Civil War

I don’t yet know what I think about Civil War, Alex Garland’s latest. I’ve not read a word from others, though I have a vague sense that there are already battle lines drawn, strong readings offered, etc. I have nothing to say about that.

I do know that Garland is smart and makes smart films. I’m hesitant to trust either my or others’ knee-jerk reaction to a film that’s clearly got things on its mind, a film that is surely not what many of us supposed it would be based on trailers and ads.

I also care not one whit what Garland himself thinks about the film. He may have thought he was making a movie about X, intending to say Y, when in fact he made a movie about A, which happens to say B and C.

Like I said, I don’t have a strong take yet. I do have one possible interpretation, which may turn out to be a strong misreading. Here goes.

Civil War is not about American politics, American polarization, impending American secession, or even Trump. It’s not a post–January 6 fever dream/allegory/parable. It’s not a liberal fable or a conservative one.

Instead, Civil War is a film about the press—about the soul of the press, or rather, about what happens when the press loses its soul. In that sense it is about Trump, but not Trump per se. It’s about what happens to the press (what happened to the press) under someone like Trump; what the reaction to Trump does (did) to journalism; how the heart of a free polity turns to rot when it begins to mirror the heartless nihilism it purports to “cover.” Words become images; images become form without content; violence becomes a “story”; an assassination becomes a “scoop.”

It doesn’t matter what Nick Offerman’s president says seconds before he’s executed. It matters that he say something and that someone was there—first—to get “the quote.” The newsroom lifers and war-time photographers documenting propaganda, unable to listen to one more canned speech spouting lies on the radio, themselves become agents of propaganda. They become what they oppose, a photo negative of what they’re so desperate to capture for their audience. (What audience? Who’s watching? There’s no evidence anybody is reading, listening, or watching anymore. Outside of the soldiers and the press, everybody else appears to be pretending the war isn’t happening at all.)

The urban warfare Garland so expertly displays in the film—better than almost anything I’ve ever seen attempting to embed the viewer on the streets and in the cramped rooms of military units breaching fortified gates and buildings, made all the more surreal by its being set in downtown Washington, D.C.—is therefore not about itself, not about the images it seems to be showing, but is instead a Trojan horse for us to observe the “PRESS” who are along for the ride. And what happens between the three leads in the closing moments tells us all we need to know. One gets his quote. One gets her shot. And one loses her shot, as she does her life, having slowly awakened across the arc of the film to the intolerable inhumanity required of (or generated by) her profession. Another propagandist, though, rises to take her place. There’s always someone else waiting in the wings, ready to snap the picture that will make her name.

There, in the Oval Office, staring through a camera lens, a star is born.

No true cessationist

I’ve never in my life knowingly met a bona fide cessationist. Cessationism, recall, is the doctrine that the signs and wonders performed by the Holy Spirit through baptized believers in the first century ceased with the passing of the apostles (whether gradually or abruptly, either way they stopped). So that, from about the year 100 to the present, the supernatural gifts of the Spirit—his charismata bestowed upon the faithful—no longer occur and/or have not occurred. These include:

1. Speaking in tongues (whether natural or angelic languages)

2. Healings of the sick (through inexplicable, divinely wrought means)

3. Exorcisms (casting out demons from those possessed by them)

4. Dreams/visions from God (e.g., Saint Paul’s vision of the Macedonian man)

5. Foretellings of the future (whether prophecies, “words,” images, visions, or dreams)

6. Ecstatic heavenly rapture (e.g., Paul’s experience in the “third heaven”)

7. Suspension of natural laws (e.g., walking on water; levitation)

8. Spectacular miracles (e.g., feeding the five thousand; blood spilling from a consecrated host)

9. Relics of saints/martyrs charged with spiritual power (e.g., Paul in Ephesus)

10. Communication with or visions of the dead (e.g., Samuel and the witch of Endor; the souls of the martyrs beneath the altar in Revelation)

That’s far from an authoritative list; I can imagine alternative taxonomies. The point is that none of them are “natural” occurrences; all of them are “supernatural” happenings. The biblical point is that they are the work of God; that God’s word attests them; that no Christian disputes their occurrence in the first century; and that some or all of them were understood to be special gifts of the Holy Spirit, “signs and wonders” performed by him through the baptized as evidence of the power of Christ and the truth of the gospel.

Testimony of such “signs and wonders” continues throughout the church’s history. So far as I can tell, nobody disputes this either (with the possible exception of tongues). The question is whether the testimony is true.

As I understand it, cessationism rose to modest prominence in and after the Protestant Reformation and has been a durable minority strand of Christian teaching and practice since then, particularly in the last two or three centuries—before Pentecostalism, as a check on Roman superstition; after Pentecostalism, as an additional brake on charismatic enthusiasm run rampant.

Here’s the thing. I grew up in a (sometimes tacitly, sometimes overtly) cessationist tradition. I know plenty of others who have similar experiences. I’m well aware that I can Google “arguments for cessationism” or “are tongues still spoken” and find plenty of websites and writers selling me on the doctrine.

And yet. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for: a flesh-and-blood cessationist. By which I mean, a Christian who is willing and able to defend actual cessationism as a principled and consistent doctrine.

Sure, I know plenty of folks who are put off by glossolalia, not to mention the peculiarities and sometime abuses of hyper-charismatic or fraudulent or prosperity preachers. But the moment I ask about the other nine signs and wonders listed above, they quickly fall into one of the following seven categories:

1. “Sure, I may not attend a charismatic church, but obviously some/all of those things have happened since the apostles’ passing and/or still happen today.”

2. “Well, I’ve not personally experienced/witnessed such things, but I don’t doubt they still happen.”

3. “Granted, I have trouble believing such things, but I’ll also admit that I have good friends whom I would trust with my life who swear that they have seen/experienced such things, and I can’t deny their credibility or honesty.”

4. “For myself, I’m extremely wary of any and all claims regarding miracles and supernatural happenings, and I take for granted that many (perhaps most) claims about them are false … but if I’m honest, since I believe they happened in the Bible, and the same God alive then is alive now, then yes, sometimes they really do happen here and now.”

5. “I’m a functioning cessationist, but I don’t actually have very good reasons to support it besides my own skepticism and disenchantment; in other words, I realize how weak my grounds are for disbelieving in any signs and wonders whatsoever performed through special gifts of the Spirit in the last two millennia—so I basically shrug my shoulders and admit that I’m probably wrong, though I wish I wasn’t and live that way too.”

6. “God is God and I am not; who am I to tell him that he’s not allowed to work wonders since the apostles? or that I know without a doubt that he hasn’t? or that it’s impossible?”

7. “You’d think I’m a cessationist, and yeah, I attend a cessationist church, and sure, I’m not evangelistic about this, but … [begins to whisper] … I’ve never told anyone this … [whispering quickens] … I’ve actually [seen/experienced/performed] a miracle, and I’ll go to my grave knowing in my bones that [X supernatural event] happened; you could never convince me otherwise.”

I’m not exaggerating when I say I have never encountered another type of response from a purported cessationist, at least not “in real life.” I’ve also known plenty of non-cessationists—there are a lot of Pentecostals and Catholics in the world!—and it’s a given that their response to this conversation is one long eye-roll.

So where are they hiding? Or why does it seem like once you start poking and prodding, the cessationist shell is hiding an inner charismatic—or, to be more precise, a thoughtful Christian unwilling to deny either charismatic gifts or signs and wonders in the present? I’ve speculated elsewhere that this is part of a broader American evangelical loosening. I’ve also seen, more and more, both pastors and normies falling back on one of four things:

1. awareness of miracles in Christian history;

2. awareness of miracles in the contemporary global south;

3. awareness of the paucity of biblical arguments for hard cessationism;

4. a profound respect for divine power and freedom.

Put those together, and they form a strong allergy to anything like doctrinaire denial of signs and wonders. And in the decline or absence of thick denominational identity with recognized teachers who authoritatively denounce charismatic belief, you can see why cessationism would be on the wane—if it is.

Screentopia

I’m grateful to Alan for writing this post so I didn’t have to. A few additional thoughts, though. (And by “a few thoughts” I mean rant imminent.)

Let me begin by giving a term to describe, not just smartphones or social media, but the entire ecosystem of the internet, ubiquitous screens, smartphones, and social media. We could call it Technopoly or the Matrix or just Digital. I’ll call it Screentopia. A place-that-is-no-place in which just about everything in our lives—friendship, education, finance, sex, news, entertainment, work, communication, worship—is mediated by omnipresent interlinked personal and public devices as well as screens of every size and type, through which we access the “all” of the aforementioned aspects of our common life.

Screentopia is an ecosystem, a habitat, an environment; it’s not one thing, and it didn’t arrive fully formed at a single point in time. It achieved a kind of comprehensive reach and maturity sometime in the last dozen years.

Like Alan, I’m utterly mystified by people who aren’t worried about this new social reality. Or who need the rest of us to calm down. Or who think the kids are all right. Or who think the kids aren’t all right, but nevertheless insist that the kids’ dis-ease has little to nothing to do with being born and raised in Screentopia. Or who must needs concern-troll those of us who are alarmed for being too alarmed; for ascribing monocausal agency to screens and smartphones when what we’re dealing with is complex, multicausal, inscrutable, and therefore impossible to fix. (The speed with which the writer adverts to “can’t roll back the clock” or “the toothpaste ain’t going back in the tube” is inversely proportional to how seriously you have to take him.)

After all, our concern troll asks insouciantly, aren’t we—shouldn’t we be—worried about other things, too? About low birth rates? And low marriage rates? And kids not playing outside? And kids presided over by low-flying helicopter parents? And kids not reading? And kids not dating or driving or experimenting with risky behaviors? And kids so sunk in lethargy that they can’t be bothered to do anything for themselves?

Well—yes! We should be worried about all that; we are worried about it. These aren’t independent phenomena about which we must parcel out percentages of our worry. It’s all interrelated! Nor is anyone—not one person—claiming a totality of causal explanatory power for the invention of the iPhone followed immediately by mass immiseration. Nor still is anyone denying that parents and teachers and schools and churches are the problem here. It’s not a “gotcha” to counter that kids don’t have an issue with phones, parents do. Yes! Duh! Exactly! We all do! Bonnie Kristian is absolutely right: parents want their elementary and middle school–aged kids to have smartphones; it’s them you have to convince, not the kids. We are the problem. We have to change. That’s literally what Haidt et al are saying. No one’s “blaming the kids.” We’re blaming what should have been the adults in the room—whether the board room, the PTA meeting, the faculty lounge, or the household. Having made a mistake in imposing this dystopia of screens on an unsuspecting generation, we would like, kindly and thank you please, to fix the problem we ourselves made (or, at least, woke up to, some of us, having not been given a vote at the time).

Here’s what I want to ask the tech concern trolls.

How many hours per day of private scrolling on a small glowing rectangle would concern you? How many hours per day indoors? How many hours per day on social media? How many hours per day on video games? How many pills to get to sleep? How many hours per night not sleeping? How many books per year not read? How many friends not made, how many driver’s licenses not acquired, how many dates and hangouts not held in person would finally raise a red flag?

Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “The North Korean state was born at about the same time that Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, and one could almost believe that the holy father of the state, Kim Il Sung, was given a copy of the novel and asked if he could make it work in practice.” A friend of mine says the same about our society and Brave New World. I expect people have read their Orwell. Have they read their Huxley, too? (And their Bradbury? And Walter M. Miller Jr.? And…?) Drugs and mindless entertainment to numb the emotions, babies engineered and produced in factories, sex and procreation absolutely severed, male and female locked in perpetual sedated combat, books either censored or an anachronistic bore, screens on every wall of one’s home featuring a kind of continuous interactive reality TV (as if Real Housewives, TikTok, and Zoom were combined into a single VR platform)—it’s all there. Is that the society we want? On purpose? It seems we’re bound for it like our lives depended on it. Indeed, we’re partway there already. “Alarmists” and “Luddites” are merely the ones who see the cliff’s edge ahead and are frantically pointing at it, trying to catch everyone’s attention.

But apparently everyone else is having too much fun. Who invited these killjoys along anyway?

“Real” movies

There are movies and there are movies. There have always been hacks for hire, but these days it’s less hack directors than hack IP that you’ve got to be on the lookout for. Hack IP is prefab by definition. Not so much too many cooks in the kitchen as no cooks at all: pull off the plastic, nuke it, and you’ve got yourself a movie. The next step, namely eliminating directors altogether in favor of A.I.-generated “content,” is only logical.

Sometimes, though, you’re in the mood for a crowd-pleaser. So the other day, when I had a couple nights to myself, I watched the second and third Equalizer films. The trilogy stars Denzel Washington and all three entries were written by Richard Wenk and directed by Antoine Fuqua. I vaguely remembered the first one, and thought it would be a pleasant, if undemanding, way to pass the time. I thought, in other words, that this was a bit of hack IP, brought to life by a hack writer and a hack director.

To my shame! There are movies and there are movies: some are fake, prefab, assembled by committee, produced by a factory, mindless, visionless, voiceless, toneless; and some are not. The Equalizer 2 & 3 are not classics; they didn’t deserve an Oscar. But they’re not fake. They’re not prefab. They’re “real” movies. And I wasn’t expecting that. Fuqua, Wenk, and Denzel surprised me.

The action in both films is well-executed. It’s what happens in between, though, that upended my expectations. Long stretches of “down time” with seemingly stock characters who, all of a sudden, are shown to have an inner life. What appears to be a minor detour is actually a bona fide B plot pulling the A plot into itself.

Wenk and Fuqua care about characters who, in any other Hollywood blockbuster, would be throwaways and caricatures. Ashton Sanders, fresh off his Moonlight turn, plays a teenage boy in the second film drawn into drugs and violence. Through Denzel’s eyes, Wenk and Fuqua train the audience—many of whom might not identify with Sanders’s character; might dismiss him as a problem; might think they already know his fate—to see him as Denzel’s character does: a sweet young boy, full of promise, caught between worlds. I sort of wanted the action movie to stop entirely and just become about this kid’s future.

Anyway. As I say, these films aren’t all-time greats. But “real” movies, however flawed, are always preferable to fake movies, however technically expertly wrought. And these two made me want to take a second look at Fuqua’s filmography especially. I’ve always dismissed him as merely competent, a professional who can work well with stars for big-budget manly movies. That was a mistake on my part. At a minimum, it turns out that professionalism—not to mention perspective and patience—go a long way in a landscape dominated by hack IP.

All together now: social media is bad for reading

We don’t have to mince words. We don’t have to pretend. We don’t have to qualify our claims. We don’t have to worry about insulting the youths. We don’t have to keep mum until the latest data comes in.

Social media, in all its forms, is bad for reading.

It’s bad for reading habits, meaning when you’re on social media you’re not reading a book. It’s bad for reading attention, meaning it shrinks your ability to focus for sustained periods of time while reading. It’s bad for reading desires, meaning it makes the idea of sitting down with a book, away from screens and images and videos and sounds, seem dreadfully boring. It’s bad for reading style, meaning what literacy you retain while living on social media is trained to like all the wrong things and to seek more of the same. It’s bad for reading ends, meaning you’re less likely to read for pleasure and more likely to read for strictly utilitarian reasons (including, for example, promotional deals and influencer prizes and so on). It’s bad for reading reinforcement, meaning like begets like, and inserting social media into the feedback loop of reading means ever more of the former and ever less of the latter. It’s bad for reading learning, meaning your inability to focus on dense, lengthy reading is an educational handicap: you quite literally will know less as a result. It’s bad for reading horizons, meaning the scope of what you do read, if you read at all, will not stretch across continents, cultures, and centuries but will be limited to the here and now, (at most) the latest faux highbrow novel or self-help bilge promoted by the newest hip influencers; social media–inflected “reading” is definitionally myopic: anti-“diverse” on principle. Finally, social media is bad for reading imitation, meaning it is bad for writing, because reading good writing is the only sure path to learning to write well oneself. Every single writing tic learned from social media is bad, and you can spot all of them a mile away.

None of this is new. None of it is groundbreaking. None of it is rocket science. We all know it. Educators do. Academics do. Parents do. As do members of Gen Z. My students don’t defend themselves to me; they don’t stick up for digital nativity and the wisdom and character produced by TikTok or Instagram over reading books. I’ve had students who tell me, approaching graduation, that they have never read a single book for pleasure in their lives. Others have confessed that they found a way to avoid reading a book cover to cover entirely, even as they got B’s in high school and college. They’re not proud of this. Neither are they embarrassed. It just is what it is.

Those of us who see this and are concerned by it do not have to apologize for it. We don’t have to worry about being, or being accused of being, Luddites. We’re not making this up. We’re not shaking our canes at the kids on the lawn. We’re not ageist or classist or generation-ist or any other nonsensical application of actual prejudices.

The problem is real. It’s not the only one, but it’s pressing. Social media is bad in general, it’s certainly bad for young people, and it’s unquestionably, demonstrably, and devastatingly bad for reading.

The question is not whether it’s a problem. The question is what to do about it.

My latest: how (not) to talk about Christian nationalism, in CT

This morning Christianity Today published my column. Titled “How (Not) to Talk About ‘Christian Nationalism,’” it argues we should retire the term entirely, because it has ceased to refer to anything concrete while functioning in our discourse as a slander term for “politics and people to my right I dislike.” It’s true, though, that there are things worth worrying about that go under the label, like racism and lawlessness; we should just talk about those things instead of a huge umbrella term that no longer picks out anything specific in the world (or picks out far too much). Here’s how the piece starts:

Some years ago, the Reformed philosopher Alvin Plantinga gave a useful definition of fundamentalist. He noted that, in academic settings, it served as little more than a smear word; he offered an expletive I can’t print here, so let’s just substitute son of a gun.

Where it retained any content beyond the smear, Plantinga argued that fundamentalist meant “considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.” Thus did academics, journalists, and many Christians come to deploy fundie to mean a “stupid [son of a gun] whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of” their own. And because there’s always someone to one’s right, the F-word is essentially relative: It has no stable reference, but it certainly can never refer to me.

These days we might say the same about Christian nationalism. The phrase has lost all substantive content. In nearly every conversation, it has little reference beyond those “stupid [sons of guns] whose political opinions are considerably to the right of mine.” Allegations of Christian nationalism can mean almost anything: Maybe the accused is a literal Nazi. Or maybe he’s just a lifelong Republican whose big issues are abortion and tax rates.

Click here to read the rest.

My latest: on Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis in LARB

This morning The Los Angeles Review of Books published my review of Marilynne Robinson’s new book, Reading Genesis. Here are the opening two paragraphs:

MARILYNNE ROBINSON HAS always been a theologian at heart. It’s merely convention that theology today is one among dozens of specialized academic subdisciplines. If that’s what theology is, Robinson doesn’t write like it—and thank God for that. Theology’s mother tongue is prayer and confession, the language of the liturgy, but these aren’t genres so much as modes that transform disparate genres into vehicles of divine discourse. Like Jacob’s Ladder, the traffic runs both ways.

It just so happens that Robinson’s theology has taken shape in essays, novels, and prose so patient and unpatronizing that it’s embarrassing how long one sometimes takes to catch the point. She has been doing this for almost half a century. She has won all the awards, sold all the books, chatted with presidents, and garnered every laurel and medal. She has nothing to prove. And so, having just turned 80, she has chosen to mark the occasion by publishing a commentary on Genesis, the first book of the Torah.

Click here to rest the rest. (See also Francis Spufford’s review and Ezra Klein’s interview with Robinson.)

The metaphysics of historical criticism

1. I, the historical critic, exist.

2. That is to say, my mind exists.

3. My mind is not deceived by a demon.

4. My mind is not self-deceived.

5. My mind has access to external reality.

6. External reality exists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My latest: on Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels, in Hedgehog Review

I’m in the latest issue of The Hedgehog Review with an essay called “Beating Slow Horses.” It’s about Mick Herron’s spy novels, which have been adapted for TV on AppleTV+. Here’s how the essay opens:

The conceit at the heart of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels is simple. There is a house in London for misfit spies. When MI5 is unable, for one reason or another, to fire failed employees, it opts to send them there. The exile is permanent, though the losers who suffer it do their best to pretend it isn’t. It’s a win-win for the service, in any case. No one gets sued. HR is pacified. And banishment proves either so unbearably dull and humiliating that the misfit spies voluntarily quit, or they remain there forever, whiling away the hours without hope of redemption. It is said of the souls in Dante’s purgatorio that the unhappiest are happier than the happiest on earth. Conversely, the happiest in Herron’s inferno are unhappier than the unhappiest outside its walls.

After all, there is no garden atop this mount and certainly no Virgil or Beatrice. Only a hulking demon, pitchfork in hand, keeping the drudges circling beneath him. The paradiso of Regent’s Park is lost forever. Only after some time does it dawn on the damned that their perpetual expulsion means they’re in hell.

Hell’s name is Slough House.

Unfortunately, the essay is paywalled at present. I imagine it’ll unlock here in the next few weeks. All the more reason to subscribe to a wonderful magazine!

Biblicism can’t get you where you want to go

Update (29 Feb 2024): I’m not going to revise what I’ve written below, but Matt rightly brought to my attention an ambiguity in the post; namely, that while I don’t accuse Matt of himself being biblicist, I strongly imply it. For the record, he’s not a biblicist! The running argument between us—a friendly one, I should add—is more about what one can reasonably expect to persuade evangelical Protestants of, given their prior commitments about Scripture, tradition, reason, and ecclesial authority. Nor, I might add, am I necessarily endorsing either the bundle of sexual ethics I lay out or the Roman procedure for affirming them. I’m intending, instead, to note a fundamental difficulty in evangelical and biblicist treatment of issues, particularly neuralgic issues related to sexual ethics, that are not addressed directly and explicitly in the Bible. I hope that still comes through. Apologies for the confusion.

*

I have a running argument with my friend Matt Anderson. My side in the argument is simple: You can’t get to Matt’s moral-theological positions via biblicism. You need more. In particular, you need three additional components.

But let me back up. Consider Catholic doctrine on sexual and procreative ethics. What Rome teaches is quite clear:

• No abortion.

• No cloning.

• No IVF.

• No artificial contraception of any kind.

• No sterilization.

• No self-abuse.

• No sexual activity whatsoever besides intercourse between one man and one woman who are married to each other, an action that (by definition, given the above) is intrinsically and necessarily open to new life.

Unless I’m mistaken, Matt affirms each of these seven components of Catholic teaching, albeit on different grounds (partially shared with Rome, partially not). Further, he believes this teaching as a whole is simply and clearly biblical. It’s biblical teaching, not “Roman” or “magisterial” teaching.

I’m not going to argue with Matt about whether that’s true. What I’d like to share instead is an anecdote. Here it is:

I have never once, in my entire life, met a single person who believes (much less practices) the foregoing seven propositions except (a) Roman Catholic Christians, (b) Christians with a theological graduate degree, and/or (c) Christian writers who cover sexual ethics and public policy.

In the case of (b) and (c), it’s worth adding that such persons, who are occasionally Protestant or Orthodox, have always and without exception been exposed in a direct and sustained manner to historic Roman magisterial teaching on sexual ethics.

What this tells me is that arriving at Catholic doctrine on these matters via “the Bible alone” may not be literally impossible (I suppose someone, somewhere, may have done it) but that it is, at the lived level of biblicist evangelical Christianity, so unlikely as to be impossible in practice.

What, then, is missing in biblicist attempts to arrive at these teachings? Three things.

First, a high view of the potential and power of natural human reason, however fallen, to draw accurate moral conclusions from the nature of created human existence regarding the essential character and divinely willed purposes of sexual activity.

Second, a living and authoritative sacred tradition developed and maintained in and by the church for the sake of instructing the faithful on new and pressing challenges to following Christ, including challenges unaddressed directly by the letter of Holy Scripture.

Third, a living and authoritative teaching office, or magisterium, governed and guided by the Holy Spirit and vested by him with the power to address, in real time, pressing challenges faced by the faithful in their daily commitment to following Christ.

It seems to me that all three are necessary and that together they are sufficient, alongside and in service to the supreme divine authority of Scripture, to do what needs doing in the moral life of the church. To do, that is, what Matt and other Protestant ethicists want to be done and see needs doing.

I should add why I believe the first two elements—which, one might argue, are found in certain Protestant communions, whether Anglican or Reformed or Wesleyan—are inadequate without the third. The reason is this. Biblicist Christians will never agree, for example, that the Bible forbids contraception, for the simple reason that there is no chapter or verse that clearly and explicitly does so. But even if some Christians were to argue that both tradition and reason likewise prohibit contraception, it remains the case that, in the absence of an ecclesial office with the authority to teach the faithful, other Christians would argue in turn (and in good faith) that their reading of Scripture, tradition, and reason differs in this respect, and that no church law, however venerable, has the power to bind their conscience on a disputed matter such as this one.

In short, Roman teaching requires Roman polity; catholic doctrine depends on and is inseparable from catholic tradition. It’s a feature, not a bug. You can’t get there otherwise, at least not in a definitive way, and not in a way that could ever command assent from other Protestants, evangelicals, or biblicists.

My latest: on faith and doubt in CT

I’ve got a column in Christianity Today this morning called “Doubt is a Ladder, Not a Home.” About a third of the way into it, I write the following:

I’m not describing atheists, apostates, or “exvangelicals” here. This is how many ordinary Christians feel. Or at least, it’s the water they swim in, the intrusive thought in the back of the mind, the semi-conscious source of inertia they feel when the alarm blares on Sunday morning. American Christians face no Colosseum, but this emotional and intellectual pressure is very real. The doubts add up.

It doesn’t help that doubt is in vogue. Doubt is sexy, and not only in the wider culture. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been told by a pastor or Christian professor that doubt is a sign of spiritual maturity. That faith without doubt is superficial, a mere honeymoon period. That doubt is the flip side of faith, a kind of friend to fidelity. That the presence of doubt is a sign of a healthy theological mind, and its absence—well, you can fill in the rest.

The pro-doubt crowd gets two important things entirely right. First, they want space to ask honest questions. Second, they want to remove the stigma of doubt.

I go on to elaborate what they get right, but also to point out four ways they go too far. Click here to read the whole thing.

My latest: a review of Christian Wiman in Comment

It’s called “A Poet’s Faith Against Despair.” The following excerpt comes after the essay’s opening discussion of kataphatic and apophatic talk about God:

You can see why apophasis—as a theory and practice of language, yes, but just as much a style or mood—might appeal to poets. Poetry is the art of saying with words more than words can say. Poets are not masters of words; or, at least, the mastery lies in their recognition of the incapacities of language and their resilience with the failures that result. Is human language metaphysically load-bearing? Poets know the answer is affirmative so long as it’s immediately negated.

Of apophasis in all its varieties, Christian Wiman is a poet without living peer. Or if that’s too grand for you—I wouldn’t really know, since I read poetry the way Wiman reads theology, for nourishment and joy and the prick of provocation, which is to say, not professionally, not with a skeptical and parsimonious eye, which is to say, the way we all read before we’re taught to stop it—then say simply that Wiman’s work stands out from the crowd. Whether he’s writing prose or poetry or something in between, you know his voice at once. In part this is because he’s always writing about the same thing (more on that below, and why it’s not a criticism). What he writes about, though, is indistinguishable from how he writes. That’s what makes him great.

Click here to rest the rest.

My latest: a review of John Mark Comer in CT

It’s titled “My Students Are Reading John Mark Comer, and Now I Know Why.” It starts this way:

I’ll begin with a confession: I was once very skeptical of John Mark Comer.

From afar, he seemed like one more polished celebrity pastor turned speaker turned writer, with slick content designed to evoke the Rob Bell aesthetic of yore—and for that reason, to annoy people like me. By “people like me,” most charitably, I mean bookish believers and teachers concerned with orthodoxy. Less charitably, I mean snobs with too many degrees who look down on books sold in airport terminals (and by “down,” I mean “with envy”).

Here’s how I learned the error of my ways: I noticed Comer’s books in the hands of my students. I assumed someone had assigned him; after all, many college students don’t read for any other reason. But no, they were reading him by choice. They were reading him on technology, on spiritual warfare, on sex—on everything. They started asking my opinion of him. I decided I needed to do due diligence if I was going to have an informed answer.

And even with my defenses up, he won me over.

Click here to read the whole thing.

If Lewis wrote today

Off the top of my head, the following things accurately describe C. S. Lewis when he was writing Christian apologetics:

• Avid tobacco smoker.

• Avid beer drinker.

• Oxbridge don.

• Scholar of medieval literature.

• Devotee of pagan literature.

• Lover of pagan myth.

• Poet and advocate of poetry (secular and religious).

• Novelist and advocate of fiction (secular and religious).

• Husband to a divorcee.

• Believer in evolution.

• Believer in a cosmos billions of years old.

• Confirmed member of the Church of England.

• Believer in the necessity and efficacy of the sacraments.

• Believer in the authority of church tradition.

• Believer in the ordination of priests.

• Witness and/or godfather to numerous infant baptisms.

• Participant in the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer.

• Confessor of the creed.

• A writer who refers readily and without apology or embarrassment to saints, mystics, and “the blessed sacrament.”

In other words, Lewis was not much of an American evangelical—that is, not a primitivist, not a teetotaler, not a literal reader of Genesis 1–11, not a strict inerrantist, not a Young Earth Creationist, not a Zwinglian on the Supper, not hesitant about sacred tradition, not anti-creedal, not anti-paedobaptism, not anti-establishmentarian, not anti-sacramental, not congregationalist, not anti-evolution, not squeamish about pagan or secular culture, not allergic to “catholic” language about the saints or sacraments or liturgy.

To be clear, Lewis was not a closet Roman Catholic either. And I may be stretching or misremembering on one or two bullet points. Regardless, the point isn’t that Lewis was Roman rather than (American) evangelical. It’s that he was Anglican, with all that that identity meant and entailed in the early to mid–twentieth century.

Others have drawn attention to similar features of Lewis’s life, thought, and work. Mark Noll reminded me of this in his recent piece for Ad Fontes on Lewis’s initial reception in America. But here’s the question it raised for me.

If there were a similar author today, would American evangelicals feel about him the way they feel (now) about Lewis? Would they blurb his books and invite him to conferences? Would they push him into pulpits and put his works in the hands of young people? Would they move heaven and earth to publish him in their flagship journals and magazines? Would they feel that he represented them, giving eloquent voice to their life and faith as believers?

What I don’t mean is: Could someone like this get a hearing today? Clearly there are plenty of Anglican (and not a few old-school Presbyterian) authors and speakers who fit the bill and don’t seem to have trouble getting published or finding venues. I would argue that many of them code “moderate” or occasionally “left of center” to normie evangelicals, but even still: they exist.

No, what I mean is: No one that I can think of who meets most/all of these descriptions would be received across the board—by charismatics, by non-denom-ers, by Baptists, by Reformed, by conservatives, by hardliners, by squishy nonpartisan types—as “our guy,” as “one of us,” as fundamentally non-threatening and unqualifiedly lauded. I just can’t see it. Whether it’s the “catholic” language and doctrine, or the personal life, or the evolution stuff, or the scriptural issues, or the elite status—one or another item would prove one too many.

Now. At first glance there’s an obvious rebuff here: N. T. Wright. Is Wright’s popularity an exception that proves the rule, then? Or just a debunking of the rule altogether?

I think it’s the former, for at least four reasons.

First, because Wright very famously has from the beginning been a point of serious dispute among Reformed pastors, seminaries, institutions, and theologians in America. Second, because Wright’s writing is so much less “cultural” (for lack of a better term) than Lewis’s and so much more biblical: quite literally translating, commenting on, and interpreting the Bible. Third, because Wright isn’t exactly known for his tobacco and alcohol habits, much less for asking parson after parson to perform a wedding—as Lewis did—in contravention of the laws of the Church of England.

And fourth, because it seems to me that evangelicals’ relationship to Wright is less affective and more transactional than it is with Lewis. They want (above all) the imprimatur of the Oxbridge New Testament scholar and his confidence in the reliability and truth of the Scriptures; they don’t want (on the whole) their kids to become “high church” and start baptizing babies, reciting the creed, grabbing a pint, and believing in evolution. (Not to mention—as American evangelicals who have gone Anglican are known to do—adoring the Eucharist, submitting to bishops, calling priests “Father,” or asking saints for intercession.)

I don’t mean the foregoing as some sort of knockdown argument. There are other, smaller exceptions one could point to. And Lewis is Lewis; he’s a one of one. There are historical and social and political and generational reasons why Living Lewis in 2024 wouldn’t fly with American evangelicals the way Dead Lewis does. I get it.

It’s just a thought I had. And it gets at something that irks me, even if I can’t quite put a finger on it. A gesture or a feeling. I wonder whether it resonates with others.

That’s what a blog’s for, no? Floating half-formed intuitions into the world…

My latest: on lights and liturgy, in CT

Yesterday Christianity Today published an article of mine called “All Hail the Power of … Stage Lighting?” It opens with an anecdote taken verbatim from one of my freshmen. (Out of the mouths of babes…) You sort of have to read it to believe it.

Here are four paragraphs from later on in the piece:

To afford, maintain, and operate professional lighting of the sort my student had in mind, a church would have to be far above the 90th percentile of American congregational size, which is 250 regular attendees. Yet for my student, as for so many others, this size and its hallmarks are paradigmatic rather than exceptional. They’re just “what church is today,” what one would reasonably expect visiting a random church in a strange city.

This trend is both cause and consequence of churches investing in technologies that make Sunday morning a high-production offering, whether for in-person crowds or for folks who stream from home. Long before COVID-19 but exacerbated by lockdown, many churches have been competing in a kind of techno-liturgical arms race to draw seekers, especially young families and professionals, to the “Sunday morning experience” of high-tech public worship.

For many seasoned evangelicals among the millennial and Zoomer generations, the result—state-of-the-art, high-definition, professional video and audio and music, with smooth transitions and fancy lighting, all frictionless and ready-made for the internet—is simply becoming the norm. It’s what church, or worship, means.

At best, the gospel retains the power to cut through all the noise. At worst, believers receive neither the Lord’s Word nor his body and blood. Instead, they get a cut-rate TED Talk, spiritual but not religious, sandwiched between long sessions of a soft rock concert.

Click here to read the rest. And keep your eyes on CT in the next week; they’ll have my review of John Mark Comer’s new book up soon as well.

A tech-attitude taxonomy

I’ve been reading Albert Borgmann lately, and in one essay he describes a set of thinkers he calls “optimistic pessimists” about technology. It got me thinking about how to delineate different positions and postures on technology, particularly digital technology, over the last century. I came up with eleven terms, the sixth one serving as a middle, “neutral” point with five on each side—growing in intensity as they get further from the center. Here they are:

1. Hucksters: i.e., people who stand to profit from new technologies, or who work to spin and market them regardless of their detrimental effects on human flourishing.

2. Apostles: i.e., true believers who announce the gospel of new technology to the unconvinced; they win converts by their true faith and honest enthusiasm; they sincerely believe that any and all developments in technology are good and to be welcomed as benefiting the human race in the short-, medium-, and long-term.

3. Boosters: i.e., writers and journalists in media and academia who toe the line of the hucksters and apostles; they accuse critics and dissenters from the true faith of heresy or, worse, of being on the wrong side of history; they exist as cogs in the tech-evangelistic machine, though it’s never clear why they are so uncritical, since they are rarely either apostles or hucksters themselves.

4. Optimists: i.e., ordinary people who understand and are sympathetic with thoughtful criticisms of new technologies but who, at the end of the day, passively trust in progress, in history’s forward march, and in the power of human can-do spirit to make things turn out right, including the challenges of technology; they adopt new technology as soon as it’s popular or affordable.

5. Optimistic pessimists: i.e., trenchant and insightful critics of technopoly, or the culture wrought by technology, who nonetheless argue for and have confidence in the possibility of righting the ship (even, the ship righting itself); another term for this group is tech reformers.

6. Naive neutrals: i.e., people who have never given a second thought to the challenges or perils of technology, are fundamentally incurious about them, and have no “position” to speak of regarding the topic; in practice they function like optimists or boosters, but lack the presence of considered beliefs on the subject.

7. Pessimistic optimists: i.e., inevitabilists—this or that new technology may on net be worse for humanity, but there’s simply nothing to do about it; pushing back or writing criticism is for this group akin to a single individual blowing on a forest fire; technological change on this view is materialist and/or deterministic; at most, you try to see it for what it is and manage your own individual life as best you can; at the same time, there’s no reason to be Chicken Little, since this has always been humanity’s lot, and we always find a way to adapt and adjust.

8. Pessimists: i.e., deep skeptics who see technological development in broadly negative terms, granting that not all of it is always bad in all its effects (e.g., medicine’s improvement of health, extension of life spans, and protection from disease); these folks are the last to adopt a new technology, usually with resentment or exasperation; they hate hucksters and boosters; they are not determinists—they think human society really can make social and political choices about technology ordered toward the common good—but know that determinism almost always wins in practice; their pessimism pushes them to see the downsides or tradeoffs even in the “best” technological developments.

9. Doomsdayers: i.e., it’s all bad, all the time, and it’s clear as day to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear; the internet is a bona fide harbinger of the apocalypse and A.I. is no-joke leading us to Skynet and the Matrix; the answer to new technology is always, therefore, a leonine Barthian Nein!; and any and all dissents and evidence to the contrary are only so much captivity to the Zeitgeist, heads stuck in the sand, paid-for shilling, or delusional “back to the land” Heidegerrian nostalgia that is impossible to live out with integrity in a digital age.

10. Opt-outers: i.e., agrarians and urban monastics in the spirit of Wendell Berry, Ivan Illich, and others who pursue life “off the grid” or at least off the internet; they may or may not be politically active, but more than anything they put their money where their mouth is: no TV or wireless internet in the home, no smart phone, no social media, and a life centered on hearth, earth, family, children, the local neighborhood, a farm or community garden, so on and so forth; they may be as critical as pessimists and doomsdayers, but they want to walk the walk, not just talk the talk, and most of all they don’t want the technopoly to dictate whether or not, in this, their one life, it can be a good one.

11. Resisters: i.e., leaders and foot soldiers in the Butlerian Jihad, whether this be only in spirit or in actual social, material, and political terms (IRL, as they say).

Cards on the table: I’m dispositionally somewhere between #7 and #8, with occasional emotional outbursts of #9, but aspirationally and even once in a while actually a #10.

Four tiers, forty authors

Last August I wrote up a long piece about “tiers” in Christian/theological writing. Go there for the details. Regular readers will know all about this by now; it’s become a bit of a hobbyhorse, as well as a shorthand—both with fellow writers and with editors and publishers.

I’ve found that, in these conversations, we don’t limit ourselves to one of the tiers but say “a high two” or “a low three” or “maybe a one point nine.” Four slots ain’t much. So I decided to unpack the tiers by decimal points into a total of forty options. I’ve also taken the liberty to put an example of the kind of author I have in mind for that particular number. If the author is prolific or tends to write on the same “level” across his or her books, then I don’t mention a title. If not, though, I give a sample book title to indicate which “version” of said author I have in mind.

Consider this your friendly reminder that the point of the original post was not that these rankings are indexed by quality; you don’t get books that are per se “better” as you get bigger numbers, nor are higher tier books per se “harder” to write compared to lower tiers. A lot of Tier 3 authors wish with all their hearts they could manage a successful Tier 2 book. But it’s really hard to do that, and to do it well.

The tiers, rather, are about intended audience, style, accessibility, density, presumed education, background knowledge, literary purpose, and so on. From normies with a day job who may read no more than a handful of books per year to fellow scholars in the academy who read hundreds—that’s the range of imagined readers for these books. Which isn’t to say that folks in the former category don’t occasionally wander “up” into Tiers 3 and 4 or that academics don’t enjoy books in Tier 1 and 2 (I do!).

But enough preliminaries. Here are forty authors across four tiers, limiting myself to authors who are either living or who have published in the last few decades and whose books continue to be in print.

1.0 – Sadie Robertson Huff
1.1 – T. D. Jakes
1.2 – Tony Evans
1.3 – Max Lucado
1.4 – Beth Moore
1.5 – Jonathan Pokluda
1.6 – Austin Channing Brown
1.7 – John Mark Comer
1.8 – Bob Goff
1.9 – Andy Crouch (in The Tech-Wise Family)
2.0 – Ben Myers (in The Apostles’ Creed)
2.1 – Tish Harrison Warren
2.2 – Jemar Tisby
2.3 – Henri Nouwen
2.4 – Alan Jacobs (in How to Think)
2.5 – Tim Keller (in The Reason for God)
2.6 – James K. A. Smith (in You Are What You Love)
2.7 – Esau McCaulley (in Reading While Black)
2.8 – N. T. Wright (in Simply Christian)
2.9 – Cornel West (in Democracy Matters)
3.0 – Beth Felker Jones (in Practicing Christian Doctrine)
3.1 – Tara Isabella Burton
3.2 – James Cone (in The Cross and the Lynching Tree)
3.3 – Ross Douthat
3.4 – Lauren Winner (in Dangers of Christian Practice)
3.5 – Miroslav Volf
3.6 – Justo González
3.7 – Fleming Rutledge (in The Crucifixion)
3.8 – Stanley Hauerwas
3.9 – Peter Brown
4.0 – Sarah Coakley
4.1 – Katherine Sonderegger
4.2 – Paul Griffiths
4.3 – Kathryn Tanner
4.4 – Willie James Jennings
4.5 – Jonathan Tran
4.6 – David Bentley Hart
4.7 – Bruce Marshall
4.8 – David Kelsey
4.9 – Alvin Plantinga

I imagine most readers would rank these authors a bit differently; others would include names I’ve not mentioned and scratch ones I have. I hope the gist is accurate, though. I’m going to use it as a springboard for further reflections later this week or next.

My latest: a review of Matthew Thiessen on the Jewish Paul

I’m in the latest issue of Commonweal with a review of Matthew Thiessen’s book A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles. Here’s how it opens:

Of all conversion stories, St. Paul’s is surely the most famous. As a zealous Pharisee, Saul was a tortured soul persecuting his fellow Jews for their dangerous faith in a failed Messiah. Starting in Jerusalem, this band of messianic Jews proclaimed a message that was catching like a plague. And just as with plagues inflicted on Israel in the past, God’s people needed a righteous man to rise up and put an end to it. Once disciplined, these wayward Jews would come to see the light. They would give up their nonsense about a crucified King; they would return to strict observance of God’s Law; and God’s punishment of his people would come to an end.

But on the road to Damascus, God stopped Saul in his tracks. He blinded him with heavenly light. He indicted him for his murderous ways. And he appointed him an apostle to the gentiles. Within days Saul was baptized and preaching the good news that God raised Jesus from the dead. Naturally, he gave up the Law of Moses, since Jesus had fulfilled the Torah and thereby rendered its observance optional, negligible, even obsolete. What mattered now was faith, a posture of receptivity and trust in God’s promises available not only to Saul’s fellow Jews but to non-Jews as well. Saul took this message across the Roman Empire, effectively founding the Church as we know it: predominantly gentile, faith-centered, and Law-free.

This is how Saul became Paul—how the persecuting Pharisee gave up Judaism for Christianity. Except that it isn’t, at least not in key respects.

Click here to read on.

The Church: cover, blurbs, pub date, and Amazon pre-order page!

Habemus cover! And publication date! And blurbs! And more!

The book in question is The Church: A Guide to the People of God. It’s the sixth in Lexham’s Christian Essentials series. Here’s the cover:

Just … wow. Perfect. The Lexham folks really know what they’re doing. (For comparison, here are the other covers in the series.)

How about some blurbs? Here they are, in all their glory. Allow me to find my fainting couch before reading them again:

This is a bright, thoughtful and passionate account of the church. Brad East roots ecclesiology in the story of Israel and the story of Jesus Christ, and in doing so provides a number of fresh perspectives which can help us in our doctrine and our practice.
—Andrew Wilson, teaching pastor at King's Church London

This book is pure delight! Inspiring, instructive, enriching, beautifully written, this book makes one want to be a Christian. It is next to impossible to write an ecumenically rewarding book on the theology of the church, but Brad East has done it!
—Matthew Levering, James N. Jr. and Mary D. Perry Chair of Theology, Mundelein Seminary

Brad East's account of Mary as the firstborn of the Church is brilliant. The theology in this book is at once scriptural and creative. With this book East becomes one of the more important theologians writing today.
—Stanley Hauerwas, Professor (retired), Duke Divinity School

I find this an extraordinary book. It is short. It is written with simplicity and clarity. And yet it covers so much, introducing its readers to an extraordinarily rich field of theology.
—Karen Kilby, Bede Professor of Catholic Theology, Durham University

In twelve concise, accessible, penetrating, and artistically-crafted chapters, Brad East provides an introductory guide to the Church as the messianic expansion of Israel among the nations of the earth. Rooting the identity of the Church in the biblical story of God's love for Israel, East shows how the redemptive work of Jesus completes that story, and is incomprehensible apart from that story. This introduction to the Church is both simple and profound—like the good news itself, which the Church proclaims and embodies.
—Mark Stephen Kinzer, moderator of Yachad BeYeshua, an international interconfessional fellowship of Jewish disciples of Yeshua, and Senior Scholar and President Emeritus of Messianic Jewish Theological Institute

Brad East's The Church wonderfully enhances the already marvelous Lexham series on Christian "Essentials." Building off of the Church's "Mystery" that is Christ's Body, as Ephesians proclaims, East outlines the story of God's people born of Abraham, in its breadth, beauty, imperative, and promise. Lucid, compact, attractive, and appropriately rich with the figures of Scripture's visionary treasure, this book is not only a fine introduction for new Christians of all traditions, but a well from which to draw continued reflection and prayerful praise. Highly commended!
—Ephraim Radner, Professor of Historical Theology, Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto

There are no words. My thanks to each of them for taking the time to read the manuscript and for their remarkable kindness. I hope other readers feel similarly!

Here is the official description of the book (written by Lexham, not by me):

You belong to God's family. But do you understand what that means?

The Bible tells the story of God and his people. But it is not merely history. It is our story. Abraham is our father. And Israel's freedom from slavery is ours.

Brad East traces the story of God's people, from father Abraham to the coming of Christ. He shows how we need the scope of the entire Bible to fully grasp the mystery of the church. The church is not a building but a body. It is not peripheral or optional in the life of faith. Rather, it is the very beating heart of God's story, where our needs and hopes are found.

That captures perfectly what I’m up to in the book. Short and sweet.

If any of the above piques your interest, here’s the good news: the book is up on Amazon and available for pre-order. As for when it’s coming out…

The publication date is October 23. That’s 39 weeks from now. A long time to wait. So why not make sure it’ll be in your mailbox on time?

Can you tell I’m excited? I’m excited. This is all not even to mention the fact that my other book coming out this fall also has its official cover and a publication date (let’s just say it’s not far off from this one). But I’ll save that announcement for another day, particularly once it too is up on Amazon and I’ve got blurbs and galleys in hand.

Until then. Thanks to everyone, but above all to Todd Hains, who made this happen from start to finish. He’s the man.

*

Update: I neglected to add two things.

First, head here for a webpage dedicated to the book. I’ll also add/share links to the publisher’s website for folks who want to check it out there or who want to avoid giving money to Mr. Bezos.

Second, I forgot to include the table of contents for those interested in such things. Here you go:

Series Preface
Prayers of the People

1. Mystery
2. Mother
3. Chosen
4. Bound
5. Redeemed
6. Holy
7. Ruled
8. Beloved
9. Incarnate
10. Sent
11. Entrusted
12. Benediction

Acknowledgments
Permissions
Notes
Worked Cited
Author Index
Scripture Index

Protestant subtraction

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues against what he calls “subtraction theories” of secularism. A subtraction account describes secularism as simply removing, say, belief in God from the equation; hence, a secular age is the same world minus outmoded ideas about an all-powerful man in the sky. Against this, Taylor argues that secularism is in fact the proposal of something positive, something new and substantive that was not there before—regardless of its truth.

Now apply the concept of subtraction to the story of Christian division over the centuries. I first thought of the following exercise as “playing the Protestant game.” Most of my life I have been surrounded by people who believe, usually explicitly, that most of what the church did and taught from the apostolic fathers through the eighteenth or nineteenth century was erroneous. Here in west Texas, that’s still true. Sometimes this view is made out to be allied to the reformations of the sixteenth century, though typically in ignorance of the fact that, for example, the magisterial reformers did not abolish creeds or infant baptism or ordination or Christian government or other phenomena low-church American evangelicals take for granted as capital-C “Catholic” (and therefore bad).

At the same time, there seems to be a creeping openness among these very people to more and more of “the tradition”: to the church calendar, to saints and monks, to sacramental practice, to creeds and councils, to patristic and even medieval wisdom. This is part of the “loosening” I’ve identified before, which is non-ideological and thus works in every which direction—sometimes toward reclaiming sacred tradition, sometimes toward pursuing charismatic gifts, sometimes toward relaxing social conventions (regarding alcohol or gambling, for example), sometimes toward liberalizing long-standing teachings (regarding sex or male ordination, for example). There’s no one way this loosening is happening. Much is being shaken at the moment; how things will settle won’t be clear for decades, or so it seems to me.

But return to the notion of subtraction. Below I have formulated a list of fifty doctrines or practices that were more or less universally accepted and established by the time of the late middle ages. Many of them underwent serious development in the medieval period; most of them have roots in the church fathers; some of them are basically present in toto before Nicaea. So it wouldn’t be fair to say that the list is just “whatever the church believed from 100 to 1500”—though parts of the list do fit that bill. It would be fair to say that all, or nearly all, of these things described the church just before the Great Schism, and that all, or nearly all, of them continue to describe the faith and piety of two-thirds of the global church today.

So here is the exercise. Ask yourself: When do you hop off the train? When do you say, Yes, I reject items x through y, but no more from here on out? And what is the logic that informs your decision? Is that logic disciplined? arbitrary? a matter of preference? a matter of upbringing? of local social convention? Are there concrete, nonnegotiable biblical or theological reasons to hold back your Christian neighbor from striking through the next item on the list—or the next ten?

Let’s say that the Orthodox have questions about the first three items and that the Anglicans, at least the higher-church among them, have modest questions about a handful (but no more) in the first twenty. Say that, depending on whom you ask, Lutherans and Calvinists want to reject the first twenty to thirty (maybe thirty-five) items on the list. Say that American evangelicals are uncomfortable with every item through forty-five. Say that primitivists and restorationists have more than occasionally set a question mark next to forty-six and forty-seven, and that Protestant liberals have done the same for the final three items.

Where do you stand? Where does your church? Where does your tradition? Why? And, perhaps most important, what is the doctrine of divine providence, wedded to what doctrine of the church, that makes sense of God’s people having gotten so much so wrong for so long? What else have Christians gotten wrong over the millennia? How can we know? Is there a limit?

And if, as I’m less than subtly wanting to suggest, this sort of indefinite unrolling logic of subtraction is neither wise nor defensible; and if, as I mentioned earlier, there is a spiritual hunger behind the “loosening” we are witnessing, a hunger for unwinding these subtractions in favor of reclaiming what was lost—then what should be reclaimed, and on what basis? Call this last query an exercise in addition, even in restoration.

But I digress. Here’s the list. See what you make of it.

1. Papal supremacy

2. Roman primacy

3. Purgatory

4. Intercession of saints

5. Canonization of saints

6. Intercession of Mary

7. Veneration of Mary

8. Mary as Theotokos

9. Icons

10. Relics

11. Holy sites

12. Monasticism

13. Vowed celibacy

14. Vowed poverty

15. Masses for the dead

16. Private masses

17. The Mass

18. Eucharistic transubstantiation

19. Eucharistic adoration

20. Eucharistic change

21. Eucharistic real presence

22. “Deutero-canonical” books

23. Priestly absolution

24. Priests

25. Bishops

26. The sacrament of holy orders

27. The sacrament of marriage

28. The magisterium

29. Dogma

30. Signs and wonders

31. Miraculous healings

32. Exorcisms

33. Baptismal regeneration

34. Confirmation/chrismation

35. Infant baptism

36. Sacred tradition

37. Liturgical calendar

38. Creeds

39. Extra-congregational polity

40. Ordination

41. Liturgical order

42. Baptismal efficacy

43. Eucharistic presence

44. Regular observance of the Eucharist

45. The necessity of baptism

46. The doctrine of the Trinity

47. The divinity of Jesus

48. The inerrancy of Scripture

49. The infallibility of Scripture

50. The indissolubility of marriage