals or communities? Is it purely negative (i.e., freedom from interference) or also positive (i.e., freedom to do, be, or say X or Y)? What may or must society "enforce" in the lives of its citizens? Are there moral or legal norms beyond the harm principle? How may they be adjudicated? Are the liberties properly sought or secured in society a creation of said society, or do they antedate their own formal recognition? What is their metaphysical status, in other words? Are they necessarily connected with "rights," or are "rights" as a concept unnecessary in a free polity? Are there "freedoms" or "rights" it is better not to permit, legally or otherwise, given the consequences for the common good? What are they, how can they be identified, and by what measure are they judged good or bad for society?
(*Initially I had "authoritarian" here, which would appear to load the deck. If someone has a nice neutral alternative term here, I'm all ears.)
5. Socialist———————Libertarian
What is the ideal, most practicable, or most preferable political economy? One in which private property is abolished or protected? Should workers own the means of production? Is the accumulation of enormous quantities of capital permissible? If permissible, is it encouraged or discouraged? Should the governing authorities have the authority to bestow or remove money or property to or from individuals or communities? If so, under what circumstances and for what reasons may it do so? To what extent should markets predominate in society, and to what extent, if any, should the governing authorities be able and willing to intervene in or to regulate those markets? Is political economy a matter of first principles, universal in scope and applicable to all contexts, or is it a pragmatic or prudential matter, local in scope and differentiated in application? What level of inequity is tolerable in society—if any at all?
6. Progressive——————Conservative
What is the proper stance toward the past? Should it be received as a gift to treasure and pass on to the next generation? Or is it primarily a legacy of oppression and suffering to reject and/or transform in the present, for the sake of a more just future? Where do the dangers lie—in an undue pessimism about our ability to improve our lot and the lot of our neighbors, or in an overly optimistic confidence in our capacity for radical change for the better? What is the status of moral and social mores and traditions? Are they wise, hard-earned advice handed on by the democracy of the dead? Or are they stultifying, lifeless customs holding us in the grip of a past from which we need liberation? Must social practices by "rationally" justified in order to approve of them or incentivize them in others? What is the weight of convention? What authority, if any, do parents, families, neighbors, pastors, civic leaders possess, and to what extent, if any, should deference be paid to them?
7. Internationalist————Nationalist
To what or to whom are one's loyalties properly due? Is patriotism a virtue? Is it a moral obligation? Are "nations" the fundamental macro-corporate political unit? Should they be? (What of supra-national entities? What of empires?) To what extent, if any, does one owe one's fellow citizens of a nation affection, affinity, or service beyond what one owes to persons from other nations? Does one owe "allegiance" to one's nation? Is allegiance different than love, and if so, how? Would the world be improved if nations were dissolved, or at least, if national identities were softened substantially? Is one's national identity an essential part of oneself? Should it be?
8. Globalist———————Localist
Though similar to the previous spectrum, this one asks a different kind of question: What is the proper scope or extent of the polity to which one belongs and to which one owes service? Hypothetically one could be an internationalist localist: caring little for the nation as such, but finding life beyond the "local"—defined, let us say, as the concentric circles of household, neighborhood, and town, populated at the outer limit in the tens of thousands, but smaller than a full-blown city—too large for thick membership. The localist knows the names of her neighbors, streets, rivers, trees, native fauna, seasonal weather, and so on. The "globe" is an abstraction, and "global citizen" a contradiction in terms. Whereas the globalist thinks the localist backwards, parochial, nostalgic, or doomed for extinction in the near future. Politics is top-down, and while local town councils might seem to get stuff down, the forces that determine life in the 21st century, even the lives of farming and ranching communities in rural contexts, are as macro-global as can be. Best to recognize the fact and live accordingly rather than head for the bunker, hoping for the clock to turn back a few centuries.
/ / / / / / /
So much, anyway, for the heuristic I've come up with. For my students, as I say, what I want them to see beyond is both the GOP/DNC binary and the Right/Left master-filter. There are illiberal conservative socialists, and progressive nationalists, and secular aristocrats, and libertarian democrats, and communitarian liberals, and religious globalists, and on and on. (We'll leave aside the anarcho-syndicalists for the moment.)
Hopefully my students are enabled to reflect on the complexity of their own political commitments as well as learn a less reductive lens for interpreting the commitments of others. At the very least, my hope is to engender a more productive conversation in the classroom.
Curriculum Vitae
Brad East
Assistant Professor of Theology
Abilene Christian University,
College of Biblical Studies
1850 Teague Boulevard, ACU Box
29420, Abilene, TX 79699
(325) 674-3736 || brad.east@acu.edu
EDUCATION
2017 Yale University
Ph.D. (M.A., M.Phil) in Religious
Studies (Theology)
Dissertation: The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in
Ecclesial Context in the Work
of
John Howard Yoder, Robert Jenson, and John Webster
Committee: Kathryn Tanner
(advisor), David Kelsey, Miroslav Volf, Stephen Fowl
2011 Emory University, Candler School
of Theology
M.Div. summa cum laude (Theology and Ethics)
2007 Abilene Christian University
B.A. summa cum laude in Biblical Text
HONORS, AWARDS, AND SCHOLARSHIPS
2015–2017 Graduate Fellowship Award, Christian
Scholarship Foundation
2015 Louise and Richard Goodwin Prize
for Excellence in Theological Writing
2014–2016 Doctoral Fellowship, Louisville Institute
2014–2015 Graduate Research Lecturer, Heritage
Christian University
2011 Award for Academic Excellence,
Candler School of Theology
2010 Award for Excellence in Biblical
Scholarship, Candler School of Theology
2008–2011 Honor Scholarship, Candler School of
Theology
2007 University Scholar Award,
Abilene Christian University
2004–2007 Presidential Scholarship, Abilene Christian
University
BOOKS
The
Church: A Guide to the People of God
(Christian Essentials; Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2023).
The
Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022).
The
Doctrine of Scripture
(Cascade Companions; Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2021).
EDITED BOOKS
Robert
W. Jenson, The Triune Story: Collected Essays
on Scripture (New York: Oxford University
Press,
2019).
JOURNAL ARTICLES
“The
Church and the Spirit in Robert Jenson’s Theology of Scripture,” Pro Ecclesia 28:3 (2019):
278–300.
“What
is the Doctrine of the Trinity For? Practicality and Projection in Robert
Jenson’s Theology,”
Modern Theology 33:3 (2017): 414–433.
“John
Webster, Theologian Proper,” Anglican
Theological Review 99:2 (2017): 333–351.
“The
Hermeneutics of Theological Interpretation: Holy Scripture, Biblical
Scholarship, and
Historical
Criticism,” International Journal of
Systematic Theology 19:1 (2017): 30–52.
“Reading
the Trinity in the Bible: Assumptions, Warrants, Ends,” Pro Ecclesia 25:4 (2016): 459–
474.
“An
Undefensive Presence: The Mission and Identity of the Church in Kathryn Tanner and
John
Howard
Yoder,” Scottish Journal of Theology
68:3 (2015): 327–344.
“Hooking
In, Sitting Loose: A Call for Theology in the Churches of Christ,” Restoration Quarterly
54:4
(2012): 219–228.
“Though
the Earth Give Way: Haiti, Suffering, and the Crucified God,” The Other Journal 16:5
(2010).
BOOK CHAPTERS
“Preaching
Peace in Violent Times: Faithful Approaches for Pacifist Pastors to Speak the
Truth in
Love,”
Preaching and the Theological Imagination,
ed. Zachary Guiliano and Cameron
Partridge
(New York: Peter Lang, 2015), 231–250.
“A
Response to Jon Coutts on Barth and the Coen Brothers,” Karl Barth in Conversation, ed. David
Congdon
and W. Travis McMaken (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2014), 247–
254.
BOOK REVIEWS
Steven
J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian
Theology, in
International
Journal of Systematic Theology
(forthcoming).
Joseph
K. Gordon, Divine Scripture in Human
Understanding: A Systematic Theology of the Christian
Bible, in Anglican Theological Review (forthcoming).
Keith D.
Stanglin, The Letter and Spirit of
Biblical Interpretation: From the Early Church to Modern
Practice, in Interpretation (forthcoming).
Hans
Boersma, Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental
Exegesis in the Early Church, in Interpretation
73:1
(2019): 91–92.
Kevin
J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Authority After
Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant
Christianity, in Interpretation 73:1 (2019): 90–91.
Gary
Anderson, Christian Doctrine and the Old
Testament: Theology in the Service of Exegesis, in
International Journal of
Systematic Theology
19:4 (2017): 534-537.
John
Howard Yoder, ed. Gayle Gerber Koontz and Andy Alexis-Baker, Theology of Mission: A
Believers Church Perspective, in Scottish Journal of Theology 69:3 (2016): 370–371.
Nicholas
M. Healy, Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical
Introduction, in International
Journal of Systematic
Theology 18:2 (2016): 236–239.
Scott
R. Swain, The God of the Gospel: Robert
Jenson’s Trinitarian Theology, in Pro
Ecclesia 23:4
(2014):
471–474.
Kevin
Giles, The Eternal Generation of the Son:
Maintaining Orthodoxy in Trinitarian Theology, in
Restoration Quarterly 56:3 (2014): 188–189.
Duane
Olson, Issues in Contemporary Christian
Thought: A Fortress Introduction, in Restoration
Quarterly 55:4 (2013): 255–256.
Lee
Camp, Who Is My Enemy?: Questions
American Christians Must Face About Islam—and
Themselves, in Restoration Quarterly 55:2 (2013): 124–126.
PAPERS AND PRESENTATIONS
“A
Third Way for Churches of Christ,” Summit Lectureship, Abilene, TX, September 18,
2019.
“Untidy
Scripture, Systematic Theology: Some Friendly Questions for Joe Gordon,” Christian
Scholars’ Conference, Lubbock, TX, June
7, 2019.
“How to
Think, or: How to Resist the Social Media-fication of Relationships,” Summer
Seminar,
Abilene,
TX, August 3, 2018.
“Theology
of Scripture: Ecclesiological Reflections,” Christian Scholars’ Conference, Nashville,
TN,
June
6, 2018.
“Theological
Reflections on Movies as Prayers,” Christian Scholars’ Conference, Nashville,
TN,
June
6, 2018.
“Unlike
Any Other Book: Theological Reflections on the Bible and its Faithful
Interpretation,”
Baylor
University, Waco, TX, February 10, 2018.
“How
Should We Read John Howard Yoder in Light of His Abuse of Women?” Ethics Colloquium,
Yale
University, New Haven, CT, November 18, 2015.
“Undefensive
Ecclesiology and Engaging the Wider Tradition”; “10 Commitments of Theological
Interpretation,”
Heritage Christian University, Florence, AL, April 1, 2015.
“Some
Nonnegotiables in Theological Interpretation Done Well, or: On Keeping the
Fight Alive
with
Biblical Scholarship,” Christian Scholars’ Conference, Nashville, TN, June 5,
2014.
“Patiently
Awaiting the Death and Resurrection of the Universe: Eschatological Memory and
Ecological
Ethics in 2 Peter 3:1–13,” Christian Scholars’ Conference, Nashville, TN, June
7,
2013.
“An
Undefensive Presence: The Mission and Identity of the Church in Kathryn Tanner
and John
Howard
Yoder,” annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Chicago, IL,
November
19, 2012.
“Hooking
In, Sitting Loose: A Call for Theology in the Churches of Christ,” Christian
Scholars’
Conference,
Nashville, TN, June 7, 2012.
“Disciples
of a State Criminal: How the Mission of the Church Relates to the U.S.
Imprisonment
Crisis,”
Stone-Campbell Journal Conference, Lincoln Christian University, Lincoln, IL,
April
14, 2012.
POPULAR, ONLINE, AND OTHER PUBLICATIONS
“Birth
on a Cross,” in The Christian Century
136:18 (August 28, 2019): 10–11.
“A
Better Country: On Michael Brendan Dougherty’s My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s
Search for Home,” in Plough (August 7, 2019).
“Briefly
Noted: Chris E. W. Green’s The End is Music:
A Companion to Robert W. Jenson’s Theology,”
in
First Things 295 (August/September
2019): 60–61.
“Enter
Paul: On Paula Fredriksen’s Paul: The
Pagans’ Apostle and When Christians Were
Jews: The
First Generation,” in The Los Angeles Review of Books (June 23, 2019).
“Five
Theses on Preaching,” in Mere Orthodoxy (June 7, 2019).
“The
Specter of Marcion,” in Commonweal 146:4
(February 22, 2019): 12–13.
“An Anti-Enlightenment
Ax to Grind: A Review of Craig A. Carter’s Interpreting
Scripture with the
Great Tradition: Recovering the
Genius of Premodern Exegesis,”
in The Christian Century 136:4
(February
13, 2019): 45–49.
“The
Church and the Common Good,” in Comment
(January 17, 2019).
“First
Things and Last Things in Christian Theology: On Ian McFarland’s From Nothing: A
Theology of Creation and Paul Griffiths’ Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures,”
in The
Marginalia Review of Books (October 26, 2018).
“God
and All Things in God: The Theology of John Webster,” in Mere Orthodoxy (August 20,
2018).
“A
Brief Introduction to John Webster,” in Anglican
Theological Review 100:3 (2018): 561–562.
“In
Captivity to the Zeitgeist: A Review of David P. Gushee and Glen H. Stassen’s Kingdom Ethics:
Following Jesus in Contemporary
Context,” in Living Church (March 11, 2018): 31–32.
“Holy
Ambivalence: On Patrick Deneen’s Why
Liberalism Failed and James K. A. Smith’s Awaiting
the Kingdom: Reforming Public
Theology,” in The Los Angeles Review of Books (March
1,
2018).
“Public
Theology in Retreat: On Three New Essay Collections by David Bentley Hart,” in The Los
Angeles Review of Books (September 20, 2017).
“Systematic
Theology and Biblical Criticism: On Ephraim Radner’s Time and the Word: Figural
Reading of the Christian
Scriptures,” in
The Marginalia Review of Books (June
22, 2017).
“Theologians
Were Arguing about the Benedict Option 35 Years Ago,” in Mere Orthodoxy (March
13,
2017).
“Renewing
the Heart of Systematic Theology: On Katherine Sonderegger’s Systematic Theology:
Volume 1, The Doctrine of God,” in The Marginalia Review of Books (August 2, 2016).
“Discerning
the (Holiday) Spirits: On Prophecy in the Negative Mode Only,” in Tokens Blog
(December
19, 2013).
“Interview
with Miroslav Volf,” in Missio Dei
4:2 (August 2013).
“Turn,
Turn, Turn, Turning No More: An Eschatological Reflection on Ecclesiastes
3:1–11,” in
The Princeton Theological Review
44 (Fall 2011):
69–73.
“Why
Theology Matters,” in New Wineskins (July
21, 2010).
“Battlestar Galactica: Frakking Feminist—So
Say We All!” in Slant Magazine’s The House Next Door
(March
20, 2009).
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Teaching Experience
Abilene Christian University:
Fall 2019 Theology; Ecclesiology; Christianity and
Culture
Sum 2019 Christianity and Culture (online)
Spr
2019 Theology; Acts to Revelation
Jan
2019 Christianity and Culture
Fall 2018 Survey of the Gospels; Ecclesiology;
Christianity and Culture; Freshman Seminar
Sum 2018 Christianity and Culture (online)
Spr
2018 Ethics; Acts to Revelation
Jan
2018 Christianity and Culture
Fall
2017 Survey of the Gospels; Ecclesiology;
Freshman Seminar
Sum
2017 Christianity and Culture
(online)
Jan
2017 Christianity and Culture
Yale Divinity School:
Spr
2016 Christian Social Ethics
(Adam Eitel)
Fall
2015 Theology and the New Testament
(Dale Martin and Kathryn Tanner)
Spr
2015 Medieval Theology (Denys
Turner)
Fall
2014 Patristic Theology
(Christopher Beeley)
Editorial Work
2017– Theology Book Review Editor, The Marginalia Review of Books
Conference Organization
Convener,
“Major Book Review: Joseph Gordon, Divine
Scripture in Human Understanding: A
Systematic Theology of the
Christian Bible,”
Christian Scholars’ Conference, Nashville, TN,
June
7, 2019.
Convener,
“Major Book Review: Keith
Stanglin, The Letter and Spirit of
Biblical Interpretation:
From the Early Church to Modern
Practice,” Christian
Scholars’ Conference, Nashville, TN,
June
6, 2019.
Convener,
“Negotiating Scripture and Culture,” Christian Scholars’ Conference, Abilene,
TX, June
4,
2015.
Convener
and moderator, “Reading the Old Testament as Scripture: A Conversation Between
Ellen
Davis
and Walter Brueggemann on Biblical Interpretation, Theology, and the
Relationship
Between
Church and Academy,” Christian Scholars’ Conference, Nashville, TN, June 6,
2014.
Convener
and moderator, “Faith in Public: A Conversation Between John Hare and Charles
Mathewes
on Religious Commitment, Christian Ethics, and Political Engagement,”
Christian
Scholars’ Conference, Nashville, TN, June 7, 2013.
LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY
Koine
Greek; German
PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS
American
Academy of Religion; Society of Biblical Literature
New essay published in Plough: “A Better Country"
In Plough this morning I have a review essay of Michael Brendan Dougherty's My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son's Search for Home. It's a beautiful book that I loved reading, some of whose ideas and proposals call for theological interrogation. I also compare his work to that of Ta-Nehisi Coates, the hyphenated identity of e.g. the Irish in America to African-Americans. It was a pleasure to write; I hope it holds together. Here's a taste:
"Dougherty is Roman Catholic, a faith recovered, like so much else in his life, in adulthood. Where he foregrounds father and fatherland, though, God remains mostly in the background. The resulting imbalance leaves certain questions unanswered. For example, Dougherty is right to insist on the heart’s reasons beyond wonk positivism. But sometimes the heart’s reasons are not enough. The Rising should not be protected by a moat of romance and high speech. Christians do indeed celebrate at the altar the ultimate sacrifice, an unbloody remembering of a bloodied and disfigured man lynched, unjustly, by occupying authorities. But that man didn’t resist, didn’t take up arms. He disarmed his disciples, in fact, and they died – have died ever since – as he did: without resistance. Martyrdom is the lived meaning of the sacrifice of Christ."
Read the rest here.
Questions for Jake Meador after reading his lovely new book
Jake Meador is one of my favorite writers to read today on the intersection of faith, politics, and culture. (Am I contractually obligated to call him a "young" writer? What are the rules here when you're not sure whether you're older than the young writer in question?) We've yet to meet, but he's been gracious to me over the past few years, posting and soliciting essays I've written for Mere Orthodoxy, which he edits.
I was eager to read his new book, In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World, and I wasn't disappointed. The book will be a boon to a variety of folks, especially pastors, churches, and college students. Indeed, I'm assigning it to one of my classes this fall. Given Meador's politics—a social conservative against racism, an agrarian against abortion, a Christian against the GOP, an evangelical against Trump, a Calvinist against capitalism—his writing makes for nice inroads to conversations with ordinary believers that bypass the partisan binary.
But while I wasn't disappointed, I was surprised by the book. I've been chewing on the reasons for that surprise for the last month. So let me try to boil down my surprise into the form of questions Meador left me with—questions I hope his ongoing work, at Mere O and especially in future books, will continue to grapple with.
1. For whom is this book written? Who is its primary audience? Meador's writing is always clear but it is often pitched "higher," to those who've read the primary sources and know the state of the conversation, and who have the desire or the power to do something about it. The book seems pitched "lower" (not in a pejorative sense), to those who haven't done the reading and aren't familiar with the driving conversations of the day. If so, perhaps the book is meant as a kind of translation or popularization for ordinary Christians, as I suggested above. In that, I think it succeeds; but it was not what I was prepared for.
2. Substantively, what surprised me most was the relative lack of direness in Meador's account of the current civic crisis. Partly a matter of tone, it's more than that too: one doesn't get the sense from the book that American society is an free fall. Sure, things are worse than they could be, but also, things are looking up, or at least, signs of (this-worldly) hope are on the horizon. But this doesn't match what I read in Meador's more regular writing. So just how bad are things? Are we in the midst of a kind of crisis? Or is it less dire than that?
3. Related is the state of the church in the U.S. I had thought, again based on Meador's other writing, that we are currently in a stage of ecclesial emergency. The church's numbers have been declining rapidly and continue to do so; those churches that have changed with the times have apostatized, and those churches that have ostensibly remained orthodox are beset by trials and scandals of a political and sexual nature. But a strikingly sanguine tone characterizes much (not all) of the book's talk of church: the simplicities and ordinary kindnesses of congregational life, etc. Is this just a non-alarmism about an objective emergency situation? Or have I misread Meador? How bad is it, and how bad are our future prospects?
4. Combining the previous two points, perhaps the biggest conceptual gap in the book for me was the relationship between the church and politics. If the church is declining in numbers and the wider culture is secularizing, indeed moving toward a post-Christian hostility to the church, then why continue to presume the ongoing power and influence of the church to effect much of anything in (at least national) politics going forward? There is a sort of running "if...then" momentum in the book, such that "if" X or Y happens within the church or on the part of Christians, "then" A or B may or should or will happen within the culture or the government. But I had thought we'd moved beyond that thinking. What if the church—the faithful, those who worship in parishes and congregations and actively follow Christ (say, 15-20% of the population)—were to be perfectly faithful across the next generation, and American culture and politics simply ignored us? What then? Or am I misunderstanding the nature of the book's vision?
5. By book's end, Meador's cheerful optimism—in one sense an antidote to the hysteria on all sides of cultural commentary today—left me with a vision of non-political politics: witness without agonistes. I had no sense of either the fight I ought to join or the battle from which I ought to retreat; the book describes not so much a field of conflict as a state of affairs in which the good has been leached out of our common life, and those of us who recognize that fact ought to do our best to pour it back in. But is Meador really so optimistic? Does he lack a sense for the conflicts facing our society and Christians therein? I don't think so. So what am I missing?
6. What I want to know (what I was left wondering) is: What is possible, and how do we get there? Does Meador think the "Trump effect" is not so much the ratcheting up of polarization, demonization, racism, reaction, etc., but instead the detonation of past paradigms so that we can imagine, more or less, whatever future we want? The Overton window not only expanded but smashed to smithereens? I doubt he'd put it in quite such extreme terms, but if it's something like that, then what does he (what should we) want at the end of our political and cultural labors? Beyond relative peace, stability, freedom, prosperity, depth of faith, intact families, and the rest. In other words, are we meant to close the book and imagine a radically transformed post-liberal America? Or a small but faithful remnant of Christ's church in the ruins of a decadent, hostile empire? That difference of visions is the ambiguity I felt from start to finish.
7. Put differently once again: Which saint, which option, ought we to choose? Should we opt for Dreher's Benedict Option, strategically withdrawing energy, emotion, time, and resources from political activism in order to shore up the wealth of the tradition and catechize our children for the dark ages? Should we instead follow Jamie Smith's Augustine Option, approaching culture and politics with a holy ambivalence that discriminates between good and evil case by case, refusing alarmist fears for engagement and resistance as the situation requires, without spurning the need for compromise? Or should we choose the Daniel Option, the proposal of Alissa Wilkinson and Robert Joustra, who don't deny the ills of modernity but basically see our time and culture as a benign one, full of signs of progress and opportunity for good, thus requiring our support for and participation in the liberal regime? (We could go on, with saints and options; perhaps Solomon standing for integralism?) I have always thought of Meador as BenOp-adjacent, not quite there but quite close, minus the tenor of Dreher's terror. But In Search of the Common Good, had I never read the author before, would have had me assuming he was somewhere between Smith and Wilkinson.
8. Speaking of saints, let me also mention martyrdom. The lack of an agonistic vision of politics combined with the cultural optimism resulted, in my reading, in a denial of tragedy, an account of political engagement without suffering or loss. I was left wondering what it might mean—not least coming from a person who has written tirelessly about putting principle over winning, means before ends—for the church to follow Meador's vision for Christian sociopolitical witness and still to "lose" or "fail" on the world's terms. What if being faithful means "death," however metaphorical? I'm confident of Meador's response: "Then so be it." But I was surprised by the implicit suggestion in the book that, in general, things will work out. What if things don't work out? What if, in 75 years, the church in America dwindles to one-tenth of the citizenry, despised but ignored, even as a third or more of the population claims the mantle of "Christian" while denying everything Christianity stands for? (Wait, that already sounds too familiar.) Note well, I'm not predicting this future. I'm saying: Christians have grown so used to this country being "theirs," so used to "running the show," to having influence and wielding it, that it is close to impossible for them (for us) to imagine a future in which that is no longer the case. Hence the very real fears of losing that power—fears we have seen manifested in spectacularly wicked ways these last few years (and not only then). What happens once we move beyond those fears to living in that future? Or is that so hypothetical as to be irrelevant to the present time—the spasms of dysfunction visible today signs of nothing seismic or epochal, just the usual bad actors and bad apples? (Answers here bears on answers to numbers two and three above. Just how bad is it?)
9. Shifting gears a bit here, and by way of closing, I sense a disjunction between two modes of thought in Meador. One is the natural, the other the supernatural; let's make their representatives Wendell Berry and St. Augustine. Meador envisions the good life as one in accord with creation, in harmony with the natural world. Hence his emphasis on farming, local community, conservation, the natural family, children, kinship, caring for the elderly, knowing one's neighbors, staying rooted in one place, and so on. This is the moral vision of Port William. Moreover, the natural good life is available, epistemically and otherwise, to all people, not just Christians. Whereas the Augustinian vision, while certainly affirming natural goods and the good of the created order, differs in important respects. The world is fallen, corrupted by sin, and women and men are depraved in their wills, their minds, their hearts, their desires. Driven by disordered love, sinful people neither know nor live in accordance with the highest good or the proper hierarchy of goods under God. They serve idols of every kind. What people need, then, is grace: to cleanse their conscience, heal their hearts, reorder their wills, and guide their lives. Apart from grace they cannot live as their ought nor know how they ought to live. Grace is a necessary condition of the good life, in and after Christ. (Recall too that, for Augustine, as for the catholic tradition after him, not to have children, not to be married, not to serve in civic life is actually the higher form of life in Christ, even if that ideal is not meant for all.) So the question arises: Where does Meador fall between Berry and Augustine here? What exactly is he recommending, and for whom is he recommending it, and on what (epistemic, moral, theological, political) basis? At what point do the theological virtues enter into the natural good life, and when and where and to what extent do they challenge, subvert, or deny aspects of it? And what of our neighbors? Is our concern for their good limited to the natural, or does it extend to the supernatural? If the latter, what social and political shape should that concern take?
That's enough for now. I've presumed too much of your patience, dear reader, as I have Jake's (if he reads this). Lest my questions be misinterpreted, let me be clear that I intend them in a spirit of friendship and of affinity for the book they query, and for the project that book advances. I'm thankful for the book, and I'm eager to see the fruit it bears in the coming years.
I was eager to read his new book, In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World, and I wasn't disappointed. The book will be a boon to a variety of folks, especially pastors, churches, and college students. Indeed, I'm assigning it to one of my classes this fall. Given Meador's politics—a social conservative against racism, an agrarian against abortion, a Christian against the GOP, an evangelical against Trump, a Calvinist against capitalism—his writing makes for nice inroads to conversations with ordinary believers that bypass the partisan binary.
But while I wasn't disappointed, I was surprised by the book. I've been chewing on the reasons for that surprise for the last month. So let me try to boil down my surprise into the form of questions Meador left me with—questions I hope his ongoing work, at Mere O and especially in future books, will continue to grapple with.
1. For whom is this book written? Who is its primary audience? Meador's writing is always clear but it is often pitched "higher," to those who've read the primary sources and know the state of the conversation, and who have the desire or the power to do something about it. The book seems pitched "lower" (not in a pejorative sense), to those who haven't done the reading and aren't familiar with the driving conversations of the day. If so, perhaps the book is meant as a kind of translation or popularization for ordinary Christians, as I suggested above. In that, I think it succeeds; but it was not what I was prepared for.2. Substantively, what surprised me most was the relative lack of direness in Meador's account of the current civic crisis. Partly a matter of tone, it's more than that too: one doesn't get the sense from the book that American society is an free fall. Sure, things are worse than they could be, but also, things are looking up, or at least, signs of (this-worldly) hope are on the horizon. But this doesn't match what I read in Meador's more regular writing. So just how bad are things? Are we in the midst of a kind of crisis? Or is it less dire than that?
3. Related is the state of the church in the U.S. I had thought, again based on Meador's other writing, that we are currently in a stage of ecclesial emergency. The church's numbers have been declining rapidly and continue to do so; those churches that have changed with the times have apostatized, and those churches that have ostensibly remained orthodox are beset by trials and scandals of a political and sexual nature. But a strikingly sanguine tone characterizes much (not all) of the book's talk of church: the simplicities and ordinary kindnesses of congregational life, etc. Is this just a non-alarmism about an objective emergency situation? Or have I misread Meador? How bad is it, and how bad are our future prospects?
4. Combining the previous two points, perhaps the biggest conceptual gap in the book for me was the relationship between the church and politics. If the church is declining in numbers and the wider culture is secularizing, indeed moving toward a post-Christian hostility to the church, then why continue to presume the ongoing power and influence of the church to effect much of anything in (at least national) politics going forward? There is a sort of running "if...then" momentum in the book, such that "if" X or Y happens within the church or on the part of Christians, "then" A or B may or should or will happen within the culture or the government. But I had thought we'd moved beyond that thinking. What if the church—the faithful, those who worship in parishes and congregations and actively follow Christ (say, 15-20% of the population)—were to be perfectly faithful across the next generation, and American culture and politics simply ignored us? What then? Or am I misunderstanding the nature of the book's vision?
5. By book's end, Meador's cheerful optimism—in one sense an antidote to the hysteria on all sides of cultural commentary today—left me with a vision of non-political politics: witness without agonistes. I had no sense of either the fight I ought to join or the battle from which I ought to retreat; the book describes not so much a field of conflict as a state of affairs in which the good has been leached out of our common life, and those of us who recognize that fact ought to do our best to pour it back in. But is Meador really so optimistic? Does he lack a sense for the conflicts facing our society and Christians therein? I don't think so. So what am I missing?
6. What I want to know (what I was left wondering) is: What is possible, and how do we get there? Does Meador think the "Trump effect" is not so much the ratcheting up of polarization, demonization, racism, reaction, etc., but instead the detonation of past paradigms so that we can imagine, more or less, whatever future we want? The Overton window not only expanded but smashed to smithereens? I doubt he'd put it in quite such extreme terms, but if it's something like that, then what does he (what should we) want at the end of our political and cultural labors? Beyond relative peace, stability, freedom, prosperity, depth of faith, intact families, and the rest. In other words, are we meant to close the book and imagine a radically transformed post-liberal America? Or a small but faithful remnant of Christ's church in the ruins of a decadent, hostile empire? That difference of visions is the ambiguity I felt from start to finish.
7. Put differently once again: Which saint, which option, ought we to choose? Should we opt for Dreher's Benedict Option, strategically withdrawing energy, emotion, time, and resources from political activism in order to shore up the wealth of the tradition and catechize our children for the dark ages? Should we instead follow Jamie Smith's Augustine Option, approaching culture and politics with a holy ambivalence that discriminates between good and evil case by case, refusing alarmist fears for engagement and resistance as the situation requires, without spurning the need for compromise? Or should we choose the Daniel Option, the proposal of Alissa Wilkinson and Robert Joustra, who don't deny the ills of modernity but basically see our time and culture as a benign one, full of signs of progress and opportunity for good, thus requiring our support for and participation in the liberal regime? (We could go on, with saints and options; perhaps Solomon standing for integralism?) I have always thought of Meador as BenOp-adjacent, not quite there but quite close, minus the tenor of Dreher's terror. But In Search of the Common Good, had I never read the author before, would have had me assuming he was somewhere between Smith and Wilkinson.
8. Speaking of saints, let me also mention martyrdom. The lack of an agonistic vision of politics combined with the cultural optimism resulted, in my reading, in a denial of tragedy, an account of political engagement without suffering or loss. I was left wondering what it might mean—not least coming from a person who has written tirelessly about putting principle over winning, means before ends—for the church to follow Meador's vision for Christian sociopolitical witness and still to "lose" or "fail" on the world's terms. What if being faithful means "death," however metaphorical? I'm confident of Meador's response: "Then so be it." But I was surprised by the implicit suggestion in the book that, in general, things will work out. What if things don't work out? What if, in 75 years, the church in America dwindles to one-tenth of the citizenry, despised but ignored, even as a third or more of the population claims the mantle of "Christian" while denying everything Christianity stands for? (Wait, that already sounds too familiar.) Note well, I'm not predicting this future. I'm saying: Christians have grown so used to this country being "theirs," so used to "running the show," to having influence and wielding it, that it is close to impossible for them (for us) to imagine a future in which that is no longer the case. Hence the very real fears of losing that power—fears we have seen manifested in spectacularly wicked ways these last few years (and not only then). What happens once we move beyond those fears to living in that future? Or is that so hypothetical as to be irrelevant to the present time—the spasms of dysfunction visible today signs of nothing seismic or epochal, just the usual bad actors and bad apples? (Answers here bears on answers to numbers two and three above. Just how bad is it?)
9. Shifting gears a bit here, and by way of closing, I sense a disjunction between two modes of thought in Meador. One is the natural, the other the supernatural; let's make their representatives Wendell Berry and St. Augustine. Meador envisions the good life as one in accord with creation, in harmony with the natural world. Hence his emphasis on farming, local community, conservation, the natural family, children, kinship, caring for the elderly, knowing one's neighbors, staying rooted in one place, and so on. This is the moral vision of Port William. Moreover, the natural good life is available, epistemically and otherwise, to all people, not just Christians. Whereas the Augustinian vision, while certainly affirming natural goods and the good of the created order, differs in important respects. The world is fallen, corrupted by sin, and women and men are depraved in their wills, their minds, their hearts, their desires. Driven by disordered love, sinful people neither know nor live in accordance with the highest good or the proper hierarchy of goods under God. They serve idols of every kind. What people need, then, is grace: to cleanse their conscience, heal their hearts, reorder their wills, and guide their lives. Apart from grace they cannot live as their ought nor know how they ought to live. Grace is a necessary condition of the good life, in and after Christ. (Recall too that, for Augustine, as for the catholic tradition after him, not to have children, not to be married, not to serve in civic life is actually the higher form of life in Christ, even if that ideal is not meant for all.) So the question arises: Where does Meador fall between Berry and Augustine here? What exactly is he recommending, and for whom is he recommending it, and on what (epistemic, moral, theological, political) basis? At what point do the theological virtues enter into the natural good life, and when and where and to what extent do they challenge, subvert, or deny aspects of it? And what of our neighbors? Is our concern for their good limited to the natural, or does it extend to the supernatural? If the latter, what social and political shape should that concern take?
That's enough for now. I've presumed too much of your patience, dear reader, as I have Jake's (if he reads this). Lest my questions be misinterpreted, let me be clear that I intend them in a spirit of friendship and of affinity for the book they query, and for the project that book advances. I'm thankful for the book, and I'm eager to see the fruit it bears in the coming years.
A confusing error by John Gray
Early in John Gray's Seven Types of Atheism, he writes the following:
"The[] Jewish and Greek views of the world are not just divergent but irreconcilably opposed. Yet from its beginnings Christianity has been an attempt to join Athens with Jerusalem. Augustine's Christian Platonism was only the first of many such attempts. Without knowing what they are doing, secular thinkers have continued this vain effort" (29).
From an otherwise admirably lucid and fair-minded thinker, I find this a bizarre claim in a number of ways.
First, Augustine was far from the first to "join" Platonist philosophy with Christian faith. His most prominent predecessor being (I can barely resist saying of course in all caps) Origen of Alexandria, whose influence spread far and wide, east and west.
Second, Gray's presentation suggests that Hellenization and Platonization commenced after Christianity's advent, after its creation as a post-Jewish phenomenon—indeed, apparently only after Constantine. But Ben Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon and Philo and the apostle Paul and the book of Hebrews all predate both Augustine and Origen; most of them predate the establishment of mainstream Christianity by the end of the first century. Judaism and therefore messianic Nazarene Judaism were thoroughly Hellenized and, at the very least, exposed to Platonist thinking for centuries prior to Augustine, indeed were such at the very source, in the age of Tiberius and Claudius and Nero.
Third, there is no such thing as "the" Jewish or "the" Greek "view of the world." Nor, even if there were, would either be a hermetically sealed whole, in relation to which ideas and practices extrinsic to itself must necessarily be alien intrusions. True, Israel's scriptures are not Platonist. So what? Who is to say what is and what is not complementary between them? Who is to say what modifications or amendments or additions would or would not count as corruption?—as if there ever were a stable essence to one or the other in the first place. It is not as if Origen or Augustine took on Platonism wholesale; they clearly and directly and explicitly reject certain philosophical ideas as inimical and contrary to the catholic faith. That's not syncretism or vain eclecticism. It's Christian theology, well and faithfully done. It might be untrue or imperfectly practiced, but it's not invalid or impossible on principle. How Gray could have come to such a conclusion I haven't the faintest clue.
"The[] Jewish and Greek views of the world are not just divergent but irreconcilably opposed. Yet from its beginnings Christianity has been an attempt to join Athens with Jerusalem. Augustine's Christian Platonism was only the first of many such attempts. Without knowing what they are doing, secular thinkers have continued this vain effort" (29).
From an otherwise admirably lucid and fair-minded thinker, I find this a bizarre claim in a number of ways.
First, Augustine was far from the first to "join" Platonist philosophy with Christian faith. His most prominent predecessor being (I can barely resist saying of course in all caps) Origen of Alexandria, whose influence spread far and wide, east and west.
Second, Gray's presentation suggests that Hellenization and Platonization commenced after Christianity's advent, after its creation as a post-Jewish phenomenon—indeed, apparently only after Constantine. But Ben Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon and Philo and the apostle Paul and the book of Hebrews all predate both Augustine and Origen; most of them predate the establishment of mainstream Christianity by the end of the first century. Judaism and therefore messianic Nazarene Judaism were thoroughly Hellenized and, at the very least, exposed to Platonist thinking for centuries prior to Augustine, indeed were such at the very source, in the age of Tiberius and Claudius and Nero.
Third, there is no such thing as "the" Jewish or "the" Greek "view of the world." Nor, even if there were, would either be a hermetically sealed whole, in relation to which ideas and practices extrinsic to itself must necessarily be alien intrusions. True, Israel's scriptures are not Platonist. So what? Who is to say what is and what is not complementary between them? Who is to say what modifications or amendments or additions would or would not count as corruption?—as if there ever were a stable essence to one or the other in the first place. It is not as if Origen or Augustine took on Platonism wholesale; they clearly and directly and explicitly reject certain philosophical ideas as inimical and contrary to the catholic faith. That's not syncretism or vain eclecticism. It's Christian theology, well and faithfully done. It might be untrue or imperfectly practiced, but it's not invalid or impossible on principle. How Gray could have come to such a conclusion I haven't the faintest clue.
Genre criticism
I'm in a book club with some buddies in town, and as it happens I'm the only one who liked the latest book, a work of fantasy. Two issues with the book have come to the surface, and I've been thinking about their status for fiction more generally.
First, I've realized that I don't believe in "pace." Or rather, a book's having a slow or fast pace is at best a neutral statement that requires content to be filled in: was the slow pace done well, or was the fast pace rushed? More often, I think pacing is a cipher for other matters: whether the reader finds the characters, interactions, descriptions, and events engaging—or not. In that sense a reader might well say, "I found the pacing slow," to which the author could reply, "Yes, exactly, that's the idea," at which point the reader then must supply further reasons as to why the slow pacing was a problem. There may be good reasons to make such an assertion, but they involve reference to other features of the narrative, not the pace as such.
Second, all fiction, all storytelling, is responsive to other instances of the same art, indeed every other art form, and thus every novel is derivative in one way or another. So that tropes—particularly when speaking of genre fiction, given the more identifiable and delimited features of that sub-form—are always everywhere present; there is no storytelling, there has never been a novel, without tropes. Nor is a novel or story's success directly proportional to the minimization of tropes: the very worst fiction in the world might be the most original. What we mean by originality, at least when using it as a criterion in the right way, is that the author's handling of the story's tropes was deft, subtle, unexpected, masterful, funny, gripping, complex, pleasing, or otherwise well done. In which case, as with pacing, reference to tropes in critique of a novel is the beginning rather than the end of the conversation, since the proper response to such a reference is, "Indeed—go on..." At which point further reasons enter in to clarify the quality of the use of tropes, granted their inevitability.
First, I've realized that I don't believe in "pace." Or rather, a book's having a slow or fast pace is at best a neutral statement that requires content to be filled in: was the slow pace done well, or was the fast pace rushed? More often, I think pacing is a cipher for other matters: whether the reader finds the characters, interactions, descriptions, and events engaging—or not. In that sense a reader might well say, "I found the pacing slow," to which the author could reply, "Yes, exactly, that's the idea," at which point the reader then must supply further reasons as to why the slow pacing was a problem. There may be good reasons to make such an assertion, but they involve reference to other features of the narrative, not the pace as such.
Second, all fiction, all storytelling, is responsive to other instances of the same art, indeed every other art form, and thus every novel is derivative in one way or another. So that tropes—particularly when speaking of genre fiction, given the more identifiable and delimited features of that sub-form—are always everywhere present; there is no storytelling, there has never been a novel, without tropes. Nor is a novel or story's success directly proportional to the minimization of tropes: the very worst fiction in the world might be the most original. What we mean by originality, at least when using it as a criterion in the right way, is that the author's handling of the story's tropes was deft, subtle, unexpected, masterful, funny, gripping, complex, pleasing, or otherwise well done. In which case, as with pacing, reference to tropes in critique of a novel is the beginning rather than the end of the conversation, since the proper response to such a reference is, "Indeed—go on..." At which point further reasons enter in to clarify the quality of the use of tropes, granted their inevitability.