Forthcoming from my friend and colleague Philip Jenkins. A kind of intro or overview here. I’m excited that this is coming.
Tag: christian (page 2 of 9)
Over at Plough, the tag is: Another life is possible. This ought to be a mantra for most of us. We can live in defiance of the mandates of technocracy and metaphysical capitalism; we can’t make those demonic Powers go away, and we probably can’t live uninfluenced by them — but we can reduce their power over our lives, one small step at a time. Independence is not gained in an instant, but I think there’s a growing body of people who want it.
There’s a funny passage in James Pogue’s recent report on right-wingers relocating to the West:
Resistance to “globalism” is a new organizing force of right-wing politics. “These people at the World Economic Forum,” DeSantis told the National Conservatism Conference in September, “they just view us as a bunch of peasants. I can tell you, things like the World Economic Forum are dead on arrival in the state of Florida.” It could have been Alex Jones talking.
Well, maybe. But it certainly could’ve been Bernie Sanders talking. And isn’t that noteworthy?
It would be nice if people found it so. Recently Michelle Goldberg wrote about recent studies showing the damage that social media platforms are doing to the mental health of young people — but as soon as some politicians on the right called attention to those studies, reactive nitwits on the left, of which there are many, fled to alternative explanations. Because Josh Hawley can’t be allowed to make a valid point about anything, now can he? Goldberg:
The idea that unaccountable corporate behemoths are harming kids with their products shouldn’t be a hard one for liberals to accept, even if figures like Hawley believe it as well. I’m not sure if banning social media for young people is the right way to start fixing the psychic catastrophe engulfing so many kids. But we’re not going to find any fix at all if we simply start with our political priors and work backward.
If people — people on social media all the freaking time, naturally — could manage to take a few minutes’ break from their Pavlovian virtual cages, they might discover the possibility of consensus — consensus on the vital necessity to restrain the predatory megacorporations that are destroying our society, and, if their recent adventures in chatbots are any indication, are very much looking for new worlds to ruin.
Any day I can take a step back from my political priors, take a step back from absorption in Technopoly, take a step back from the commodification of myself, is a good day. That some of us find that extremely difficult is perhaps a good Lenten meditation.
In the morning, one of the prisoners who hadn’t yet lost track of the calendar recalled, “Today is Easter Sunday.”
Here’s a beautiful meditation by Eleanor Parker on the Cross and the medieval poem “The Dream of the Rood.” I recently read Parker’s book Winters in the World, which is a delight and a treasure-house.
Wilmore, Kentucky, is the kind of quaint town (population 6,027) you might drive through and forget. Perhaps if you stop at the intersection of Main Street and Lexington Avenue you may notice a white Presbyterian chapel and a redbrick Baptist church on opposite corners — reminders of a bygone era when America was staunchly Christian.
Maybe someone should tell The Economist that those churches are not museums devoted to “a bygone era” — people today actually attend them.
If you’re going to read only one piece about the Asbury revival, make it this one by Ruth Graham. (I won’t let the fact that Ruth was once my student prevent me from saying that she’s the best religion reporter in this country, and it’s not close.)
I don’t have anything further to say about this event, though. Whether this is a genuine fruit-bearing revival is something that can’t be discerned now, and perhaps won’t ever be discernible. As George Eliot teaches us in the famous concluding words of Middlemarch, we don’t really understand the causes of the changes in our lives: sometimes the most important influences, and the most important people, work in ways too subtle for us to perceive. Maybe — and please, Lord, let it be so — this will be a great revival with lasting effects; but we’re unlikely to know what those effects are or how they have shaped people’s hearts. God works in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.
Re: this explicit deepening of Pope Francis’s hostility to trad Catholics, let me call attention to something I wrote two years ago.
As she pondered and internalized the meanings of slavery, affliction, and humility, Weil stumbled upon a central Christian idea: when he was incarnated, Jesus Christ took “the form of a slave” (morphē doulou), as we learn from St. Paul in Philippians 2:7. Weil went into the factory to find out more about the social conditions of the modern worker in capitalism. Instead, she found Jesus Christ.
Weil may have been raised in a secular Jewish home, but her whole education was shaped by France’s Catholic mindset. In the factory she started to use Christian notions, symbols, and images liberally to make sense of what she was going through. First among them was affliction itself, which defines both the slave condition and the Christian experience. In her “spiritual autobiography,” she describes how the “affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul.” Because of her profound empathy for the oppressed, she felt the suffering around her as her own. That’s how she received la marque de l’esclavage, which she likens to “the branding of the red-hot iron the Romans put on the foreheads of their most despised slaves.” That’s also how she was transformed: “Since then,” she wrote, “I have always regarded myself as a slave.”
An intense religious experience, which occurred soon after her factory stint, sealed the transformation. Finding herself in a small fishing village in Portugal, she witnessed a procession of fishermen’s wives. Touring the anchored ships, they sang “ancient hymns of a heart-rending sadness.” Weil froze in place. There, a conviction was “suddenly borne in upon me that Christianity is preeminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among them.” Nietzsche, too, had said that Christianity was the religion of slaves. He was right, but for all the wrong reasons.
Everybody is talking these days about the decline of the West, and with good reason. Some people think that Christianity should have something to say about this: that as the faith was the rock on which the West was built, so the faith should rebuild it again, or defend it against its enemies. We need a Muscular Christianity! they insist in the comment sections. Bring on the Christian knights! they shout on YouTube. But I don’t think this is how it works. When the last empire collapsed, the Christians of Europe weren’t trying to build, let alone defend, some construction called “Christendom.” They didn’t plan for the dome of St. Peter’s or the Battle of Lepanto. They were just trying to do the humblest and the only thing: to worship the true God, and to strip away everything that interfered with that worship. They took to the deserts to follow Christ and to battle the Enemy. Their work was theosis. They had crucified themselves as instructed. What emerged as a result, and what it turned into — well, that wasn’t up to them.
In a time when the temptation is always toward culture war rather than inner war, I think we could learn something from our spiritual ancestors. What we might learn is not that the external battle is never necessary; sometimes it very much is. But a battle that is uninformed by inner transformation will soon eat itself, and those around it. Why, after all, were the cave Christians so sought after? Because they were not like other people. Something had been granted to them, something had been earned, in their long retreats from the world. They had touched the hem. After years in the tombs or the caverns or the woods, their very unworldliness became, paradoxically, just what the world needed.
I think the importance of [Katelyn Beaty’s Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church] is the conversation it opens about ethics in institutions, not (just) pious personal practices. The scandal at the heart of her book is not the celebrity pastors; their corruption and scandal is the least interesting and most predictable part of the package. The scandal is the enabling organizations and the collapse of institutional ethics — a dangerous pragmatism married to a startlingly idealistic naïveté.
Thus the need for the repair of institutions, something that I think requires the cultivation of piety.
In one sense the question I posed in an earlier post — What are the proper focal practices for a pilgrim people? — has an obvious answer. In a sermon John Wesley wrote that the “chief … means” of God’s grace to us
are prayer, whether in secret or with the great congregation; searching the Scriptures (which implies reading, hearing, and meditating thereon); and receiving the Lord’s Supper, eating bread and drinking wine in remembrance of Him: And these we believe to be ordained of God, as the ordinary channels of conveying his grace to the souls of men.
Surely it is true, and has been true as long as Christians have walked the earth, and will always be true, that these three practices are permanently and non-negotiably focal for Christians. If we’re not doing these, then we’re going to be distracted, diffracted, “blown about by every wind of doctrine.”
But if these are the “ordinary channels” by which God conveys grace to us, might there be, in certain times and places, extraordinary channels — channels especially appropriate to a given context? I think so, and in this and future posts will be drawing on Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society to identify some.
In this post I want to talk about intervals. In an especially provocative passage — and in another, later post I’ll discuss its context — Han writes,
Only by the negative means of making-pause can the subject of action thoroughly measure the sphere of contingency (which is unavailable when one is simply active). Although delaying does not represent a positive deed, it proves necessary if action is not to sink to the level of laboring. Today we live in a world that is very poor in interruption; “betweens” and “between-times” are lacking. Acceleration is abolishing all intervals. In the aphorism, “Principal deficiency of active men,” Nietzsche writes: “Active men are generally wanting in the higher activity … in this regard they are lazy…. The active roll as the stone rolls, in obedience to the stupidity of the laws of mechanics.” Different kinds of action and activity exist. Activity that follows an unthinking, mechanical course is poor in interruption. Machines cannot pause. Despite its enormous capacity for calculation, the computer is stupid insofar as it lacks the ability to delay.
Almost everyone at times has the sense that we are not using our technologies but are being used by them. Which is why, in the long run, as Jaron Lanier has pointed out, “the Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?” We therefore come to imitate the distinctive stupidity of machines. If we are to be stupid, at least let our stupidity be human.
So maybe the first focal practice, the one that enables all the others, is simply this: to pause. To create intervals in our busyness. Maybe we will later fill those intervals with prayer, for instance, but just to create them is the first desideratum. Pause, and breathe — that alone declares our humanity and distinguishes us from our machines. The pilgrim pauses along the Way, and in that manner combats the laziness peculiar to a technologically accelerated age.
Kierkegaard, from his Journals:
Christianly the emphasis does not fall so much upon to what extent or how far a person succeeds in meeting or fulfilling the requirement, if he actually is striving, as it is upon his getting an impression of the requirement in all its infinitude so that he rightly learns to be humbled and to rely upon grace.
To pare down the requirement in order to fulfill it better (as if this were earnestness, that now it can all the more easily appear that one is earnest about wanting to fulfill the requirement) — to this Christianity in its deepest essence is opposed.
No, infinite humiliation and grace, and then a striving born of gratitude — this is Christianity.
Here’s a wonderful post by Ian Paul on the Epiphany story — what Matthew and Luke have in common and how they differ; the unconfronted assumptions of many biblical critics; the Parthians’ use of horses and camels. All the good stuff.
In this book, Ralph Cudworth makes the following fascinating argument:
Now the Tabernacle or Temple being thus a House for God to dwell in visibly, to make up the Notion of Dwelling or Habitation complete, there must be all things suitable to a House belonging to it. Hence in the Holy Place there must be a Table and a Candlestick, because this was the ordinary Furniture of a Room … A Table and a Candlestick … suit the Notion of a Dwelling House. The Table must have its Dishes, and Spoons, and Bowls, and Covers, belonging to it, though they were never used, and always be furnished with Bread upon it. The Candlestick must have its Lamps continually burning.
There must be a Continuall Fire kept, in this House of God’s, upon the Altar, as the Focus of it.
Cudworth cites the Hebrew of Isaiah 31:9 — KJV: “the LORD, whose fire is in Zion, and his furnace in Jerusalem” — and renders it into Latin: Qui habet ignem suum in Sion, et focum suum in Jerusalem, or, “Whose fire is in Zion, and his hearth in Jerusalem.”
(I may be getting too deep into the weeds here, but: Cudworth’s rendering differs from the Vulgate, which has: cujus ignis est in Sion et caminus ejus in Jerusalem. Apparently caminus — which is a straight theft from the Greek κάμῑνος — can also mean “hearth” but is more likely to be used to describe a furnace, an oven, or a kiln. It’s only focus, as far as I can tell, that bears the familial associations.)
It’s noteworthy that the Hebrew word that the KJV translates as “furnace” and Cudworth as focus is rendered in the Septuagint as οἰκείους — from the root οἶκος, meaning “household” or “home.” The LORD, whose fire is in Zion, and his household in Jerusalem.
But now, as Christians have always said, through his sacrifice Jesus has himself become the Temple. (See Hebrews 10.) The place of sacrifice has been transformed into a place of feasting — as Paul says in 1 Timothy 3, the ἐκκλησία Θεοῦ (the assembly or church of God) is also the οἴκῳ Θεοῦ (the household of God) — and the focus, the central hearth, of that household is the altar.
I love this notion of the church’s altar as the hearth of the Lord’s House, the place where we gather to warm ourselves and to receive nourishment — the focus of our worship in a distinctively familial and homely sense.
Albert Borgmann talks about the relationship between focal practices and focal things — “things” being a poor choice of words here, because he means something more like “what or whom those practices centrally attend to.” When two people get married they are the central figures in the practice the old Prayer Book calls The Solemnization of Matrimony, but they aren’t things. I don’t know why Borgmann doesn’t just talk about focal practices and foci, but that’s what I will do: Participation in a service of Holy Communion is a focal practice whose focus is in one sense the altar — but in another and deeper sense Jesus Christ himself.
In The Point of View of My Work as an Author Kierkegaard explains why he writes sometimes under his own name and sometimes under pseudonyms. One of his primary goals — or, as he rather curiously puts it, one of the primary goals of “the authorship” — is to attack the illusions under which his fellow Danes are living, the chief among them being that they are living in a Christian society (which means that they believe themselves to have received Christianity as a kind of natural inheritance). The problem, Kierkegaard says, is that such illusions are hard to remove by direct attack — and indeed, the deeper the illusion is the more resistant it is to any direct confrontation.
No, an illusion can never be destroyed directly, and only by indirect means can it be radically removed. If it is an illusion that all are Christians — and if there is anything to be done about it, it must be done indirectly, not by one who vociferously proclaims himself an extraordinary Christian, but by one who, better instructed, is ready to declare that he is not a Christian at all….
There is nothing that requires such gentle handling as an illusion, if one wishes to dispel it. If anyone prompts the prospective captive to set his will in opposition, all is lost. And this is what a direct attack achieves, and it implies moreover the presumption of requiring a man to make to another person, or in his presence, an admission which he can make most profitably to himself privately. This is what is achieved by the indirect method, which, loving and serving the truth, arranges everything dialectically for the prospective captive, and then shyly withdraws (for love is always shy), so as not to witness the admission which he makes to himself alone before God—that he has lived hitherto in an illusion.
I especially adore this: “for love is always shy.” See also the magnificent tale of the king and the lowly maiden in the Philosophical Fragments.
There is much more that could be said about this, and how it relates to, for instance, Leo Strauss’s case for the value of esoteric writing in philosophy (something I have often mused on when engaged in my own writing). But for now I simply want to ask this question: What can I do to remove my own illusions?
I think it was A. J. Ayer — one of those 20th century Oxford philosophers anyway — whose highest praise of any other philosopher was “Yes, he’s very well defended.” I think almost all of us are well-defended against the dispelling of our illusions. This is why Kierkegaard said that the person whose life is governed by some powerful illusion must be as it were approached from behind. But how could I approach myself from behind? After all, as I recently wrote, the most dangerous lies are the ones we tell ourselves. Shouldn’t I take seriously my own position?
Well, for the past couple of years I’ve been trying to do just that. I’m not any less interested in theological reflection (or in being a Christian!) that I used to be, but I’ve been reading theology for so long that it’s hard for me to be surprised by it — hard for me not to assimilate whatever I’m reading to my existing categories. So I’ve been trying to read more stuff that evades those categories, that forces me into a less predictable and (ideally) more creative response.
That’s why I’ve been trying to learn from Russian socialists and Daoists and anarchists — they’re all people who are trying to address the same social and ethical issues that concern me, but who do so from different perspectives and with the use of different intellectual tools. But I’m now thinking that, having been fortified by my encounters with those traditions of thought, it may be time to return to my specifically theological concerns and see what they look like in light of what I’ve learned. For instance:
- What does Christian peaceableness look like in light of Alexander Herzen’s melioristic approach to social change?
- Is there really, as I have suspected, a kind of familial resemblance between Daoism and Franciscan spirituality?
- Can the “emergent order” of anarchism be a key to the building of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the beloved community”?
In short: Can I, through these oddball explorations, remove the illusions that prevent me from seeing what I should see about myself and the world? Can I learn through these exercises to think more wisely and act more justly? I dunno. I hope so.
Grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things. You either go under, or it changes you, or, worse, you become a small, hard thing that has contracted around an absence. Sometimes you find a grieving person constricted around the thing they have lost; they’ve become ossified and impossible to penetrate, and, well, other people go the other way, and grow open and expansive.
Arthur’s death literally changed everything for me. Absolutely everything. It made me a religious person. I am not talking about being a traditional Christian. I am not even talking about a belief in God, necessarily. It made me a religious person in the sense that I felt, on a profound level, a deep inclusion in the human predicament, and an understanding of our vulnerability and the sense that, as individuals, we are, each of us, imperilled. Each life is precarious, and some of us understand it and some don’t. I became a person after my son died.
How Would You Prove That God Performed a Miracle?:
J. Ayodeji Adewuya is a professor of New Testament at the Pentecostal Theological Seminary in Tennessee. He saw his share of miracles in his home country, Nigeria — including, he believes, the raising of his stillborn infant son after he spent 20 minutes shouting and pacing the room in prayer. “I joke, you don’t really need to pray the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Give us our daily bread,’ when you have everything provided by Walmart and your fridge is full,” he told me. “When you’re in a place where you have nothing, the only thing you can do is depend on God, and at that point you’re expecting something. The average white evangelical Christian doesn’t expect anything.”
Western skeptics have disregarded witness testimony from places like Nigeria at least since David Hume complained in his 1748 essay on miracles that “they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations.” Such dismissal is more awkward for 21st-century secular liberals, who often say that Westerners should listen to people in the Global South and acknowledge the blindnesses of colonialism. “Some people claim that the best thing to do is to listen to people’s experiences and learn from them,” Dr. Chinedozi said. “Yet these people will be the first to find a way to disprove experiences in other cultures and contexts.”
He’s not wrong.
For some reason I haven’t thought about this passage in years, though it is one of the most glorious things I know:
God made Sun and Moon to distinguish seasons, and day, and night, and we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their seasons: But God hath made no decree to distinguish the seasons of his mercies; In paradise, the fruits were ripe, the first minute, and in heaven it is alwaies Autumne, his mercies are ever in their maturity. We ask panem quetidianum, our daily bread, and God never sayes you should have come yesterday, he never sayes you must againe to morrow, but to day if you will heare his voice, to day he will heare you. If some King of the earth have so large an extent of Dominion, in North, and South, as that he hath Winter and Summer together in his Dominions, so large an extent East and West, as that he hath day and night together in his Dominions, much more hath God mercy and judgement together: He brought light out of darknesse, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the wayes of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintred and frozen, clouded and eclypsed, damped and benummed, smothered and stupified till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate all shadowes, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.
That’s John Donne’s glorious sermon for Christmas Day 1624, wonderfuly explicated by Joe Mangina here.
In my new essay on anarchism, I describe myself as “a person with an exceptionally low anthropology” — and if you want to know what I mean by that, here’s more from David Zahl.
The Church universal also has a set of overlapping responsibilities, but how these responsibilities are translated into the work of individual churches is a tension of its own. Local churches are first obligated to their own members, to preach, worship, disciple, and administer the sacraments. Adding anything beyond this to any individual church is tying on a burden too great to bear. Yet the Body of Christ spread across the world is also responsible for sending messengers of the Gospel to places that have not yet heard it, meeting the needs of the poor (local and distant), and advocating for justice in whatever society they find themselves in. (I would draw primarily from Isaiah 58 as the source of the lattermost impetus.) The Body of Christ also has an obligation to be in communication with itself such that the hand can know if the eye is suffering and then do something about it.
This task might seem impossible, but the power of the Holy Spirit among God’s people allows us to order ourselves according to the moral obligations we have to one another and to the world. We seek in prayer to know which people in need we ought to be in proximity to, and we obey accordingly as we embark on whichever road to Jericho we are called to. Some may physically remain wherever they are; others may move across town, across the country, or across the world. The wealth of believers, once yielded to the direction of the Holy Spirit, also has centripetal and centrifugal forces acting upon it but should in general go to where there is the greatest need and the least knowledge of the Gospel.
A long, complex essay, incisive and provocative. Every thoughtful Christian should read it. I hope to comment more fully later.
In for a penny, in for a pounding, I always say. I really don’t want to talk about the whole “three worlds” thing again, but I’m going to, because it allows me to segue into something I do want to talk about. I just completed a book project, so I’m gonna take the time to do this stuff. Buckle up; it won’t be brief.
My friend Brad East claims that the “negative world” thesis is self-evidently true: “publicly professing to be a Christian in the 1950s was — on balance, no matter who you were or where you lived, with relatively minor exceptions — more likely than not to enhance your reputation and/or social status and/or professional-political-familial-marital-financial prospects.” In response to that I would again emphasize the distinction between the profession of faith and actual Christian living. As far as I’m concerned, a world in which the public profession of faith is rewarded but serious Christian practice is discouraged is not a positive world. It’s a Whited Sepulcher World.
I would also add that the exceptions are not “relatively minor” unless you consider the experience of Black people in America to be minor. White Americans, especially but not only in the South, have long been suspicious of what gets taught in Black churches. In her Incidents in the Live of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs narrates how the slaveholding leaders of her community demolished the church the local Blacks had built with their own hands, and then made sure they were taught by preachers whose only biblical text was “Slaves, obey your masters.” And then, of course, if you were a churchgoing Black family in my home town of Birmingham during the supposedly “positive world” era you might find that your church is bombed and your children killed. Again, this isn’t ancient history to me: the girls killed in that bombing were born less than a decade before I entered this vale of tears, which I did in a hospital about two miles from their church. I lived close enough to that church that I could have heard or felt the explosion, though I don’t remember whether I did.
So in the simplistic three-world formulation the word “world” is doing a lot of work, work it’s not capable of doing. A “positive world” for middle-class conservative white people who don’t speak out against the evils of segregation and naked hateful racism is not a positive world for Christians tout court. You can actually see Brad implicitly acknowledging that the whole debate is too vague when, at the outset of his post, he does what Aaron Renn does not do and narrows the frame of reference to the attitude of the “nation’s elite institutions” – which institutions, of course, are not our whole world.
But even if you do that, the story is more complicated than the three-worlds framework suggests. For instance, though a lunatic fringe insisted (and still insists) that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim, millions of American voters were clearly reassured by his longstanding church membership and open affirmation of the Christian faith. There’s no way he could have been elected President without being explicitly Christian – and I think it’s fair to say that the Presidency is an “elite institution.” America has never elected an avowed atheist as President, nor a Jew, nor a Muslim, and indeed the electorate taken as a whole still seems to think of some profession of Christian faith an important qualification for office. (That may well change in the future, of course.) But the kind of straightforward profession of belief in Jesus Christ that we saw in Obama, and before him in Jimmy Carter, would at any previous time in our history have been a red flag. Too much religiosity!
So there are many vectors here of varying power and varying directionality. Let me turn, then, to Derek Rishmawy’s response:
Nevertheless, it does not seem inane, politically, or pastorally irrelevant to ask the question: is there a coherent sense in which one could say the Roman world shifted to a “neutral” or “positive” stance with respect to Christian practice and confession before or after Constantine’s Edict of Milan? Is that a question that is relevant to Christian political witness and pastoral practice?
I’m gonna say No. I’m gonna say that the question is indeed irrelevant, and for several reasons. First, because within the Empire conditions for Christians varied from time to time and place to place. Even at the height of Christian power there were pockets of pagan dominance; and let’s not forget that the reign of Julian the Apostate came after Constantine. Historians may be able to look back and see clear patterns, but no one at the time could have had that kind of assurance. No one knew that Constantine’s support for Christianity would succeed, or that Julian’s opposition to it would fail. Christians then had to face whatever reality confronted them in any given place, at any given moment — as do Christians today. And sometimes adherence to an abstract account of the-situation-in-general can obscure what’s right in front of your face.
I’m emphasizing how contextually variable the circumstances of Christians always are because simplistic accounts lead to strategies. The most profound problem with the three-worlds account is not that it’s wrong, though it is wrong, but that it’s supposed to yield a strategy. And let me be blunt about this: Whenever Christians decide that they need a strategy, they’re writing a recipe for disobedience to the Lord Jesus. As Stanley Hauerwas has always said in response to people who say that the Church needs a social strategy, “the Church is a social strategy.” And here’s Lesslie Newbigin:
When our Lord stretched forth His hand to heal a leper, there was no evangelistic strategy attached to the act. It was a pure outflow of the divine love into the world, and needed no further justification. Such should be the Church’s deeds of service.
The Church’s job is to be the Church, and the Christian’s task is to be like Christ, and strategies invariably get in the way of both. In fact, I believe that, generally speaking, though the people who hold them typically don’t realize this, that’s just what they’re designed to do.
One of the more curious ways Christian “strategic thinking” plays out these days is in the use, by people who hold some version or another (there are several) of the negative-world hypothesis, of the example of Israel. It seems to me telling that the Catholic integralist strategy for infiltrating the corridors of power relies exclusively on Old Testment examples. Likewise this recent post by Kirsten Sanders critiquing Tim Keller’s Areopagocentric emphasis on the need for Christian persuasion:
Certainly such a view on persuasion is one way to read the biblical text. But there are other biblical accounts, too, where Israel encountered a changed world and needed to learn how to live there. Israel in Babylon wasn’t doing a whole lot of cultural exegesis or persuasion. They were learning how to pray while they longed for home.
Indeed – but this neglects the essential fact that Israel were recipients of a Promise, while the Church, while inheriting that same Promise, has also been given a Commission. Jews typically don’t proselytize because they aren’t asked to. It’s always useful for Christians to look to “captive Israel” for consolation and example, but not at the expense of heeding the Commission that led Paul to Athens and the Areopagus.
Moreover, where would we Christians be if the Apostles and the holy martyrs had adopted the negative-world strategy? We would not be, is the answer. I don’t know whether there can be bitter laughter among the company of heaven, but if the martyrs know that we American Christians, beneficiaries of extraordinary legal protections for our professions of faith and inheritors of centuries of faithful stewardship, are complaining that we can’t try to persuade people because our world is too negative, then they are certainly laughing, and not in a way that would be musical to our ears.
•
So if having a strategy is wrong, what’s right? This is the part I actually want to talk about. What follows may seem personal to the point of self-centeredness, but if you bear with me I think you’ll eventually see why I take this path.
A while back a friend, another Christian writer and scholar, paid me a visit and as we sipped our whisky commented, “You know, Alan, I can’t think of anyone else who has had a career remotely like yours.” And it’s true: I have had – for good or ill or (more probably) both – a very strange career. Just a few weeks ago I met with a group of Christians leaders, leaders in various fields quite different than mine, who wanted me to explain to them how I have ended up writing for the publications I write for. My response came in two parts. The first part was this: I asked them to reflect on the fact that they were the very first people ever to ask me that question. And the second part was this: The key, I said, is that I have never had a plan.
I mean, Do I really look like a guy with a plan?
A while back some Christian writers and editors stirred up an online contretemps by criticizing other Christian writers for seeking publication in “more prestigious” secular outlets. I didn’t weigh in because every online contretemps is definitionally stupid and anyway I had already made my views on this matter clear. But for those who haven’t memorized my blog history, here’s the story: I was perfectly content when I wrote my non-academic essays almost exclusively for Books and Culture and First Things, but then First Things started turning down everything I sent them and Books and Culture was shut down. I was asked to write for Christianity Today but when I suggested topics I was told that they were too academic. So when Alexis Madrigal encouraged me to write for the Technology channel of the Atlantic, and then, later, Chris Beha asked me to write for Harper’s, I did. I didn’t have a plan or a strategy – I just stopped knocking at the doors that had been slammed in my face, or that had disappeared altogether, and started going through the doors that were opened to me in welcome. Obviously there are limits to such a practice – if the Nazi Herald Tribune had asked me to write for them I would have declined – but I didn’t see anything wrong with writing for the Atlantic and Harper’s, especially they have always allowed me to make my Christianity known.
Whether I have been a good Christian witness in the public sphere I am not in a position to say. It’s very possible that I have totally wasted my opportunities, and I have often prayed that this topic not come up when I go before the Judgment Seat. But whether I have used those opportunities wisely or not, I got them precisely because I didn’t have a strategy. Instead, I had certain commitments – commitments that I wouldn’t abandon, some of which were overtly Christian and others of which were implicitly so: for instance, I wanted to write rigorously but also as elegantly as I could manage, I wanted to be deeply scholarly but also fair-minded and honest, and while non-Christians can do all those things, I am committed to them because I believe that I have been entrusted with the stewardship of certain gifts that come from God. That conviction also helps me to perceive that maybe, just maybe, if I get interested in something that doesn’t appear to be directly related to my Christian faith I may in the end discover connections I could not have anticipated. (See e.g. my persistent fascination with Daoism and anarchism.)
My conviction, for what it’s worth, is that Christians should have commitments without strategies, but instead tend to have strategies without the requisite commitments. Let me tell you what I think that leads to.
Thomas Aquinas says that hope is the virtue that lies between the two vices of presumption (praesumptio) and despair (desperatio).
Integralists, by and large, are presumptuous: they want to rule the world, but decline to ask whether they are fit to rule the world. They think being on the right side is all the justification they need. It isn’t. (Like Boromir, they cannot think of Power as anything but a gift to them.) When Thomas Merton was Master of Novices at the Abbey of Gethsemani, he would constantly remind those novices that they were in monastic life not because they were too pure for the world — which they thought they were: big stars for Team Catholic — but because they were too weak to flourish there. Christian formation begins and, I think, ends in the Jesus Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.
By contrast, those who decline to try to persuade others of the hope that is in them on the grounds that the “world” is too “negative” for that are in the grip of a kind of despair – not in relation to themselves (presumably they do not doubt that God is gracious to them) but in relation to their neighbors. To those people, I would just say that if God can speak through Balaam’s donkey He can speak through you.
Thomas says that the presumptuous and the despairing alike have something important in common, which he calls the status comprehensor – they are fixed, immobile. The despairing don’t think they can go anywhere; the presumptuous don’t think they need to go anywhere. Having a strategy pushes you towards such a stasis: by choosing in advance a particular path to follow, you are foreclosing on all the other possible paths. You are making yourself deaf to God’s unexpected calls upon your life.
What characterizes the hopeful Christian, Thomas says, is the status viator – the state of being a wayfarer. Thus Josef Pieper refers to “the wayfaring character of hope.” Wayfarers know their destination but aren’t sure how to get there; all along the way they look for signs indicating the best path, and seek help both from their companions and from those they encounter on the road. They know that they have to be flexible and agile; they know that their enemies are Aimlessness and Fixity. They trust in a Guide they cannot see; they listen for His still small voice. Maybe things will be better than they expect; maybe worse; unquestionably different. But they make their way along the pilgrim road, because they hold firm to this twofold truth about Jesus Christ: “As God, he is the goal; as man, he is the way” (Augustine, City of God XI.3).
As a wayfarer you must have a destination but you must accept the inadequacy of any strategy. You must be willing to sprawl.
Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.
Reprimanded and dismissed,
it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
of possibility. It may have to leave the Earth.
Being roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek
And thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl.
Rowan Williams on Ronald Blythe at 100:
“He’s somebody who is very committed to the Christian tradition and he uses it to think with, he uses it as a structure – a Christian year, the round of festivals and commemorations, for him is woven into the round of the calendar year as it would have been for generations before him,” Williams says. “You can think more freely and you may be able to feel more deeply if you’re confident that there’s this steady backdrop. You don’t have to keep making things up. There’s a world you can inhabit, your feet are on the ground, and that means you can walk around, breathe deeply and look slowly. That’s faith.”
Richard Mabey, in his introduction to the new collection of Blythe’s writings that Williams also contributes to, writes:
Ronnie’s knowledge and practice of scripture are evident in many of his writings. But only in these Wormingford columns does he openly declare his quite unselfconscious, unquestioning, sometimes irreverent, and just occasionally pagan-tinged Christian faith. And as a friend but a non-believer I have to make a reckoning with this. By unspoken common consent we have never discussed religion. But at a dinner with village friends once, I betrayed my metropolitan prejudices by insisting that the church no longer had any influence on everyday social life. Ronnie turned to me and said, quietly, ‘Richard, you don’t know what you are talking about.’ And as far as Wormingford is concerned he was quite correct, as these pages abundantly show. It was the closest we have ever come to a row.
Jonathan Spence, in The Gate of Heavenly Peace, relates that the great Chinese reformer Kang Youwei, troubled by the way China in the late 19th century was dominated by other nations, founded an organization called the Know Our Humiliation Society. We American Christians need one of those.
Here’s something people have been asking me to weigh in on for quite a while, but I’ve been putting it off, because … well, what’s the point? But here at last I am.
You know that argument by Aaron Renn about “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism”? Well, it’s wrong. Let me explain … no, there is too much. Let me sum up.
I can sum up just by quoting one of the first parts, because that is where the argument goes wildly off the rails:
Positive World (Pre-1994): Society at large retains a mostly positive view of Christianity. To be known as a good, churchgoing man remains part of being an upstanding citizen. Publicly being a Christian is a status-enhancer. Christian moral norms are the basic moral norms of society and violating them can bring negative consequences.
The “pre-1994” timeframe is obviously wrong. Few of the Founding Fathers held anything remotely approximating orthodox Christian faith; Abraham Lincoln had famously unknowable and shifting religious beliefs, and never joined a church. At the time of the Founding probably no more than 10% of Americans belonged to any church. You can get the details on all this in Mark Noll’s magisterial America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln; America became a markedly more religious country in the 1950s, a process described by George Marsden in another authoritative history, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment. Turns out that for much of America’s history, and in most of America’s places, whether someone was demonstrably a Christian or not really didn’t matter all that much. You can find that out, if you take the time.
So, you see, we’re already in the midst of major difficulties. Renn has begun with a big historical claim that is demonstrably untrue. If instead of “Pre-1994” he had written “1945-1994” then we could at least have proceeded. So let’s pretend he did and come to his first sentence.
That sentence is the general claim, the next three unpack it. Sentence 2 strikes me as being generally correct, but irrelevant or ambiguous in import. (Was Jesus considered “an upstanding citizen”?) Sentence 3 would be correct if the phrase “being a Christian” were replaced with “professing Christianity.” Sentence 4 would be correct if its first word were “Some,” but because it isn’t, the sentence is incorrect, and incorrect in a way that destroys the entire argument.
Here’s what I mean: Some Christian moral norms carried social authority in many though not all parts of America. For instance, generally speaking, a married person could not openly conduct extramarital affairs, nor could an unmarried one be openly promiscuous. Certainly homosexuality was almost always seen as a sin. Whether divorce damaged you socially — well, that varied a lot from place to place. Renn doesn’t cite any examples, so I don’t know what else he might have in mind. Maybe “honor your father and mother”? — That certainly was a commandment held in far higher regard before the social upheavals of the Sixties.
But for much of America’s history there were very large sections of the country in which, if you wanted to argue that all human beings are made in the image of God and the laws of America should in this respect follow the law of God, you were, shall we say, unlikely to get a respectful hearing. (And as David French recently pointed out, those problems, and other related ones, haven’t altogether gone away.) Does Renn seriously think that the slaves in the cotton fields singing their spirituals were living in a Christianity-positive world? But wait — that’s pre-1945, sorry. Does Renn think that six-year-old Ruby Bridges, praying for those who cursed and reviled her, was living in a Christianity-positive world? (And, to me anyway, this ain’t ancient history: Ruby Bridges is just four years older than I am.) Or Jonathan Daniels, who stood between a black woman and a deputy sheriff and got himself shot dead for his trouble — and whose killer was acquitted and lived out his life in peace?
Now, I’m sure many of those who screamed abuse at Ruby, or voted to acquit the murderer of Jonathan Daniels, would have insisted that they were good and faithful Christians — which takes me back to the distinction I made above, and that Renn failed to make, between “publicly professing Christianity” and “publicly being a Christian.” Those who hated Ruby may have professed Christianity, but did they live it?
If they had not professed Christianity they probably would have suffered social disapproval; if they had sought to practice it in relation to Ruby Bridges and their other black neighbors they certainly would have been excoriated — or worse. (Look at what happened to my old colleague Julius Scott, for the crime of saying that Black people should be welcomed into all-white churches.)
What David French means when he says that “It’s Always a ‘Negative World’ for Christianity” is simply this: Professing Christianity is what Renn calls a “status-enhancer” when and only when the Christianity one professes is in step with what your society already and without reference to Christian teaching describes as “being an upstanding citizen.” If you don’t believe me, try getting up on stage in an evangelical megachurch and reckoning seriously with Jesus’s teaching on wealth and poverty. Even a sermon on loving your enemies, like Ruby Bridges, and blessing those who curse you, can be a hard sell — as many pastors since 2016 have discovered. News flash: if you make a point of never saying anything that would make people doubt your commitment to their preferred social order, they’ll probably think you an upstanding citizen. (Who knew?)
There are pretty much always some elements of Christian teaching that you can get away with publicly affirming; but you can never get away with affirming them all. If American Christians sixty years ago felt fully at home in their social world, that’s because they quietly set aside, or simply managed to avoid thinking about, all the biblical commandments that would render them no longer at ease in the American dispensation. Any Christians who have ever felt completely comfortable in their culture have already edited out of their lives the elements of Christianity that would generate social friction. And no culture that exists, or has ever existed, or ever will exist, is receptive to the whole Gospel.
As I said at the outset: What’s the point even of writing this? Renn saw French’s essay, and he simply congratulated himself on getting attention. He didn’t answer any of the arguments made against his scheme, and I doubt he ever will. He’s articulated a tall tale that some people want to live by, and that seems to be good enough for him.
But there’s another reason why I doubt the usefulness of this whole debate: It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter one whit. I’ve said this over and over again: Whether it’s a positive world or a neutral world or a negative world or a multiverse or just a crazy old world, my job is the same: to strive for faithfulness to the Lord Jesus. What I hear him saying is, “What is all that to you? Follow me.” And following him is hard, because I am subjected to precisely the same pressures against faithful Christian witness that every other Christian faces. I’m fighting for my spiritual life here. So I’m done with this topic; my time is better spent in other ways.
A therapeutic church is an atheist church — Brad East:
The more … a congregation becomes therapeutic, in its language, its liturgy, its morals, its common life, the more God recedes from the picture. God becomes secondary, then tertiary, then ornamental, then metaphorical, then finally superfluous. The old-timers keep God on mostly out of muscle memory, but the younger generations know the score. They don’t quit church and stop believing in God because of a lack of catechesis, as if they weren’t listening on Sundays. They were listening all right. The catechesis didn’t fail; it worked, only too well. The twenty- and thirty-somethings were preached right out of the gospel — albeit with the best of intentions and a smile on every minister and usher’s face. They smiled right back, and headed for the exit sign.
Therapeutic churches exchange the Good News they have been entrusted with for a cold pottage of bargain-basement bromides. If churches want to help people in their suffering, that’s wonderful — and there’s a rich 2000-year history of Christian pastoral care to draw on. But when you ignore all that and pick up your therapeutic categories from YouTube, You’re not making Christianity better, you’re just making therapy worse.
Sermon for All Souls, 2 November 2022
Ely Cathedral, 7.30 pm
Canon Jessica Martin
NT: 1 Peter 1.3–9
Gospel: John 5.19–25
Although you have not seen him, you love him (1 Pet.1.8)
We are joined to the invisible work of love. We are entangled in its bonds, marked by its effects, changed by its force. We steer by its sights.
The writer of the letter of Peter was thinking of the ascended Jesus, part of this invisible Godhead, when he wrote these words to his readers: ‘Although you have not seen him, you love him’. He was speaking of the way that we who are Christian walk by faith and not only by sight. But our making, our being in the visible world, has also been shaped — and shaken — by human lives, human loves, now withdrawn from bodily sight and touch, invisible to the beings we are in this space, this time. For each of us here is joined to the dead that made us, and who we honour through remembrance in this requiem mass.
There are the dead whom we name, bringing them in our naming into the circle of the present. Those beloved names reach beyond sight and touch to the deep knowledge of memory and longing. Their absence is a wound in our present time, but we speak of them believing that past and future are always ‘now’ to God; that what has been is, for our Creator, never lost, never out of reach. Good and bad together, sorrow and joy, bitterness and division, misunderstanding and reconciliation, the blunders that shake our lives, the encounters that make it – all stand within the divine sight, for judgement; and for mercy. In speaking the names of the dead we do not only speak loss; we do not even only speak recollection. We bespeak our hope that all that has ever been exists for redemption in the eyes of God, through the resurrection of his son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. This is what it actually means to walk by faith and not only by sight.
Just a little out of sight of our remembered and beloved dead, lie those who are being forgotten, the names and beings slipping out of human memory. Sometimes, with the tail of our eye, we see them going. In a conversation with a nonagenarian in my last parish, he mentioned names of local villagers buried in the churchyard. Not all of them had headstones. Not all of them had been living even in his time; their resting places had been remembered by his parents, by the adults of his childhood in the early years of the twentieth century. Are their graves and names recorded, or did their memory slip away when the man I knew died, just a couple of years ago? What are the names and histories of the babies and small children buried in local graves housing members of my mother’s family? Only two or three generations have swept their short lives beyond our sight; we do not know how they felt, what they saw. Yet they live, in the eternal now; in the eye and heart of their loving Maker.
The act of remembering keeps our love in sight. And the act of remembering, the human act of remembering, stands in for everything we don’t know about our beloved dead. The most open, the most communicative of people will take much of his or her life forever away at death, across the river that divides the living from the dead. As the spirit returns to God who made it, its most private thoughts and feelings fall out of the earth and into the divine hand. My own dreams and nightmares, my own betrayals and spiritual victories, the things I saw on a particular day, at a particular hour forty years ago – many of them are no longer available to my memory, let alone anyone else’s. Much of what shaped and shook the person I have become is beyond my own knowing, now. But all this is known to God, before whom we are always and forever fully known.
As we remember, we participate in the great act of recollection that is God’s constant work. But it is not our work, not primarily. It is God’s work. It is ‘kept in heaven for us; imperishable, undefiled, unfading’. Such a thing is hard even to imagine.
We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed. The past is not static. It works in us. The Jesus of the past, who died and was raised, makes all the dead live. But the dead are not only raised to life and breathe again. The dead past is brought before the living eye of our Saviour, and changed: from blunder to wisdom, from incomprehension to understanding, from fear to love, from pain to recognition. We are not only meant for life, but for the redemption of our life. Not only shaped, but shaken into newness, into seeing afresh. As we hope to come home, so also do we hope to find ourselves always coming home in the sight of God’s bright homeliness.
Remember the beloved dead. And remember the forgotten dead. And offer to God the Father all that you yourself have forgotten. For, in the end, through Jesus who lives in the love of the Father, all that is hidden shall embrace the light perpetual, and all that lies unknown shall be for ever recognised.
Blessed are those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways to Zion.
Who going through the barren valley find there a spring; and the pools are filled with water.
They will go from strength to strength; and appear before God in Zion.
(Ps.84.4-6)
Amen.
The other day I emailed my friend Adam Roberts and told him that I would have something to say about his despicable atheism.
Adam: “SCANDALOUS atheism! Not despicable! Scandalous!”
Me: “That’s just what a despicable atheist would say.”
Do please read Adam’s post; it’s extremely thoughtful and nuanced. Adam is responding to a claim by the late great literary critic Frank Kermode – a model of critical excellence for both Adam and me – that “From poetry and music I derive the little I know about holiness.” Adam wants to counterclaim that as much as he also is moved by poetry and music, that’s not really a religious experience.
I say so with a certain sorrow, for, like Kermode, poetry and music are very important to my life, and in them I often find the transcendence, the holiness of which he speaks here. But I don’t think his larger point is correct, actually. I cannot avoid the self-knowledge that this merely secular pseudo-faith lacks the blood, the force — lacks, the stationed and parrhesiastic surrender to absolute otherness — of religious faith in the Kierkegaardian sense I just mentioned — which is to say, in the sense that Kierkegaard understood the Christian idea of eternity as something applied to every moment of human existence.
Of course, it’s possible that speaking from experiential ignorance, as I necessarily am, leads me to over-romanticise what it is that people of faith have, and I lack. For many faith is, perhaps, a far more mundane business; it is surely, for most, a more quotidian business. Religion is a taxonomy of beliefs, yes; and it is (what I’m talking about here) an access to a transcendent otherness, an intensity of affect and apprehension, a power and glory. But more than that it is a social mode of being-in-the-world, a form of community, of belonging to a particular tribe: not just going to church, temple or mosque on high holy days, but helping-out at the church jumble sale, running the soup kitchen, reading-groups, social events, all that. It is something that serves to identify self and help it bond with others. Of seeing in other people not just strangers but brothers and sisters. Sitting at home and listening to a Bach cantata on your stereo isn’t any of that.
This is just one part of a complicated essay, but it should at least give the flavor.
All of what Adam says about religious faith – with its vertical (Godward) and horizontal (Neighborward) dimensions – seems to me correct, and useful in distinguishing such faith from whatever it is we most powerfully experience when we encounter the arts. But …
First of all, I don’t feel that I know anything about religion or religious faith in general; I only know what it means to be a Christian, or rather what it means to me to be a Christian. And to me the deepest heart of the matter is neither the ethical life of neighborliness nor an encounter with the transcendent but simply that as I read the Gospels I see in the life and words of Jesus an astonishing thing: Though I am unloveable, God loves me, and is willing to pay an enormous price to reconcile me to Himself. God loves me and hopes – “hopes” is a strange word to use with regard to the Omnipotent and Omniscient, but it’s the best word I have – God hopes that I will love Him in return.
Kierkegaard, in Philosophical Fragments:
And the cause of all this suffering is love, precisely because the God is not jealous for himself, but desires in love to be the equal of the humblest. When the seed of the oak is planted in earthen vessels, they break asunder; when new wine is poured in old leathern bottles, they burst; what must happen when the God implants himself in human weakness, unless man becomes a new vessel and a new creature! But this becoming, what labors will attend the change, how convulsed with birth-pangs! And the understanding – how precarious, and how close each moment to misunderstanding, when the anguish of guilt seeks to disturb the peace of love! And how rapt in fear; for it is indeed less terrible to fall to the ground when the mountains tremble at the voice of the God, than to sit at table with him as an equal; and yet it is the God’s concern precisely to have it so.
From my sense of this love, and its call upon my life, everything else, including the love of my neighbor, flows. Auden in “Winds,” the first of his “Bucolics”:
One bubble-brained creature said —
“I am loved, therefore I am” — :
And well by now might the lion
Be lying down with the kid,
Had he stuck to that logic.
I’m trying, heaven knows I’m trying, to stick to that logic.
That when reading about Jesus I feel drawn to this life I perceive as a free gift, a gift that, I well understand, not everyone receives. (I also understand that others receive it with far greater power than I do. I am a man of vague and shaky faith.) My friend Adam may be, like Max Weber — and the metaphor is especially appropriate given the contrasts at the heart of Adam’s post — “religiously unmusical.” But I do hope that one day he will hear the now-hidden harmonies of the Christian way; and even should he not, I trust that this ever-loving God will be infinitely merciful to him. It seems to me that Adam is a man after God’s own heart, whether he feels it or not.
When the Church leads with its moral code — and elevates that moral code over even the most basic understandings of Jesus Christ himself — the effect isn’t humility and hope; it’s pride and division. When the Church chooses a particular sin as its defining apostasy (why sex more than racism, or greed, or gluttony, or cruelty?), it perversely lowers the standards of holy living by narrowing the Christian moral vision.
The result is a weaker religion, one that is less demanding for the believer while granting those who uphold the narrow moral code a sense of unjustified pride. Yet pride separates Christians from each other, and separates Christians from their neighbors.
Millions of Christians are humble and hopeful. Millions are also prideful and divisive. Why? One answer is found in the LifeWay-Ligonier survey. In the quest for morality, they’ve lost sight of Jesus — but it is Jesus who truly defines the Christian faith.
AMEN.
Having written recently about the death of Queen Elizabeth, I’d like to call attention to some of the things I’ve written in the past about what I believe to be the essentially monarchical character of the human imagination:
- My essay for the Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis on the Narnia books, which I argue have a single theme: disputed sovereignty
- A post on the very idea of the return of the King
- An essay on how Emile Durkheim’s portrayal of the dominant concerns of traditional or “primitive” societies has a modern afterlife
- An essay on the ongoing power of what Leszek Kołakowski calls “mythical thinking” (and do check out the Kołakowski tag at the bottom of this post)
Short version of all this: Every distinction we make between our “modern” selves and our “primitive” ancestors is wrong. We’re exactly like them in all the ways that really matter for our own self-understanding.
Today’s American evangelical Christianity seems to be more focused on hunting heretics internally than perhaps in any other generation. The difference, however, is that excommunications are happening not over theological views but over partisan politics or the latest social media debates.
I’ve always found it a bit disconcerting to see fellow evangelicals embrace Christian leaders who teach heretical views of the Trinity or embrace the prosperity gospel but seek exile for those who don’t vote the same way or fail to feign outrage over clickbait controversies.
But something more seems to be going on here — something involving an overall stealth secularization of conservative evangelicalism. What worries me isn’t so much that evangelical Christians can’t articulate Christian orthodoxy in a survey. It’s that, to many of them, Christian orthodoxy seems boring and irrelevant compared to claiming religious status for already-existing political, cultural, or ethnonational tribes.
A strong and sad Amen to this. It is perfectly clear that there is a movement in America of people who call themselves evangelicals but have no properly theological commitments at all. But what’s not clear, to me anyway, is how many of them there are. Donald Trump can draw some big crowds, and those crowds often have a quasi-religious focus on him or anyway on what they believe he stands for — but those crowds are not large in the context of the entire American population. They’re very visible, because both Left and Right have reasons for wanting them to be visible, but how demographically significant are they really?
I have similar questions about, for instance, the “national conservatism” movement. Is this actually a movement? Or is it just a few guys who follow one another on Twitter and subscribe to one another’s Substacks?
Questions to be pursued at the School for Scale, if I can get it started.
After the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, C. S. Lewis wrote to an American friend,
You know, over here people did not get that fairy-tale feeling about the coronation. What impressed most who saw it was the fact that the Queen herself appeared to be quite overwhelmed by the sacramental side of it. Hence, in the spectators, a feeling of (one hardly knows how to describe it) – awe – pity – pathos – mystery. The pressing of that huge, heavy crown on that small, young head becomes a sort of symbol of the situation of humanity itself: humanity called by God to be His vice-regent and high priest on earth, yet feeling so inadequate. As if He said ‘In my inexorable love I shall lay upon the dust that you are glories and dangers and responsibilities beyond your understanding.’ Do you see what I mean? One has missed the whole point unless one feels that we have all been crowned and that coronation is somehow, if splendid, a tragic splendour.
You either feel this kind of thing or you don’t. It makes sense that Lewis would feel it, not so much because he was British — as a native Irishman he had somewhat complicated feelings about that — but because he had been steeped all his life in stories, in histories true and feigned, about a monarchical world. He didn’t just know about the King’s Two Bodies, he felt that doctrine in his bones. Thus his overwhelming “awe – pity – pathos – mystery” at the doubleness of the moment: an ordinary young woman, wife and mother, bearing in her own body and on her own head the astonishing idea that we are all meant to be kings and queens, and to rule on behalf of the One True King. As the hymn says,
Finish, then, thy new creation;
true and spotless let us be.
Let us see thy great salvation
perfectly restored in thee.
Changed from glory into glory,
till in heav’n we take our place,
till we cast our crowns before thee,
lost in wonder, love, and praise.
That hymn is the secret text of Lewis’s most famous address, “The Weight of Glory,” which describes the burden we feel when we face this high calling:
I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important. Indeed, how we think of Him is of no importance except insofar as it is related to how He thinks of us. It is written that we shall “stand before” Him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. To please God … to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness … to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a son — it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.
The coronation of Elizabeth as Queen, seen in a certain way, the way Lewis saw it, is the coronation of one nation’s Queen but also a dramatic performing of this weight of glory — the glory and the weight in equal measure, poised in juxtaposition.
One of the most-quoted sentences in the days since Elizabeth’s death has been the pledge she made on her twenty-first birthday in 1947: “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” And I don’t think anyone — friend or enemy of the British Crown — doubts that she meant it when she said it and that she tried to live up to it for the rest of her very long life. And thus many, in these recent days, have felt a rather different “awe – pity – pathos – mystery” than Lewis felt at the coronation: in this case this peculiar complex of emotions arises from seeing one who has borne a burden, a weight, for a very long time finally laying that burden down.
As I say, either you feel this way or you don’t. It’s perhaps a little harder for us Americans to feel it, because we are not accustomed to the idea that the head of state can be someone altogether different (and fulfilling an altogether different function) than the head of government. On rare occasions something can happen to awaken the impulse even in us. JFK’s assassination was that for many, and gave birth to a kind of cult of Lost Hope — the Camelot myth. Perhaps a better example was provided to me by my mother-in-law, who is a year older than Elizabeth and is still with us: She said that when FDR passed “it was like everyone’s father had died.” Likewise, many Christians, and not just Roman Catholics, felt that the stooped, frail figure of Pope John Paul II in his final years was an image of what we all might be someday — what we all are, in a way, at least sometimes.
But whether you feel it or not, I will say: Just as the coronation of the Queen was an image of something meant for all of humanity, so too her funeral. She has borne the weight faithfully, and she has laid down her burden. Her obsequies then are not just about “the King’s two bodies” but about all of us. If we allow it, Elizabeth can be our representative: made up of “the dust that we are,” but also one who has born the weight of glory for a very long time, and now can rest; now can cast her crown before the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and then forever be lost in wonder, love, and praise.
Very much looking forward to Jamie’s latest, which seems the natural — indeed the wonderfully inevitable — next step in his thoughtful and provocative Augustinian journey. I might want to read it in conjunction with a re-read of this.
Ivan Illich, from In the Mirror of the Past:
Rather than life in a shadow economy, I propose, on top of the z-axis, the idea of vernacular work: unpaid activities which provide and improve livelihood, but which are totally refractory to any analysis utilizing concepts developed in formal economics. I apply the term ‘vernacular’ to these activities, since there is no other current concept that allows me to make the same distinction within the domain covered by such terms as ‘informal sector, ‘use value,’ ‘social reproduction.’ Vernacular is a Latin term that we use in English only for the language that we have acquired without paid teachers. In Rome, it was used from 500 B.C. to 600 A.D. to designate any value that was homebred, homemade, derived from the commons, and that a person could protect and defend though he neither bought nor sold it in the market. I suggest that we restore this simple term, vernacular, to oppose commodities and their shadow. It allows me to distinguish between the expansion of the shadow economy and its inverse the expansion of the vernacular domain.
One of Les Murray’s collections of poems is called The Vernacular Republic, and while that title is usually thought to refer to Australia simpliciter, I don’t think that’s right. The Vernacular Republic is more an ideal image of Australia, what it might have been and perhaps (with repentance) still could be.
I think if we take Illich’s understanding of the vernacular domain, and add to it the image of an alternative but “more comprehensive” economy that Wendell Berry writes of, then we have a rough outline of what a genuine Vernacular Republic would be. The Vernacular Republic is an “informal sector” that opposes the logic of commodity and gradually but steadily practices the Kingdom of God.
When we are caked with the mud of political struggle, and tired of Pyrrhic victories that seed new hatreds, and frightened by our own capacity for contempt, the way of life set out by Jesus comes like a clear bell that rings above our strife. It defies cynicism, apathy, despair and all ideologies that dream of dominance. It promises that every day, if we choose, can be the first day of a new and noble manner of living. Its most difficult duties can feel much like purpose and joy. And even our halting, halfhearted attempts at faithfulness are counted by God as victories.
God’s call to us while not simplifying our existence does ennoble it. It is the invitation to a life marked by meaning. And even when, as mortality dictates, we walk the path we had feared to tread, it can be a pilgrimage, in which all is lost, and all is found.
Before such a consummation, Christians seeking social influence should do so not by joining interest groups that fight for their narrow rights and certainly not those animated by hatred, fear, phobias, vengeance or violence. Rather, they should seek to be ambassadors of a kingdom of hope, mercy, justice and grace. This is a high calling and a test that most of us (myself included) are always finding new ways to fail. But it is the revolutionary ideal set by Jesus of Nazareth, who still speaks across the sea of years.
Letter from Martin Luther King Jr. to Clarence Jordan and the people of Koinonia Farm in Georgia; from a fine reflection on Jordan by Starlette Thomas.
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works:
To those in whose breast it lodges, the holy is everywhere evident as the first principle of both seeing and doing. If you regard the world as God’s book before you ever take a particular look at it, any look you take will reveal, even as it generates, traces of his presence. If, on the other hand, the reality and omnipresence of God is not a basic premise of your consciousness, nothing you see will point to it and no amount of evidence will add up to it. You will miss it entirely, as Mammon [in Paradise Lost] does when all he can see in the soil and minerals of hell is material for a home-improvement project, one that will make up for the loss of heaven: “Nor want we skill or art, from whence to raise / Magnificence; and what can Heav’n show more?” He’s not kidding; he really means it. As far as he can see (a colloquialism I want to take very seriously), there is nothing more to see than the phenomena his art and skill will be able to produce; and those phenomena will bring heaven back to him because he never knew what it was in the first place…. Had he truly known heaven, he could not have moved away from it, for it would have been “a heaven within” (as it is for Abdiel, whose physical removal to the North leaves him unchanged in his essence); and were he now to know it by realizing what he had lost and could not replace by feats of construction, he would no longer have lost it, for its reality would be animating him even in exile and he would be in the position the Elder Brother imagines for his virtuous sister: “He that has light within his own clear breast / May sit i’th’ center, and enjoy bright day” (Comus, 381–382).
My wife Teri and I first met Fred Buechner in 1984, when he came to Wheaton College for a ceremony acknowledging the donation of his papers to the college’s Special Collections. We only spoke briefly at that time, and my chief memory of our conversation is Fred’s passionate impromptu defense of Anthony Trollope as a great and deep novelist – not the relatively lightweight storyteller, the maker of fictional comfort food, that he is often said to be. I had not read Trollope at that time, and when I first sat down with his books I was glad to recall Fred’s words – they made me a better reader of that much-loved but still-underrated writer.
The next year Fred returned to Wheaton for an eight-week stint as a visiting professor, an adventure that he describes in the third of his series of brief memoirs, Telling Secrets. A couple of years earlier he had spent a term teaching homiletics at Harvard Divinity School, an experience he found always perplexing and sometimes discouraging:
Whatever may have bound my students together elsewhere in the way of common belief or commitment, I was much more aware of what divided them. It did not take me long to discover early in the game, as you might have thought I would have known before I came, that a number of them were Unitarian Universalists who by their own definition were humanist atheists. One of them, a woman about my age, came to see me in my office one day to say that although many of the things I had to teach about preaching she found interesting enough, few of them were of any practical use to people like her who did not believe in God. I asked her what it was she did believe in, and I remember the air of something like wistfulness with which she said that whatever it was, it was hard to put into words. I could sympathize with that, having much difficulty putting such things into words over the years myself, but at the same time I felt somehow floored and depressed by what she said. I think things like peace, kindness, social responsibility, honesty were the things she believed in – and maybe she was right, maybe that is the best there is to believe in and all there is – but it was hard for me to imagine giving sermons about such things. I could imagine lecturing about them or writing editorials about them, but I could not imagine standing up in a pulpit in a black gown with a stained glass window overhead and a Bible open on the lectern and the final chords of the sermon hymn fading away into the shadows and preaching about them. I realized that if ideas were all I had to preach, I would take up some other line of work.
This experience was still fresh in Fred’s mind when he came to Wheaton – and if you want to know what he thought about that event, well, you should read Telling Secrets, which is by any measure a beautiful book and more than worth reading even if you don’t care a fig about Harvard or Wheaton.
Teri and I spent a good bit of time with Fred during that eight-week period: we went to the Wheaton Theater to see Return to Oz (the Oz books were always totemic and iconic for Fred); on weekends we traveled into Chicago to eat at fancy restaurants, meals for which Fred always paid, referring to himself as “the rich man from the east”; and two or three times we ate at a local restaurant that he somewhat comically grew attached to. It was called the Viking, and was a more or less standard Midwestern steakhouse with one peculiarity on the menu: they served a spinach salad that they would flame at your table. At one point a salad was set afire directly behind Teri and me, and we flinched forward in our seats as the flames warmed our necks, which caused Fred to lean over and whisper conspiratorially to Teri: “This is a dangerous restaurant.” (Fred loved Teri, in part because she was the same age as one of his daughters – he and his wife Judy had three daughters – and he would occasionally say to me, “I only put up with you because of your wife.”)
A year or so later, I think, the Viking was badly damaged in a fire, and since nothing could have been less surprising, I hastily wrote Fred a letter about it. The relevant portion of his reply:
And the fiery fate of the Viking! I can only hope that by now it is back in commission again. I remember with extraordinary pleasure – together with so many other things about my Wheaton weeks – my suppers there. Steak, medium rare, with a baked potato and salad, and a glass or two of red wine for the stomach’s sake. I would always bring a book to read as I ate, but most of the time I would just sit there feasting my eyes on my fellow diners and the flames from the various chafing dishes ablaze around me. Had I only thought to warn them.
On several occasions that semester I got to hear Fred read from his own work, and he was an absolutely marvelous reader. His writing was, I think, and this is true of most of the best writers, emergent from speech. He loathed excessive punctuation, and a sentence didn’t have to have a lot of punctuation for him to consider it excessive: he wanted the pauses and emphases to be clear from the words. Read that passage from Telling Secrets aloud; it’s a marvel of timing and rhythm, like the phrasing of a great jazz singer. Or consider this passage from what I think is his best novel, Son of Laughter – a retelling of the story of Jacob, who refers to YHWH as the Fear:
The unclean blood no longer clung to our hands, but the small gods clung still to our hearts. They clung with silver fingers, with fingerless hands of wood and baked clay. Like rats, the gods gibbered in our hearts about the rich gifts they have for giving to us. The gods give rain. The swelling udder they give and the sweet fig, the plump ear of grain, the ooze of oil. They give sons. To Laban they gave cunning. They give their names as the Fear, at the Jabbok, refused me his when I asked it, and a god named is a god summoned. The Fear comes when he comes. It is the Fear who summons. The gods give in return for your gifts to them: the strangled dove, the burnt ox, the first fruit. There are those who give them their firstborn even, the child bound to the altar for knifing as Abraham bound Isaac till the Fear of his mercy bade the urine-soaked old man unbind him. The Fear gives to the empty-handed, the empty-hearted, as to me from the stone stair he gave promise and blessing, and gave them also to Isaac before me, to Abraham before Isaac, all of us wanderers only, herdsmen and planters moving with the seasons as gales of dry sand move with the wind. In return it is only the heart’s trust that the Fear asks. Trust him though you cannot see him and he has no silver hand to hold. Trust him though you have no name to call him by, though out of the black night he leaps like a stranger to cripple and bless.
Fred was one of the great prose stylists of his era, and while I don’t write like him — I don’t have the skill, and in any case the sorts of things that I write about and the ways that I write about them demand a different style than he developed — I’ve learned a great deal about the writing of prose from him. He made me think about prose in a different way than I ever had before, and if I have ever managed to write well, I think I owe a lot of that success to Fred.
But the most important lessons that I learned from Fred, lessons I’m still learning from him, arise from his temperament as a Christian. Not his beliefs, specifically, but his manner of approaching God and approaching the world. It was open-minded, to be sure, but more than that it was open-hearted, and continually aware of the ways that the world, like the Fear who made the world, can both hurt us and bless us. (He and I shared a great love for the passage in Anna Karenina in which Kitty gives birth to her first child and Levin, the new father, immediately thinks: Now the world has so many more ways to hurt me.) Fred was always fascinated by the many ways the God who loves us can use both the wounds and the blessings to form and shape our very being. Fred manifested – and in some ways this is even more evident from his personality than from his writing – a kind of gently ironic but faithful and hopeful bemusement. It’s very hard to describe, but I found it enormously winning, and the absence of it from the world is I think a real loss.
We hadn’t often been in touch in the past fifteen years. Once, I sent him a copy of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, a book I deeply love and that I felt sure Fred would also love. He wrote back to tell me that he had read it and indeed loved it, though he went on to say that he had absolutely no idea what it was about. Correspondence languished after that, alas. I thought many times over the last few years of writing to him, but I didn’t know what kind of shape he was in, and I didn’t know whether our relationship had ever been close enough to deserve that. I now regret not having made connection, as one does.
The last time Teri and I saw Fred and his quietly gracious wife Judy was at Calvin College some years ago, where Teri and Judy talked about their mutual love of horses. As we parted Judy asked Teri to come and ride with her sometime at their farm in Vermont, and of course that never happened, because Teri and I are the sort of people who are afraid of imposing, and fear that that sort of invitation might be pro forma rather than genuine. Now of course we wish we had put it to the test.
I am so thankful for Fred’s life and work and example, and I will miss him, and the world will miss him. May you rest in peace, good and faithful servant.
One more tiny thing: One autumn day in 1985, Fred came to our shabby apartment because he wanted to see my recent acquisition: an original Macintosh, complete with an ImageWriter printer. (My mom, who worked in a bank, had arranged a loan for me — the two items cost nearly three thousand bucks, as much as a car, and a fifth of my annual salary. But I had a dissertation to write and a determination not to take forever doing it.) Fred was quite taken with these devices, and ordered his own when he got back to Vermont; so I always smiled when I got ImageWriter-printed letters from him, like this one:
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time:
The church was very exciting. It took a long time for me to disengage myself from this excitement, and on the blindest, most visceral level, I never really have, and never will. There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicolored, worn, somehow triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord. I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many others have testified, to “rock.” Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, “the Word” — when the church and I were one.
Michael Warner, from his essay “Tongues Untied”, on listening to a lay teacher at his family’s Pentecostal church:
Every Wednesday night without fail, as this man wound himself through an internal deconstruction of the entire Calvinist tradition, in a fastidiously Protestant return to a more anthropomorphic God, foam dried and flecked on his lips. For our petit-bourgeois family it was unbearable to watch, but we kept coming back. I remember feeling the tension in my mother’s body next to me, all her perception concentrated on the desire to hand him the Kleenex that, as usual, she had thoughtfully brought along.
Being a literary critic is nice, I have to say, but for lip-whitening, veinpopping thrills it doesn’t compete. Not even in the headier regions of Theory can we approximate that saturation of life by argument. In the car on the way home, we would talk it over. Was he right? If so, what were the consequences? Mother, I recall, distrusted an argument that seemed to demote God to the level of the angels; she thought Christianity without an omniscient God was too Manichaean, just God and Satan going at it. She also complained that if God were not omniscient, prophecy would make no sense. She scored big with this objection, I remember; at the time, we kept ourselves up-to-date on Pat Robertson’s calculations about the imminent Rapture. I, however, cottoned on to the heretical engineer’s arguments with all the vengeful pleasure of an adolescent. God’s own limits were in sight: this was satisfaction in its own right, as was the thought of holding all mankind responsible in some way.
If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line – starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King’s Highway past the appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circling or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led — make of that what you will.
— Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow
From H. L. Mencken’s obituary for J. Gresham Machen, the proto-evangelical:
There was a time, two or three centuries ago, when the overwhelming majority of educated men were believers, but that is apparently true no longer. Indeed, it is my impression that at least two-thirds of them are now frank skeptics. But it is one thing to reject religion altogether, and quite another thing to try to save it by pumping out of it all its essential substance, leaving it in the equivocal position of a sort of pseudo-science, comparable to graphology, “education,” or osteopathy.
That, it seems to me, is what the Modernists have done, no doubt with the best intentions in the world. They have tried to get rid of all the logical difficulties of religion, and yet preserve a generally pious cast of mind. It is a vain enterprise. What they have left, once they have achieved their imprudent scavenging, is hardly more than a row of hollow platitudes, as empty as [of] psychological force and effect as so many nursery rhymes. They may be good people and they may even be contented and happy, but they are no more religious than Dr. Einstein. Religion is something else again — in Henrik Ibsen’s phrase, something far more deep-down-diving and mudupbringing, Dr. Machen tried to impress that obvious fact upon his fellow adherents of the Geneva Mohammed. He failed — but he was undoubtedly right.
This has always struck me as the proper view of the matter. I could be Machenesque or I could be Menckenesque, but I could never be a theological Modernist.
The first person to demonstrate this to me was Nietzsche, in his great early essay “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer,” in Untimely Meditations. Nietzsche’s scorn for Strauss’s attempt to build a post-Christian religion on the foundation of Darwinism is eviscerating. Nietzsche shows that the Darwinian model of the cosmos is not exactly a consoling one — and yet Strauss wants to console, wants to be a kind of optimist. So:
Whereupon Strauss started the ‘soothing oil’ flowing, led on a God who errs out of a passion for error, and assumed for once the wholly uncongenial role of a metaphysical architect. He does all this because his ‘we’ are afraid and he himself is afraid – and here we discover the limits of his courage, even with respect to his ‘we’. For he does not dare to tell them honestly: I have liberated you from a helpful and merciful God, the universe is only a rigid machine, take care you are not mangled in its wheels! This he dares not do: so he has to call in the sorceress, that is to say metaphysics.
A metaphysics meant, essentially, to make his readers believe that the “rigid machine” of the cosmos is a kind of worship-worthy God, or at least the secure grounding of a new religion.
At bottom, then, the new religion is not a new faith but precisely on a par with modern science and thus not religion at all. If Strauss nevertheless asserts that he does have a religion, the reasons for it lie outside the domain of contemporary science. Only a minute portion of Strauss’s book, amounting to no more than a few scattered pages, treats of that which Strauss could have a right to call a faith: namely that feeling for the cosmos for which he demands the same piety as the believer of the old stamp feels towards his God. In these pages at least the scientific spirit is certainly not in evidence: but we could wish for a little more strength and naturalness of faith! For what is so extremely striking is the artificiality of the procedures our author has to adopt in order to convince himself he still possesses a faith and a religion at all: as we have seen, he has to resort to jabbing and cudgelling. It creeps weakly along, this stimulated faith: we freeze at the sight of it.
Nietzsche has a usefully clarifying effect on those of us who want to see what our actual choices are. Mencken was pretty good at that also.
In Times of Tribulation, Prophecy Books Multiply:
“We are looking for books that not only try to decipher what the Bible is describing, but also how we live now,” says Kim Bangs, editorial director at Chosen Books, an imprint of Baker Publishing. Bangs attributes a greater interest in the End Times to social media, where crises happening around the world are shared. “When you see in real time what the Bible says will happen in the End Times, you start to pay attention and ask questions,” she says. “We seem to be closer to the end than ever before.”
I’m gonna go way out on a limb and say we are unquestionably closer to the end than ever before.
Joel Lehman and Kenneth O. Stanley (2011):
Most ambitious objectives do not illuminate a path to themselves. That is, the gradient of improvement induced by ambitious objectives tends to lead not to the objective itself but instead to dead-end local optima. Indirectly supporting this hypothesis, great discoveries often are not the result of objective-driven search. For example, the major inspiration for both evolutionary computation and genetic programming, natural evolution, innovates through an open-ended process that lacks a final objective. Similarly, large-scale cultural evolutionary processes, such as the evolution of technology, mathematics, and art, lack a unified fixed goal. In addition, direct evidence for this hypothesis is presented from a recently-introduced search algorithm called novelty search. Though ignorant of the ultimate objective of search, in many instances novelty search has counter-intuitively outperformed searching directly for the objective, including a wide variety of randomly-generated problems introduced in an experiment in this chapter. Thus a new understanding is beginning to emerge that suggests that searching for a fixed objective, which is the reigning paradigm in evolutionary computation and even machine learning as a whole, may ultimately limit what can be achieved. Yet the liberating implication of this hypothesis argued in this paper is that by embracing search processes that are not driven by explicit objectives, the breadth and depth of what is reachable through evolutionary methods such as genetic programming may be greatly expanded.
Late in their essay, Lehman and Stanley illustrate their point by describing the navigation of mazes: If you’re going to make your way from the periphery of a maze to the center, you have to be willing to spend a good bit of time moving away from your goal. A determination to go directly towards your goal will “lead not to the objective itself but instead to dead-end local optima.”
(I got to this by following some links from Samuel Arbseman’s newsletter.)
I think this insight has implications far beyond machine learning, and even beyond what Lehman and Stanley call “large-scale cultural evolutionary processes.” It’s true of ordinary human lives as well. When we define our personal goals too narrowly or too rigidly, we render ourselves unable to reach them — or to reach them only to discover that they weren’t our real goals after all.
There’s a wonderful moment in Thomas Merton’s The Seven-Storey Mountain when Merton — a new convert to Catholicism — is whining and vacillating about what he should be: a teacher, a priest, a writer, a monk, something else altogether maybe, a labor activist or a farm laborer. And his friend Robert Lax tells him that what he should want to be is a saint. It’s a marvelous goal not only because all Christians are called to be saints but also because there’s a liberating vagueness to the pursuit of sainthood. In his great essay on “Membership” C. S. Lewis comments that “the worldlings are so monotonously alike compared with the almost fantastic variety of the saints,” and it’s true: there are so many ways to be a saint, and you can never know which of them you’ll be called to take.
I think these thoughts may have some implications for secular vocations as well.
We know that when Dickens wrote David Copperfield he had not read Kierkegaard’s Either/Or – published less than a decade earlier, available only in Danish – but when I reflect on one character from that novel, James Steerforth, I find it hard to believe that Dickens didn’t know the “Seducer’s Diary.” Steerforth’s seduction, abduction, and abandonment of David’s childhood love Emily (Little Em’ly, as her family call her) proceeds precisely according to the emotional sequence outlined in that diary. Johannes the Seducer and Steerforth are both perfect embodiments of what Emile Durkheim would later call anomie – a combination of amorality and unconquerable boredom, with the boredom generated by the amorality, though seducers think that by rejecting the moral laws of their societies they can make their lives more interesting.
More on anomie later. For now I want to focus not on Steerforth himself but on his family – his, and Emily’s. Dickens regularly juxtaposes Mrs. Steerforth, James’s mother, to Daniel Peggotty, Emily’s uncle and adoptive father; this juxtaposition is one of the most important elements of the book. When Steerforth sweeps Emily away, just on the eve of her marriage to her cousin Ham, and takes her to Europe, both families are devastated, but in very different ways.
When, soon after the lovers’ disappearance, Daniel Peggotty visits Mrs. Steerforth – he hopes to learn whether Steerforth is likely to marry Emily – the lady treats him to this discourse:
“My son, who has been the object of my life, to whom its every thought has been devoted, whom I have gratified from a child in every wish, from whom I have had no separate existence since his birth – to take up in a moment with a miserable girl, and avoid me! To repay my confidence with systematic deception, for her sake, and quit me for her! To set this wretched fancy, against his mother’s claims upon his duty, love, respect, gratitude – claims that every day and hour of his life should have strengthened into ties that nothing could be proof against! Is this no injury? […]
“If he can stake his all upon the lightest object, I can stake my all upon a greater purpose. Let him go where he will, with the means that my love has secured to him! Does he think to reduce me by long absence? He knows his mother very little if he does. Let him put away his whim now, and he is welcome back. Let him not put her away now, and he never shall come near me, living or dying, while I can raise my hand to make a sign against it, unless, being rid of her forever, he comes humbly to me and begs for my forgiveness. This is my right. This is the acknowledgement I will have. This is the separation that there is between us!”
To understand this outburst fully, we need to recall that earlier in the story, Mrs. Steerforth’s companion Rosa Dartle – a shrewd and ironic young woman embittered by her hopeless love for Steerforth – had, with a malicious false ingenuousness, asked Steerforth what might happen if “you and your mother were to have a serious quarrel.” To this Mrs. Steerforth replied, “My dear Rosa, … suggest some other supposition! James and I know our duty to each other better, I pray Heaven!”
“Oh!” said Miss Dartle, nodding her head thoughtfully. “To be sure. That would prevent it? Why, of course it would. Exactly. Now, I am glad I have been so foolish as to put the case, for it is so very good to know that your duty to each other would prevent it! Thank you very much.”
Rosa’s mock-inquiry arises from her understanding that Steerforth and his mother do not perceive their relationship in the same light: his “duty” would not, and in the end does not, prevent him from acting in what he perceives to be his interest, even when that interest is merely the avoidance of boredom. Rosa also understands that Mrs. Steerforth sees her relationship with her son contractually and legalistically: he owes her obedience and deference because, she says, he is the one “whom I have gratified from a child in every wish.” Thus her outrage at his failure to meet the terms of the contract is extreme and implacable: he is banished from her presence until he (a) abandons Emily forever and (b) begs his mother’s forgiveness. “This is the acknowledgement I will have.”
After she delivers herself of this announcement Daniel Peggotty takes his leave of her; there is no more to be said; their models of parental love are incommensurable, irreconcilable.
The vastness of the chasm between them may be seen by comparing Mrs. Steerforth’s distribe with Daniel Peggotty’s response when he learns that Emily has fled with her lover:
“I’m a-going to seek her, fur and wide. If she should come home while I’m away – but ah, that ain’t like to be! – or if I should bring her back, my meaning is, that she and me shall live and die where no one can’t reproach her. If any hurt should come to me, remember that the last words I left for her was, ‘My unchanged love is with my darling child, and I forgive her!’”
Call me a normie if you want, call me sentimental, what you will – I don’t know many things in all of fiction more moving than this. Let me wipe a tear from my eye and then take a moment to unpack both the explicit statements and the implications in Mr. Peggotty’s declaration.
- Emily is in need of forgiveness, for she has sinned. (Emily herself knows this perfectly well; she is nearly consumed with guilt.)
- Mr. Peggotty offers this forgiveness completely and without condition or reservation, no matter what Emily does or fails to do.
- He does not wait for her to beg forgiveness – he does not wait for her to repent or return – he’s “a-going to seek her, fur and wide.” The biblical analogue here is not the parable of the Prodigal Son, because there the son returns home on his own initiative. That story is lovely enough, with the old man seeing his son “a long way off” and, as Frederick Buechner has envisioned the scene, picking up his skirts and running as fast as his old legs will carry him to the beloved boy. But what Mr. Peggotty does calls forth something more radical still: “What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing.”
- He knows that Emily will suffer for her sin; he knows that the way of the world – as exemplified, for instance, by Mrs. Steerforth – is not to forgive but rather to “reproach”; so he will do what he has to do, suffer whatever he needs to suffer, so that she will not be further wounded.
- His love for his “darling child” is “unchanged” – unchanged. Not altered in one fraction of a degree either by what she has done or what she has left undone, and never to be altered by anything in the whole wide reproaching world.
•
What most people want, or think they want, is affirmation. Indeed, many people demand it, and seek to punish those who do not give it to them. But affirmation never comes without conditions, even if they’re unstated. Thus I think it’s fair to say that Mrs. Steerforth, by explicitly indulging her son’s every wish while forever hinting that by so doing she is binding him contractually to her, is enriching the soil in which anomie flourishes. (Rosa Dartle sees all this coming, but because Steerforth does not return her love, she does nothing to avert it but merely waits for the inevitable crack-up. This may be a function of some inbuilt perversity of Rosa’s character, but I think it rather an outgrowth of her dependent status and Mrs. Steerforth’s contempt for her needs — that relationship too is contractual; it’s impossible to imagine Mrs. Steerforth having any other kind.)
What people need, whether they know it or not, is not affirmation but rather unconditional love – because only with unconditional love can there be genuine honesty. What Emily needs is not the fiction that she has done no wrong; what she needs, and what she receives, is the double truthfulness that she has indeed sinned but is wholly forgiven. It’s what she needs; it’s what we all need, and from those who genuinely love us we just may get it.
For abuse to happen under any circumstances is gut-wrenching; when it happens in a church setting, and is perpetrated by people who are viewed as spiritual leaders, who are entrusted with the care and formation of the young, it’s that much worse. And when those in positions of leadership not only fail to step in to help victims of abuse, but actually attack them, it becomes even more wicked and grievous. Brown’s haunting phrase — soul murder — is what happened within the SBC, and it’s only the latest in a string of recent scandals that have rocked the evangelical world.
The other thing that makes the SBC scandal so twisted and ugly is how leaders of the denomination used the Bible and spiritual language as weapons against the innocent victims, as when Boto invoked Satan to discredit the survivors. That is yet another level of depravity.
We need a word worse than “depravity” for this. See also Russell Moore on this tragic situation. It’s time for pretty much everyone in the current and recent leadership of the SBC to take the Profumo Option.
I have said that I think there is a strong case for the exclusion of the Moscow Patriarchate from the [World Council of Churches], and that they have a case to answer; I’m not suggesting that they should have no opportunity for such an answer. I don’t feel sanguine about their willingness to defend themselves in this particular “court”, but I would not advocate any precipitate decision without notice and consultation.
Should it come to this, however, my reasons for supporting an exclusion would be that we have a situation in which the hierarchy of one particular Christian organisation is actively advocating — not merely passively acquiescing in — a war of pure aggression, in which the routine slaughter of non-combatants is evidently a matter of accepted policy, and which is being presented by this hierarchy as a defence of Christian civilisation.
My question would be: If the behavior of the Moscow Patriarchate is insufficient to warrant an expulsion from the WCC, what would be sufficient? What kind of behavior, generally speaking, would lead to expulsion? My immediate feeling (subject to revision or correction) is that if this behavior isn’t bad enough to get you expelled, nothing is, and membership in the WCC is absolutely permanent.
That said, I’m not sure that this is an issue we need to spend too much time on. The genuinely Christian view is, it seems to me, both longer and narrower. And maybe it’s not just Christians who need to think this way. I like to remind myself of this passage from Voltaire’s Candide:
In the neighborhood there was a very famous dervish who was considered the best philosopher in Turkey; they went to consult him; Pangloss was the spokesman and said to him: “Master, we have come to ask you to tell us why such a strange animal as man was ever created.”
“What are you meddling in?” said the dervish. “Is that your business?”
“But, Reverend Father,” said Candide, “there is a horrible amount of evil on earth.”
“What does it matter,” said the dervish, “whether there is evil or good? When his highness sends a ship to Egypt, is he bothered about whether the mice in the ship or comfortable or not?”
“Then what should we do?” said Pangloss.
“Hold your tongue,” said the dervish.
I’m pretty much with the dervish about this, but because as far as I can tell, Christ’s call upon my life is essentially the same regardless of whether I think that current conditions are propitious or not. You people can keep debating these things if you want, but I have a couple of gardens to tend.
In my first years at Wheaton College I had a colleague named Julius Scott. (He retired in 2000 and died in 2020. R.I.P.) Julius was a New Testament scholar, but earlier in life, in the 1960s, had been a Presbyterian pastor in Mississippi. He was raised in rural Georgia and loved the South, but he knew a good deal about our native region’s habitual sins also, and as the Civil Rights movement grew stronger and stronger, he understand that he had a reckoning to make. So he did.
After much prayer and study of Scripture, he decided that nothing could be more clear in Scripture, and nothing more foundational to Christian anthropology, than the belief that each and every human being is made in the image of God; that every human being is my neighbor; and that to “love your neighbor as yourself” is required of us all. Julius could not, therefore, avoid the conclusion that the Jim Crow laws common to the Southern states were incompatible with the Christian understanding of what human beings are and who our neighbors are; but even if those laws proved impossible to dislodge, and even if his pastoral colleagues thought them defensible, it was surely, certainly, indubitably necessary for all churches to welcome every one of God’s children who entered their doors, and to welcome them with open arms, making no distinction on the basis of race. When his presbytery — gathering of pastors in his region — next met, Julius felt that he had to speak up and say what he believed about these matters.
He did; and thus he entered into a lengthy season of hellish misery. He was prepared for the condemnation and shunning he received from almost every other member of the presbytery; what he wasn’t prepared for was what happened when word of his speech got out to the general public, I believe through a newspaper article: an ongoing barrage of threats against his life and the lives of his wife and children. For years, he told me, he had to sleep — and sleep came hard — with a loaded gun under his bed; the fear for his family didn’t wholly abate until he left Mississippi. (“I was afraid for my babies,” Julius said, and with those words the tears filled his eyes.) Of course he remained a pariah to most of his colleagues — and even the ones who respected him told him so in private, expressing their agreement with his theological conclusions only on condition that Julius never share their views with anyone else.
Think about that story for a while. Please understand that it’s not an uncommon one; and please understand, further, that Julius escaped with no worse than shunning and terror because he was white. (If you want to know more about Christians in Mississippi in that era, the persecuted and the persecutors alike, I recommend Charles Marsh’s book God’s Long Summer. And if you want to know what life in that era was like in Birmingham, Alabama, where I grew up, read Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home.)
Now: the next time you’re tempted to say that American Christians today experience hostility unprecedented in our nation’s history, and can escape condemnation only if they bow their knee to the dominant cultural norms; that it didn’t used to be like that, that decades ago no American Christian had to be hesitant about affirming the most elementary truths of the Christian faith — the next time you’re tempted to say all that, please, before you speak, remember Julius Scott.
I want to connect a post of mine from five years ago —
There are always questions. Which ones arise — that’s not for us to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the questions that are presented to us. My one consistent position in all these matters is to resist taking the nuclear option of excommunication. It is the strongest censure we have, and therefore one not to be invoked except with the greatest reluctance. Further, I don’t think the patience that St. Paul commands is to be exhausted in a few years, or even a few decades. We need to learn to think in larger chunks of time, and to consider the worldwide, not just the local American and Western European, context. Many of us tend to think that, if we haven’t convinced someone after a few tweets and blog posts, we can be done with them and the questions they bring. But the time-frame of social media is not the time-frame of Christ’s Church.
— with a post of mine from ten days ago:
So it turns out that “the economic way of looking at life” – which is pretty much the American way of looking at life, and certainly the Silicon Valley way – means that you think of time as a scarce consumable resource. Which is indeed how most of us, it seems, think about time, and that, in turn, is why we might experience the idea of traveling at the speed of God as not just wrong but, more, offensive – a failure to maximize consumption.
Breaking that habit of thought, and imagining how to move at the speed of God – these are real and vital challenges. Maybe the first thing we need to learn how to repair is our disordered sense of time — time is not a scarce resource but rather a gift.
Increasingly I am convinced that we can’t make the changes we need to make — and I’m thinking not just of Christians, but also of all members of our current social order — until we reset our understanding and experience of time.
I even wonder whether the problem I posted about earlier today — what seems to me our increasing reluctance to pursue common rules for the social order, our disdain for proceduralism — is an outgrowth of a diseased experience of time. If we knew, if we really knew, that the people we despise are going to be our neighbors for the rest of our lives, then maybe we’d see the value in coming to some sort of procedural agreement with them before the shooting begins.
But then the shooting has already begun, hasn’t it?
Ross Douthat is a brilliant writer and an old friend, but I wish he wouldn’t participate — as he does in this essay — in the fiction that intra-Catholic disputes constitute the whole of Christian thought.
Okay, so, first we have Andy Crouch’s book The Life We’re Looking For.
Then we have Brad East’s essay-review on Andy’s book in The New Atlantis.
Then we have three follow-up posts by Brad: one, two, and three.
Got all that? Trust me, it’s all worth reading. Okay, then let’s proceed. (Oh, also: I know both Andy and Brad so I will be using first names.)
Those follow-up posts concern Brad’s reservations about Andy’s book, but as he rightly points out, his review is a positive one, and we shouldn’t forget that. The reservations can be summed up in this passage from the review:
[Crouch’s] counsel is wise. But I worry that it understates the problem we face, particularly the extent to which it has infiltrated, and is already integrated with, each of our households. For Crouch agrees that the evils of Mammon and Digital and Acedia amount to something like a globalized conglomerate or racket. Before such an overwhelming power, how could my household be in a position to “choose a different vision,” even for its own members? We are too beholden to the economic and digital realities of modern life — too dependent on credit, too anxious about paying the rent, too distracted by Twitter, too reliant on Amazon, too deadened by Pornhub — to be in a position to opt for an alternative vision, much less to realize that one exists. We’ve got ends to meet. And at the end of the day, binging Netflix numbs the stress with far fewer consequences than opioids.
This is the burnout society, as Han calls it; or the Machine, in the label of Kingsnorth, who learned it from R. S. Thomas. We are sick. It would be unfair to fault Crouch for lacking the cure. The terrifying fact may be that there is none. Moreover, Crouch insists as a matter of principle that the life he commends to us is a life worth living for its own sake, not because it will Change The World. He is right about that. He is right as well to warn against the temptation to look for a magical elixir in the manner of the alchemist. That way lies danger: the quest for power to match the might of Mammon. As he writes, most people who want to influence the culture want to be a force, whereas “Jesus calls us to be a taste.” The book succeeds in offering us a taste, and it is unquestionably a taste of the good life. Whether that life is truly available to most of us, and how, is another matter.
My chief response to this is that I don’t read Andy’s book the way that Brad does, at least in the sense that I don’t see Andy making heroic demands upon us. There’s a point near the end of The Life We’re Looking For where Andy is talking about his use of his iPhone:
It would not be quite right to say that it is entirely up to me whether my iPhone, or future computational technology yet to be developed, becomes an instrument or a device – although it is true enough that every day I can choose which way to use it, within the limits of the programs and interfaces that others have designed it to provide.
But it is certainly true that in the long run that choice is up to us: what we ask our technology to do, what we ask its designers to optimize, what we believe is the good life that we are pursuing together.
That last sentence is the real key. I see the core purpose of Andy’s book to be not a denunciation or even a critique of technology but rather an attempt to orient us towards a vision of the kind of life that we want, individually and collectively, with the emphasis that if we really understand “the life we are looking for” we will be able to alter our technological environment, albeit in incremental ways. That doesn’t seem to me to require heroism; in fact, I would say that it’s pretty sober: our choices will not bring down the power of what Brad calls the Digital and what Andy (I think more accurately) calls Mammon – the Digital is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mammon – but I think that those choices can create a subtle and over time significant redirection of our energies.
So I’m inclined to think that Brad’s question of whether “the good life … is truly available to most of us” is not the best one to ask. A better question – I think Andy pushes us towards this one, though maybe it’s just me who’s doing the pushing – is Augustinian in that it’s about orientation. Orientation is one of the most fundamental Augustinian concepts. He believed that caritas is “the motion of the soul towards God”; by contrast, cupiditas is the motion of the soul towards itself, which makes one incurvatus in se, curved in on oneself. For Augustine the initial question to be asked of anyone is: Which way are you facing? And I think what Andy is trying to do in his book is get people facing in the right direction – towards the life they really desire, as opposed to the life that Mammon wants to sell them – so that they may begin their pilgrimage, become true wayfarers. Wayfarers often have a long road ahead of them, but one of the best reasons to read Augustine, and to think along with that great saint, is to be reminded that what matters most is not the distance from our goal but whether we are facing it. Even if we never achieve “the good life” — in the Christian sense or even in a Stoic sense — surely we can today orient ourselves a little more accurately towards it than we did yesterday. (Maybe start by reading some Dickens?)
It’s true, as Brad suggests, that mighty Powers are arrayed against the wayfarer, such that we may end up looking more like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History than Gandalf plodding towards the Shire; but better to be the Angel of History than one who strolls smilingly into Mammon’s glamorous emporium.
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus
