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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.
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.
New essay published in The Los Angeles Review of Books: "Enter Paul"
I have a new essay published this morning over in The Los Angeles Review of Books, titled "Enter Paul," on Paula Fredriksen's two latest books, Paul: The Pagans' Apostle and When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (both from Yale University Press). Here's a sample:
"Put it this way: an itinerant rabbi from the Galilee — the backwaters of Palestine — leads a popular movement among the Jews, one that comes to an ignominious end when he is executed for sedition by the Roman authorities. Some of his followers form a small community in Jerusalem, proclaiming that not only was this rabbi and prophet the longed-for Messiah of Israel, but he is alive, in glory with God, vested with impregnable power and heavenly authority. These messianic Jews share goods in common and worship daily at the temple, praying and waiting eagerly for Jesus’s imminent return, when he will drive out the pagan occupiers and restore his people’s fortunes.
"Pause the frame there. Nothing about this picture offers even a hint that this same community — one defined by exclusive loyalty to Jesus, Israel’s Messiah and Lord — will, centuries hence, find itself filling the Roman Empire, legalized and endorsed by that same empire, dominated by gentiles, not Jews, and led by men like Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis.
"How did this happen? Why did it happen? To answer, we need to leave Augustine behind and follow Fredriksen into the world of the eastern Mediterranean in the first century of the common era, specifically Jewish life under the thumb of the Roman Empire."
Read the rest.
"Put it this way: an itinerant rabbi from the Galilee — the backwaters of Palestine — leads a popular movement among the Jews, one that comes to an ignominious end when he is executed for sedition by the Roman authorities. Some of his followers form a small community in Jerusalem, proclaiming that not only was this rabbi and prophet the longed-for Messiah of Israel, but he is alive, in glory with God, vested with impregnable power and heavenly authority. These messianic Jews share goods in common and worship daily at the temple, praying and waiting eagerly for Jesus’s imminent return, when he will drive out the pagan occupiers and restore his people’s fortunes.
"Pause the frame there. Nothing about this picture offers even a hint that this same community — one defined by exclusive loyalty to Jesus, Israel’s Messiah and Lord — will, centuries hence, find itself filling the Roman Empire, legalized and endorsed by that same empire, dominated by gentiles, not Jews, and led by men like Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis.
"How did this happen? Why did it happen? To answer, we need to leave Augustine behind and follow Fredriksen into the world of the eastern Mediterranean in the first century of the common era, specifically Jewish life under the thumb of the Roman Empire."
Read the rest.
DIY Christianity
What is the greatest threat to the church in America today? You could list a lot of candidates.
My answer is DIY Christianity.
That's the term I use with my students to communicate the notion—which they readily recognize—of the Christian faith as recreated anew in, by, and for each generation, or even perhaps each local body of believers. This is Christianity without history, without tradition, without authority, without saints or martyrs or anything mediate, that is, anything intervening (thus obtruding, thus obstructing) between the individual and Jesus. DIY Christianity is "founding" a local church the way entrepreneurs found a start-up, with Big Ideas and Enough With The Old and Radical Innovation. (DIY Christianity thinks "innovation," like "curiosity," is a virtue rather than a vice.)
DIY Christianity is a mortal enemy to the faith once for all delivered to the saints and handed on, generation after generation, from the apostles to the present day. In all that I do—writing and teaching, at church or in the classroom—my singular goal is, so far as I am able, to excise this malignant tumor from the hearts and minds of anyone who will listen.
In positive terms, what I want is for American Christians today to learn, or relearn, to be catholic: to belong to the one great tradition, the one apostolic faith, the one universal church. To reimagine faith not as something they create or manufacture or curate or judge for themselves, but that to which they submit, in joy, the way one simply receives an unexpected gift, a beloved friend's return, the birth of a child. The faith as a given, and the real matter before us one of how to live that faith today, in the midst of so many challenges.
For catholic faith to reign, and DIY Christianity to die: that is the task before us, and therefore the prayer on my mind and on my lips, every single day.
My answer is DIY Christianity.
That's the term I use with my students to communicate the notion—which they readily recognize—of the Christian faith as recreated anew in, by, and for each generation, or even perhaps each local body of believers. This is Christianity without history, without tradition, without authority, without saints or martyrs or anything mediate, that is, anything intervening (thus obtruding, thus obstructing) between the individual and Jesus. DIY Christianity is "founding" a local church the way entrepreneurs found a start-up, with Big Ideas and Enough With The Old and Radical Innovation. (DIY Christianity thinks "innovation," like "curiosity," is a virtue rather than a vice.)
DIY Christianity is a mortal enemy to the faith once for all delivered to the saints and handed on, generation after generation, from the apostles to the present day. In all that I do—writing and teaching, at church or in the classroom—my singular goal is, so far as I am able, to excise this malignant tumor from the hearts and minds of anyone who will listen.
In positive terms, what I want is for American Christians today to learn, or relearn, to be catholic: to belong to the one great tradition, the one apostolic faith, the one universal church. To reimagine faith not as something they create or manufacture or curate or judge for themselves, but that to which they submit, in joy, the way one simply receives an unexpected gift, a beloved friend's return, the birth of a child. The faith as a given, and the real matter before us one of how to live that faith today, in the midst of so many challenges.
For catholic faith to reign, and DIY Christianity to die: that is the task before us, and therefore the prayer on my mind and on my lips, every single day.
Gentiles exiting the faith
It seems to me that most Christians today—in my context, I mean: college-educated or middle-class American Christians, especially those raised in the church—see their spiritual options as basically threefold. Either they maintain Christian faith of some kind; or they become spiritual but not religious; or they become officially agnostic, though functionally atheist. That is, there are basically two "exit" options from Christianity, both of which can be described as a form of nonbelief: faith in nothing at all, or faith in something-or-other left undefined.
In other words, such wayward believers aren't drawn to other religious traditions: the primary question is organized theism. Give up the former, you remain spiritual but not Christian; give up the latter, you're neither Christian nor spiritual. The temptation isn't ordinarily to become a Muslim or Sikh or Hindu. (Though the other day I did hear someone say, "If it weren't for X in Christianity, I'd be Muslim." But the exception proves the rule.)
Here's my question: Why don't Christians who cease to believe in Christ become Jews instead?
By which I mean: Why don't gentile worshipers of the God of Israel who cease to confess Jesus as the Messiah of Israel convert to Orthodox Judaism—precisely that religious community that worships the God of Israel without confessing Jesus as Messiah?
This is hardly an unknown trend in Christian history. It saturates the pages of the New Testament. Depending on how late you date some of the New Testament texts, it seems to have lasted well into the second century. Moreover, it's popular as late as St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom—the latter of whose sermons contain such strikingly anti-Jewish rhetoric exactly because his listeners find the synagogue so attractive.
There are social, political, and historical reasons that help to explain why so few American gentile Christians would ever, in the absence of faith in Jesus, even for a moment consider converting to Judaism, not least secularization's spiritual minimalism and liberalism's ethical individualism. Here's what I think the main factor is, though; it's theological and, in my view, the most damning one.
Most—or at least, far too many—gentile American Christians do not love the God of Israel.
Which is to say, the fact that the God and Father of Jesus Christ is the God of the Jews, and thus the God of the Law, the prophets, and the Psalms, is a stumbling block for Christians today. It may be a stumbling block they've overcome, or seek to overcome. But it's a part of the challenge of faith, not part of its appeal. They don't want the Father without the Son; they want the Son, and are stuck with the Father. Drop the New Testament, they're not left with the Old; they've only accepted the Old because of the New.
Now, obviously gentile believers the world over are believers because of the person and work of Jesus, through whom they have been grafted into the covenant people of God. I'm not suggesting for a moment that that is odd or out of sorts. What I'm saying, rather, is that, according to the gospel, Jesus is the mediator, not between generic humanity and generic divinity, but between gentile humanity and the God of Abraham. Jesus's introduction of the gentiles to the praise and glory of YHWH, Lord of Hosts, isn't meant to remain at the level of stiff formalities: gentiles are meant to grow in knowledge and affection for this One, precisely as their trusted Father and King.
And the truth is, converting to Judaism would sound to these Christians like a prison sentence. Why? Because of sermon after sermon, catechesis class after catechesis class, Bible study after Bible study preaching and teaching more or less explicit Marcionite doctrine.
They love Jesus. But not the One who sent him.
If I'm even close to right, this only furthers my resolve so to teach and preach that—counterfactually—if Jesus were not risen from the dead, his gentile disciples would nevertheless long with all their hearts to continue confessing the ancient prayer with Abraham's children: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one."
In other words, such wayward believers aren't drawn to other religious traditions: the primary question is organized theism. Give up the former, you remain spiritual but not Christian; give up the latter, you're neither Christian nor spiritual. The temptation isn't ordinarily to become a Muslim or Sikh or Hindu. (Though the other day I did hear someone say, "If it weren't for X in Christianity, I'd be Muslim." But the exception proves the rule.)
Here's my question: Why don't Christians who cease to believe in Christ become Jews instead?
By which I mean: Why don't gentile worshipers of the God of Israel who cease to confess Jesus as the Messiah of Israel convert to Orthodox Judaism—precisely that religious community that worships the God of Israel without confessing Jesus as Messiah?
This is hardly an unknown trend in Christian history. It saturates the pages of the New Testament. Depending on how late you date some of the New Testament texts, it seems to have lasted well into the second century. Moreover, it's popular as late as St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom—the latter of whose sermons contain such strikingly anti-Jewish rhetoric exactly because his listeners find the synagogue so attractive.
There are social, political, and historical reasons that help to explain why so few American gentile Christians would ever, in the absence of faith in Jesus, even for a moment consider converting to Judaism, not least secularization's spiritual minimalism and liberalism's ethical individualism. Here's what I think the main factor is, though; it's theological and, in my view, the most damning one.
Most—or at least, far too many—gentile American Christians do not love the God of Israel.
Which is to say, the fact that the God and Father of Jesus Christ is the God of the Jews, and thus the God of the Law, the prophets, and the Psalms, is a stumbling block for Christians today. It may be a stumbling block they've overcome, or seek to overcome. But it's a part of the challenge of faith, not part of its appeal. They don't want the Father without the Son; they want the Son, and are stuck with the Father. Drop the New Testament, they're not left with the Old; they've only accepted the Old because of the New.
Now, obviously gentile believers the world over are believers because of the person and work of Jesus, through whom they have been grafted into the covenant people of God. I'm not suggesting for a moment that that is odd or out of sorts. What I'm saying, rather, is that, according to the gospel, Jesus is the mediator, not between generic humanity and generic divinity, but between gentile humanity and the God of Abraham. Jesus's introduction of the gentiles to the praise and glory of YHWH, Lord of Hosts, isn't meant to remain at the level of stiff formalities: gentiles are meant to grow in knowledge and affection for this One, precisely as their trusted Father and King.
And the truth is, converting to Judaism would sound to these Christians like a prison sentence. Why? Because of sermon after sermon, catechesis class after catechesis class, Bible study after Bible study preaching and teaching more or less explicit Marcionite doctrine.
They love Jesus. But not the One who sent him.
If I'm even close to right, this only furthers my resolve so to teach and preach that—counterfactually—if Jesus were not risen from the dead, his gentile disciples would nevertheless long with all their hearts to continue confessing the ancient prayer with Abraham's children: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one."
Scruton, Eagleton, Scialabba, et al—why don't they convert?
The question is a sincere one, and in no way facetious. Roger Scruton, Terry Eagleton, and George Scialabba represent an older generation of thinkers and writers who take religion, Christianity, and theology seriously, and moreover ridicule or at least roll their eyes at its cultured despisers (like the so-called New Atheists). And there are others like them.
Yet it is never entirely clear to me why they themselves are not Christians, or at least theists of one sort or another. In The Meaning of Conservatism Scruton refers vaguely to "those for whom the passing of God from the world is felt as a reality." In his review of Marilynne Robinson's The Givenness of Things, Scialabba remarks that, for neuroscientists, "the metaphysical sense" of the soul is a "blank," and asks further, "wouldn't it be a bit perverse of God to have made His existence seem so implausible from Laplace to Bohr?" (Surely an affirmative answer to this spare hypothetical depends wholly on a shared premise that already presumes against the claims of revelation?) My sense is that Eagleton is something of a principled agnostic perhaps, though I've by no means read either his work or the others' exhaustively. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Scruton, as a philosopher, has addressed this question head-on. And Scialabba belongs explicitly to a tradition of thought that believes "metaphysics" to have been descredited once and for all.
But why? I mean: What are the concrete reasons why these specific individuals reject the claims of either historic Christianity or classical theism or some other particular religious tradition? Is it theodicy? Is it "science" (but that seems unlikely)? Is it something about the Bible, the exposures of historical criticism perhaps? Is it something about belief in the spiritual or transcendent as such?
I'm genuinely interested. Nothing would be more conducive to mutual learning between believers and nonbelievers, or to theological reflection on the part of Christians, than understanding the actual reasons why such learned and influential thinkers reject the claims of faith, or at least hold them at arm's length.
I suppose the hunch I harbor—which I don't intend pejoratively, but which animates why I ask—is that there do not exist articulable robust moral or philosophical reasons "why not," but only something like Scruton's phrase above: they, and others like them, are "those for whom the passing of God from the world is felt as a reality." But is that enough? If so, why? Given the world's continued recourse to and reliance on faith, and a sufficient number of thoughtful, educated, and scholarly believers (not to mention theologians!) in the secularized West, it seems to me that an account of the "why not" is called for and would be richly productive.
But then, maybe all of them have done just this, and I speak from ignorance of their answers. If so, I readily welcome being put in my place.
Update: A kind reader on Twitter pointed me to this essay by Scialabba: "An Honest Believer," Agni (No. 26, 1988). It's lovely, and gives you a good deal of Scialabba's intellectual and existential wrestling with his loss of Catholic faith in his 20s. I confess I remain, and perhaps forever will be, perplexed by the ubiquitous, apparently self-evident reference to "modern/ity" as a coherent and self-evidently true and good thing to be/embrace; but that is neither here nor there at the moment.
Yet it is never entirely clear to me why they themselves are not Christians, or at least theists of one sort or another. In The Meaning of Conservatism Scruton refers vaguely to "those for whom the passing of God from the world is felt as a reality." In his review of Marilynne Robinson's The Givenness of Things, Scialabba remarks that, for neuroscientists, "the metaphysical sense" of the soul is a "blank," and asks further, "wouldn't it be a bit perverse of God to have made His existence seem so implausible from Laplace to Bohr?" (Surely an affirmative answer to this spare hypothetical depends wholly on a shared premise that already presumes against the claims of revelation?) My sense is that Eagleton is something of a principled agnostic perhaps, though I've by no means read either his work or the others' exhaustively. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Scruton, as a philosopher, has addressed this question head-on. And Scialabba belongs explicitly to a tradition of thought that believes "metaphysics" to have been descredited once and for all.
But why? I mean: What are the concrete reasons why these specific individuals reject the claims of either historic Christianity or classical theism or some other particular religious tradition? Is it theodicy? Is it "science" (but that seems unlikely)? Is it something about the Bible, the exposures of historical criticism perhaps? Is it something about belief in the spiritual or transcendent as such?
I'm genuinely interested. Nothing would be more conducive to mutual learning between believers and nonbelievers, or to theological reflection on the part of Christians, than understanding the actual reasons why such learned and influential thinkers reject the claims of faith, or at least hold them at arm's length.
I suppose the hunch I harbor—which I don't intend pejoratively, but which animates why I ask—is that there do not exist articulable robust moral or philosophical reasons "why not," but only something like Scruton's phrase above: they, and others like them, are "those for whom the passing of God from the world is felt as a reality." But is that enough? If so, why? Given the world's continued recourse to and reliance on faith, and a sufficient number of thoughtful, educated, and scholarly believers (not to mention theologians!) in the secularized West, it seems to me that an account of the "why not" is called for and would be richly productive.
But then, maybe all of them have done just this, and I speak from ignorance of their answers. If so, I readily welcome being put in my place.
Update: A kind reader on Twitter pointed me to this essay by Scialabba: "An Honest Believer," Agni (No. 26, 1988). It's lovely, and gives you a good deal of Scialabba's intellectual and existential wrestling with his loss of Catholic faith in his 20s. I confess I remain, and perhaps forever will be, perplexed by the ubiquitous, apparently self-evident reference to "modern/ity" as a coherent and self-evidently true and good thing to be/embrace; but that is neither here nor there at the moment.