Jenson on catechesis for our time

I’ve done my best to read everything Robert Jenson ever wrote, but he was so prolific that I regularly stumble onto something I’ve never seen before (or, at least, have no memory of reading). The latest is an essay on catechesis.

It comes from a 1999 volume that Jenson and Carl Braaten co-edited, titled Marks of the Body of Christ. It consists of essays by a wide range of ecumenical scholars on Luther’s so-called seven marks of the church: the word of God, the sacraments, the office of the keys, the pastoral office, the holy cross, and the liturgy. The volume interprets the cross as discipleship and the liturgy as catechesis, since Luther uses the latter term to pick out the Creed, the Decalogue, and the Lord’s Prayer as central to the church’s public worship of God.

Jenson’s essay is called “Catechesis for Our Time.” It’s a barnburner. If I could, I would republish the entirety below. Since I can’t, I’ll limit myself to quoting some of the juiciest excerpts.

Jenson, for readers unfamiliar with him, was born in 1930 and died in 2017. He was a polymath, a Midwesterner, a Lutheran, and German-trained. He was deeply involved in international ecumenical dialogues throughout his career and taught at a variety of institutions. He remained an ordained Lutheran all his life, but was deeply catholic in piety, liturgy, doctrine, and ecclesial sensibility. He was an astute observer of late modern culture in all its permutations and depredations.

Here’s how the essay begins:

I began teaching in 1955, in a liberal arts college of the church. My students were mostly fresh from active participation in their home town Protestant congregations. In those days, I and others like me re­garded it as our duty, precisely for the sake of students’ faith, to loosen them up a bit. They had been drilled in standard doctrine — Jesus is the Son of God, God is triune but what that means is a mystery, heaven is the reward of a good life — to the point of insensibility to the gospel itself.

In 1966 I left undergraduate teaching. Then just 23 years later, I re­turned to teach at a similar churchly liberal arts college. My students were again mostly fresh from active participation in Protestant congre­gations — though now with more Catholics mixed in. During those years, the situation exactly reversed itself.

It is now my duty to inform these young Christians that, e.g., there once was a man named Abraham who had an interesting life, that then there was Moses and that he came before Jesus, that Jesus was a Jew who is thought by some to be risen from the dead, that there are command­ments claiming to be from God, and that they frown on fornication and such, and other like matters.

Well hello there, shock of recognition. It’s always good to be reminded that Protestant liberalism comes for everyone; evangelicals are not immune, they just lag the mainline by a couple generations.

Jenson comments on the development of the catechumenate and the logic that lay behind it. He writes:

[Following the initial apostolic generations] the church needed and was granted institutions that could sustain her faithfulness within continuing history. So the canon of Scripture emerged, and the episcopate in local succession, and creeds and rules of faith. And so also an instructional institution arose, situated between conversion and baptism.

For it was the experience of the church, after a bit of time had passed in which to have experience, that baptism and subsequent life in the litur­gical and moral life of the church, if granted immediately upon hearing and affirming the gospel, were too great a shock for spiritual health. Life in the church was just too different from life out of the church, for people to tolerate the transfer without some preparation.

Converts were used to religious cults that had little moral content, that centered often on bloody sacrifice, and that were oriented — as we might now put it — to the “religious needs” of the worshiper. They were entering a cult oriented not to their religious needs but to the mandates of a particular and highly opinionated God. They were entering a cult cen­tered around an unbloody and therefore nearly incomprehensible sacri­fice. And most disorienting of all, they were entering a cult that made ex­plicit moral demands. They needed to be coached and rehearsed in all that, if their conversion was to be sustainable.

Catechesis therefore involves a comprehensive instruction in three areas of life: worship, ethics, and doctrine. Here’s how Jenson puts it:

Thus they needed to study, for a first thing, liturgics, that is, how to do these Christian things, so different from what could appeal to their exist­ing habits and tastes. And they needed to be instructed in how to under­stand what they were doing.

And then there were those moral demands. Christian heads of household were not supposed to treat their wives as subjects, and both husband and wife were supposed to be sexually faithful — for converts from late-antique society such puritanism was a shocking violation of nature. More amazingly yet, Christian parents did not get rid of inconvenient children, not even of unborn ones. The list went on and on of things that converts’ previous society regarded as rights, that the church regarded as sins. If converts were to stand up under all these infringements on their personal pursuits of happiness, they needed some time under the care of moral instructors and indeed of watchful moral disciplinarians.

And then there were those creeds and doctrines. New converts were used to religions with little specificity, and so with little intellectual con­tent. You were expected to worship Osiris in Egypt and the Great Mother in Asia Minor and Dionysus in Greece, and all of them and a hundred oth­ers simultaneously in Rome, and if the theologies of these deities could not all be simultaneously true, no matter, since you were not anyway expected to take their myths seriously as knowledge. For a relatively trivial but historically pivotal case: Did you have to think that the notorious lunatic Caligula was in fact divine? Not really, just so long as you burnt the pinch of incense.

But with the Lord, the Father of Jesus, things were different. He in­sisted that you worship him exclusively or not at all. And that imposed a cognitive task: if you were to worship the Lord exclusively, you had to know who he is, you had to make identifying statements about him and intend these as statements of fact. You had to learn that in the same history occu­pied by Caesar or Alexander, the Lord had led Israel from Egypt and what that meant for the world. You had to learn that in the same history occu­pied by Tiberius one of his deputies had crucified an Israelite named Jesus and what that in sheer bloody fact meant for the world. You had to learn that this Jesus was raised from the dead, and try to figure out where he might now be located. It was a terrible shock for the religious inclusivists and expressivists recruited from declining antiquity. There was a whole li­brary of texts to be studied and conceptual distinctions to be made, if new converts were in the long run to resist their culturally ingrained inclusivism and relativism.

Catechesis was born as the instruction needed to bring people from their normal religious communities to an abnormal one. That is, it was born as liturgical rehearsal and interpretation, moral correction, and in­struction in a specific theology. Apart from need for these things, it is not apparent that the church would have had to instruct at all.

One more excerpt, this time about what it means for the church to catechize the baptized for liturgical participation in a post-Christendom cultural context, in light of the temptation to water down or eliminate what makes her worship unique, which is to say, Christian:

Instead of perverting her essential rites, the church must catechize. She must rehearse her would-be members in the liturgies, fake them through them step by step, showing how the bits hang together, and teach­ing them how to say or sing or dance them. And she must show them wherein these rites are blessings and not legal impositions.

Nor does it stop with the minimal mandates of Scripture. The church, like every living community, has her own interior culture, built up during the centuries of her history. That is, the acts of proclamation and baptism and eucharist are in fact embedded in a continuous tradition of ritual and diction and music and iconography and interpretation, which constitutes a churchly culture in fact thicker and more specific than any national or ethnic culture.

Now of course this tradition might have been different than it is. If the church’s first missionary successes had taken her more south than west, her music and architecture and diction and so on would surely have devel­oped differently. And in the next century, when the center of the church’s life will probably indeed be south of its original concentration, the church’s culture will continue to develop, and in ways that cannot now be predicted. But within Christianity, what might have been is beside the point; contingency is for Christianity the very principle of meaning; it is what in fact has happened — that might not have happened — that is God’s history with us, and so the very reality of God and of us.

We are not, therefore, permitted simply to shuck off chant and cho­rale, or the crucifix, or architecture that encloses us in biblical story, or ministerial clothing that recalls that of ancient Rome and Constantino­ple, or so on and on. Would-be participants will indeed find some of this off-putting; people will indeed drift into our services, not grasp the pro­ceedings, and drift out again. We will be tempted to respond by dressing in t-shirts and hiring an almost-rock group — not, of course, a real one — and getting rid of the grim crucifixes. Then we will indeed need less catechesis to adapt would-be participants to the church, because we will be much less church. If instead we are aware of the mission, and of the mission’s situation in our particular time, we will not try to adapt the church’s culture to seekers, but seekers to the church’s culture.

So, for an only apparently trivial example, it is almost universally thought that children must be taught childish songs, with which occasion­ally to interrupt the service and serenade their parents. They are not, it is supposed, up to the church’s hymns and chants. The exact opposite is the truth, and in any case the necessity. In my dim youth rash congregational officials once hired me to supervise the music program of a summer church school. I taught the children the ditties supplied me, but also some plain chant. When in the last days, I asked the children what they wanted to sing, it was always the plain chant.

Catechesis for our time, as the culture of the world and the culture of the church go separate ways, will be music training and art appreciation and language instruction, for the church’s music and art and in the lan­guage of Canaan. If we do not do such things, and with passionate inten­tion, the church will be ever more bereft of her own interior culture and just so become ever more the mere chaplaincy of the world’s culture. The recommendations of the “church growth” movement will indeed produce growth, but not of the church.

I’m in Mere O on church and culture

I’ve got an essay in the latest issue of the print edition of Mere Orthodoxy, and Jake has just posted it online this morning. It’s titled “Once More, Church and Culture.” Here’s the opening paragraph:

Christendom is the name we give to Christian civilization, when society, culture, law, art, family, politics, and worship are saturated by the church’s influence and informed by its authority. Christendom traces its beginnings to the fourth century after Christ; it began to ebb, in fits and starts, sometime during the transition from the late middle ages to the early modern period. It is tempting to plot its demise with the American and French revolutions, though in truth it outlasted both in many places. It came to a more or less definitive end with the world wars (in Europe) and the Cold War (in America). Even those who lament Christendom’s passing and hope for its reestablishment have no doubt that the West is post-Christian in this sense. The West will always carry within it its Christian past — whether as a living wellspring, a lingering shadow, a haunting ghost, or an exorcised demon — but it is indisputable that whatever the West has become, it is not what it once was. Christendom is no more.

Re-reading what I’ve written there (drafted last summer, I think), I’m inclined to say the opening seven paragraphs make for some of my better writing. It’s a potted history of Christendom before and in America, and how it continues to haunt Protestant reflection about “church and culture.” Part two of the essay takes up H. Richard Niebuhr’s typology and James Davison Hunter’s “faithful presence.” Part three takes a stab at an alternative framework—but not one more single-label option that captures all contexts and circumstances. Read on to see more.

And once you’ve read it, go subscribe to the Mere O print magazine. It’s great!

Two further thoughts. First, some version of this essay has been rattling around in the back of my mind since January 2017, when I first taught a week-long intensive course called “Christianity and Culture.” I’ve taught it now every single January since. That’s seven total! Didn’t even miss for Covid. The texts have varied, but I’ve consistently had students read Hauerwas, Jenson, JDH (excerpts), JKAS (You Are What You Love), THW (Liturgy of the Ordinary), TIB (Strange Rites), Douthat (Bad Religion), Dreher (the old pre-book FAQ), Wilkinson/Joustra, Tisby, Cone, and Crouch. It always goes so well. And every Friday of the course, I conclude with, basically, what I’ve written in this essay: a set of typologies; a critique of them; and my own proposal. I’m grateful to Jake for letting me finally put it down in black and white.

Second, this essay has brought home to me how much this topic has dominated my thoughts, and therefore my writing, since I finished my dissertation six years ago. Specifically, the topic of the church in relation to society, which brings in its wake questions about Christendom, America, liberalism, and integralism, not to mention missiology, culture, technology, liturgy, and even anti-Judaism. Everything, in other words! For those who may be interested, here is an incomplete list of publications that bear on these matters and thus supplement this particular essay:

• Theologians Were Arguing About the Benedict Options 35 Years Ago” Mere Orthodoxy | 13 March 2017

• Public Theology in Retreat Los Angeles Review of Books | 20 September 2017

• Holy Ambivalence Los Angeles Review of Books | 1 March 2018

• The Church and the Common Good Comment | 17 January 2019

• The Specter of Marcion Commonweal | 13 February 2019

• A Better Country Plough | 4 August 2019

• Sacraments, Technology, and Streaming Worship in a Pandemic Mere Orthodoxy | 2 April 2020

• The Circumcision of Abraham’s God First Things | 1 January 2021

• When Losing Is Likely The Point | 18 June 2021

• Market Apocalypse Mere Orthodoxy | 25 August 2021

• Statistics as Storytelling The New Atlantis | 1 October 2021

• Still Supersessionist? Commonweal | 29 October 2021

• Jewish Jesus, Black Christ The Christian Century | 25 January 2022

• Unlearning Machines Comment | 24 March 2022

• Can We Be Human in Meatspace? The New Atlantis | 2 May 2022

• Another Option for Christian Politics, Front Porch Republic | 4 July 2022

• The Ruins of Christendom, Los Angeles Review of Books | 10 July 2022

• The Church in the Immanent Frame First Things | 14 July 2022

• The Bible in America (forthcoming in The Christian Century)

Christians and politics

My friend and colleague Richard Beck did me the honor of writing a seven-part series in response to a post I’d written last May, itself a reply to a previous post of his a few days prior. I told him I’d find the time to write about the new series, but I haven’t found it until now.

There’s much to say. As it turns out, Richard and I are not far apart here, but our instincts lead us in slightly divergent directions. Let me see if I can summarize his own views before laying out my own.

Richard begins by taking my point: In a liberal democracy, it can be an all-or-nothing proposition for Christians; namely, electing (or not) to be politically active and engaged. He allows that perhaps his hope for a kind of holy ambivalence, to use Jamie Smith’s phrase, is unrealistic. Democracy saps the energies of the electorate, Christian or otherwise. Be that as it may, Richard wants a certain baseline for Christian thought and practice with respect to political witness, in this or in any context. In ten theses:

1. The powers that be are always already at war with the kingdom of God.

2. The church, therefore, ought always to be on the side of God’s kingdom over against the kingdoms of this world.

3. It follows that the first and enduring political vocation of the church is prophetic criticism. Whatever else the church does, it begins and ends with the prophetic task.

4. Because the powers are fallen, our view of both the state and the arc of history should be deeply Augustinian: not tragic, but pessimistic. We are not going to bring heaven to earth, or establish God’s kingdom here and now, or proclaim peace in our time. Utopian dreams, including the Christian variety, are false and dangerous.

5. Because the powers are created, though, Christian pessimism need not write off the state altogether. This isn’t pure Anabaptism. Not only does the state have a divinely ordained role to maintain a modicum of peace and relative justice; Christians may—within limits, with modesty and caution—participate in and contribute to governance and other forms of political action in the wider society.

6. Such modest involvement does not lead to Christendom, however. Christendom is a dead end, precisely because it is not pessimistic enough about either the powers or the perduring sinfulness of Christian communities, projects, and institutions.

7. Together, these commitments repudiate any and all nostalgia for or attempts to “reclaim” a lost Christian past, pristine in innocence or even supposedly preferable to the present. Whatever one thinks of the middle ages, they aren’t coming back and Christians in America should not try to resuscitate an erstwhile medieval order. Stop working toward your imagined American Christian Commonwealth. Not only is it not happening (being a fool’s errand), it’s not worth the effort: it’ll blow up in your face like all the other attempts.

8. In a word, Christian politics should begin wherever we are, not in some other time or place where we most decidedly are not. Given the Augustinianism (or Pascalianism) of the foregoing, then, there is no One Right Way for Christians to approach politics. It’s piecemeal personal discernment all the way down, based on context, temperament, local conditions, prayer, opportunity, and other similar factors. Some Christians in the U.S. will “get involved”; others won’t. Realists will vote, march, and advocate, thereby getting their hands dirty; radicals will find themselves unable to do so. Neither is right or wrong. It’s a matter of prudence. We should stop duking it out to see who’s the victor between the Augustine of Niebuhr and the Yoder of Hauerwas.

9. The political challenge for American Christians today is thus an odd one: emotional disengagement via recalibration. American Christians have to find a way to stop caring so much, to stop finding their identity in politics, to stop investing the totality of themselves in winning or losing the latest (existential) political fight. Even if this borders on the impossible, it’s what’s called for in our situation.

10. To illustrate the point, suppose Christians in America stepped away from politics entirely for the next decade. From 2023 to 2033, no one in this country heard from a single Christian about political matters. A ten-year silence from the church. Christians kept living their lives, going about their business, seeking to be faithful, following the Lord—but without commentary of any kind (personal, public, digital, media, pulpit) on political affairs. Richard asks: “Do you think this ten year season would improve the church? Would this season improve the church internally, helping us conform more fully to the image of Jesus and more deeply into the kingdom of God, and externally, in how the world might perceive us?” He believes the answer is yes. The church needs a political detox, and it would be good for all involved.

I hope I’ve done Richard justice. Let me make one major point before I try to unpack a few more minute ones.

I take my original challenge to be this: Democracy is a genuinely new challenge for Christian political thought, because democratic involvement makes comprehensive demands of citizens. Self-governance is an exacting affair. Even prior to matters of identity, democratic action has the potential to be all-consuming. Because it is the business of life, our common life, it soaks up the whole of one’s attention, energy, and emotion. The most successful democratic movements in American history never could have happened if their adherents had been half-invested. Richard makes this observation a premise of his response, rather than a point of disagreement. The upshot as I see it, then, is twofold.

On one hand, it seems to be the case that democracy is a problem for Christian discipleship. Democracy wants your soul. But no servant can serve two masters. So how can politically engaged Christians also be disciples of Christ alone? I’m far from the first person to ask this question. Roman Catholic political thought has had anxieties on this score for two centuries and more. But it’s worth highlighting outright because it’s something of a taboo for American Christians to see democracy per se as a problem. To say it is a problem is not to say it should be dismantled or replaced. Only that it shouldn’t be assumed to be unproblematic from a Christian perspective.

On the other hand, Richard’s series left me thinking that we find ourselves where we started (or so it feels to me): that is, with the BenOp. Or in Richard’s words, from a post written six years ago, a progressive version of the Benedict Option. But the overall picture is the same. The American imperium is at odds with Christian witness. Don’t make the error of shoring up the imperium, much less mistaking shoring it up for the mission of the church. Instead, withdraw your heart, mind, voice, and labor to what is before you: the local congregation in its surrounding community. Attend to that. Think little, as Wendell Berry puts it. Stop thinking big; stop selling your soul to politics, only to be shown a fool for the umpteenth time.

In my view, this is where Richard lands: at a theologically orthodox, socially progressive version of the Benedict Option. A soft Anabaptism that doesn’t scream Nein! to politics so much as ignore it with a shrug before turning to love one’s neighbor—whose face and name one knows, living as one does in a flesh-and-blood neighborhood, not on Fox News or CNN or Twitter or TikTok.

I think this is wise counsel. For individual believers, I think it’s good advice, and especially for those most in need of a detox, i.e., folks who can tell you in detail what happened yesterday in D.C. but not the names of a neighbor in any direction, or the problems facing the city they actually live in.

So that’s that. Now let me turn to some larger thematic or architectonic matters that Richard’s series raised and about which I think we disagree.

First, while the “ten years of silence” proposition is an instructive thought experiment, I don’t think it works on its own terms. What it reveals, after reflection, is how it is impossible to live as a Christian without doing politics. For example, there are a lot of school-age children in Abilene (where Richard and I live) who are homeless. Christians here rightly see this as a pressing problem that calls for their involvement. But issues like family breakdown, poverty, nutrition, abuse, schooling, and homelessness are all political matters. Christians can’t be part of the solution if they forswear politics. Moreover, the call for silence overlooks the fact that speech is a part of action, indeed is a form of action. “I have a dream” is far more than a set of words. It’s a public political performance. It’s a world-shaping deed, expressed verbally. Words get things done. We know this from the Bible. That’s what prophecy is! Words that do things, words that make things happen. In short, Christians can’t follow Christ without doing or speaking about politics. That means ten years of silence is a nonstarter—even if we all (as I do) understand what Richard has in mind.

Second, I am very wary of framing the question of Christians and/in politics by present conditions and possibilities. Doing so results in ahistorical assumptions and parochial answers. Twenty-first century American liberalism sets the terms of the debate. But why should we let it? The church has two millennia of reflection and practice on these matters. If we allow ourselves to listen to it, not only will we expand the horizons of our imagination (the proverbial Overton window); we will see that the status quo to which we are so accustomed is far from necessary or immutable. It is contingent, like all social and political arrangements. We need not take it for granted.

Third, I am equally wary of issuing judgments in the present that entail wholesale indictment or repudiation of past Christian teaching and practice. It may well be true that American believers need not advocate for Christendom in 2023. That is not the same as saying Christendom is and always was an error. Whatever seems given in the moment appears inevitable and right to those living in it. I don’t want to fall for that temptation. To see all past political forms endorsed by Christians as fundamentally wrong, because they had not yet arrived at what we, now, endorse and inhabit, seems to me undeniably myopic, anachronistic, and uncharitable. To be clear, I doubt Richard would endorse that view, but it is all too common in modern Christian political thought. I want to avoid it at all costs.

Fourth, some political questions are existential. Granted, most political questions are prudential and still others can be disagreed about by reasonable people (Christians included). But some are matters of life and death, or of ultimate, or at least penultimate, significance. Chattel slavery is one example from our history. Civil rights is another. War and capital punishment are perennial. Abortion and euthanasia are relatively newer, in terms of laws and technology. If, for example, prenatal life is human life created and beloved by God, then it would seem to follow that political regimes should protect it and, to the extent that they do not, Christians should work to persuade them to do so. If the vulnerable, the poor, the unhappy, the lonely are finding themselves ushered by a medical bureaucracy to allow themselves to be killed rather than to be cared for, then Christians’ obedience to the command of Jesus would seem to require their active political involvement, precisely for the sake of the least of these. “Lord, when did we see you a victim of MAID and intervene…?”

Fifth, we should not presume to be more Augustinian than Saint Augustine himself. Augustine saw that, all things being equal, a polity that pays homage to Christ as Lord and seeks to do justice in accord with Christ’s teaching is a polity to be desired, to be sought, and to be received with gratitude. Personally, I want to live in a city and a state whose laws and social norms run with and not against the grain of the Word made flesh. Now, is that easier said than done? Yes. Does it open up leaders, of the church as well as the state, to abuse, corruption, hypocrisy, and dissimulation? Yes. Has such an approach failed before? Yes. All granted. I fail to see, though, that these admissions automatically and in all circumstances render the question moot. Christianity has never taught that one form of polity is ordained of God: empires, city-states, nation-states, monarchies, republics, democracies, and others have been led and supported by Christians. All I want to add is that I see no reason to rule out, on principle, the possibility of a genuine Christian commonwealth, whether in the past, the present, or the future, here or elsewhere.

Sixth and finally, there is no way banish God from politics. That’s true for Jews and Muslims as well as Christians, because God is one, and his claim to allegiance is total. That allegiance cuts against the claims of the state but also makes inroads on the state. For example, if the state is grinding the faces of the poor, followers of Christ know this is wrong. More, they know whose side God is on in the struggle. And they therefore know what to say to the state as the word of the Lord. This is exactly when prophetic criticism enters into the equation. My only point is that prophetic criticism is not a distancing mechanism; not a way to keep church and state separate. It’s a way of holding the state’s feet to the fire—that is, the consuming fire of God’s judgment. And if God is both the judge and the desire of the nations, then we are never going to be free of the entanglement of faith and politics, church and state, discipleship and governance, prophecy and law.

That indefinite entanglement suggests to me, in conclusion, that the sort of emotional and psychological disengagement (and recalibration) for which Richard is calling is a dead end. I too want Christians in America to call cease-fire in the infinite culture war and to stop letting tribal identities overwrite their baptismal identity in Christ. I too want Christians to worship God and love their neighbors and to worry less about Washington. In general, arguing over Christendom and Commonwealths and Integralism and Christian Nationalism (Lord help us) can easily become a distraction from the command of Christ to me, here and now, to do his will within the limits and opportunities of my life, not another.

Nevertheless, the command of Christ also, as we’ve seen, necessarily includes the realm of politics, a realm from which Christ is by no means absent. Finding him there, following him there, obeying his will there is not for the faint of heart. It takes much wisdom. It usually ends in one form of failure or another. But it can’t be avoided. And Christians are right to want to succeed there, and to care about the results. For the results bear on the lives of their neighbors—lives of great concern to the Lord.

Once more, negative world

I sometimes think of what I write on this blog as mostly just drafting off two other, far superior blogs: Richard Beck’s and Alan Jacobs’. Both are friends whose work I’ve been reading for more than a decade, and who have been kind enough, more than once, to link to my own work or to respond to it in some way.

Recently Alan wrote a follow-up to his blistering rejection of Aaron Renn’s “Three Worlds” framework for understanding Christians’ social status in the United States. In the follow-up, Alan mentions both Derek Rishmawy’s and my respective attempts to interpret and commend a version of Renn’s framework. Gently but firmly, he rebukes these attempts and underscores why he finds the whole business—the whole conversation—a misdirect: a futile, self-regarding failure to attend to the main thing, namely following Christ irrespective of our surroundings and their purported (in)hospitality to the gospel. We do not, Alan argues, need detailed plans in order to fulfill this charge. Nor do we need an ostensibly (or fantastically) friendlier society in order to succeed. We just need the will, the resolve, the obedience to Christ requisite to set one foot in front of the other, answering the call of the Lord whatever it may be, wherever it may lead, whenever it may come.

I see that Derek has written his own response to Alan (though I haven’t yet read it). I’m going to attempt my own here, with the aim both of understanding what Alan is concerned about and of clarifying my own position.

The simplest way to put my view is in the form of two broad questions:

1. Do different societies, in different times and different places, treat an individual’s or a community’s public identification as Christian in different ways?

2. If yes, does knowledge of those differences make some relevant difference for how Christians should understand, approach, engage, and inhabit their societies?

I take the answer to the first question as read: yes, obviously. I take the answer to the second to be yes as well.

To me, that settles the matter—at least at the formal level.

The third question descends from the heights of history and missiology, respectively, to applied sociology: Is it accurate to say, all things being equal, that being known publicly as a Christian in the U.S. is less likely to enhance one’s social status than at any time since World War II? Or, to put it differently, that public identification as Christian is more likely to downgrade one’s social status that at any point in living memory? Or, to put it more weakly and less comparatively, that in general “being identified as Christian” is not something a non-Christian would, in our society today, be tempted to pursue nominally for the sole reason of trying to enhance his or her social status?

Granted, the U.S. is a big country. I live in a town of 120,000 in west Texas. Having a nominal membership at a local church one doesn’t actually attend or care much about might still grant a certain cache here. (Though, in most circles, I doubt it.) Any comment, then, about “the U.S. today” is going to be an “in general, on balance, all things being equal, thinking about the country as a whole” comment. If you don’t think such comments can be meaningful, fair enough. But if you do, then this sort of comment is permissible like any other.

Region and subculture are one element here. Institutions and professions are another. Some organizations and careers will be neutral as regards religious identity; others, far from it. Also granted.

The upshot, all qualifications made, is simply that something has changed in the last century regarding how self-identifying as a Christian orients oneself to the wider culture; how one is perceived as a result. And apart from claims about this as a change, the point about the present moment is that, whether or not there ever was such a time (in this society or another) when being seen to be a Christian was something that might raise one’s prospects—marital, educational, financial, professional, political—this time, in this society, is not one of them. We can haggle over whether it’s preferable to say “it is not” one of them versus “it is no longer” one of them. But either way, it’s not.

Suppose Alan agrees with me (though, if I’m reading him correctly, I don’t think he does). Does it matter?

I think it does. But let me say how I don’t think it matters before I say how I think it does.

It does not matter “because America is no longer a Christian nation.” It does not matter, that is, as if this analysis were at heart a declension narrative, according to which things have been getting worse and worse and now, at this moment, we’ve reached the nadir; or at least have crept up to the edge of the cliff. No. The social status of being-seen-as-Christian is simply one among many sociological variables relevant to Christian consideration of the church’s mission.

I also don’t think it matters “because things are really bad out there.” They’re not. It’s bad when Christians get thrown to the lions. It’s bad when Christians can’t vote. It’s bad when certain Christians aren’t afforded basic rights and privileges common to civic society. It’s bad when it is against the law for Christians to gather on Sunday mornings, to pray and celebrate the Eucharist, to read their Bibles and worship without fear, to share the gospel with whomever will listen.

American society does not fit these descriptions, and it isn’t close to any of them. Christians in America are remarkably free; our privileges are innumerable. Words like “persecution” are inapt to our context, and unwise to use—not least since we have sisters and brothers elsewhere in the world who suffer actual persecution at this very moment.

How, then, is the social status of public identification as Christian relevant? In this respect:

The church cannot bear faithful witness to Christ in a given context if she lacks awareness of the particular features that constitute that context, that make it what it is.

Think about different locations and cultures today. Does Christian witness look the same in Riyadh, Nairobi, Beijing, St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, Miami, Milan? Does it look the same in 2022, 1722, 1422, 1122, 822, 522, 222? Surely not. And surely all Christians would agree that differences of context in each time and place call for different forms of response to those differences? Such that the specific contours of Christian witness actually and rightly look different based on when and where one lives, and how a culture or society in question responds to—welcomes, rejects, shrugs, punishes—public identification as Christian?

Perhaps, again, Alan would agree with this. Let me try to say a bit more, then, to get enough meat on these bones to prompt a meaningful disagreement.

Consider the difference between life under Diocletian, about half a century before St. Augustine’s birth, and life under Honorius, when Augustine was bishop of Hippo. The former was a time when the imperial authorities were your enemy, if you were known as a Christian; the latter was a time when claiming to be a Nicene Christian might enhance one’s political or financial prospects (though not necessarily). How should the church navigate each setting? This was a real question faced by bishops, monks, priests, and laypersons around the Mediterranean. The first was, in Renn’s language, a “negative world”; the second, a (more) “positive world.” I see no reason to declare a priori that such labels, and the analysis underlying and following from them, an inadmissible distraction.

Now for an example closer to home. I teach undergraduate students of all kinds, but every semester I have a class all to myself composed only of Bible and ministry majors: i.e., young persons preparing for a life of formal service to the church in the form of teaching, preaching, pastoring, and so on. These students largely come from the Bible Belt, and many of them come from big churches in big cities where being Christian and attending such churches doesn’t feel abnormal. This experience in turn nurtures in a good number of them a sense of their context, present and future, as either neutrally or favorably disposed toward Christianity. A world of megachurches and popular pastors and celebrity Christians and spiritual influencers is just “the world”: yesterday, today, and forever. The churches they one day will lead will be large, healthy, full, and financially stable. The folks in the pews will lead lives as middle-class American Christians long have (so they imagine): unthreatened and tacitly buoyed by the surrounding culture.

Not for all of them, but for quite a few, it is something of a shock to learn about the declining rates of identification as Christian in America; about the decades-long decreasing numbers of church attendance; about how many churches are closing their doors each month; about some of the modest but real social, political, and professional challenges facing folks known to be Christian in what once were considered mainstream careers and institutions in this country.

In a word, most of my students believe they live in Renn’s Positive World. They really do. Others suppose it’s a Neutral World for Christians. Few to none see it as a Negative World. And I’m telling you, it makes a difference for how they understand their faith, their future, and their eventual ministry in the church.

This is one reason, in my view, why we keep seeing so many pastors quitting formal ministry in their 20s and 30s. It’s hard out there. And many of them are unprepared for what’s awaiting them. As I see it, part of that lack of preparation is a gap between the “World” they expect to inhabit as ministers and the actual “World” they find. And the gap is perpetuated if and when professors and writers like me fail to help them see—clearly, soberly, and accurately. I want them to see the world as it is. Not to scare them. Not to lament the supposed loss of a prior world. Not to remake the world in our desired image, in the image of what it “should” be. Not to be fatalist about the future or to forsake the challenge of persuasion or to give up on faithful witness until the world is nicer to us. By no means. The world owes us nothing, and as the apostle teaches, friendship with the world is enmity toward God.

What I want, rather, is for them to be equipped to minister in the real world, not the cloistered world of their childhoods, or the 1990s/2000s, or a fictional 1950s, or any other time and place. In that sense and to that extent, I find the “Three Worlds” heuristic to be useful. As a starting point. As a conversation starter. As an initial sociological, historical, and missiological framework, by which to help normie Christians and ministers to begin thinking about the particular challenges facing the mission of the church today—here and now, in our setting, not our parents’, not someone else’s: ours.

Maybe Renn’s “Three Worlds” comes with social or political baggage not worth onboarding in this particular conversation. Maybe it’s overdetermined by the uses to which various of its adherents want to put it. Maybe it’s wrong in certain key details, not least its laser focus on the last few decades and specific public events that occurred during them; a myopic legal and juridical cultural frame. Maybe its examples are wrong, such as offering the rhetorical style of Tim Keller as an artifact of a now-past “World,” no longer relevant. Maybe the “pre-1994” timeframe of “Positive World” is far too open-ended, and needs bracketing closer to the World Wars than to the Founding Fathers. Maybe the emphasis on elite institutions combined with a blurring of the lines between “public profession of Christian faith” and “actual discipleship to Christ” renders the framework finally useless at the practical level.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. With the qualifications I make above, I find it useful enough. More broadly, analysis like it seems to me self-evidently helpful, even needful. Not because Alan is wrong, but because he is right: The content of Christian witness is always and without exception the same: the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. But what does imitation of and conformity to those life and teachings require in this time, in this place, by comparison to other times, other places?

That’s the question I want to answer. And I’ll take all the help I can get.

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.

One long thought on Wood v. Keller

It seems to me that there is a single pressing issue raised by James Wood’s essay (and follow-up) on Tim Keller: namely, the social and political fortunes of evangelical churches under social and political conditions that are truly post-Christendom.

For seventeen centuries Christianity in the main has not been averse to seeking, maintaining, and deploying political power in the name of and in the service of explicitly Christian convictions, purposes, and interests. Even those offshoots of Christianity, beginning some five centuries ago, that to some degree expressed concerns or hesitancy about the Christian exercise of political power—and these have always been minority traditions in any case—have continued, broadly speaking, to operate under the conditions laid down by Christendom, and even to presuppose certain fundamental features of a Christian or semi-Christian regime. Even when, in the last two centuries or so, the overt Christian elements of “Western” political regimes have dried up, it is unquestionable that most of those elements remained, covertly, in one form or another. It is only in the last century, and in the U.S. in the last half-century, that the lineaments of a genuinely and comprehensively post-Christian political order have come into view and begun to be implemented. Whether or not that order has fully arrived in certain European nations, it has not yet here in the States. It is coming, though, and about that there should be no illusions.

Here is the point. Magisterial Protestantism was never anti–political power. It retained a vision, rooted in Christendom, for what it means for a nation (or state) to “be” Christian. That vision concerned both the character of leaders and the content of laws. As forms of populist, non-magisterial Protestantism grew, developed, and expanded—let’s just call these groups “evangelical” for lack of a better word—even where the magisterial political vision went unclaimed or repudiated, the political order created and maintained by it remained in place. In other words, evangelicalism in all its varieties knows no other regime in the West other than Christendom, semi-Christendom, or covert-Christendom. Post-Christendom is a new beast altogether.

(To be sure, evangelical churches have existed and do exist in other parts of the world, where Christendom never took root; some of these places are actively hostile to the faith. I leave to the side all the very interesting issues that attend this intersection of evangelicalism and non-Christian or anti-Christian contexts.)

The question posed by this confluence of factors is the following: How is evangelicalism supposed to operate politically in a truly post-Christian civilization? I take this to be the fundamental issue Wood is raising for us; bracket all that he says about Keller, and how you might feel about that. The heart of the matter is how both (evangelical) Christians and the (evangelical) church ought to comport themselves politically in relation to a full-bore, actually realized post-Christian culture.

Here’s the problem I think he’s putting his finger on. Historically, Christians have not had an ideal-typical, above-the-fray political program for society. Their program has been actionable, and they have acted upon it. They have commended it to the wider society; they have executed it in the courts of kings and magistrates; they have expanded on it in legal and theological texts. In no sense was the Christian vision for political order a “trans-partisan” affair. It was partisan all the way down. It could not help but be so if it would be concrete, which every political platform must be.

Roman Catholicism has not abandoned this approach to politics, though the reception of the Christendom vision is a matter of enormous debate since Vatican II. In principle, though, Rome rejects the wholesale privatization of religion and does not renounce its having a role in public affairs, even (at times, past or present or future) being established as the faith of the land.

Likewise, magisterial Protestantism has not abandoned a modified version of the Christendom project. Yet—and I don’t mean this to be as harsh as it sounds—magisterial Protestantism is, for all intents and purposes, dead. Those Protestants who seek to maintain or to recover the magisterial and confessional traditions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may well be performing admirable and good work; but as a living institution with either ecclesial or political power, it’s a thing of the past. Whether they like it or not, they’re all evangelicals now.

Which brings us back to where we started. I understand the ecclesio-political program criticized by Wood to be one that keeps the (evangelical ) church qua church apolitical, while encouraging individual Christians to be faithfully engaged in democratic politics, where “faithful engagement” means (a) keeping political activity penultimate by (b) permitting Christians to be on both sides of most/all political questions, which in turn requires (c) avoiding partisanship, because (d) the gospel stands above and in judgment upon all political endeavors, inasmuch as (e) neither the gospel nor the church is fully aligned with any political party, platform, or policy. The upshot is a modest, even ambivalent, investment in political activity, characterized by gentleness, civility, and the self-critical admission of a general fallibility.

Many of us may find this picture of Christian participation in politics to be an attractive one. What Wood wants us to see, however, is three things.

First, it has little precedent in Christian history. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But we should realize just how new it is. Its newness should caution our sense that it’s self-evidently “the” “Christian” approach to politics; it is certainly a such approach. Prima facie we can’t say much more than that. In historical perspective, it’s something of a novelty.

In part that’s because, second, our circumstances are radically new—and, again, without precedent in the church’s past. The church once found itself in a pagan world that judged it worthy, at best, of benign neglect and, at worst, of legal and social punishment. But the church has never faced a post-Christian legal-cultural regime. So even those politics-reticent ecclesial traditions that have arisen since the mid–sixteenth century have no previous experience of what we are (currently or imminently) facing.

Third, Wood believes this picture of winsome, faithful presence is bound to fail—that is, as a social and political program. That doesn’t prejudge whether it’s what Christ demands of us. Nor does it amount to a suggestion that the tasks of Christian discipleship are measured by (likelihood of) sociopolitical success. Instead, it’s meant to draw attention to the fact that “faithful discipleship” and “faithful political engagement as outlined in this particular proposal” are not synonymous. The latter is a contingent suggestion that may or may not be (a) good in the merits and/or (b) apt to specific material conditions. I take Wood’s bedrock claim to be that, as a concrete but intrinsically contestable proposal, this vision of political engagement is good on the merits and was apt to the conditions of its time and place when it was proposed. But, given a change in social and political conditions on the ground—being an at least partly empirical question subject to all manner of analysis—the practical question of what faithful discipleship requires of American Christians today, in terms of active political engagement, calls for a rethinking of said proposal in favor of a revised or even altogether new vision. Not, I repeat, because the former was or is ineffective, but because, given certain cultural mutations, it is inapt (unfitting, unresponsive) to the needs and demands of Christian life and witness in this moment, in our context as it stands.

If this is granted, then the question is not whether (what Wood takes to be) Keller’s project is “good” or “faithful” or “worth defending.” The question is whether, as a contingent proposal for how Christians in a particular time and place ought to comport themselves politically, it continues to be properly responsive to the social, political, and missional challenges facing the American church today. Perhaps it does; perhaps it doesn’t. Much of one’s answer will turn on the logically prior question regarding the state of those challenges and whether, across the last four decades, they have changed, or are currently in process of changing, as substantially as Wood believes.

This is where the historical backdrop I offered above is meant to give some credence to Wood’s argument—which is, recall, about Protestant evangelicalism in America. There is no one-size-fits-all “Christian relation to politics.” (And if there were, it would be of the Christendom variety, not the belated liberal-democratic variety.) Christians have always adjusted, with impressive flexibility, to countless regimes and types thereof. In our case, this means (on one hand) that what has “worked” in the recent past will not necessarily be what works in the present or the future; and (on the other) that we ought to hold before us a far greater variety of Christian approaches to politics than what we are lately used to. If we are truly entering a post-Christian period, we’re going to need all the help we can get. Some of that help, therefore, may turn out to come from the distant rather than the recent past. Some of it may look wholly unfamiliar to us. We cannot know in advance what may prove useful or apt to the moment. Everyone is agreed that no proposal is licit that contradicts the teaching or authority of Christ. Granting that criterion, the floor is wide open. The moment is unprecedented, the terrain uncertain. Only by hearing from everyone and taking into consideration what surprises or even confounds us can we move forward, together, into the unknown.

A+ DBH

David Bentley Hart has a new essay in the latest issue of Commonweal, and it’s a corker. It’s Hart in full form, but in his sober (rather than his exuberant or polemical) mode: considerate, charitable, open-handed, wide-angled, just, critical, and constructive. Just what the doctor ordered, in other words.

Ostensibly a review of a translation of a new book by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, it opens up into a diagnosis of Christendom’s exhaustion in the early third millennium after Christ, a rejection of certain nostalgic paths “forward” (i.e., backward), and an alternative vision for the future of the faith after secular modernity. (It’s surprisingly Hegelian!) I imagine it’s a preview of his forthcoming book, due early next year, titled Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief. Here’s an excerpt from the essay:

So, again, given these realities, what ought Christians to do?

Certainly, what they should not do is indulge in sickly nostalgias and resentments, or soothe their distempers with infantile restorationist fantasies. History’s immanent critique has exposed too many of the old illusions for what they were, and there can be no innocent return to structures of power whose hypocrisies have been so clearly revealed. There are any number of reasons, for instance, for dismissing the current vogue of right-wing Catholic “integralism”: its imbecile flights of fancy regarding an imperial papacy; its essentially early-modern model of ecclesial absolutism; its devotion to a picture of Christian social and political order that could not be any less “integralist” or any more “extrinsicist” and authoritarian in its mechanisms; the disturbingly palpable element of sadomasochistic reverie in its endorsement of various extreme forms of coercion, subjugation, violence, and exclusion; the total absence of the actual ethos of Christ from its aims; its eerie similarity to a convention of Star Trek enthusiasts gravely discussing strategies for really establishing a United Federation of Planets. But the greatest reason for holding the whole movement in contempt is that it is nothing more than a resentful effort to reenact the very history of failure whose consequences it wants to correct. Secularity was not imposed upon the Christian world by some adventitious hostile force. It simply is the old Christendom in its terminal phase.

Well then. There’s no one quite like Hart (as I’ve written before). Go read the rest.