O God, who endowed your servant Hugh with a wise and cheerful boldness and taught him to commend to earthly rulers the discipline of a holy life: give us grace like him to be bold in the service of the gospel, putting our confidence in Christ alone, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Tag: christian (page 3 of 8)
Leah Libresco Sargeant on an “illiberalism of the weak”:
To give an honest accounting of ourselves, we must begin with our weakness and fragility. We cannot structure our politics or our society to serve a totally independent, autonomous person [which is the person imagined by liberalism] who never has and never will exist. Repeating that lie will leave us bereft: first, of sympathy from our friends when our physical weakness breaks the implicit promise that no one can keep, and second, of hope, when our moral weakness should lead us, like the prodigal, to rush back into the arms of the Father who remains faithful. Our present politics can only be challenged by an illiberalism that cherishes the weak and centers its policies on their needs and dignity.
This is a strong and vital word. But genuinely to hear it we will have to dethrone the two idols that almost everyone with a political opinion worships: My People and Winning. The goal of almost every political activist and pundit is the same: My people must win, and those who are not my people must lose. Do not be deceived by talk of the “common good,” because the often quite explicit message of the common-good conservatives is: My people are the ones who know what the common good is, and that common good can only be achieved if my people win. A politics of weakness and dependence, a politics of bearing one another’s burdens, can only begin when those two idols are slain.
UPDATE: Rowan Williams, from a review of God: An Anatomy, by Francesca Stavrakopoulou:
Stavrakopoulou … takes Hans Holbein the Younger’s famous picture of the dead (and prematurely decaying) body of Christ as illustrating the way in which Judaeo-Christian orthodoxy ends up in a conspicuously unbiblical position, presenting human bodies as “repulsive” (her word), unfit to portray the divine. But – apart from the fact that in Holbein’s lifetime the glory of the human form as representing divinity was being reaffirmed by artists in southern Europe as never before – the point of a picture like this, or of any other representation of the torment and suffering of Jesus, was to say that “the divine” does not shrink from or abandon the human body when it is humiliated and tortured.
In contrast to an archaic, religious sacralising of the perfect, glowing, muscular, dominant body, there is a central strand in Jewish and Christian imagination which insists that bodies marked by weakness, failure, the violence of others, disease or disability are not somehow shut out from a share in human – and divine – significance. They have value and meaning; they may judge us and call us to action. The biblical texts are certainly not short of the mythical glorifications of male power that Stavrakopoulou discusses; but they also repeatedly explore divine solidarity with vulnerable bodies, powerless bodies. Is this a less “real” dimension of the Bible? Even a reader with no theological commitments might pause before writing it off.
Christians must develop and encourage practices of suffering that accompany those in pain, like Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross during Christ’s passion. The ethical imperatives of the Church are only intelligible to a watching world to the degree that Christians are willing to walk alongside those who suffer and bear their pain with them. Without these practices of accompaniment, Christian moral teaching about issues like abortion or assisted reproductive technology is a cold set of rules enforced by people who have the privilege of not having to bear their cost. It is through these experiences — and not just experiences with those who forsake an accessible but immoral technological intervention, but also accompaniment with the poor, the imprisoned, and those whose suffering cannot be relieved by any human means — that Christians are able to experience growth through suffering and acquire the perspective from below that shapes their advocacy for those who need the work-towards-shalom the most.
A powerful essay.
The themes of that essay do not immediately seem directly related to the themes of this interview with Loftus, but I think they are. Responding to claims by some doctors that we should ration Covid care to favor the vaccinated and disfavor the unvaccinated, Loftus, himself a physician, says,
I think it is a matter of justice not to ration care away from the unvaccinated, because to do so, I think, is to pass a judgment on someone’s other personal health decisions that we would never apply in any other case. All health care is a mixture of trying to provide justice while also being merciful to others. It’s impossible to be a good health-care worker and not be willing to be merciful with people who, quite frankly, got themselves into the trouble that they’re in and had many opportunities not to do so. But it’s also a matter of justice in giving that person what they need to survive or, if not to survive, to die in a way that honors the person they are.
Loftus is pointing here to a version of what Scott Alexander, in one of the more useful ethical essays I have read in the past decade, calls “isolated demands for rigor.” When doctors treat people for health problems that arise from obesity, they don’t withhold care until they learn whether those people have some kind of genetic predisposition to obesity or are fat because they eat at McDonald’s every day — they just treat the patients. Oncologists don’t give better treatment to lung cancer patients who smoke less or don’t smoke at all. We only think to subject the unvaccinated-against-Covid to that kind of strict scrutiny because the discourse around Covid has become so pathologically tribalized and moralized.
But Christians in particular have a very strong reason not to employ such strict scrutiny: We believe in a God who sought out and saved “people who, quite frankly, got themselves into the trouble that they’re in.” In an earlier reflection on this general subject, I mentioned Eve Tushnet’s wise comment that “mercy to the guilty is the only kind of mercy there is.” The rationing of medical care away from the unvaccinated is structural mercilessness. It is anti-shalom.
Detachment and objectivity are not to be found in the Confessions. Analysis of divine affairs is not only not kept apart from self-analysis, but the two streams are run together in what often appears to first readers to be an uncontrolled and illogical melange. This book’s fascination for modern readers stems in large part from its vivid portrayal of a man in the presence of his God, of God and the self intimately related but still separated by sin, and of a struggle for mastery within the self longing for final peace. It is an extraordinary book, no matter how studied.
The rest of Augustine’s life was spent writing books of a more conventional sort. He would analyze in painstaking detail the inner workings of the Trinity, the whole course of salvation history, and the delicate commerce between God and man in the workings of grace and the will, all in an objective, detached, and impersonal style. What is different about them is that they were written by a man who had already written the Confessions, made his peace with God insofar as that was possible, and drawn from that peace (the forerunner of heavenly rest) the confidence he needed to stand at the altar and preach or to sit in his study dictating works of polemic and instruction for the world to read….
The Confessions are not to be read merely as a look back at Augustine’s spiritual development; rather the text itself is an essential stage in that development, and a work aware both of what had already passed into history and of what lay ahead. No other work of Christian literature does what Augustine accomplishes in this volume; only Dante’s Commedia even rivals it.
John Shelby Spong is dead. If he had been an intelligent man, he would have developed more coherent and logical arguments against the Christian faith; if he had been a charitable man, he would have refrained from attempting to destroy the faith of Christians; if he had been an honest man, he would have resigned his orders fifty years or more ago. May God have mercy on his soul.
First-century Athens, Greece, was just as intellectually averse to Christianity as twenty-first-century Athens, Georgia – and far more sexually “liberated” too. And the gospel went forth and the churches grew. The problem now is not that people think the church’s way of life is too demanding, too morally rigorous, but that they have come to think the church doesn’t believe its own moral teachings. The problem is not that they reject the idea that God could send anyone to hell but that, when they see the church covering up predatory behavior in its institutions, they have evidence that the church believes God would not send “our kind of people” to hell.
If people reject the church because they reject Jesus and the gospel, we should be saddened but not surprised. But what happens when people reject the church because they think we reject Jesus and the gospel? People have always left the church because they want to gratify the flesh, but what happens when people leave because they believe the church exists to gratify the flesh – in orgies of sex or anger or materialism? That’s a far different problem. What if people don’t leave the church because they disapprove of Jesus, but because they’ve read the Bible and have come to the conclusion that the church itself would disapprove of Jesus? That’s a crisis.
For those of us who would love to see genuine Christian renewal in America — and not just people deciding to call themselves “evangelical” because they support Donald Trump — Russell Moore’s voice is an absolutely essential one.
Last week I read Kate Shellnutt’s long and carefully reported piece on the conflicts at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, and afterwards something was vaguely nagging at my mind. After reading Russell Moore’s essay I finally figured out what it is: The entire controversy at BBC is essentially a struggle about which group gets to rebuke another group. People are fighting at church over their right to rebuke their sisters and brothers.
Why does the American church today “disapprove of Jesus”? There are many reasons, but I think the essential one, the one from which everything else flows, is this: Jesus tells us to worry about our own moral and spiritual condition rather than that of our neighbor. He tells me to attend to the log in my own eye before I worry about the speck in someone else’s. If my neighbor abuses me, I am to pray for him and bless him. Rather than thanking God that I am not like that [black person, homosexual, Trump supporter] over there, I am to pray “Lord have mercy on me a sinner.”
When Christians begin to obey, or just begin trying to obey, Jesus in these matters, then we’ll have taken the first and essential step towards restoring our legitimacy. But until we take the commandments of Jesus seriously, why should we expect anyone else to?
Very nice to see from Crossway these lovely new editions of some of Jim Packer’s books.
In a previous post I wrote:
This tension between the ancient vessels of culture and what they contain is not indefinitely sustainable: in the long run, either we will adjust our thinking and feeling to match the shapes of our familiar institutions, or we will reshape those institutions so that they suit our thoughts and feelings. The latter is quite obviously what’s happening, because new institutions — the catechizing and propagandizing ones, which cunningly present themselves as non- or trans-institutional — are co-opting the old ones. “The media creates us in its image” — but the existing institutions are incompatible with the shape in which we are being remade. So they must either be transformed or destroyed.
I want to link this with an earlier post on the idea of a “long march through the institutions”:
You sometimes hear Dutschke’s phrase from conservative commentators frustrated by the success of the left in making just such a march through American civil society, through the media and the arts and the universities. They are correct that this has happened, but they rarely draw the appropriate conclusions from it. Instead of imitating the patience and persistence of the leftist marchers, they long for a strongman, a Trump or an Orban, to relieve them of the responsibility for reshaping civil society. If reshaping those institutions seems hard, then why not dream of someone powerful enough to blow them up and start over? Dreams of an omnicompetent strongman are the natural refuge of people too lazy and feckless to begin, much less complete, a long march.
What’s the purpose of a strongman? The strongman props up the decaying institutions on which we have come to depend. The strongman postpones the day of reckoning. The strongman kicks the can down the road so we can go peacefully to our graves knowing that institutional collapse will be our grandchildren’s problem to deal with, not ours. Sweet dreams to us.
You know what the Trumpistas and Orbanistas remind me of? Denethor. Last year, I gestured at some of the issues I’m here concerned with in a post about intellectual/political “fascist architecture,” about the ways in which laziness leads to hopelessness and hopelessness to a kind of nihilistic wrath:
“I would have things as they were in all the days of my life … and in the days of my longfathers before me: to be the Lord of this City in peace, and leave my chair to a son after me, who would be his own master and no wizard’s pupil. But if doom denies this to me, then I will have naught: neither life diminished, nor love halved, nor honour abated.”
For all Denethor’s talk of “honour,” his behavior is shameful. But there are two reasonable and, yes, honorable alternatives to authoritarian nihilism, especially for my fellow Christians. (Much of what I say in the following paragraphs also applies to cultural conservatives more generally.)
The first is to seek the renewal of those institutions that are not too far gone for rescue — genuine renewal, not turning them into puppets for strongmen. For guidelines to that project, see my posts on Invitation and Repair.
The second is, when institutions cannot be renewed, to follow the example of James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, who strove to create for himself an environment in which he could, in the face of cultural indifference or opposition, thrive as an artist. “I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning.” Let Stephen be our model, even though his enemy — I am not unaware of the irony — was the Church, along with his nation and his family. Stephen is our model because he thought hard about how to survive, and even thrive, while still in thrall to Powers he could not directly challenge.
Silence: Not a permanent silence, but a refusal to speak at the frantic pace set by social media; silence as the first option — the preferential option for the poor in spirit, you might say; silence as a form of patience, a form of reflection, a form of prayer. A refusal to be baited; a renewal of the old and forgotten virtue called “keeping my counsel.”
Exile: The idea of the Church in exile is an increasingly popular one these days, and for good reason. I’m a little suspicious of some of its potential implications, but overall, I think, we do well to think of ourselves not simply as on pilgrimage — though yes, always that, we are a pilgrim people — but more specifically as pilgrims who are also exiles, who are on the way because we have been cast out of the place where we had hoped to rest. (Call it Christendom, America the Christian Nation, what you will.) Whether this casting out is primarily due to our sins or the ruthlessness of our enemies is something we can debate as we walk, though my counsel is that we should always focus primarily on where we have missed the mark, because that leads to repentance and amendment of life. Moreover, while some exiles are simple this one is complex, because we have not all been exiled to the same place. The body of Christ is not just wounded but divided: our exile is of that particularly painful type known as Diaspora. In such circumstances we travel light, our luggage reduced to the barest essentials; we regularly send out messengers to seek the brothers and sisters whom we have lost; and we relentlessly recite to ourselves the terms that mark our identity. These are the prime virtues of a people in exile.
Cunning: Many traditional communities rely heavily on the kind of person that in England used to be called “cunning men” and “cunning women” — every American Indian community likewise had its “wise woman.” If you had a bad tooth, of course, you’d go to the surgeon — who was usually also a barber — and he’d yank it out. But you’d go to the cunning folk if you didn’t know what was wrong with you, or if anything was wrong with you at all, other than a suspicion that something was wrong with you. The cunning folk had no technique — if they had technique they’d belong to some proper profession — but could draw on experience, and a body of lore passed down from generation to generation, and a certain undefinable shrewdness: a nose for trouble. The cunning man or woman needs, above all, attentiveness and imagination — especially in relation to the beauty hidden in filth. We Christians are in likewise desperate need, not of better techniques for management of our “diminished thing” called the church — as though our highest ambition were to make our spiritual nest egg last just a little bit longer; kicking that can down the road — but of theological and pastoral cunning. What do we have to lose but our chains?
This lovely post by my friend Wesley Hill on carrying and using a Bible reminds me of a question I ask myself on a regular basis: What is Christianity when it is no longer a religion of the book? Because I think Christianity around the world, for varying reasons, is becoming and in some places has already fully become a post-book practice. I don’t think we Christians have reckoned as seriously as we ought to with that change — and especially how those of us who remain People of the Book are best to relate to and connect with those whose Christian faith doesn’t employ books.
George MacDonald, “The Voice of Job”:
In the confusion of Job’s thoughts — how could they be other than confused, in the presence of the awful contradiction of two such facts staring each other in the face, that God was just, yet punishing a righteous man as if he were wicked? — while he was not yet able to generate, or to receive the thought, that approving love itself might be inflicting or allowing the torture — that such suffering as his was granted only to a righteous man, that he might be made perfect — I can well imagine that at times, as the one moment he doubted God’s righteousness, and the next cried aloud, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him,’ there must in the chaos have mingled some element of doubt as to the existence of God. Let not such doubt be supposed a yet further stage in unbelief. To deny the existence of God may, paradoxical as the statement will at first seem to some, involve less unbelief than the smallest yielding to doubt of his goodness. I say yielding; for a man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to rouse the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood; and theirs in general is the inhospitable reception of angels that do not come in their own likeness. Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed. In all Job’s begging and longing to see God, then, may well be supposed to mingle the mighty desire to be assured of God’s being. To acknowledge is not to be sure of God.
I’ve just returned from Laity Lodge, where I had a glorious time with my dear friend Wesley Hill: talking about “praying with Jesus”; joyously embracing old friends — including our artist-in-residence Mia Carameros — but also making new friends; worshipping; listening; singing … what a memorable three days it was.
Among the many delights was getting to know Jon and Valerie Guerra, whose music greatly enlivened our time together. A real highlight was the Saturday evening concert, where they gave us a song I want to share with you all. There’s a lovely studio version, but maybe because I heard it live, I’m inclined to post this powerful solo performance by Jon, who gives us in song a prophetic word that I answer with an emphatic Amen:
As Eve Tushnet has reminded us, “Mercy to the guilty is the only kind of mercy there is,” which is something to remember as you read about Shirley Chisholm and George Wallace.
This Stefani McDade report in Christianity Today about the post-Trump reckoning among charismatic Christian leaders is absolutely superb.
I am so pleased to be named (by my dear friend Richard Gibson) among my people, the idiosyncratic readers.
Re: this reflection on printed books: for the last decade, e-books have comprised about 10% of the sales of my books, and that’s been pretty constant.
Zito Madu, speaking strong and bitter truth:
The feeling of dread before Saka took his penalty betrayed a truth about the relationship between the Black English players and members of their country. The wish for Saka to score in order to avoid racist abuse only reveals a deeper truth: that respect for him as a person and recognition of his dignity is only possible if he and the other Black players keep making the people who hate them happy. A conditional respect of a person’s humanity, which means that it’s no recognition at all. […]
It was heartening to see some fans, teams and politicians push back against the bigotry by showering the players with love and support. A group of people decorated the defaced Rashford mural with hearts. Yet, while the players surely appreciate the support, and hopefully will one day have a chance to have success at the highest level, it’s not hard to imagine that they will never forget that many of their supporters see them as sub-human — and no level of sporting achievement will change that.
Above is a painting on the wall of the Commandery, a building said to have been built as a hospital by Wulfstan, then Bishop of Worcester, later St. Wulfstan. The painting is damaged — the chief injuries having been inflicted on it by iconoclasts who erased the faces of the people represented — but the story is easy enough to read. The central figure in the scene is the Archangel Michael, holding scales with which sinners are weighed in the balance. On the left you see a small demon, trying with all his might to drag that pan down to enforce damnation; but on the right the Blessed Virgin Mary lowers rosary beads onto her pan to ensure that the sinner, who seems to be tucked in quite snugly, will indeed be saved.
It is a vivid drama of our eternal destiny in which Jesus Christ plays no role whatsoever.
I am of course tempted to say “And that’s why we needed the Reformation!” — and I would say it except that Jesus is just as irrelevant to much Protestant theology and spirituality as he was to the debased pseudo-theology that inspired that wall painting in Worcester. H. Richard Niebuhr famously described the message of liberal Protestantism: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross” — but what need had those sinless ones for a Christ, with or without a cross? After all, “The Kingdom of God is within you”! (As someone once said, or near enough.)
Jesus is, generally speaking, a distraction and an embarrassment both to religious people and to those who want to be spiritual-but-not-religious — people who check “Christian” when completing surveys but who more truly affirm the Inner Light, or Natural Law, or Judeo-Christian Values, or Holy Tradition, or Mindfulness, or A Christian Nation, or My Personal Relationship With God — basically, anything but Jesus, who is perceived to be … shall we say, unpredictable? More than a little wild. It’s better to evade him, or set him aside, or just look the other way. It’s certainly safer — it leaves us free to make a religion that suits our preferences and our understanding.
Charles Williams’s book The Descent of the Dove is subtitled “A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church,” which is rather an ambitious description, and I have often thought of writing a companion book which I would call Evasions: A Short History of Jesus and the Church.
As for me, Jesus is the only reason I am in this game, half-hearted and inconstant a Christian as I am. I hang on to this one figure with desperation. When all else fails to console, he consoles me. In his famous Divinity School address, Emerson described, with a fastidious moue of distaste, “Historical Christianity” as a movement that “has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus.” May all the Emersons of the world say that about me! God forbid that I should fail to give them cause to say it!
I am drawn magnetically to the Jesus depicted in the canonical Gospels because it seems manifest to me that he is not someone any of us would have invented. (The contrast with the later narratives of his life, especially the Gnostic-inflected ones, is striking: The extravagantly thaumaturgic Jesus depicted therein is precisely the kind of figure a pinwheel-eyed enthusiast of mysteries would invent.) Given the uncompromising strangeness of the canonical Jesus — his oscillation between a prophetic fierceness that rattles us all and an infinite tenderness that may be in its own way even more disconcerting — I find myself warmly endorsing Auden’s statement: “I believe because He fulfills none of my dreams, because He is in every respect the opposite of what He would be if I could have made Him in my own image.” Which is followed by the real zinger:
Thus, if a Christian is asked: “Why Jesus and not Socrates or Buddha or Confucius or Mahomet?” perhaps all he can say is: “None of the others arouse all sides of my being to cry ‘Crucify Him’.”
Even those not compelled, as Auden and I have been, to kneel before this man — those who, as one might say, perceive him merely as “this swell figure from the East” — can be affected by the compelling, and in the ancient Hellenistic context utterly unique, depiction of him in the Gospels. Iris Murdoch, pausing in a philosophical exposition to reflect on these strange texts, notes that they “are in a sense easy to read, can seem so (even I would think for a complete stranger to them), because they are the kind of great art where we feel: It is so.” But what they narrate — is it so? “What happened immediately after Christ’s death, how it all went on, how the Gospel writers and Paul became persuaded He had risen: this is one of the great mysteries of history. It is difficult to imagine any explanation in purely historical terms, though the unbeliever must assume there is one.”
That is an assumption I have been unable to make. And so I cling to Jesus, and only to Jesus. And as I strive to do so, certain words have become touchstones for me, sources of strength and encouragement. Some of them are well-known, like a passage from one of George MacDonald’s novels, and the magnificent answer given by the Heidelberg Catechism to the question “What is your only comfort in life and death?” Others are perhaps less well-known: Reynolds Price’s wrestling with Jesus, in delight and terror, in his Three Gospels; many set-pieces from Romano Guardini’s The Lord; the entry on “Jesus” in Frederick Buechner’s Peculiar Treasures; the chapter called “Yeshua” in Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic. All these draw me back towards the center of things, towards the One who is the heart and soul of all Creation. Every day I want to evade him, to look the other way, and when I do my faith wanes and weakens; but when I look, when I draw near, I remember what I’m all about, what the world is all about. When I look towards Jesus I am caught and held, even if sometimes shattered by what I see.
Probably the most regular re-centering in my life comes when, in the middle of an Anglican Eucharistic service — for this is a distinctively Anglican thing — we hear what we call the Comfortable Words. I commend them to you all.
Hear the Word of God to all who truly turn to him.
Come unto me, all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you. (Matthew 11:28)
God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)
This is a true saying, and worthy of all men to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. (1 Timothy 1:15)
If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the perfect offering for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world. (1 John 2:1-2)
By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. Whichever fate awaits us, Catholics and Christians of every political persuasion should remember that admonition and prove their fidelity by entering an uncertain future not just as disputants, but as friends.
Serious question arising from this: Are there any American Catholic thinkers for whom “fellow Christians” is a meaningful, operative category? I am inclined to think not. The frivolities of the so-called ecumenical movement of the previous century and the intensity of subsequent intra-Catholic disputes have combined put an end to that, at least for now. And this isn’t just a Catholic thing: as I have often commented in the past, the more strongly Christians feel that the faith is in decline, the less likely they are to think that we’re all in this together.
I’ve been re-reading the book of Acts, and my chief response this time is: It’s wonderfully encouraging to see how bluntly and unapologetically Luke records a chronicle of confusion, ineptitude, and misdirected enthusiasm. The apostles are often a collective mess, and Luke does nothing to hide that from us. I find this strangely consoling.
It’s also fascinating to note how little the apostles understand the message they been entrusted with. They know that Jesus is the Christ, the promised Messiah of Israel, and they know that the Christ’s own people rejected him and demanded his death – but beyond that they’re a little fuzzy about what the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus mean. The idea that what Jesus offers them (and all of us) is God’s limitless grace is rarely mentioned. It’s there, but only in tentative and vaguely articulated form.
The Reformation’s idea of returning to the apostolic church is therefore, I think, only partly right. We want their spirit – their enthusiasm, their boldness in proclamation, their trust in God, their loving care for one another – but we don’t want their ignorance. How to develop theological depth and complexity without acquiring an accompanying institutional structure that tends toward sclerosis, that makes the communal life of the church stiff and inflexible and disconnected from its natural missional energies – that is the ongoing problem that Christ’s church faces, just as much as the structurally similar problem of navigating between legalism and antinomianism.
We don’t navigate those complexities very well, and never have, in large part because of pride. Every time a new Christian movement arises in a place where there is a dominant form of church, that dominant form should be grateful to the dissenters, because the dissenters – who are not necessarily correct to dissent – nevertheless reveal to the dominant church the ways it has fallen short, the needs and desires it has failed to meet or address. (The flip side of this point is Auden’s contention that Kierkegaard should have been grateful to the Danish Lutheran Church for teaching him the very Bible in which he found the standards by which he condemned it.) Every dissent contains a lesson for those with ears to hear, for those whose ears are not closed by pride.
One more noteworthy point about this narrative: Again and again, in their disputes with the new Jesus sect, the leading rabbis try to get management to take their side, to the ongoing puzzlement and frustration of the Romans, who repeatedly ask, “How is this our business?” A Roman official even has one of the rabbis beaten to discourage him from further approaches, yet still the rabbis return and demand Roman intervention. And of course this is what Paul, another rabbi, does as well: King Agrippa even comments to the Roman procurator Festus that Paul could have been freed and set on his way if he hadn’t appealed to Caesar (which seems to have set some unstoppable legal machinery into motion).
The Jews had a lot of practice dealing with hostile or at least semi-hostile occupying powers; they had been doing it for hundreds of years – though if N. T. Wright is correct they developed a particular hatred of the Romans when Pompey entered and desecrated the Temple in 63 BC. (This hatred apparently intensified when no equivalent of Judas Maccabeus appeared to resist the oppressor.) That said, Simon Schama, in his Story of the Jews, notes that before Pompey had even entered Jerusalem several rival claimants for Jewish leadership visited him, serially, to enlist his support against the others. So hatred there may have been, but hatred doesn’t preclude calculation, intrigue, and trying to get management to take your side.
About that Current Affairs essay … I think it’s pretty much wholly wrong. It’s true that fundamentalist Christianity is insistently literal about anything in the Bible that looks like historical narrative (seven literal days of creation, yes the sun did too stand still in the sky, etc.), but even more dominant than Pentateuchal literalism in the fundamentalist mindest is a fascination with prophecy, and especially with the Book of Revelation (plus parts of Daniel and Ezekiel) as a blueprint for the End Times — but the blueprint is legible only if its symbolism is properly deciphered. And especially in the 70s and 80s, such deciphering involved the most mythologically baroque interpretations imaginable. Precisely nobody thought that guys actually named Gog and Magog were going to show up when the parousia was near. When you claim, as Hal Lindsey did, that the the book of Daniel prophesied the European Common Market, your hermeneutical vice is not excessive literalism.
The problem with things like D&D was not that they were mythoi as opposed to logoi, but rather that they were alternative mythoi — they were scary because they were potentially appealing in the same way that prophecy culture was supposed to be, by involving me as a kind of participant observer in a big coherent story.
This would take a long time to explain, but I think the mythos/logos contrast is far less useful for describing the pathologies of fundamentalist exegesis in particular and fundamentalist culture more broadly than Kermode’s distinction in The Sense of an Ending between fictions and myths. Not that I would expect fundamentalists (or any other interpreters of Scripture) to see their exegeses as fictive! — but Kermode is brilliant, I think, on the ways that properly provisional narratives or explanations harden, calcify, into fixed myths.
I taught for many years at Wheaton College, which has a detailed Statement of Faith that everyone on campus signs. From this detailed statement emerges what we might call a thick theological anthropology, built up from layers of Biblical interpretation and historically orthodox theological formulations. By contrast, this is what my current employer, Baylor University, asks of its faculty:
Faculty members at Baylor University are expected to be in sympathy with and supportive of the University’s primary mission: “to educate men and women for worldwide leadership and service by integrating academic excellence and Christian commitment within a caring community.” The personal and professional conduct of each faculty member should be supportive of and consistent with this mission.
That’s it. There can be a lot of debate about what it means to be “in sympathy with and supportive of the University’s primary mission”: in the Honors College, where I teach, it certainly requires open and substantive Christian commitment, but that’s not the case everywhere at Baylor, and as I have said before I think of us in the HC as Baylor’s equivalent of Tom Bombadil. Baylor talks a lot about being “unambiguously Christian,” but the statement on expectations for faculty strikes me as an ambiguous one — and surely intentionally so, because it gives to the administration a great deal of leeway in determining whether a particular candidate is, as administrators like to say, a “good institutional fit.” It would be possible to interpret it in ways that do not require from the faculty any religious belief at all.
There are eminently defensible reasons to do things Baylor’s way rather than Wheaton’s; if I didn’t think so I wouldn’t have changed jobs. But it’s obvious that thin communal commitments do not lead to, and are not even conducive to, a thick theological anthropology, and it would be foolish to expect people held together by such weak confessional ties to share views that only make sense within the robust account of human life generated by historic Christian orthodoxy.
In white Evangelicalism the true challenge of “wokeness” isn’t that congregations will embrace critical race theory, it’s that fear of critical race theory will drive congregations away from thoughtful, necessary engagements with the world as it is — a world that is still too far removed from the hope of King’s dream.
Spot on, alas.
From an extraordinary essay by Paul Kingsnorth:
It kept happening, for months. Christ to the left of me, Christ to the right. It was unnerving. I turned away again and again, but every time I looked back, he was still there. I began to feel I was being … hunted? I wanted it to stop; at least, I thought I did. I had no interest in Christianity. I was a witch! A Zen witch, in fact, which I thought sounded pretty damned edgy. But I knew who was after me, and I knew it wasn’t over.
These are things I think about a lot. I can only answer briefly now, because having returned home I am in serious catch-up mode, so just a couple of thoughts: I really like the space-program metaphors Walker Percy uses in Lost in the Cosmos: the idea that circumstances can sometimes throw us, not into the world as Heidegger had it, but out of our lifeworld, out into a deep-space orbit, from which we don’t know how to return. Thus what Percy calls the problem of “re-entry”: take too shallow an angle and you bounce back out into space; take too steep an angle and you burn up.
I think a lot of people in our world are terrified of being cast out into an orbit from which they don’t know how to return, so they use social media to perform, daily, their obedience, their fealty to the Zeitgeist. Because once cast out, how could they ever get back?
In Underworld Don DeLillo has Lenny Bruce say, “Love me unconditionally or I die. These are the terms of our engagement.” (And because he didn’t get it, Lenny was cast into deep-space orbit, and burned up on attempted re-entry.) But what people today know in their bones is that love is never unconditional. So they strive ceaselessly to meet the conditions. Which would be a great opportunity for Christian witness, if we had a church that wasn’t too busy fighting the culture wars to remind people of the one who says, “Come unto me, all ye who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
This by Russell Moore is incisive — devastatingly so:
Where a “de-churched” (to use an anachronistic term) “ex-vangelical” (to use another) in the early 1920s was likely to have walked away due to the fact that she found the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection to be outdated and superstitious or because he found moral libertinism to be more attractive than the “outmoded” strict moral code of his past or because she wanted to escape the stifling bonds of a home church for an autonomous individualism, now we see a markedly different — and jarring — model of a disillusioned evangelical. We now see young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what the church teaches. The presenting issue in this secularization is not scientism and hedonism but disillusionment and cynicism.
Thousands upon thousands of young people are leaving evangelicalism because they have been told all their lives that evangelicals hold up Jesus as Lord and the Bible as God’s Word — and have seen all their lives that many evangelical leaders ignore Jesus and ignore Scripture whenever those witnesses conflict with the leaders’ preferred cultural politics. “And what if people don’t leave the church because they disapprove of Jesus, but because they’ve read the Bible and have come to the conclusion that the church itself would disapprove of Jesus? That’s a crisis.”
When, therefore, we see in Him some things so human that they appear in no way to differ from the common frailty of mortals, and some things so divine that they are appropriate to nothing else but the primal and ineffable nature of deity, the human understanding with its narrow limits is baffled, and struck with amazement at so mighty a wonder and knows not which way to turn, what to hold to, or whither to betake itself. If it thinks of God, it sees a man; if it thinks of a man, it beholds One returning from the dead with spoils after vanquishing the kingdom of death.
— Origen of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of John
Jessica Martin’s Maundy Thursday homily at Ely Cathedral.
From Ely today, The Preaching and Proclamation of the Cross.
Via Ken Myers, an absolutely superb 30 minute overview, with key excerpts, of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.
I said grace cannot prevail until law is dead, until moralizing is out of the game. The precise phrase should be, until our fatal love affair with the law is over — until, finally and for good, our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed. As long as we leave, in our dramatizations of grace, one single hope of a moral reckoning, one possible recourse to salvation by bookkeeping, our freedom-dreading hearts will clutch it to themselves. And even if we leave none at all, we will grub for ethics that are not there rather than face the liberty to which grace calls us. Give us the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, and we will promptly lose its point by preaching ourselves sermons on Worthy and Unworthy Confession, or on The Sin of the Elder Brother. Give us the Workers in the Vineyard, and we will concoct spurious lessons on The Duty of Contentment or The Moral Aspects of Labor Relations.
Restore to us, Preacher, the comfort of merit and demerit. Prove for us that there is at least something we can do, that we are still, at whatever dim recess of our nature, the masters of our relationships. Tell us, Prophet, that in spite of all our nights of losing, there will yet be one redeeming card of our very own to fill the inside straight we have so long and so earnestly tried to draw to. But do not preach us grace. It will not do to split the pot evenly at four A.M. and break out the Chivas Regal. We insist on being reckoned with. Give us something, anything; but spare us the indignity of this indiscriminate acceptance.
Samuel L. Bray and Drew N. Keane have produced a volume that, I may say with confidence, I will be relying on for the rest of my life. It is The 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition. What they have done is something deceptively simple, with only a few elements:
- Take the 1662 Prayer Book;
- Replace the prayers for the British monarchy with more general prayers for political leaders;
- Replace a few terms that have become wholly archaic or have changed in meaning so much that they will not be understood;
- Add a brief glossary for the unusual terms that it would have been unwise to replace;
- Present the result in beautiful typography.
That’s it! The distinctive structure of the 1662 BCP — built around the rhythms of Morning and Evening Prayer, following the changing seasons of the church year, and centering always on Coverdale’s Psalter — remains, and it remains because it can’t be bettered. I don’t expect this book to be widely used for public worship in churches, though it certainly should be, but I can’t imagine a greater boon to those of us who would like to pray better in our homes day by day.
And if you’d like to learn more about the history of The Book of Common Prayer, well, there’s a book for that.
(Reply to an email from a friend who engaged with my recent posts on this subject)
Thanks so much for this excellent and gracious pushback! It helps me to think more clearly.
Let me start with this: “Truth-telling, in various senses, is a precondition for forgiveness.” I can’t be sure without more specificity, but I am inclined to say that, in Christian and biblical terms, that is not an accurate statement.
Now, to be sure, there is a sense in which truth-telling is coterminous with forgiveness. When someone says to me “I forgive you,” that is a kind of performative utterance which also states, implicitly but inescapably, that I have done something that requires forgiveness. (It is of course possible for someone to announce that she has forgiven another person when in fact that other person has done her no wrong, in which case there would be no truth-telling involved, but we’ll set that aside for now.)
But the truth-telling need not precede the forgiveness. When Jesus asked his Father to forgive those who were killing him, he did not first confront them with a list of their offenses and demand a response. When he tells us that we must forgive our offending brother seventy times seven times, he does not add an instruction about truth-telling exercises. He just says to forgive.
But then he also adds, in other places, instructions for achieving reconciliation, as does Paul. So when you put those passages together, here’s the picture that I think you get: Reconciliation is a process that begins with forgiveness and proceeds to truth-telling.
Am I wrong?
Two other points:
First, I don’t think I’m conflating personal and corporate forgiveness. In the kinds of situations I’m envisioning, people like me are asked to acknowledge our complicity in systemic racism. I am not asked to confess to and be absolved of the systemic racism itself — which is appropriate, because there’s no meaningful way in which I could do that — but to my complicity in it. So it remains a personal exchange.
Second, you were exactly right to point to my slippage in invoking the life appropriate to the ekklesia in this non-ecclesial context. I need to be more clear about my views there, which are: Christian colleges and institutions are not the church and should not try to do the things that churches do, for instance, administer the sacraments or promulgate doctrine. Their character and authority are always in a sense derivative of the prior authority of Scripture and/or some body of believers. However, insofar as they claim to be Christian in character they are obliged to behave, insofar as they are able, in ways consistent with the commandments Jesus Christ and his apostles give to the Church.To take an extreme example, it would be absurd to say, “Yes, in our churches we are supposed to forgive one another as God in Christ has forgiven us, but in non-ecclesial contexts we are free to bear grudges forever.”
People often say things like, “Well, you can’t expect him to forgive her after what she did to him.” And in many situations I don’t expect it. Forgiveness is hard, and gets exponentially harder in proportion to the seriousness of the offenses. Sometimes I see people forgiving others and think “If I were in their shoes I don’t think I could do that.” Sometimes people might take decades to get to the point of forgiving someone, if they get there at all.
And you know what would make that process infinitely easier? If the offenders were to come to those they offended and say, “I hurt you. Will you please forgive me? Can I do anything to make it up to you?” That is, in an ideal situation the process of reconciliation will be initiated by the offender asking forgiveness, not the offended offering it. But as far as I can tell, even when that kind of confessing and penitent initiation is not forthcoming, Christians are commanded to forgive. I don’t expect them to, especially when they have been badly hurt, but I don’t see how to avoid admitting that the commandment is what it is.
Of course, the circuit of forgiveness, as it were, cannot be completed unless that forgiveness is both offered and accepted. In a really important sense Hell is the refusal to be forgiven. Lewis’s The Great Divorce is piercing on this topic.
I go on and on about all this because I think it’s really easy for us to carve out exceptions — to say that the rules are different in ecclesial and non-ecclesial contexts, that the rules are different in corporate as opposed to personal contexts, that the rules are different when people have been really badly hurt — and that’s how you end up in a situation in which nobody forgives anybody.
UPDATE: My correspondent here is my friend Nathan Cartagena, whose pushback on my posts has been both charitable and firm. Here are some points from a subsequent message of his that I want to take on board — or rather: read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest:
- Is reconciliation “a process that begins with forgiveness and proceeds to truth-telling”? Perhaps not always. Yes, Jesus does this as he hangs on the cross; on the other hand, this does not seem to be the practice of the Hebrew prophets.
- Forgiveness gets entangled with several other actions, including restoration as well as reconciliation. “Paul didn’t tell the Corinthians to forgive the guy sleeping with his mother-in law. Perhaps he assumed they knew to. But he does say to excommunicate him; and eventually Paul commands the Corinthians to restore him. Seems the restoring involves righting individual and communal injustices.” (Yep.)
- When Paul rebuked Peter (Galatians 2:11) was forgiveness involved? (An interesting question! Paul told Peter he was wrong, but one can be wrong without sinning. We should certainly say that Peter needed to accept correction, but it’s not clear from the text that he needed to be forgiven.)
- When we’re looking at Jesus’s own behavior, to what extent do we need to consider his unique triple role as prophet, priest, and king. Do things look different to those of us who are none of those things?
- Ditto with Paul, who is an apostle. Does he by virtue of that divinely-appointed role handle things differently than we should?
- Perhaps we should consider forgiveness as an act and a process. (Yes indeed. When Jesus tells his followers to forgive those who sin against them “seventy times seven” times, it’s not at all clear that every time they do so it’s in response to some new sin. Perhaps we have to get up every morning and forgive those who have sinned against us all over again. And if so, we shouldn’t complain if those we have offended must pursue a long process of forgiving us.)
- In terms of the larger social issues, in this country the debates are perhaps unhelpfully focused on two groups, black and white Americans, leaving everyone else out of the discussion.
I will reflect prayerfully on all of these points. Thanks, Nathan!
I want to knot some strands of rope here.
Some folks have responded to my recent posts on Christian obedience — one and two — by noting that I critique conservative Christians but say nothing about progressive or leftist Christians, who are, I am told, just as bad or worse. In those posts I focused on conservative Christians because they often define themselves by their high regard for Scripture and I wanted to point to certain commandments that I believe they would find in their Bibles if they looked. Progressive Christians tend not to cite Scripture as often — but if they did, they would be in the same boat, because as far as I can tell they’re no more forgiving than their right-wing counterparts.
Case in point: Last year I wrote a post about racial relations at Baylor University, where I teach, and made this comment:
Any quibbles I have about what’s included in Baylor’s statements are insignificant in comparison to my concern about what’s not in them. There is quite a lot about repentance, but I have yet to find one single word about forgiveness, or reconciliation, or hope.
Christianity has a lot to say about sin, repentance, and forgiveness. It tells us that we all sin. It tells us that when we sin against a sister or brother, in thought, word, or deed, we must seek to make it right, and to ask that person’s forgiveness. And if we feel that someone has sinned against us, we are to tell that person so, to give them the opportunity to repent. The New Testament authors go on and on about these matters. 1 John 1: “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness”; but also we should take care to “Bear fruit worthy of repentance” (Matthew 3) — we must do more than speak words of penitence, but also pay our debt to our neighbor, the debt of love (Romans 13). And our overall daily approach to one another is prescribed by St. Paul in Ephesians 4: “So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another…. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” Also in Colossians 3: “Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful.”
If you’re not a Christian, this stuff probably looks like a way to let people off easy. And in one sense it is. As Hamlet says, “Treat every man according to his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” Christianity is all about people not getting what they deserve.
In more recent statements from the University, I have seen the occasional reference to reconciliation, but mainly in order to say how long a road it will be to get there, if we get there at all. But still: as far as I can tell, not one word about grace, or mercy, or forgiveness — not one word of Christian hope.
And I get it, or think I do. If you start talking about grace people will seize it, cheaply; hell, they might not only accept forgiveness but demand it. They will abuse the gift — but that’s because that’s what we sinners do, we abuse gifts. Our God hands them out anyway. Again: Jesus asked the Father to forgive those who were hanging him on a cross. Had they asked for it? Did they even want it? Had they undergone a lengthy process of truth and reconciliation in order to deserve it? Everything about the demand for earned forgiveness makes total human sense. But it’s not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. “Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.” It’s not an ambiguous statement.
I think most of our projects of reconciliation, when they exist at all, have it backwards. They want a long penitence at the end of which the offended parties may or may not forgive. I think the Christian account says that forgiveness given and accepted is where reconciliation begins. So if we say we are Christians and want reconciliation but do not put grace, mercy, and forgiveness front and center in our public statements, then we’re operating as the world operates, not as the ekklesia is commanded to.
Almost four years ago I wrote:
When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness. The great moral crisis of our time is not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather vindictiveness. Social media serve as crack for moralists: there’s no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors. But like every addiction, this one suffers from the inexorable law of diminishing returns. The mania for punishment will therefore get worse before it gets better.
I think it’s fair to say that that prophecy turned out to be true. And when it comes to dealing with malefactors … I look from Christian to unbeliever, and unbeliever to Christian, and as far as I can tell there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference between them.
One of the major themes of my book Breaking Bread with the Dead is the danger of presentism. But what do I mean by that? Presentism is an unspoken and often unconscious allegiance to the conventional wisdom of our own era. Presentism assumes that the past is rarely if ever a source of instruction or insight — indeed is more typically something to fear and loathe — and can only be of interest in so far as it pleasingly anticipates something that we already (thanks to our contemporaries) know to be true or aggravatingly fails to affirm something we know to be true.
But there is another sense in which the present, for Christians especially, has a signal value. That value is explained to us by Screwtape in his fifteenth letter to Wormwood:
The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with Eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present — either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.
You can see that presentism as I describe it means something altogether different than Screwtape’s description of the Present. Presentism limits our intellectual and moral equipment and thereby constrains our development; for Screwtape, or rather for the Enemy whose views he is describing, attention to the Present is absolutely essential for faithful Christian practice.
Screwtape makes a related point earlier in his series of letters when he comments that human beings have a curious ability to worry about many different possibilities at once, even though only one of them will happen. We radically multiply our anxieties by trying to prepare ourselves, all at once, for a series of eventualities that will never come to pass. It is as an antidote to this anxiety (among other things, of course) that attention to the present is counseled.
I think of Screwtape’s point often these days because for the last few years conservative Christianity in America has been completely inattentive to the requirements of the moment — in ways I recently commented on — but has been obsessively focused on a series of terrible futures which they believe are sure to come.
This kind of noise is ceaseless, and characteristic of non-religious as well as Christian populism. I commented a few years ago on the idea of the “Flight 93 Election,” when we were told to “charge the cockpit or die.” What does that mean? I asked over and over again, and no one would ever tell me. Die how? Rounded up and shot on the day of Hillary Clinton’s inauguration? Gradually shipped to concentration camps? Presumably not; presumably it wasn’t meant literally — but what was even the figurative meaning? I could guess, but not with any confidence.
The same rhetoric re-emerged last fall. “I’d be happy to die in this fight,” Eric Metaxas told Donald Trump. “This is a fight for everything.” Obviously not “everything” — it’s not a fight for the continued existence of cronuts or for the political leadership of Zambia — so what does “everything” mean, for Metaxas? Also, how exactly does he think he would die? (I mean, Biden is President and Eric is still alive …) In this case I can’t guess what he means.
(Though maybe some of these people really and literally do mean that everything hangs in the balance: the MyPillow guy says that if his movie about election fraud doesn’t convince everyone in America that the election was stolen from Donald Trump, then “We pray and we go to heaven, it’s over.” He can’t mean what he’s saying … can he?)
All the “prepare for great tribulation” shouting, in its milder and more severe forms, has certain common traits.
The first is what I’ve called an “absolutizing of fright.”
The second is that this absolute fright has no content. What, specifically, do they think will actually happen to American Christians over the next few years? What do they think are the next steps even? It’s usually impossible to tell, and it’s impossible to tell because they don’t know, they don’t have any actual ideas, they just have overwhelming forebodings.
Which leads me to the third point: They have been completely consumed by their forebodings. I think of the character in Dostoyevsky’s Demons who says to one of the revolutionaries, “I only know that you did not eat the idea — the idea ate you.” These people have been eaten by their fears.
And that’s why they can’t pay any attention to the demands God makes on them in the moment. That’s why — referring back to my post from the other day — they don’t bless those who curse them or pray for those who persecute them or turn the other cheek or seek to live in peace with their neighbors or any of the other things that their faith clearly commands them to do. They don’t obey in the moment because they can’t see the moment — their eyes are fixed on the distance, where they perceive a great and terrible cloud of … something. Something coming to destroy them. Somehow.
And they don’t, therefore, remember that even if their worse fears come true, it won’t abrogate or even lessen a single one of those commandments. Jesus Christ asked forgiveness for those who were nailing him to a cross. Do we think we have it tougher than that? Or will? If we were to give a seriously biblical and genuinely Christian answer to the question of how we might prepare for some future disaster, we would have to say: By doing what Christians always do. In good times or bad, Christians proclaim that Jesus is Lord and seek to love Him and love our neighbors as ourselves. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away; Blessed be the name of the Lord.
This is a word for myself as well as for my fellow Christians. I’ve said things like this before, but I can’t remind myself too often.
Do people twist the truth or simply lie about us? Are we treated with subtle and not-so-subtle bigotry? Are we mocked and belittled? Might we, soon enough, be facing actual persecution? If so, then we have our instructions:
We are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.
If people take our coats we should give them our cloaks as well.
We should never return evil for evil, but should strive to live at peace with everyone.
We should treat our fellow Christians, even when they’re liberals, “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
Conservative Christians who seek to follow these commandments must be out there — they must — but I’ve struggled to find them online. Instead, I keep coming across people who loudly proclaim their orthodoxy, and give much sage advice to their fellow conservatives, and yet somehow never manage to land on these themes which, in my Bible at least, are pretty prominent. These pundits are fighters; they point fiercely at their enemies and denounce them; they cry that they are being treated unfairly; they mock and belittle those on the other side of the political isle; but if they ever ask God’s blessing upon those enemies and persecutors, or seek to make peace with their liberal sisters and brothers, it doesn’t seem to happen where I can see it.
George Macdonald said something in one of his “unspoken sermons” that I think of often. It pierces my soul, in a way that I try (not always successfully) to think of as a gift, and so I’d like to offer it also to my fellow Christians. Here it is:
Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because He said, Do it, or once abstained because He said, Do not do it. It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you.
There seems to be a pretty lively conversation going on in Chile about the new Spanish translation of my book The Year of Our Lord 1943. I can with great difficulty read Spanish, but listening to the conversation is beyond my capabilities. Maybe they all hate the book and I am spared from learning that?
I have been clinging for months now, and expect to be clinging for years, to this word from Beth Moore:
We have burned down our evangelical witness. Burned it to the ground. But here is what I know. I know God can bring beauty from ashes. I believe He will raise up a people purified by the very fires we set. A people defined by Jesus Himself, not denomination nor political party.
— Beth Moore (@BethMooreLPM) October 19, 2020
Can I get an amen for this powerful reflection by Justin Giboney? It gets a hearty amen from me.
Neither the warmonger nor the pious bystander is a peacemaker. Those too heavenly or high-minded to soil their ceremonial garb by touching common ground and advocating for their neighbors aren’t peacemakers. Moreover, those who exploit prayer as a copout to neglect the issues God has placed in their sphere of influence aren’t peacemakers either. Their silence condones a conflicted state of affairs and makes them keepers of a riotous status quo.
Peacemakers will engage the conflicts necessary to achieve racial justice, but they won’t be carried away by the moment. In the tensest times, they’ll watch their words, acknowledge their opponent’s human dignity, and guard their hearts from tribalism. They’ll address today’s bleak situation with tenacity and moral imagination, rather than cynicism. This means peacemakers will seek out approaches that transcend the inadequate options offered by ideological conservatives and progressives. They won’t run from reality, but they’ll attempt to reach higher ground rather than settling for the base terrain immediately available.
I’m tempted to quote the whole thing, but I’ll confine myself to the challenging conclusion:
No other group is better situated to bring healing to this land than the church. There are Bible-believing Christians on both sides of the political spectrum, and outside of politics we have a lot in common. We’re stuck with one another for good. We need each other. It’s time to set our partisan hang-ups aside, make peace, and do justice.
A twofold something I already knew but that I re-learned this past week:
- During a crisis one turns instinctively and desperately to the internet for news;
- During a crisis the worst thing one can do is turn to the internet for news.
Now, I do want to have some compassion for myself: Last Wednesday was completely insane and I think almost anyone who had access to live or near-live media would have been strongly, perhaps overwhelmingly, tempted to tune in. In that respect I was like everyone else.
But you know what? It did me no good. I got mixed messages, unreliable reports, rapidly changing stories; and I heard repeatedly from fools and knaves. If I had waited a day, or two days, or three, I wouldn’t have had all the emotional upheaval and I wouldn’t have missed anything significant. What possible difference could it make to me to learn about the Capitol Disgrace on Wednesday or on the following Monday (which is my usual news-reading day)? The only answer: None. None at all.
And all this has been going on in the aftermath of a year, a true annus horribilis, in which I also realized that “Everything I care about and have written to defend has crumped, is crumping, will crump.”
All that as prelude. The chief point is this: I received a gift today, in the form of a post by Ian Paul. That post is about the Greek word hypomone (ὑπομονή), which means “patient eudurance,” “the capacity to hold out or bear up in the face of difficulty, patience, endurance, fortitude, steadfastness, perseverance.” The associated verb, hypomeno (ὑπομένω), means “to stay in a place beyond an expected point of time, remain/stay (behind), while others go away”; “to maintain a belief or course of action in the face of opposition, stand one’s ground, hold out, endure, remain instead of fleeing.”
Love, St. Paul says, “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” — panta hypomenei (πάντα ὑπομένει). That’s 1 Corinthians 13:7, and I think I’ll make it my verse for 2021. My prayer for myself is that I will have the patient endurance, this year, to maintain my beliefs, my core commitments, “in the face of opposition”; to stand firm and defend what I care most about “beyond an expected point of time … while others go away.” I declare 2021 The Year of Hypomone.
Some of my readers will have friends and family members who believe that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump and that the recent invasion of the United States Capitol was therefore justified — or perhaps that the Capitol was actually invaded by leftist activists. Some of my readers may hold these views themselves. So I’d like to share some recent reporting, analysis, and commentary that may be helpful. All of what follows comes from conservative, Christian, and Republican sources — in some cases the writers are all three.
The links below are not, except for the last couple, opinion pieces. They report.
First and most generally: There are many “fact-checking” sites out there, but if you are a political conservative you can’t beat the one from The Dispatch. That link goes to their complete archive, but here are some especially important ones related to the election itself:
- Did Pennsylvania Have More Mail-In Ballots Recorded Than Were Requested?
- Did a Dominion Technician Manipulate Voting Data in Gwinnett County?
- Did a Georgia County Use ‘Sequestered’ Machines to ‘Break the Dominion Algorithm’?
- Did Detroit Poll Workers Scan the Same Ballots Over and Over?
- Did Joe Biden Receive Millions More Votes Than There Were Eligible Voters?
- Fact Check: Debunking Donald Trump’s Claims About Voter Fraud
That last one is the most detailed. Also from The Dispatch, on the storming of the Capitol Building:
(I think all of those are out from behind the paywall — my apologies if they aren’t.) Maybe you believe The Dispatch is not trustworthy because it’s run by a bunch of Never-Trumpers. That’s okay — you don’t have to take their word for any of it. Each of those posts has many, many links to other sites that have the hard-core evidence. Here as in all other cases of research, wisdom lies in patiently following the trail of bread crumbs as far as it goes.
Further, from the front lines:
- John McCormack of National Review reports on what it was like to be in the Capitol last Wednesday (may also be behind a paywall, sorry)
- Newly elected Republican Representative Peter Meijer, who was also there, on what he experienced — and what his party should learn from it
- This collection of videos from Parler, taken by people participating in the invasion of the Capitol, answers many questions about who the participants were and what they were doing
And, for all my fellow evangelical Christians, please read this post by David French, especially these words:
Rebutting enabling lies does not mean whitewashing the opposition. It does not mean surrendering your values or failing to resist destructive ideas. It does mean discerning the difference between a problem and a crisis, between an aberration and an example. And it means possessing the humility to admit when you’re wrong. It means understanding that
no emergency is ever too great to stop loving your enemies and blessing those who persecute you.
And the rebuttal has to come from within. The New York Times isn’t going to break this fever. Vox won’t change many right-wing minds. But courageous Christians who love Christ and His church have a chance. Amen, brother David — who also made a wonderful and powerful case, on a recent episode of The Dispatch’s podcast, for welcoming those who have recently come to see that their trust in Donald Trump was misplaced.
It is extremely discouraging for me to see so many Christians, and so many churches, losing all sense of their mission and purpose — and at such a crucial time. Political conflicts and anxieties are at the forefront of American minds right now, but in another few days the catastrophic effects of the coronavirus will loom into our general view again. (They never should have left it.) I find myself thinking about all the ways that many American churches have soldiered on bravely through the miseries of the past year — and about all the ways that other churches have stoked political conflict, denied the truth about disease and elections alike, angrily demanded their rights … and ignored their mission, which is, after all, to seek and save those who are lost.
I’ve moved away from the business of evidence and fact-checking, but I’ve done so for a reason: None of us is likely to practice due diligence in finding out the truth if our hearts are not properly oriented, if we’re not primarily actuated by the double love of God and our neighbor. If we are so actuated, we’ll find ways to pursue our mission even in the darkest hours.
My patron saint in all these matters is the Reverend Pat Allerton, about whom I read in a recent piece by Harry Mount in the Telegraph:
In the first week of the first lockdown, as the Church of England shut its doors, the Reverend Pat Allerton, vicar of St Peter’s, in London’s Notting Hill, had a brainwave…. ‘I had an idea to take a hymn and a prayer to the streets of my parish, to lift spirits and bring a bit of joy. So, on the 26th March, I went out to the Portobello Road.’
He was cautious about the effects of hitting the streets with a loudspeaker, blaring out Judy Collins’ “Amazing Grace” on Spotify. ‘I thought I might be told to do one,’ he says jauntily. ‘But I was amazed by the response. People were really moved. They clapped and invited me back! They probably regret that now. I believe God was coming alongside people, letting them know He’s there.’
Over the following weeks, Allerton did 64 walking services around London, helped by the amazing weather. Each service – with a hymn, a prayer and a 60-second sermon – took seven minutes. He invited people – up to 50 at a time – to join in from a window or doorway. ‘So many people commented on social media, saying things like, “I’m not religious but I’ve got goosebumps. There are tears coming down my face.” God’s presence was touching people.’
Allerton is not happy about his government’s restrictions on church services. He thinks they are shortsighted and unfair. But still, there’s the Gospel to be preached, people in need to minister to. So he gets to it.
My own pastors have been getting to it for the past ten months. Preaching the Gospel, baptizing newborns, confirming young people, burying the dead, comforting the grieving — all of which are ways of preaching the Gospel. My wife Teri has certain pre-existing medical conditions that would make it very, very dangerous for her to contract covid, so we haven’t even dared the recently instituted outdoor socially-distanced Eucharistic services. No problem: our associate rector Neal McGowan recently brought the Eucharist to us. And would do it again any time we asked. Meanwhile virtual Morning Prayer continues, a six-times-weekly blessing and encouragement.
No protests, no insurrections, no complaints, no cries of persecution, no demands for rights: just ministry in the name of Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth, the Life, the one who came to seek and save those who are lost. Christians who focus on that cannot go wrong. And caring enough about the truth to get our facts right is actually part of that ministry.
UPDATE: If you really want to get deep into the evidential weeds, this 124-page legal complaint against Sidney Powell by Dominion Voting Systems is jaw-dropping — and heavily, heavily documented. I don’t know how you could read this and still believe any word that comes out of Sidney Powell’s mouth, including “and” and “the.” (Hmmm, maybe I shouldn’t put it that way.) It’s also a thorough record of a much broader pattern of lies and deceptions, and reckless disregard for the truth, by others. The ironically-named American Thinker seems to have gotten the message: “It was wrong for us to publish these false statements. We apologize to Dominion for all of the harm this caused them and their employees. We also apologize to our readers for abandoning 9 journalistic principles and misrepresenting Dominion’s track record and its limited role in tabulating votes for the November 2020 election. We regret this grave error.” (Not sure which nine principles were abandoned.)
I’m blogging too much, focused too much on the things of the moment, but I think the circumstances just may warrant it. It’s certainly hard for me to concentrate on anything other than the current political calamity. And since soon a new term will start and I’ll be back in my old books, here comes another round:
In my reflections on Donald Trump when he was running for President in 2016, I made one significant error: I didn’t think he would nominate responsible judges and Justices. I thought he would hand out judicial appointments like candy to friends and toadies. But it turned out that the judiciary couldn’t capture his attention, so he farmed out the decisions to others who acted on sound conservative principles. (Given how many of the very judges he appointed ruled against his recent frivolous lawsuits, precisely because they were honest conservative jurists rather than toadies, I wonder if he’s belatedly reassessing his priorities.)
But I think my more general assessment, made in June of 2016, has, except for one point, stood the test of time:
We all know what Trump is: so complete a narcissist that the concepts of truth and falsehood, right and wrong, are alien to him. He knows only the lust for power and the rage of being thwarted in his lust. In a sane society the highest position to which he could aspire is apprentice dogcatcher, and then only if no other candidates presented themselves.
If you put a gun to my head and told me that I had to vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, I would but whisper, “Goodbye cruel world.” But if my family somehow managed to convince me to stick around, in preference to Trump I would vote for Hillary. Or John Kerry, or Nancy Pelosi. In preference to Trump I would vote for the reanimated corpse of Adlai Stevenson, or for that matter that of Julius Caesar, who perhaps has learned a thing or two in his two thousand years of afterlife. The only living person that I would readily choose Trump in preference to is Charles Manson.
The one point that I can’t now affirm is that last one, but only because Charles Manson is dead.
A few months later I published an essay about the Christian defenders and celebrants of Trump, in which I described the pastors who claimed that God had revealed to them that Trump was The Chosen One — perhaps in the mode of King Cyrus of Persia — and looked toward the possibility that his presidency might run onto the rocks:
These leaders have replaced a rhetoric of persuasion with a rhetoric of pure authority — very like the authority that Trump claims for himself. (“Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”) Consequently, their whole house of cards may well collapse if the Trump presidency is anything other than a glorious success, and will leave those who have accepted that rhetoric bereft of explanations as well as arguments. Presumably the most fervent supporters of Trump will argue (as Trump himself will argue) that his failures have occurred because others have betrayed him, have rejected the man that God raised up to rescue America, but this will require the replacement of the Cyrus analogy with another one yet to be determined. We can only hope that no one compares a failed Trump to an American Jesus betrayed by American Judases.
These claims to divine revelation have certainly been perpetuated by Eric Metaxas, who claims to have all the evidence he needs right there in his heart to prove that the election was stolen, and who has asserted, in classic “name it and claim it” style, that, no matter how things appear, “Trump will be inaugurated.” I’m sure that as I speak Metaxas and the other Jericho March leaders are writing Donald Trump Superstar and are debating whether the role of Judas is to be played by Mike Pence or Mitt Romney. I’m betting on Pence. (Update: I changed my mind.)
More soberly, in that same essay I wrote this, wrapping up my reflections on the Christian True Trump Believers:
If all this sounds like a strange fantasyland of narrative, an imaginative world of what members of the Trump administration have taken to calling “alternative facts,” that’s because it is just that. The larger, and longer-term, effect of accounts like this is to encourage Christians to abandon the world of shared evidence, shared convictions, and shared possibilities, and such abandonment is very bad news for Christians and for America.
And lo, even as I foretold, it has come to pass.
For alternatives to all this nonsense, I’d encourage you to reflect on two essays: one by Michael Gerson that I quoted yesterday, and a cautionary message, both prescient and wise, written by my friend and colleague Frank Beckwith five years ago.
The collapse of one disastrous form of Christian social engagement should be an opportunity for the emergence of a more faithful one. And here there are plenty of potent, hopeful Christian principles lying around unused by most evangelicals: A consistent and comprehensive concern for the weak and vulnerable in our society, including the poor, immigrants and refugees. A passion for racial reconciliation and criminal justice reform, rooted in the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity. A deep commitment to public and global health, reflecting the priorities of Christ’s healing ministry. An embrace of political civility as a civilizing norm. A commitment to the liberty of other people’s religions, not just our own. An insistence on public honesty and a belief in the transforming power of unarmed truth.
There is no infallible means for discerning when a religious believer has been spoken to, directly and personally, by God. However, there is a reliable way to disconfirm such a claim. When a person demands that other people immediately accept that he has been spoken to by God, and treats with insult and contempt those who do not acknowledge his claim to unique revelation, then we can be sure that no genuine message has been received, and that the voice echoing in that person’s mind is not that of God but that of his own ego.
A surprising number of readers of my previous post have written out of concern for my state of mind, which is kind of them, but I think they have read as a cri de coeur what was meant as a simple summary of the facts. Not pleasant facts, I freely admit, but surely uncontroversial ones. Stating them so bluntly is just one element of my current period of reflection.
The primary reason I am not in despair is simply this: I know some history. I think we will probably see, in the coming decades, the dramatic reduction or elimination of humanities requirements and the closure of whole humanities departments in many American universities, but that will not mean the death of the humanities. Humane learning, literature, art, music have all thrived in places where they were altogether without institutional support. Indeed, I have suggested that it is in times of the breaking of institutions that poetry becomes as necessary as bread.
Similarly, while attendance at Episcopalian and other Anglican churches has been dropping at a steep rate for decades, and I expect will in my lifetime dwindle to nearly nothing, there will still be people worshipping with the Book of Common Prayer as long as … well, as long as there are people, I think. And if evangelicalism completely collapses as a movement — for what it’s worth, I think it already has — that will simply mean a return to an earlier state of affairs. The various flagship institutions of American evangelicalism are (in their current form at least) about as old as I am. The collapse I speak of is, or will be, simply a return to a status quo ante bellum, the bellum in question being World War II, more or less. And goodness, it’s not as if even the Great Awakening had the kind of impact on its culture, all things demographically considered, as one might suspect from its name and from its place in historians’ imaginations.
This doesn’t mean I don’t regret the collapse of the institutions that have helped to sustain me throughout my adult life. I do, very much. And I will do my best to help them survive, if in somewhat constrained and diminished form. But Put not your trust in institutions, as no wise man has even quite said, even as you work to sustain them. It’s what (or Who) stands behind those institutions and gives them their purpose that I believe in and ultimately trust.
The Great Crumping is going on all around me. But if there’s one thing that as a Christian and a student of history I know, it’s this: Crump happens.
Here is where Temple still matters as a theorist of guild socialism. In the early 1940s, both before and after he became Archbishop of Canterbury, Temple got very specific about how to democratize economic power. He was incredulous that modern democracies tolerated big private banks, lamented that Christian socialists turned away in the 1890s from the land issue, and proposed a new form of guild socialism. The banks, he argued, should be turned into utilities or socialized; otherwise the rich controlled the process of investment. God made the land for everyone, and society creates the unearned increment in the value of land; therefore the increment should go to society. Above all, though Temple took for granted that certain natural monopolies must be nationalized, the centerpiece of his proposal was an excess-profits tax payable in the form of shares to worker funds. These funds, over time, would gain democratic control over enterprises. Economic democracy, he argued, can be achieved gradually, peaceably, and on decentralized terms, without abolishing economic markets or making heroic demands on the political system.
The ultimatum complains that, in its view, past initiatives aimed at enlarging the number of faculty of color at Princeton have “failed” because in 2019–20 “among 814 faculty, there were 30 Black, 31 Latinx, and 0 Indigenous persons. That’s 7%.” According to the ultimatum, this “is not progress by any standard; it falls woefully short of U.S. demographics as estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau, which reports Black and Hispanic persons at 32% of the total population.”
The suggestion that these statistics show racial unfairness in hiring at Princeton is misleading. According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, African Americans in recent years earned only around 7 percent of all doctoral degrees. In engineering it was around 4 percent. In physics around 2 percent. Care must be taken to look for talent in places other than the familiar haunts of Ivy League searches. But even when such care is taken, the resultant catch is almost invariably quite small.
The reasons behind the small numbers are familiar and heart-breaking. They include a legacy of deprivation in education, housing, employment, and health care, not to mention increased vulnerability to crime and incarceration. The perpetuation of injuries from past discrimination as well as the imposition of new wrongs cut like scythes into the ranks of racial minorities, cruelly winnowing the number who are even in the running to teach at Princeton.
The racial demographics of its faculty does not reflect a situation in which the university is putting a thumb on the scale against racial-minority candidates. To the contrary, the university is rightly putting a thumb on the scale in favor of racial-minority candidates. That the numbers remain small reflects the terrible social problems that hinder so many racial minorities before they even have a fighting chance to enter into the elite competitions from which Princeton selects its instructors. The ultimatum denies or minimizes this pipeline problem.
Many of Ambrose’s contemporaries were quietly convinced that the ills of Roman society had a supernatural origin. Many of the sharpest critics of their age were not Christians; they were pagans. For them, bad times had begun with the “national apostasy” of Constantine. The rampant avarice denounced by pagan authors was thought to go hand in hand with the spoliation of the temples and the abandonment of the old religion.
Ambrose had to answer such views. He did so by subtly secularizing the contemporary discourse on decline. He turned what many thinking persons considered a religious crisis into a crisis of social relations. We moderns tend to applaud Ambrose for the perspicacity of his diagnosis of the weaknesses of Roman society. But pagans such as Symmachus would have regarded Ambrose’s criticisms of society as mere whistling in the dark. Symmachus knew why things had gone wrong. The moment that the first fruits of the fields of Italy that had fed the Vestal Virgins for 1,200 years were withdrawn (in 382), the link between the land and the gods was broken.
My friend and colleague Frank Beckwith is singing my song in a recent blog post. Responding to an essay by Princeton’s Keith Whittington, Frank writes,
Without a doubt, racism ought to be opposed at every turn. But that is only because racism is a false view about the nature of human beings. At religious institutions, such as the university at which I am honored to serve (Baylor), the rejection of racism is baked into the very Christian idea of the imago dei, that human beings are by nature made in the image of God. But that image is not merely symbolic, it is descriptive of the aspect of our nature that is the most “Godlike,” our intellects. As St. Thomas Aquinas put it: “Since man is said to be the image of God by reason of his intellectual nature, he is the most perfectly like God according to that in which he can best imitate God in his intellectual nature.” Consequently, it would be a mistake for Christian institutions to try to emulate the project envisioned in the Princeton faculty letter. For it would undercut the epistemic grounds for why we believe racism is wrong: it is wrong because it is false. But that judgment depends on what the truth is, something that we can only know because of the power of our intellects. Thus, a Christian university that takes its stand against racism by giving identity politics and group perceptions pride of place over the pursuit and acquisition of truth not only diminishes the imago dei and violates the very reason for its existence but cultivates in its students reflexes that do not fulfill the demands of Christian charity: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (I Corinthians 13: 4–7).
This is related, I think, to something I wrote recently about Baylor, where Frank and I teach:
President Livingstone likes to say, “The world needs a Baylor.” If Baylor simply echoes the language and the policies of other institutions, then no, the world really doesn’t need a Baylor. But if we think and speak and act out of a deep commitment to the Gospel of the Crucified and Risen One, then we can make a difference indeed.
If Baylor has a problem with racism — and I think it does — then that didn’t happen because we were insufficiently up-to-date with whatever the outrage of the moment is. It happened because we did not think and live out of the Christian convictions we claim to have. It happened because our adherence to our tradition was nominal rather than substantive. It hapened because, while we may have agreed, if asked, that all human beings are made in the image of God, we had not internalized that doctrine in such a way that it shaped our thoughts. And that’s the shortcoming that we should be attentive to. It is a moral and spiritual one, but also an intellectual one. That matters especially at a university.
After the killing of George Floyd, when universities around the country were scrambling to put together anti-racism statements, Baylor scrambled too. But if we had consistently lived up to our convictions we wouldn’t have had to. A Christian institution should be leading the way in critiquing racism, and should be doing so in distinctively Christian language that arises from specifically Christian convictions; it shouldn’t be chasing the pack and echoing the pack’s language. Think of William Wilberforce and the other evangelicals who led the way in ending Britain’s slave trade — and Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano. Those people should be our models.
There’s opportunity for some serious self-reflection here, should we choose to take it. A few years ago I wrote a post about Christian organizations that were changing their views on sexuality, and there I argued that there are three ways to interpret such a change:
1) At one point, the organization held views about sexuality that were largely determined by its social environment, but it has now reconsidered those views in light of the Gospel and has come to a more authentically Christian understanding of the matter.
2) At one point, the organization held authentically Christian views about sexuality, but has succumbed to public pressure and fear of being scorned or condemned and now holds views that are determined by its social environment.
3) The organization has always held the views about sexuality that were socially dominant, bending its understanding of Scripture to suit the times; it just changed when (or soon after) the main stream of society changed.
Note that there is no way to read this story as one of consistent faithfulness to a Gospel message that works against the grain of a dominant culture.
I would apply the same logic to Christian institutions that are just now discovering the tragedy of American racism. If racism has always been endemic in American life, and the Christian faith gives us the intellectual and equipment we need to diagnose and combat racism, why are you just now noticing the problem? How have you been thinking about racism in the past — or not thinking about it? Isn’t it likely that when a kind of quiet racism was socially acceptable you accepted it, and when it became socially imperative to denounce it you denounced it?
Self-reflection is hard, and it’s easier, even if stressful, just to chase the pack. And there’s another factor to be considered. The cause of the moment is anti-racism, and Christianity, properly understood, is full-throatedly anti-racist, even if its reasons for taking that view are quite different from those of many activists, and its preferred means for redressing it will often be different too. But if you try to think from the heart of the Christian tradition, often you will find yourself moving in a direction very different than that of the pack — and the pack is not tolerant or forgiving of dissent. “Joining the crowd / is the only thing all men can do,” and for the crowd joining is mandatory. In these circumstance chasing the pack, even if it’s not heroic, will always be not just easier but also safer.
I have to admit that I am a bit shaken by Rod Dreher’s post yesterday — and more by the vehemence with which, today, he is doubling and tripling down on even the worst of its claims.
If Rod had simply wanted to explain why he thinks the new bodycam footage will serve to exculpate the officers charged in the death of George Floyd, I would have no problem with that. But he decided to yoke that argument to a ranting attack on George Floyd, a determination to blame Floyd for what happened to him, even when offering sequentially two incompatible views of why he was at fault for his own death. (First it was because he resisted arrest; then, later, it didn’t matter whether he resisted arrest or not, he was about to die anyway. So whether it’s by resisting arrest or by taking drugs, “George Floyd is dead today almost entirely because of George Floyd.”)
In responding to friends — Leah Libresco and me — who challenged him on his attitude, Rod wildly misrepresented half of what we said and wholly ignored the other half. The more feverish and rage-filled of his commentators, though, he seems to trust wholly.
Well, that’s Rod’s call. Nothing I can do to change it.
I still love Rod, and will not give up on him, because I just don’t give up on people — God, after all, did not give up on me. But I’m not reading his blog any more, and I can no longer defend him — which Lord knows I’ve spent enough hours doing over the post few years.
Finally: On principle I don’t sign manifestos, but if Matthew Loftus turned this into a manifesto, I would sign it.
I think this post by my friend Rod Dreher is horrifying. I think Rod ought to be ashamed of himself for writing it, and should apologize.
Rod says that recently leaked bodycam footage of George Floyd being uncooperative with police and acting in a “bizarre” fashion “dramatically changes what we thought we knew about this story.” [UPDATE: Rod, thank God, has changed the headline that was the most offensive part of the post, so I have cut some of the things I first wrote.] George Floyd behaved strangely and was uncooperative with police. He was not violent and did not threaten anyone with violence. Derek Chauvin killed him by kneeling on his neck for eight minutes. To say that George Floyd is in any way responsible for his own death is a shockingly offensive thing to write and I struggle to process the fact that Rod wrote it. But Rod went further than that: he wrote, “George Floyd is dead today almost entirely because of George Floyd.” A thousand times no. George Floyd is dead today entirely — not almost entirely, entirely — because Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for eight minutes. You can call that murder — I do — or you can call it something else, but that is how and why George Floyd died.
The newly released footage might — might — embarrass some of the people who have tried to paint Floyd as some kind of saint, papering over his history. But beyond I don’t see how the footage changes anything. I still think exactly what I thought before I saw that footage: Non-saints, indeed even habitual criminals, don’t deserve what was done to George Floyd. Behaving bizarrely, “shrieking and carrying on like a lunatic,” is not a capital offense. Some of us might even say that a person who is clearly not in his right senses deserves compassion. Instead George Floyd got death. Eight minutes of patient, calm, unrelenting asphyxiation.*
UPDATE: Rod has added the following to his post:
Floyd is dead because Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for eight minutes. That is a fact. Chauvin should have been charged with something — abuse of force? — but I don’t see how it constitutes murder. I am willing to be corrected, especially by those who understand the law.
What shocked me about this video was how wildly uncooperative Floyd was prior to the neck restraint. I had believed prior to this that the police had thrown him to the ground and subdued him with the neck restraint. I did not realize all that preceded the neck restraint. I think it is a good thing that neck restraints are being abandoned by police. If Minneapolis had not had that policy, Floyd would probably be alive today.
And if Floyd had not resisted arrest for eight minutes, he would be alive today. He shouldn’t be dead, period, but his death was not the simple case I thought it was prior to seeing this video. Context matters.
This helps, but it would be a lot better if it stopped after the first sentence.
I don’t know whether the new footage will change the thinking of a jury, but it doesn’t change my thinking one iota. If George Floyd had tried to attack Derek Chauvin, then maybe; but what I see is a pathetic, desperate, sick, terrified man. The cops could have waited him out. They chose to kill him instead.
And as for Rod’s claim that “if Floyd had not resisted arrest for eight minutes, he would be alive today,” that is true in exactly the same way, and to exactly the same degree, that “If she hadn’t been wearing that short skirt she wouldn’t have been raped” is true.
* Apologies for phrasing it this way. George Floyd did not die of asphyxiation but rather as a result of “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” Rod says this means “his heart and lungs stopped working,” apparently believing that the business about “law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression” was just tacked on the end of the medical examiner’s sentence for no reason.
So whereas earlier Rod said that George Floyd died because he resisted arrest, now he agrees with some of his readers that George Floyd — the same George Floyd we see in that bodycam video talking and moving freely — was just minutes from death anyway, and therefore it is complete accident that he happened to do so with a police officer’s knee on his neck for eight minutes. Funny old thing, death.
So the details of the story keep changing, but the main thrust doesn’t change — Rod puts it in bold type so we don’t miss it: “George Floyd is dead today almost entirely because of George Floyd.” Nothing else to see here, folks, move right along. And certainly not one drop of compassion for a man who is dead, and friends and family who are mourning him.
I have so much on my plate that I shouldn’t even be writing this, so let me end with one more comment. In an update to his post Rod quotes an email from Leah Libresco, writes maybe a thousand words in reply to it, but totally ignores her key point. I’m going to post Leah’s thoughts as my final contribution here, because I think Rod needs to hear them — and so do I.
When you hold up examples primarily of the excesses of the social justice movement, but not the evils it is responding to, I think you let down your readers. We’re called as Christians to bind up wounds. If you don’t like how that’s being done, point your readers at people who you admire who are doing this well, so they can be part of good work.
I was glad to see that your new book is split between pointing at the problem and giving examples of solutions. I think your blog and your readers would be well served by rebalancing your writing to point more toward what you admire than what you abhor. And remember, people act for the sake of a perceived good. Many of the people you disagree with are grappling with real evils, and you will do more to tell the whole truth when you acknowledge that they are motivated by a desire for justice, not just power.
In response to my recent post I have heard from a few (white) people who say something like this: Nothing we can do is right. If we speak, we’re wrong to speak; if we’re silent, we’re wrong to be silent. What are we supposed to do??
If you feel that people are treating you unfairly … well, to this at least there’s a straightforward answer for Christians:
But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.
If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
And like the commandment to forgive, this one doesn’t come with exceptions.
Easier said than done, right? Much easier. (I speak to you as the all-time grandmaster of Talking A Good Game.) And yet there’s a simplicity about this that’s immensely liberating. Just knowing what I’m supposed to do relieves me of the burden of worrying about other people’s intentions, other people’s morals. It doesn’t matter what their intentions and their morals are: my job is precisely the same whatever the state of their souls.
These are the words I’ve decided to spend the next month meditating on: Love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
Rod Dreher has a post today about a letter from Linda Livingstone, Baylor’s President. Rod’s post turned up a day after I got an email from a woman whose daughter is thinking of applying to Baylor — she had seen President Livingstone’s letter and wondered whether it constitutes Baylor’s official policy on race now. My correspondent expressed her conviction that racism is deeply embedded in American society and, tragically, in the Christian church also, but then asked: “Is it possible for a student to thrive at Baylor if she doesn’t think white people are evil and the source of everything bad in the world?”
I don’t think that anything in Baylor’s statements about race in America, and at Baylor, indicates hatred of white people, nor claims that everything bad in the world is perpetrated by us. But the sins of white people are certainly the focus. There’s justification for that. We’re going through a nationwide reckoning on race that is long overdue. The problem is that it is not a very good or constructive reckoning. Baylor could help with that, if it wanted to. But I’m not sure Baylor wants to.
The problem doesn’t really lie with what Baylor says, even though most of Baylor’s public statements paint the situation with far too broad and coarse a brush. For instance, consider the several statements that denounce white supremacy. I think white supremacy exists and is demonic, but there’s a big difference between white supremacy and garden-variety racial prejudice — which is more destructive, overall, but less wicked. White people who are bigoted against black people aren’t on those grounds white supremacists, any more than Christians who sin habitually are on those grounds Satanists.
But any quibbles I have about what’s included in Baylor’s statements are insignificant in comparison to my concern about what’s not in them. There is quite a lot about repentance, but I have yet to find one single word about forgiveness, or reconciliation, or hope.
Christianity has a lot to say about sin, repentance, and forgiveness. It tells us that we all sin. It tells us that when we sin against a sister or brother, in thought, word, or deed, we must seek to make it right, and to ask that person’s forgiveness. And if we feel that someone has sinned against us, we are to tell that person so, to give them the opportunity to repent. The New Testament authors go on and on about these matters. 1 John 1: “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness”; but also we should take care to “Bear fruit worthy of repentance” (Matthew 3) — we must do more than speak words of penitence, but also pay our debt to our neighbor, the debt of love (Romans 13). And our overall daily approach to one another is prescribed by St. Paul in Ephesians 4: ”So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another…. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” Also in Colossians 3: “Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful.”
If you’re not a Christian, this stuff probably looks like a way to let people off easy. And in one sense it is. As Hamlet says, “Treat every man according to his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” Christianity is all about people not getting what they deserve, and the grace of forgiveness + genuine repentance (in that order) is the engine that makes this happen. And, for Christians, them’s the universal rules: there are no exceptions.
It’s become fashionable, in some circles, to denounce calls for reconciliation. Some say, “We don’t want reconciliation, we want justice.” But to Christians, reconciliation is what justice is for. When injustice marks our relations, then what is unjust must be repaired or healed in some way, insofar as that is possible, so that we may live peaceably and lovingly with one another. Walking away from one another is not, for Christians, an option. Forgiveness must be asked for and granted, ordered and received.
In my judgment, it is the opportunity to receive and extend forgiveness that is the greatest possible inducement to repentance and amendment of life, and — I cannot stress this too strongly — a shared repentance and amendment of life make genuine community possible. I have many colleagues who believe the same, and students at Baylor can find us. We will join the prophets and cry out for justice to roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. But we will also echo St. Paul and tell you that we Christians forgive others because God in Christ has forgiven us. We will tell you that your shortcomings and failures can never outpace the mercy of God, who loves his wayward children, all of them, and will someday wipe from their eyes every tear. This is the great hope of those who wound as well as those who are wounded. And all of us sometimes wound and sometimes are wounded.
(And then we will sit down at a table and strive better to understand, and better to pursue, the good, the true, and the beautiful.)
But does Baylor University, as an institution, believe in any of this? If so, why is none of it ever mentioned in our administration’s public statements about race and racism? Why do we strive to build an entire system of dealing with racism that doesn’t touch on the Christian Gospel at any point? Why don’t we offer a word of hope? President Livingstone likes to say, “The world needs a Baylor.” If Baylor simply echoes the language and the policies of other institutions, then no, the world really doesn’t need a Baylor. But if we think and speak and act out of a deep commitment to the Gospel of the Crucified and Risen One, then we can make a difference indeed.
(This is an updated and significantly revised version of the post I wrote yesterday.)
In this essay from a couple of years ago and today’s post at the Hog Blog — the first for a Christian audience, the second for a general one — I’m trying to think through what I’m calling plurality without pluralism. I take it that pluralism is a preferential option for a diversity of human ends, as well as the means by which to pursue those ends. I also take it that Christians cannot affirm such pluralism. Christians believe that “the chief end of man is to glory God and enjoy him forever,” or, if they would not put it precisely that way, perhaps they would say, with St. Augustine in the final chapter of the City of God that our end is the Great Sabbath of God:
Suffice it to say that the seventh day will be our Sabbath, whose end will not be an evening, but the Lord’s Day, as an eighth and eternal day, consecrated by the resurrection of Christ, and prefiguring the eternal rest not only of the Spirit, but of the body also. There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. Behold what will be, in the end to which there shall be no end! For what other end do we set for ourselves than to reach that kingdom of which there is no end?
However we choose to put it, it is surely clear that there is no diffuse plurality of ends for human beings, but rather one great one. In Revelation 7, we see “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,” but they are all “standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands, and singing the same hymn: “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” Jesus commands us to be one as he and the Father are one.
There’s no need to belabor the point — nothing could be more foundational to the Christian faith. So why, then, do I think I have cause to give at least one cheer, maybe two, for plurality?
1) The diversity of callings in the church, and of charisms, which it seems we always struggle to acknowledge and accept, though Catholics do a much better job of it than Protestants, at least in my experience. These callings and charisms, when rightly exercised, all tend towards the one telos of Christians, but they often don’t look that way. The teacher leading students in conversation, the contemplative in ecstasy, the hospice worker cleaning the body of a dying woman, seem to be following wholly different models of the conduct of life, and indeed can themselves be tempted to think that way. People called to any active form of life always tend to suspect the contemplative of not really doing anything. Examples could be multiplied endlessly.
2) The double character, immediate and eschatological, of Jesus’s commandments. We are commanded to be One even as the Father and the Son are one, but this does not give us license to enforce a merely visible oneness — this is what Simone Weil calls “spiritual totalitarianism” and Charles Williams “the method of imposition of belief.” (In The Year of Our Lord 1943 I explore this theme in more detail.) Just as there is an idolatry of experience that drives us apart, there is also an idolatry of order that unwisely strives to force us together. The commandments must be pursued immediately but will only be fully realized eschatologically. “Be perfect, even as my Father in heaven is perfect” is not something I will do today.
3) The need, resulting from the former two points, for humility. We must be constantly aware of the self-blinding nature of sin, yes, and that should be enough to guarantee at least a measure of humility. But more than that, we need to remember the general character of revelation about both human and cosmic teleology. “No man knows the hour” and all that. And still more we must acknowledge the imperfect knowledge that comes from being simply finite creatures. Even the wisdom of the unfallen Adam was a human and thus a finite wisdom. I’m not a fan of Schleiermacher, but every Christian needs a theology of finitude.
A few years ago I would have said that the greatest danger facing the Christians I know was a kind of carelessness about the truth, a shrugging at difference and disagreement; now I think it’s the opposite, a kind of premature foreclosure, which is a way of immanentizing the eschaton. Obviously in any group of people we will find both intellectual flaccidity and intellectual rigidity present, but I do think that rigidity is now in the ascendent, simply because it is in the ascendent in our ambient culture and Christians, for the most part, behave as their ambient culture behaves.
In a recent conversation with Cherie Harder of the Trinity Forum, I recommended what I called — then half-jokingly, and now that I think about it more seriously — the Gandalf Option. I take that phrase from something Galdalf says to Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, who believes that Gandalf is plotting to rule that kingdom:
“The rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?”
I think we Christians today have become so exercised by the felt need to sniff out and banish disagreement and difference that we are forgetting to nurture the worthy things in this world that are now in peril. Thus I said, in a recent post, that “pure critique is a high-demand, low-reward kind of work. It can be helpful if you want to rally your base, but I find it more useful to celebrate what I believe to be true, and true, and beautiful, and embed critique in a larger, more constructive enterprise.” We are called to be gardeners, but it often seems that we prefer to be cops.
We need to remember that — to cite Gandalf again! — that “it is not our part to master all the tides of the world,” and that we are just a handful of people in the great procession of Christ’s saints. That’s why I think I can, with a bit of adaptation, be comforted by some words that Tom Stoppard gives to Alexander Herzen, which I discuss in today’s post — words that call us to work patiently towards oneness without demanding, or even expecting, that in this vale of tears we will come into the full inheritance of it: The Gospel of Jesus Christ “will not perish. What we let fall will be picked up by those behind. I can hear their childish voices on the hill.”
I am grieved to hear today of the death of J. I. Packer, a great evangelical Christian and a great saint. He had been failing for some time but I did not know that the end was near.
Jim — whom I knew for about twenty years, though not intimately — was considerably more Reformed than I am and considerably “lower” in his worship preferences, but he is to me, and has been for many years, a model of how to combine firm conviction and graciousness. It is because of Jim and a handful of other public figures (setting aside the great saints who are known only to a few) that I can still be proud to call myself an evangelical. Moreover, I have always deeply admired the consistency with which Jim set the needs of Christ’s church ahead of his own scholarly reputation. He always knew how to put first things first.
The last time I saw Jim, some years ago, we ate fajitas and drank margaritas together at Joe T. Garcia’s in Forth Worth. (Service to the Lord can take a boy from Gloucester to some peculiar places.) The next time I’m there, I’ll lift a glass to you, Jim, in gratitude for all you did — and more, all you are. Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Very well done indeed.
My buddy Rod Dreher has a book coming out soon called Live Not By Lies, and it’s about what American Christians can learn about living under an oppressive regime by studying what believers did under the old Soviet Union. I think this is a story that Christians ought to be interested in, whether they agree with Rod’s politics or not. Every thoughtful Christian I know thinks that the cause of Christ has powerful cultural and political enemies, that we are in various ways discouraged or impeded in our discipleship by forces external to the Church. Where we differ is in our assessment of what the chief opposing forces are.
Rod is primarily worried about the rise of a “soft totalitarianism” of the left, what James Poulos calls a “pink police state.” Other Christians I know are equally worried, but about the dangers to Christian life of white supremacy, or the international neoliberal order. For me the chief concern (I have many) is what I call “metaphysical capitalism.” But we all agree that the Church of Jesus Christ is under a kind of ongoing assault, sometimes direct and sometimes indirect, sometimes blunt and sometimes subtle, and that living faithfully under such circumstances is a constant challenge. Why wouldn’t we want to learn from people who faced even greater challenges than we do and who managed to sustain their faith through that experience? Isn’t that valuable to all of us?
I felt the same way about The Benedict Option, which was mostly not an argument but rather a job of reporting, reporting on various intentional Christian communities. I read the book with fascination, because I was and am convinced that the primary reason American Christians are so bent and broken is that we have neglected catechesis while living in a social order that catechizes us incessantly. What can I learn from those communities that would help me in my own catechesis, and that of my family, and that of my parish church? I read The Benedict Option with the same focus I brought to my reading of a marvelous book by another friend of mine, Charles Marsh’s The Beloved Community. Charles’s politics are miles away from Rod’s, but their books share an essential concern: How can the church of Jesus Christ, how can Christ’s followers, be formed in such a way that they can flourish in unpropitious conditions?
That’s exactly the right question, I think, and both The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies introduce me to people who help me — even when I don’t agree with their strategies! — to think better about what its answers might be. (And The Beloved Community as well. Christians under Marxism and the Black church under Jim Crow offer remarkably similar kinds of help to us, a point that deserves a great deal more reflection than it is likely ever to get in our stupidly polarized time.)
Often when I make this argument people acknowledge the force of it but tell me that Rod is the “wrong messenger.” I understand what they mean. Rod is excitable, and temperamentally a catastrophist, as opposed to a declinist. (That’s Ross Douthat’s distinction.) Like the prophet of Richard Wilbur’s poem, he’s gotten himself “Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,” and I often think that if he writes the phrase “Wake up, people!” one more time I’m gonna drive to Baton Rouge and slap him upside the head.
Also, when Rod rails against “woke capitalism,” he clearly thinks that “woke” is the problem, without giving real assent to the fact that Christians are susceptible to woke capitalism because they were previously susceptible to other kinds. He perceives threats to the Church from the Right, from racism and crude nationalism and general cruelty to whoever isn’t One Of Us, and writes about them sometimes, but they don’t exercise his imagination the way that threats from the Left do. I can see why people whose politics differ from Rod’s don’t what to hear what he has to say.
But, you know, Jonah was definitely the wrong messenger for Ninevah — he even thought so himself — and yet the Ninevites did well to pay attention to him.
And if you think Rod has a potentially useful message but is the wrong conveyer of it, then get off your ass and become the messenger you want to see in the world. Lord knows we need more Christians, not fewer, paying attention to the challenges of deep Christian formation. Wake up, people!
In these posts on “critical theory,” I’m doing what I pretty much always do: I am separating and sorting questions that tend to be conflated. That’s my thing, right? It’s why I wrote a book called How to Think, and why I say, in a blog post, that “it seems to me that arguments about Christianity and politics have an almost unique ability to reduce the intelligence of the people involved by at least a third. We desperately need clarity about what, exactly, we’re arguing about.”
So, in that spirit, onward! — with apologies for self-quotation. A number of these issues I have dealt with before, sometimes at greater length. Here I’m trying to sum up what I think are the key theological themes we need to keep in mind when evaluating what people are determined to call “critical theory.” It’s a bit of a stepping back from the details.
ONE: As noted in an earlier post, some of the questions raised by “critical theory” are empirical ones. Has the history of what became the United States been deeply, indeed essentially, implicated in the slave trade since 1619? Is our society still dominated by white supremacy? Is our social and political order structurally racist? To answer these questions is to evaluate historical and sociological evidence. You could be a deeply orthodox Christian and answer “Yes” to all those questions. You could also be a deeply orthodox Christian and answer “No” to them all. It would depend on the evidence you gather and how you evaluate it.
TWO: But — and here’s where things get complicated — the people who hold the political views mentioned above tend to hold other views that are philosophically unrelated to the historical claims. Indeed many people who are not “woke” at all in their thinking about race also hold these views, which cluster around what I have called “metaphysical capitalism”: I am a commodity owned solely by myself; I may do with this property whatever I want and call it whatever I want; any suggestion that my rights over myself are limited in any way I regard as an intolerable tyranny. I am what I say I am. I am my own. As a Christian I do not and cannot believe this. My only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.
But how can I communicate this to people who aren’t Christians? Can I give them any reason to believe that they are not their own without invoking Jesus? Is there some kind of political principle accessible to non-believers that would encourage them to overcome the I-am-my-own principle? I hope so, because I think that self-ownership is destructive to the self and damaging to that self’s community. But in a plural and indeed pluralist society it’s difficult to know how to make such arguments effectively. I have tried to explore some of these issues in this essay, which, though it is largely about intra-Christian disputes, has relevance for the larger social body. I hope.
THREE: More generally, we need a great disentangling. You can see from the above how philosophically unrelated claims get entangled with one another and can seem to belong to the same general movement even when that’s logically impossible. One cannot simultaneously be fundamentally defined by one’s group identity and free to be whatever one wants to be. The attempt to hold both views at once without acknowledging their incompatibility is what leads to situations like the Hypatia transracialism controversy, in which a single academic article shorted out the entire system. Similarly, the doctrine of “intersectionality” tends, as I have written in this blog post, to focus on intersections that intensify but to ignore intersections that cancel each other out. The problem with the Ongoing Oppression Thesis is not that it’s wrong about ongoing oppression, but that the people who deploy it tend to think they need in any given situation to have a clear victim and a clear perpetrator. That’s morally simplistic, and also cannot account for the distributed character of power, as I explain in this interview: “I’ve got a chapter in my book [The Year of Our Lord 1943] called ‘Demons,’ about demonic activity. Or if you don’t want to say ‘demonic’ activity, you can call it the activity of what St. Paul calls the ‘principalities and powers.’ It’s interesting, Foucault is a kindred spirit — the ‘principalities and powers’ is a kind of Foucauldian argument, right? In the sense that it is power — and what Weil would call force — disseminated through social and political structures.” That whole interview is relevant to a lot of the questions I’ve been exploring in these posts. It’s an attempt to think in as thoroughly biblical a way as I can manage about these questions.
FOUR: The final set of questions relates to what I will call, for lack of any catchy and concise term, the practical implications of theological anthropology. My point here is closely related to the previous one. Whatever Christians think about the issues I have raised above, we are obliged to conduct ourselves in ways that avoid what I call “rhetorical Leninism.” We have to extend mercy to those whom we believe to be wrong, even tragically wrong, because this is how God treats us. He loves the unlovely, and is gracious to the wicked — like me. We are to be imitators of Him. For us there can be no “Lord, I thank you that I am not like that racist over there,” or “Lord, I thank you that I am not like that pathetic cuck over there” – there can only be “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” Because when we choose to measure others according to a certain standard, we are asking that that same measure be used to measure us.
Okay, that’s it, I’m done. No more from me about this — though I am, as I mentioned earlier, engaged with some colleagues on a project that will address many of the issues at stake here. But that has to remain a Big Secret for now.
Here’s the question I mentioned in my last post: What should be the Christian’s response to critical theory? Note that this is not a question that is equally relevant to everyone concerned with the debates over “critical theory.” (I still hate that term.) Neil Shenvi is a Christian, but James Lindsay is an atheist, last I heard anyway. What follows is specifically for Christians and will likely be of no interest to anyone else.
But note: this will not be good. Because of other commitments I don’t have time to do this thoroughly, and anyway I have serious doubts that anyone will pay attention to anything I say — the whole discourse is now running like a perpetual-motion machine and I can’t do anything even to slow it down, much less stop it. But I have promised some people that I would say something, and this is something.
Let’s begin by trying to replace the question by a more specific and more accurate one. How should Christians respond to a workplace environment in which employees are pressured to acknowledge the historic and ongoing systematic oppression of racial and sexual minorities by white straight people, and to welcome and support all efforts to remedy that oppression? I think that’s the really substantive question for the church to deal with. The questions of intellectual genealogy that I pursued in my previous post are not especially relevant here, though they might be relevant in another context.
Before going any further, it’s important to recognize that this whole question feels a lot different to a person of color than it does to a white person. I do not mean that all persons of color will agree with the Ongoing Oppression Thesis, or that all white persons will disagree with it; neither is true. But the Thesis will have different valences for different people, and much of what I say below will be more directly relevant to the fears of white people than to the experiences of others. This makes me slightly uncomfortable, but it’s white people, by and large, who are asking the question. I do believe that the general principles I articulate are valid for all Christians, as will become evident. What I’m exploring here today provides but a particular instance of the kind of challenge that most Christians regularly face, in infinitely varied forms. In one sense it represents nothing new under the sun, and there is a great tradition of faithful Christian response throughout our history for you to draw upon for instruction and courage. You’ll see what I mean.
Now, let’s get to the substance. Any valid response to the question I’m addressing will necessarily have three components: the empirical, the prudential, and the principial.
Empirical: If you claim that our society is characterized by “historic and ongoing systematic oppression of racial and sexual minorities by white straight people,” you’re making an empirical claim, a claim that is to be assessed by gathering and sifting evidence. It’s not clear to me that Christians will, or should, do this any differently than anyone else. Some Christians will believe the claim to be warranted, and some will not; but I don’t see that what they believe about these matters has any necessary relation to their Christian faith. After all, a Christian might believe — many Christians do believe! — at one and the same time that (a) homosexual acts are forbidden to Christians and (b) straight Christians have singled out gays and lesbians for demonization while turning a blind eye to their own sexual sins. The empirical questions are distinct from the theological ones.
Prudential: It’s when we get to remedies that things get complicated. If your employer is suggesting remedies that you don’t think are ideal — let’s suppose that you’re not opposed to “diversity” hires but think that not enough attention is being paid to professional qualifications; or, again let’s suppose, you think an enormous amount of valuable company time is being devoted to woke “training exercises” — what, as a Christian, do you do? You do what every intelligent person does: You try to exercise prudence. You reflect on the difference between major and minor problems; you think about who in your workplace might serve as your advocate or ally; you look for ways to gently nudge the company in what you believe to be a healthier direction. Meditate on Joseph and Daniel: you think they didn’t have to deal with some messed-up stuff? They put up with certain practices and policies that troubled or even offended them because they had a strategy for faithfulness. If you don’t have one of those, you should think about getting one.
Principial: But of course, as the example of Daniel illustrates, sometimes you’re invited — or rather ordered — to cross a line that you can’t in conscience cross. Most of you will know what that line is when you’re presented with it; it’s very difficult to say in the abstract what it might be. Indeed for me it’s impossible, not knowing your situation. But that will be at the very least a small martyrdom for you, and the rule about martyrdom is very simple: Lord, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not my will but yours be done. That said, do, please, take prayerful thought to distinguish faithfulness to the True God from obeisance to any of many false gods who forever seek to occupy the highest place. It was the tragedy of Stonewall Jackson’s life that he conflated the cause of the Confederacy with the cause of Christ.
One more post is coming on all this, connecting these general reflections to some of the more technical theological issues. It also will be bad.
