New essay: “Market Apocalypse” in Mere Orthodoxy

My latest is up at Mere Orthodoxy this morning. Titled “Market Apocalypse,” it’s a review essay of Rodney Clapp’s new book, Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age. Here’s a taste:

Clapp’s book is titled Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age. But you might imagine it renamed, à la Patrick Deneen’s bestseller, Why Neoliberalism Failed. Like Deneen, Clapp wants to draw critical attention to what is hiding in plain sight. “What goes unnamed” in such circumstances “is the neoliberal framework that entraps us all.” Entrapment is the proper image for Clapp’s view: we are seduced and deceived by neoliberalism’s lure, but once we fall for the trick, we’re stuck. And the consequences are comprehensive: “Neoliberalism has transformed us — heart, body, and soul.”

Clapp is uninterested, however, in merely naming neoliberalism: many writers and scholars have already done that. He wants to name it as a Christian. That is, he wants to reveal neoliberalism for what it is in theological perspective, and to propose a specifically theological alternative. He thinks this task crucial because neoliberalism can be neither fully understood nor adequately opposed without reference to God, specifically the gospel of the incarnate God, Jesus Christ, and his people, the church.

Go read the rest here.

On reading political writing from the 1990s

Recently I've been reading through Left Hooks, Right Crosses: A Decade of Political Writing, edited by Christopher Caldwell and the late Christopher Hitchens. It's a collection of 40 essays written during the 1990s, nearly all under the Clinton administration.

It's been a revelation. I was 7 years old when Clinton was elected the first time. I came of age politically and intellectually during the second Bush's two terms, and I didn't start consistently reading serious—or at least good—political writing from across the ideological spectrum until Obama's second term.

That means I'm basically a novice in these matters. I have a fairly good sense of the historical scope and shape of these arguments; I've read political philosophy, old and new; I'm conversant with what's going on at present. But I've little idea what it was like in the moment, in weekly and monthly political journalism, in each of the previous decades, even those I lived through.

So as a window into the debates, fights, and major moments and figures in the 1990s, this volume is indispensable. But more than that, it's been revelatory as a window on our own moment and the arguments and people involved. Because in one sense everything has changed, and in another, almost nothing.

Consider who's featured in the book: Thomas Frank and David Brooks, Adolph Reed Jr. and Andrew Sullivan, Mark Lilla and Tucker Carlson, Jonathan Rauch and David Rieff. These are only a few of the names of writers and thinkers "still in the mix." (Not to mention Caldwell, who is a major voice on the right today, and Hitchens, whose influence lingers still.)

And consider the topics: free speech and political correctness; gay rights and liberative intersectionality; postmodern fraud in the academy; military adventurism abroad; classical liberalism, contested and reclaimed; authoritarian populism; unchecked executive power, lies, and sexual abuse; so-called civility in public discourse; race and IQ; reactionary conservatism's left-friendly critique of globalization and American empire; the need for conservatism to evolve beyond Reaganism; the staying power of the socialist vision in liberal capitalist America; left-right shared contempt for Clintonist centrism; the ongoing and future demands of mass immigration to Europe and the U.S. from the global south; and more.

It isn't that we're simply replaying the culture wars and political battles of the 1990s, though in some respects we are—where the "we" in question is even, at times, the very same soldiers who fought on the front lines more than two decades ago. It's that the seeds of a generation ago have finally borne fruit, and in retrospect, you can see the organic growth from one era to another. And reversing the line of sight, some of that era's political thinkers actually did see 2019 coming: which suggests they might be worth listening to today, too.

One other effect worth mentioning: reading the consistently apocalyptic tone of political journalism under Clinton, especially as the turn of the millennium approached, has actually served to de-eschatologize the moment we are currently living through. Not to say it isn't bad, or in some respects genuinely new. But it isn't the End. We're not living in the Last Days. There's no Antichrist on the scene.

Sobriety clarifies. Sober analysis can describe in detail the extent to which things are bad, and why, and offer suggestions for what might make things better—all without pushing the rhetorical doomsday clock to midnight, or projecting onto the situation or the reader the exhaustion and fear besetting the writer's psyche. (Here I imagine Clinton's impeachment hearings plus Twitter. God save us all.)

For those reasons and more, I heartily recommend Left Hooks, Right Crosses. And if similar volumes for other American decades exist, drop me a line; I would love to get my hands on them.

On Paul, apocalyptic theology, and the rest of the New Testament

I'm nearing the end of a full academic year teaching the New Testament to freshmen. Many of my students are new to the Bible, or at least to reading the Bible. I taught the Gospels in the fall, focusing primarily on Mark, and this spring I've taught the rest of the New Testament, without skipping any books.

Usually, the way the spring course works is revealed by its traditional title: Acts to Revelation. Both sequentially and substantively, the class is defined by the history Luke tells of the church's mission after the ascension of Jesus, which crystalizes around Paul's work among the gentiles; this, naturally, is followed by an extensive reading of Paul's letters, beginning with Romans. Then the catholic epistles and Revelation invariably find themselves scrunched together at the end.

On a lark, I decided to try to de-center Paul from the course structure, and to see what would happen. Here's how I've taught the course:

Acts (2 weeks)
James, 1–2 Peter, Jude, 1–3 John (2 weeks)
Hebrews (2 weeks)
Revelation (2 weeks)
[Spring Break]
1–2 Thessalonians, Philippians (2 weeks)
1–2 Corinthians (1 week)
Galatians & Romans (2 weeks)
Colossians, Ephesians, Philemon, Pastorals (2 weeks)

As you can see, my students don't even read a letter from Paul until the second half of the course; and they don't read Galatians or Romans until Week 12—in the final quarter of the semester.

I was prepared for this plan to backfire in a serious way, not least with so many students (all of whom are majoring in something other than the Bible) unfamiliar with the basic stories, persons, terms, and concepts of the New Testament. As it happens, the result has been better than I could have imagined. What my students have been exposed to—at least from my vantage point as the teacher—is a picture of the profound cultural, geographical, and theological diversity of the apostolic church in its first three generations of life. They have been asked to think about Peter's leadership in the early church; about the teaching of James Adelphotheos, in Acts and in the epistle that bears his name; about the gospel according to Hebrews; about the vision of Jesus and the church found in the Apocalypse; and so on. We spent a full six weeks basically not thinking about gentiles, concerned instead with specifically Jewish Christianity, its faith, its relationship to Israel's scriptures, its understanding of the Messiah, etc.

Put differently: My students didn't hear the phrase "justification by faith" until after they had read 19 other books in the New Testament: all four Gospels, everything Paul didn't write, and a few letters that he did. They weren't introduced to the Jesus of the Gospels plus Pauline Christianity. They were introduced, over the course of a year, to 27 different texts bearing witness to a dizzying display of distinct (though—a topic for another blog post—impressively complementary and unified) modes of approaching, understanding, and presenting the story and meaning of the good news about Jesus. It's true that 13 of those 27 texts bear Paul's name—though they are far from the majority of the New Testament in terms of overall length—and it's true that some of those 13 texts have been very important in the history of Christianity in the West. But they aren't the sum total of the gospel, either historically or theologically. And there is a way of teaching the New Testament that permits, even encourages, a certain selection of Pauline literature to dominate: to serve as a filter on everything else, as the master hermeneutic for the figure of Jesus, the early church, and the definition of the euangelion. My experiment has proven to me, at least, that that is neither necessary nor beneficial.

Which brings me to the topic of apocalyptic theology.

I read a fair bit of apocalyptic theology during my Master's work, and some of it made quite an impression on me. And I just got Phil Ziegler's book in the mail yesterday, which I am very much looking forward to reading. I have the highest respect not just for Ziegler but for all his compatriots in the apocalyptic vanguard.

As I read the introduction, however, it raised the following question. What do the apocalyptic folks do with those parts of the New Testament—in my view, a clear majority—that are not apocalyptic? Or at least, are not apocalyptic in the way that Romans and Galatians are? More to the point, is there a worked-out bibliological claim that positively asserts and defends the thesis that (a) the non-apocalyptic portions of the New Testament ought, normatively, to be read through apocalyptic Paulinism, and (b) those non-apocalyptic portions are, in some profound way, inadequate to the gospel?

I'm aware that there are vaguely supersessionistic, semi-Marcionite, and/or anti-Catholic modes of biblical scholarship and hyper-Protestantism that more or less explicitly cut out "the later catholic epistles" along with Hebrews, the Gospel of Matthew, Luke-Acts, and huge swaths of the Old Testament. I'm going to assume that the people I have in mind steer clear of those (alternately dangerous and silly) theological dead-ends.

But granting that assumption, does there exist a sustained, theologically robust answer to this set of questions? One that makes sense of, or constitutes, a doctrine of Scripture that isn't a pick-and-choose canon-within-the-canon, much less an arbitrary Paul's-the-only-one-who-really-truly-got-it-right?

If you know of resources, essays, books, etc., or if you yourself have an answer, holler. I'm all ears.