I’m in LARB on Hauerwas, Barth, and Christendom

This morning Los Angeles Review of Books published an essay review of mine on Stanley Hauerwas’s latest book, which came out earlier this year, titled Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth. Here is the opening paragraph:

THIS YEAR STANLEY Hauerwas turns 82 years old. To mark the occasion, he has published a book on Karl Barth, who died at the same age in 1968. The timing as well as the pairing is fitting. Barth is the greatest Protestant theologian of the 20th century, and probably the most widely read of any theologian over the last 100 years. As for Hauerwas, since the passing of Reinhold Niebuhr in 1971, he has been the most prolific, influential, and recognizable Christian theological thinker in American public life. Barth somehow graced the cover of Time magazine in 1962, even though he was a Swiss Calvinist whose books on technical theology are so thick they could stop bullets. Hauerwas has never made the cover, but in 2001 Time did call him “America’s best theologian.” That fall, Oprah even invited him onto her show. In short, given Hauerwas’s age and stature, Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth has the inevitable feel of a valediction.

Click here for the rest.

This is now my fifth time writing for LARB; the first came in the fall of 2017. It is never not a pleasure. It’s a challenge writing about Christian theology for a highbrow audience that is neither religious nor academic—but one I’ve learned to relish. Usually my essays there come in between 4,000 and 5,000 words, but this one is shorter, at about 2,000. I hope it does both Hauerwas and Barth honor; I try to use the occasion to raise some important issues. Enjoy.

Enneagram anthropology

For years I teased friends and family members—and especially colleagues: pastors love faddish personality tests—about their affinity for the Enneagram. I rolled my eyes and made astrology jokes. I made the requisite asides about pentagrams and its claim to “ancient provenance,” etc. But since you shouldn’t criticize something you don’t understand, I read the book, specifically Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile’s The Road Back to You, and lo and behold, I didn’t hate it. I wasn’t converted. I’m not a fanatic. I didn’t read any other books and I don’t listen to daily podcasts. But like all tools, this tool’s value lies in its utility. And it’s useful, not least (in my case) for understanding the motivations and desires of my children. So it’s joined some other helpful instruments in the parental toolkit.

(This also means that I now know what people are talking about when they speak in numbers around me; before it was just gibberish.)

Having said that, there’s a tic common to the Enneagram crowd, indeed common to all folks enamored of personality tests, that bugs me, and (in my view) invariably turns such tests’ relative utility on its head. That tic is explaining one’s behavior as a function of one’s number. As in, “I do [X behavior] because I am a [Y personality].” Call this reflex Enneagram anthropology, where the Enneagram stands in for any and all shorthand psychological measures and theories. The reflex is understandable: people avidly seek for causal explanations for their own behavior, and all the better when those causes are somehow naturally fixed, psychologically immutable, or spiritually bestowed from without.

Such a move is an error, however, in more than one way. It supposes that (e.g.) the nine numbers of the Enneagram are something akin to Platonic forms: eternal paradigms or divine ideas instantiated or individuated in concrete human persons. Being thus incarnate as “a [Y personality],” it follows inexorably that I—the Y-I-am, the Y-embodied-in-me, the Y-that-is-me—do X behavior. Almost as though the person were to cap off the explanation with: “Now you know. (And you better get used to it.)”

But even apart from trading on a sort of Platonizing theory of the Enneagram, the explanatory procedure, if the personality test is going to be meaningfully useful at all, has to run the other direction. Instead of saying, “Because I’m Y-personality, I do X-behavior,” one ought to say instead, “Because I do X-range-of-behaviors, I—or my pastor or my spouse or my therapist—believe the loose, incomplete, and unscientific personality-type ‘Y’ maps that range of behaviors in the most illuminating fashion.” Put more succinctly: “Because X, therefore Y-ish.” Whereupon that Y-identifier functions (usefully) to help oneself or one’s loved ones understand better, albeit in a small and quite limited respect, one’s own unique mix of temperament, motivations, desires, beliefs, and behaviors. Whereas it would function uselessly and counterproductively, because falsely, to explain what one does in terms of who one is, where “who one is” is captured by a predetermined generic description of a broadly universal “type.” For this latter function is not far from explaining away one’s behavior, at which point it is no longer an explanation but merely an excuse—and a bad one at that.

“You are your actions”: close, but not quite

Over on Freddie deBoer's blog, he has a sharp piece up criticizing the vacuous identities induced by mass entertainment in late modern capitalism. Instead of having a nice time watching a Marvel movie, for instance, one's sense of self gets wrapped up in "being a Marvel fan." But Marvel doesn't care about you. Nor can it offer that depth of identity-constitutive meaning. It's just a movie that's a pinch of fun in a dark world, for which you fork over some money. Forgetting that, and allowing Disney to define who you are, is both childish and a trap. It doesn't end well, and it's a recipe for arrested development.

Here are the closing two paragraphs (my emphasis):

I wish I had a pat answer for what to do instead. Grasping for meaning – usually while drenching yourself in irony so that no one knows that that’s what you doing, these days – is universal. I will risk offending another very touchy subset of the internet by saying that I think many people turn to social justice politics and their prescriptivist politics, the notion that your demographic identifiers define you, out of motives very similar to the people I’ve been describing. There are readymade vehicles for acquiring meaning, from Catholicism to New Age philosophy to anarchism, that may very well create the solid ground people are looking for, I don’t know. I suspect that the best answer for more people would be to return to an idea that is very out of fashion: that you are what you do. You are your actions, not what you consume, what you say, or what you like.

It’s cool to name the bands you like to friends. It’s cool to be proud of your record collection. I’m sure it’s fun to create lists for Letterboxd. But those things don’t really say anything about you. Not really. Millions of people like all the things you like, after all. And trying to build a personality out of the accumulation of these things makes authentic appreciation impossible. I think it’s time to look elsewhere, as much as I admit that it would be nice if it worked.

The critique is on point, but the solution is not quite there. Part of the reason why presupposes what deBoer in turn presupposes is off the table (though he acknowledges it as a possibility for others): Christian anthropology. But the following points, though they trade on theological judgments about the nature of the human person, can be defended from other perspectives as well.

So why is defining one's identity by one's deeds an inadequate prescription?

First, because most people's actions are indistinguishable from others' actions: you wake up, you eat, you punch a clock, you watch a show, you pay the bills, you mow the lawn, you grab drinks with a friend, you text and email and post and scroll, maybe you put the kids to bed, you go back to sleep, you repeat it all over again. Such things "don't really say anything about you" either, since "millions of people [do] all the things you [do], after all."

Second, because meaning comes from without, not from within: even if your actions were robust enough to constitute a worthwhile identity, you'd still be seeking, desiring, yearning for that which is other than you, that which transcends you—whether in a lover, a friend, a child, a marriage, a job, a group, a church, a nation, a deity. Not only is it humanly basic for the source of our identity and meaning to come from beyond us (David Kelsey defines human life as "eccentric existence": the ground of our being stands outside ourselves); not only is it literally true that we depend on what is outside us for sustenance, care, and flourishing (gestation, birth, food, relationships, art); even more, turning in to oneself for one's own meaning is a dead end: simply put, none of us is up to the task. True navel gazing is monastic: it turns the self inside out—to find God within.

Third, because (positively speaking) your actions will never be enough: not impressive enough, not heroic enough, not virtuous enough, not even interesting enough. If I am what I do, I am a poor, indeed a boring and forgettable, specimen of the human species. Even if it were true that all that I am is found in my actions, that would be a cause for despair, not hope or meaning.

Fourth, because (negatively speaking) you are an inveterate sinner: you will fail, you will falter and stumble, you will invariably harm and hurt others, not always without intending to do so, but by commission and omission, you will err, you will induce pain, you will fall short—for the rest of your life, world without end. Christians don't think this is the end of the story (God not only forgives you but provides means of reparation for others, healing in oneself, and moral improvement over time), but there is a reason that Chesterton called original sin the one empirical doctrine. Look around at the world. Look at your own life. Does either inspire confidence? Does it suggest a source of reliable meaning and stable identity going forward? I didn't think so.

None of this means it's either deBoer's way or the church's. Even if my description were right, perhaps that merely means that life is meaningless and there is nowhere to look, even in one's own actions or character, for personal significance and rich identity. (Though in that case, who can blame the geeks for their projections?) Or perhaps I'm right at the formal level, but there are sources of transcendence beyond the church that folks like deBoer are remiss in overlooking. In any case, though, the upshot is clear. In terms of deep personal meaning and life-giving identity, the last place to look for who I am is in what I do. Look instead at what I'm looking for—looking at, looking to—and that'll tell you who I am. Or at least who I hope to be, who I'm trying to become.