I’m in Mere O on streaming worship

Three weeks after Tom Hanks and Rudy Gobert tested positive for Covid, Mere Orthodoxy published an essay of mine titled “Sacraments, Technology, and Streaming Worship in a Pandemic.” It’s a long exploration of the nature of Christian liturgy and the questions posed to it by an emergency like a global pandemic. It uses Neil Postman and Robert Jenson to place a question mark next to the seeming self-evident answer to the question, To stream or not to stream? In particular, it makes the case that, if churches are going to stream worship, they should not include the sacraments. That is, they should fast from the Eucharist while separated in the body; they should not encourage individual believers to “self-administer” communion at home.

Nearly three years later, I’m back in Mere O with another essay on the same topic, this time titled “Stream Off.” It’s about the lingering questions posed by the emergency measures implemented during lockdown and the broader crisis phase of Covid. Namely: Granting that nearly every church did turn to streaming worship online, should they continue to do so? Moreover, should they actively seek to “expand their reach” through live-streaming? Should they invite people to “join us online”? to “be a member of church from afar”? to “worship from home,” if and as they please?

You know my answer. This essay, long burbling in the back of my mind, makes the case.

Update (January 12): LOL. Apparently a full year ago Tish Harrison Warren wrote about this in the NYT, followed by some responses from readers. Twelve months ago! Obviously it’s kosher to write about the same topic, especially one that’s continuing in the way streaming is, but I’m not sure how I overlooked it. As they say, I regret the error.

Lifelong ministry

People today are leaving ministry in droves. Churches, likewise, are shockingly under-staffed. As a colleague of mine recently wrote, “ministers are in short supply.” The pandemic is a major factor, but it exacerbated existing trends; it did not create the problem. The ministers I know—and for the purposes of this post I’m thinking exclusively of “low-church” traditions, not mainline or catholic—get calls on the regular from churches offering generous salaries and appealing jobs, and the churches in question are reasonably sized, in cities anyone would be happy to live in, and often have gone without a lead pastor for months, if not years. Whereas, on the flip side, many churches that once (pre-pandemic) had a budget for X number of ministers are now having to cut their staff down to size.

A few reflections on the dynamics at work, past and present.

Of the teenagers and college students I meet who (a) are believers, (b) go to church, and (c) are interested in pursuing formal ministry, none of them, with only the rarest exceptions, plans on becoming a “head” or “lead” pastor/preacher. What they want instead is a job with one of four modifiers affixed to the title of “minister”: children’s, youth, college/young adult, or worship.* There are many reasons for this shift. One is that the person who most influenced them in their faith was such a minister. Another is that the churches in which they were raised aren’t organized by and around a single visible head pastor, along the lines of the traditional parish or rural/neighborhood church model. Instead, these churches have ministry staffs, filled with specialties and sub-specialties (including evangelism, outreach, missions, poverty, rehab, media, sports, etc.). Naturally, young people being raised in such communities see modeled for them a specialized ministerial role, not the single (if capacious) traditional “office” of ordained pastor, whose principal task is the proclamation of the word and the administration of the sacraments in the context of public worship. To the extent that these young people’s churches do have a single visible “head” person, he is usually conceived (in their minds and in their experience) as a Public Speaker, whose primary job is, naturally enough, public speaking. Indeed, he is paid the highest salary to be the best possible weekly speaker he can be. Such a person is not necessarily (or uniquely) involved with pastoral tasks, the sacraments, and/or worship more generally. And because young people, like all people, fear public speaking as a fate worse than death, only rarely do any of them see in this Head Role a vocation to which they might aspire.

Thus, whatever the reasons—and there are surely others, not least the decline of seminary and of churches’ expectation that ministers have an MDiv—more and more young people who enter ministry today are doing so much differently than those who did so in the past. In my anecdotal observation, a majority of people who enter one of the “big four” ministry staff roles I mentioned above—children’s, youth, college/young adult, worship—exit full-time, formal ministry at some point between ages 30 and 45. I’m tempted to speculate that the percentage is far higher than a bare 51%, perhaps even as high as 75-85%. Such ministers serve, often ably, in the churches for (on average) a dozen years before returning to civilian life. Half of those remaining stick with their original titles; the other half climb the staff ladder (for there is unquestionably an internal hierarchy at work, even if it is never spoken outright) to administrative, pastoral, or preaching roles.

As I trust is obvious, there is a problem here. Not only are fewer and fewer young people seeking and entering lifelong pastoral (homiletical and sacramental) ministry. Those who do become ministers aren’t remaining ministers for long. Worse still, the process is compounded, thereby creating a negative feedback loop. I suppose the crisis isn’t more pronounced than it already is because churches are themselves declining in numbers and closing their doors at high rates. Which itself raises a chicken-and-egg problem for figuring out what’s going on here.

In any case, here’s one last thought prompted by these trend lines. It seems to me that there are two necessary conditions for a person to enter into, to undertake, and actually to accomplish a lifetime of formal ministry as a pastor in the local church:

1. Belief in and commitment to a concrete ecclesial tradition.

2. The socially embodied and transmitted principle and concept of being called to be a “ministry lifer”—whether explicitly, through the sacrament of holy orders, or implicitly, through a tacit but passionate understanding of and dedication to the pastoral vocation as divinely given, normatively irrevocable, and necessarily enacted at the parish or congregational level.

This, I think, is the deeper problem at issue. The young people I have in mind are “non-denominational,” down to the marrow, even when they belong to a specific denomination. The Baptists attend the local “community church,” the Reformed attend the local Church of Christ, the CoC-ers attend the local Baptist church. In other words, they’re all members of that ever-embattled, ever-thriving American family called evangelicalism. And because they have little to no deep-set, self-conscious membership in, much less identity as, this or that particular denomination or tradition, they swap churches without a second thought. It’s the gig economy applied to the church: a more or less comprehensive collapse in institutional durability and reliable ecclesial identity. So that, if and when a thoughtful, committed young Christian considers ministry, s/he does not do so with a mind toward serving this particular tradition but only “the church” in generic, non-denom terms.

Furthermore, such a person lacks any reason to believe that s/he is making a lifelong commitment, or that the church expects—much less that God commands!—ministerial service to be for life. That lifer status still applies by default to catholic traditions and, in an attenuated but real way, to mainline and confessional Protestant traditions that maintain official procedures and gatekeeping bodies for equipping, credentialing, and ordaining priests and pastors. Not so here. I’ve come to realize, though, that something like a wholly untheorized analogue to sacramental orders existed for quite a long time in the evangelical (and adjacent) communities I have in mind. That is the only explanation (along with the existence of sectarian and/or denominational identity) for why nineteenth- and twentieth-century ministers would spend their whole working lives slaving away in financially painful, psychologically grueling, and emotionally punishing congregations, sacrificing all that they had, moving twice a decade, and rarely considering the simplest option: namely, heading for the EXIT sign. Truth be told, there was no such sign, at least most of the time, since the two conditions I’ve named were met. Given, that is, thick ecclesial identity and thick pastoral vocation, to be a minister just was to be a minister for life, since that is what the call of God through the church entailed as a matter of course. Remove either or both of those conditions, however, and the EXIT sign lights up in bold, bright neon. Its flashing letters begin on the periphery then drift toward the center of one’s vision. At some point, ministry involves too much sacrifice for any but the most heroic to stay. Lacking the necessary conditions to hold them in place, to endure through the suffering that ministry invariably brings in its train, ministers head for the door. They may come back, but not as clergy. That door is closed for good.

Can you blame them?

*In case it’s necessary, allow me to add that my comments here in no way imply denigration of what I’m calling “specialized” forms of ministry. My first book is dedicated to my youth minister, who is the reason I earned a PhD in theology and am now a professor, and my second book is dedicated to my children’s minister, who is the reason why literally thousands of children who came through the doors of my home church first heard the name of Jesus. Nothing I’ve written here should be taken to mean that such ministers are either “less than” or an unwelcome development. It does mean, however, that their development raises new questions and challenges for modeling, communicating, and training young persons for lives of full-time, formal ministry. And that we ought to be identifying and addressing those questions and challenges now, for they are as urgent as any problem facing the church today.

Digital ash

I'm on the record regarding "streaming" the sacraments, or otherwise digitally mediating the celebration of the Eucharist. With Lent approaching, the question occurred to me: Might churches "stream" Ash Wednesday? That is to say, would they endorse or facilitate the self-imposition of ashes?

Nonsense, was my initial thought. No way. Of course not. Who would suggest such a thing?

But that was naive. Surely, after almost a full year of administering the body and blood of Christ to oneself at home, the imposition of ashes upon one's own forehead at home is but a small leap; indeed, it is not so much a leap as a logical next step. If the blessed sacrament admits of auto-administration via digital consecration, how much more so the rites of Ash Wednesday?

I am prepared, therefore, for digital ash. Which is another way of saying that I am praying: Lord, deliver us from Covidtide.

Peter van Inwagen on disciplinary hubris, relevant expertise, expectations of deference, and ordinary prudence

In the early 1990s the philosopher Peter van Inwagen wrote an essay called "Critical Studies of the New Testament and the User of the New Testament." It is a long, detailed philosophical investigation of the epistemic nature, or status, of academic biblical scholarship; specifically, it asks whether ordinary Christians or readers of the Bible ought to consult such scholarship, or defer to its judgments, prior to or in the course of their readings of the Bible or accompanying theological judgments. After many pages, his answer is a firm No. Here are the final paragraphs of the essay (bolded emphases are mine):

I conclude that there is no reason for me to think that Critical Studies have established that the New Testament narratives are historically unreliable. In fact, there is no reason for me to think that they have established any important thesis about the New Testament. I might, of course, change my mind if I knew more. But how much time shall I devote to coming to know more? My own theological writings, insofar as they draw on contemporary knowledge, draw on formal logic, cos­mology, and evolutionary biology. I need to know a great deal more about these subjects than I do. How much time shall I take away from my study of them to devote to New Testament studies (as opposed to the study of the New Testament)? The answer seems to me to be: very little. I would suggest that various seminaries and divinity schools might consider devoting a portion of their curricula to these subjects (not to mention the systematic study of the Fathers!), even if this had to be done at the expense of some of the time currently devoted to Critical Studies.

 Let me close by considering a tu quoque. Is not philosophy open to many of the charges I have brought against Critical Studies? Is not philosophy argument without end? Is not what philosophers agree about just precisely nothing? Are not the methods and arguments of many philosophers (especially those who reach extreme conclusions) so bad that an outsider encountering them for the first time might well charitably conclude that he must be missing something? Must one not devote years of systematic study to philosophy before one is competent to think philosophically about whether we have free will or whether there is an objective morality or whether knowledge is possible?—and yet, is one not entitled to believe in free will and knowledge and morality even if one has never read a single page of philosophy?

Ego quoque. If you are not a philosopher, you would be crazy to go to the philosophers to find anything out—other than what it is that the philosophers say. If a philosopher tells you that you must, on methodological grounds, since he is the expert, take his word for something—that there is free will, say, or that morality is only convention—you should tell him that philosophy has not earned the right to make such demands. Philosophy is, I think, valuable. It is a good thing for the study of philosophy to be pursued, both by experts and by amateurs. But from the premise that it is a good thing for a certain field of study to be pursued by experts, the conclusion does not follow that that field of study comprises experts who can tell you things you need to attend to before you can practice a religion or join a political party or become a conscientious objector. And from the premise that it is a good thing for a certain field of study to be pursued by amateurs, the conclusion does not follow that anyone is under an obligation to become an amateur in that field.

This is very close to some of the depreciatory statements I have made about the authority of Critical Studies. Since I regard philosophy as a Good Thing, it should be clear that I do not suppose that my arguments lend any support to the conclusion that the critical study of the New Testament is not a Good Thing. Whether it is, I have no idea. I don't know enough about it to know whether it is. I have argued only that the very little I do know about Critical Studies is sufficient to establish that users of the New Testament need not—but I have said nothing against their doing so—attend very carefully to it. (God, Knowledge, and Mystery [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995], 189–190)

The choice quote here, reduced to a general maxim:

If an [expert in X] tells you that you must, on methodological grounds, since he is the expert, take his word for something, you should tell him that [X] has not earned the right to make such demands.

One cannot substitute just anything for "X," but one can substitute most things, and certainly anything outside the hardest of hard disciplines. Any and all discursive practices and realms of knowledge in which prudence is required or normative questions are involved, or in which ongoing contestation, adjudication, and dissent are prominent or at least typical, are by definition substitutable for "X." Moreover, if a legitimate expert in X attempts to mandate deference to her authority, but in this case regarding not X but Y, the attempt is patently fallacious, mendacious, confused, and absurd. One owes such an attempt and such an expert little more than an eye-roll, though laughter and mockery are warranted.

Let the reader understand.

Between pandemic and protest: introducing The Liberating Arts

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to join a group of gifted Christian scholars with an idea for a grant proposal. The idea was to respond to the crisis facing institutions of higher education, particularly liberal arts colleges, proactively rather than reactively. That is, to see the moment—pandemic, protest, political upheaval, demographic collapse, threats to the future of the liberal arts on every side—as an apocalyptic one, in which deep truths about ourselves and our culture are unveiled, as it were, from without. What to do in light of those revelations? How to shore up the ruins, and more than that, to articulate a positive and hopeful case for the institutions and areas of expertise to which we all belong, and by which we have been so profoundly formed, in the midst of so many competing challenges and voices?

Led by Jeff Bilbro, Jessica Hooten Wilson, Noah Toly, and Davey Henreckson, the proposal was approved and we received the grant from CCCU. Earlier this month the project launched, and The Liberating Arts was born. Go check it out!

Here's the description from the About page:

COVID-19 has been apocalyptic for higher education, and indeed for our nation as a whole. It has intensified pressures already threatening liberal arts education: concerns over the cost of college, particularly for majors without clear career outcomes; the popularity of professional degrees with large numbers of required credits; the push for badges or micro-credentials as alternatives to a four-year degree; declining birth rates; the growth of online programs and other hybrid forms of “content delivery.” Concerns over the practicality of the liberal arts intensify ongoing questions about the very idea of moral formation central to this tradition. And within our nation, the pandemic has exacerbated preexisting inequalities and racial injustice. Pandemic conditions have fueled a surprisingly robust protest movement that is powerfully, and inspiringly, raising questions too often ignored by Christian educators. These are particularly pressing issues for Christian colleges and universities, which situate career preparation, moral formation, and critical inquiry within a broader vision for spiritual vocation. 

This project gathers faculty from a variety of institutions to lead conversations regarding the enduring relevance of the liberal arts. We welcome you to watch or listen to these conversations and participate in these vital discussions. The 2020-2021 academic year will likely prove an inflection point for higher education as the coronavirus pandemic and #BlackLivesMatters protests accentuate financial difficulties and surface mission ambiguities. Might it be a tipping point in a positive direction, as institutions seek to better equip students for the complexities facing them? Our conversations will enable colleges and universities across the country to learn from one another in addressing these challenges and opportunities, and they will encourage these institutions to draw on the rich heritage of the liberal arts tradition, while acknowledging its historical limitations, in shaping their responses. Our goal is to think and talk in public about the enduring value of the liberal arts for the particular concerns and challenges of our time.

Other members of the project include Jonathan Tran, Angel Adams Parham, Francis Su, Stephanie Wong, Greg Lee, Rachel Griffis, Kristin Du Mez, Joseph Clair, and Joe Creech. Each week we will be posting 2-3 video interviews with different leading scholars, thinkers, and writers from a variety of backgrounds and institutions. The interviews will track with one of four main thematic "channels" on the website: questions about the liberal arts of a definitional, formational, institutional, or liberational sort.

Already we have videos up featuring Willie James Jennings, Zena Hitz, Alan Jacobs, Karen Lee, and Francis Su. We have many more in the can or scheduled, including my own interview of Alan Noble, which should be posted next week.

I encourage you to peruse the site, watch/listen to the interviews, and share what will hopefully develop into a useful resource with as many others as you can!

10 thoughts on colleges reopening

1. Not every college is the same. There are community colleges, private colleges, public colleges. Some have 1,500 students, some have 50,000 students. Some are in rural areas and small towns, some are in densely populated urban centers. Some have wild and uncontrollable Greek life, some (very much) do not.

2. Not every place is the same. There are regions, locales, and states that are still hot spots on lockdown, and there are others that are in rather better shape.

3. Not every institution is the same. Some are cash-strapped or risk-averse or profit-driven or top-down—or what have you—and some have resilient and time-honored habits of shared governance.

4. Not every professor is the same. This applies not only to characteristics like age or discipline but also to personal judgment or preference: universities are not split, in a perfect dichotomy, between administrators who are pushing forward with reopening and faculty who are pushing back.

5. Economic pressures are real. Although it is a sad and lamentable fact, American higher ed is a teetering tower ready to topple over at any moment. Without relitigating the relevant history, that is where things stand. Many, perhaps most, colleges were forced to make an impossible decision: reopen residential instruction, or initiate systematic lay-offs, firings, departmental cuts, and program eliminations. If the latter would have been truly unavoidable, how many staff and faculty would have opted to go fully online?

6. Students and families have agency. No one and nothing is forcing students to return to campus; if families preferred doing a gap year, getting a job, or learning online, there are readily available options for all three of those routes. Students and their families are making their own assessment of the risk. It is far from irrational to select residential college instruction, given the options.

7. Consider the alternatives for students. If a 20-year old who would be in college isn't in college, what is she doing? Either she is quarantined at home, working (likely not from home), or living it up with friends. The latter two options entail levels of risk commensurate with or far greater than residential college life. And the first follows on the heels of six full months of functional social lockdown, in the best of circumstances alone with a couple family members, in the worst trapped in dysfunctional households with negligent or unhealthy persons. We are only beginning to reckon with the effects of such extended isolation on young persons' mental health. In any case, there is no prefabricated universal calculus for what would be best for each person: continued isolation versus greater risk of exposure, and if the latter, at work or at college. Given the fact that so many families have chosen to send their children to college, shouldn't we presume a reasonable assessment of the risk and of the various options, and respect the possibility that such a decision was wise (or, again, the least bad choice, given the options)?

8. It follows from all of these reflections that there is no one-size-fits-all judgment upon "American colleges reopening." I have no doubt that some colleges should not have reopened; that some could have done so wisely but have not implemented adequate precautions; that some made the decision largely out of fear; that most did so as a financial necessity; that plenty did so cynically, hoping to make it long enough to capture non-refundable tuition. But those facts, in the aggregate, have little to say regarding particular cases; nor still do bad actors or even commonly held bad motivations per se mean that most colleges should not have reopened. The need for tuition and the precarity of jobs, on the one hand, and the rational desire of families to have a residential college to send their children to, on the other, can all coexist together.

9. What has been ascendant these last few months is a species of scientism that supposes questions of politics and prudence can be answered by experts in epidemiology and pandemics. But they cannot. What is needed instead is wisdom, the virtue of phronesis that puts practical reason to work in making global judgments, in light of all the evidence and the totality of factors, about what is best to be done in this case for this person for these reasons. Those reasons cannot be put under a microscope or studied in a lab. They are not verifiable. But resort to them is what is sorely needed in this moment.

10. In addition to wisdom, what we need is grace. Prudence can be applied differently; different people come to opposed judgments, either about distinct cases or about the same one. That is okay. We can live with that. I understand and respect those friends and writers and fellow academics who think reopening is foolhardy or unwise; I know they have their reasons. But such a judgment, even if correct, is not self-evident or uncontested. We have to have grace with one another, we have to learn how to be patient. I myself am impatient in the extreme. We have to try nonetheless (I have to try). That's the only way we're going to get through this together.

Covid, church closures, and three rationales for worship

Why do people go to church? Why do churches gather for worship on Sunday morning?

I've been asking myself this question in light of the lockdown and subsequent church closures and shifts to online streaming. And the question isn't theological so much as sociological.

After all, ordinary Christians don't go to church according to highly technical doctrinal articulations of the sort offered by systematic theologians. They have much more banal or quotidian or subjective reasons.

That's not to say those reasons aren't theological. Only that we shouldn't resort to high-level dogmatic language to explain lay folks' behavior or reasoning—or even local congregations' or parishes'. (In the case of the latter, the question isn't so much what they say explicitly but what their organization and enactment of worship "says"; what unspoken logic is embedded, implicit, in their actual liturgical practices.)

Part of the motive for thinking about this concerns the other side of society-wide lockdowns: Why would or should churches reopen? How urgent is the need or desire to do so, at the objective or subjective level? What motivates individual members of churches to delay or hasten reopening?

Here's my answer. I think, broadly speaking, there are three inner rationales for American churches' gathering for worship: sacrament, fellowship, and experience. Let me unpack these briefly.

First is sacrament. This group comprises catholic and liturgical churches ordinarily led by priests: Anglican, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, perhaps Lutheran or even sometimes Methodist traditions. Why does one go to church? Why does the church gather? Among other reasons, to receive the holy sacrament. That is the thing, the sine qua non, of Christian worship. Moreover, one cannot partake of it anywhere else. To quarantine under lockdown is one and the same as to fast from the body and blood of Christ.

Second is fellowship. This group would likely cover every manner of church across nearly all denominations. I leave "fellowship" unqualified, since it can refer simultaneously to communion with God and with fellow believers. But the emphasis is on the fellow-feeling of being gathered together with sisters and brothers in the unity of the corporate body of Christ. Such fellow-feeling is far from a natural property or a mere subjective experience; it is a spiritual and communal fact: this body of believers, right here, assembled in this space, are the sign and site of God's presence in the world. Why gather, then? Among other reasons, to enact and participate in the fellowship that Christ's Spirit makes possible when disciples congregate to worship God and hear from his word.

Third is experience. This group includes those other Protestant and especially "low church" traditions that emphasize the subjective aspect of worship. Certainly these churches are going to trend charismatic and Pentecostal, but they also include decidedly non-charismatic evangelical and non-denominational churches that place a premium on the concert-level quality of the praise band's leading of Sunday morning worship. In many ways these churches put on a weekly performance, and what attendees come for is to experience that performance. (NB: The highest of high-church liturgy is also a kind of performance, indeed a kind of extended drama; so the term itself is neutral, not pejorative.) Believers in these traditions and congregations wake up on Sundays and gather with others in order to experience what can only be had then and there: the communal, emotional, and (sometimes) charismatic energy and power of the Holy Spirit at work in mighty ways to make known the promeity—the for-me-ness—of God's love in Christ.

Suppose this typology is near the mark. What then does it say about church closings and reopenings under Covid?

First, fellowship-churches have the least intrinsic urgency to reopen. Why? On the one hand, because however attenuated, worship from home is a possibility for such communities. On the other hand, because the very thing sought in assembled worship is supremely difficult to achieve in a pandemic; mandatory mask-wearing, social distancing, no hugging or coffee hour or any of the other common ways the body is built up—these all mitigate the possibility of fellowship, both horizontal and vertical, in the extreme.

Second, sacrament-churches have the strongest inner rationale to reopen, indeed never to have fully closed in the first place. Many priests have continued unceasingly to say Mass or lead the Divine Liturgy since March, sometimes alone, sometimes with deacons or assistants, sometimes with half a dozen or so parishioners. Why? Because God ought still to be worshiped in the appointed manner by his ordained servants who stand in for, which is to say represent, the people as a whole. And because there is no digital Eucharist, no streaming sacrament, no self-feeding or solo consecration available to believers at home. (Perhaps, in fact, they view from afar and receive the sanctified elements later that day, distributed by the priest to congregants in their homes.)

Third, experience-churches are in something of a bind. On the one hand, there is a sense in which church members can participate from home: if worship is akin to a musical (or didactic!) performance, then YouTube was made for such things. On the other hand, streaming a concert and attending one are two distinct experiences. So the longer the lockdown lasts, the stronger the desire to return to in-person worship. The question for leaders at such churches is fourfold, however. First, if you build it, will they come? That is, what if your people's cautions about Covid are greater than their subjective desire to have the experience? Second, what of health precautions in worship? It's difficult to have unfettered communal experience of the Spirit in accordance with CDC guidelines (a la fellowship-churches above). Should such precautions go to the wind, given the importance of worship, or no? Third, if a church's particular appeal is the quality of the experience it has to offer, what happens when (a) the experience is no longer there to be had and/or (b) onetime attendees do some digital church shopping and find superior experiences elsewhere? Relatedly, and last, what if such church-shoppers realize the experience isn't appreciably different at home, and that streaming worship from the comfort of one's home—at a time one chooses, in a medium one prefers, while eating a snack or wearing pajamas—is preferable to the analog rigors of actually getting up and going to a physical building with other people?

I know pastors, ministers, elders, and other church leaders are asking themselves these and many other questions. I don't envy them. But it's useful to realize that not all churches are the same; not every Christian or parish has the same inner rationale for gathering or regathering under ordinary, much less extraordinary, conditions. At the very least, it's going to be illuminating to see what the American church looks like on the other side of the pandemic.

An update

I've not written much on the blog these last few months, but I've been busy in the meantime. I'm hoping, though, to get back into my self-imposed charter of "mezzo-blogging," some happy midpoint between tweet-length commentary and full-blown (intimating to find the time for) essays. So here's what I've been up to during my absence, together with what's on my plate for the present and near future.

1. Covid, obviously. Everything hit during our spring break, and students never returned to campus. I've written a few things Covid-related, though I've wanted to find the time to write more. We'll see if I get anything out before school returns.

2. I revised an article for publication in the Journal of Theological Interpretation. It'll come out in the first issue of 2021. It's called "What Are the Standards of Excellence for Theological Interpretation of Scripture?" It's 15,000 words, double the usual limit for the journal. I'm grateful to them for making the exception, and excited to see it appear.

3. I wrote a long review essay of N. T. Wright's Gifford lectures for the Los Angeles Review of Books, where I've written similar pieces before on David Bentley Hart, Patrick Deneen and James K. A. Smith, and Paula Fredriksen. I'm hopeful it will come out this fall. (My editor there, who is supremely gracious, has also extended me some slack on the word count. He's a mensch.)

4. Once the semester was complete—a real endurance test, since both my wife and I teach at ACU, and we had four children 7 years old and under at home with us as we transitioned and taught online—I had 15 weeks ahead of me in which to complete two major book-length projects. The sixth week we took off for a family vacation, and the fifteenth week is full of pre-sessions, meetings, and other "welcome back" activities. So effectively that meant 13 weeks, usually working four days each week, about 6-7 hours per day.

5. The first five weeks were devoted to revising my manuscript (drafted last fall) for The Doctrine of Scripture in the Cascade Companions series. I finished a full penultimate draft, and am very happy with it. I over-shot the word count, though, so this fall I'm going to be working on trimming it down to size. Which, I trust, will only increase its clarity, substance, and readability. I am a fan of small books, but they're harder to write than the larger sort! In any case, it'll be a semester of killing my darlings, all those darn adverbs and dependent clauses cluttering the page.

6. Following vacation, I've given the remaining eight weeks to a revision of my dissertation for Eerdmans, titled The Church's Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context. This one's been a bear, for a few reasons. First, it turns out sentences written by 2015 me are unsatisfactory to 2020 me. So a lot of re-writing. Second, the dissertation-ness of it all. Gotta tear out that academese root and branch. Third, dropping the word count from ~175,000 words to ~140,000. Again, that can only improve the project, but it's been more drudgery than I was anticipating. Writing and even editing has always been a pleasure to me, but this one's been a pain. So be it. I'm grateful for the contracts and the opportunity. Lord willing, both manuscripts will be emailed off by Christmas, and I'll be a free man come January.

7. The next manuscript isn't due till end of year 2022, and that one's the 25,000-word entry in Lexham's "Christian Essentials" series called The Church: A Guide to the People of God. So while I might draft some chapters next summer, most of 2021 will be reading, reading, reading.

8. Having said that, two other short-term projects worth mentioning. One is that I have the privilege of curating a symposium in the journal Political Theology on Karen Kilby's new book, God, Evil, and the Limits of Theology. That should come out late this year, perhaps early next year, depending on the ability of contributors to receive books and get responses out. I won't share the lineup just yet, but just know that when you see it your eyes are going to bug out of your head.

9. The second project is part of a Templeton grant, which I was generously rewarded through Biola University's Gratitude to God project (GTG). I'll be researching and writing on the difference that the doctrine of God makes for a Christian grammar of gratitude. That'll occupy most of my time in 2021. I'm honored to be a part of the project as a junior scholar. I can't wait to meet and learn from those involved in it, especially from other disciplines.

10. Speaking of grants, my home institution, ACU, awards internal grants for faculty research, and I was also fortunate to receive one of those this spring, primarily for my work this summer on turning the dissertation into a book. The grant meant my wife and I could rely on childcare for our youngest two kids this summer, and I could afford to decline teaching a summer course. Lord willing and the creek don't rise, by Christmas 2021 I will have not one but two books published, an article in JTI, an essay in LARB, a symposium in PT, an article in the works from my research on GTG, and maybe some scattershot essays online or in magazines. In the midst of a global pandemic, I'll take it.

11. Otherwise, we've been taking quarantine very seriously. Our kids (as of this coming September, 2, 4, 6, and 8 years old, respectively) have borne the lockdown as well as could be hoped. We've reopened modestly, seeing other families outdoors while social distancing. Besides that, we're mostly just hunkered down and are doing our best to stay sane.

12. I've yet to mention the way in which Covid has rocked and is continuing to rock higher education. That's largely because (a) I still have a job and (b) worrying about it is bad for my mental health. Once I knew I would have a job for AY 2020–2021, I did my best to let go of all the anxieties besetting friends and colleagues around the country, put my head down, and got to work. I've waited to prepare for the fall, for the most part, because it hasn't been clear what exactly the semester would look like. But as of now, the plan is that we will be teaching in person, with students returning one month from now. We're taking all the necessary precautions—mandatory masks, social distancing, hybrid pedagogy, larger classrooms for smaller class sizes, no large gatherings indoors, office hours outdoors or on Zoom, etc., etc.—but the truth is nobody knows what the lay of the land will look like come Labor Day, much less Halloween. We'll be done with residential learning by Thanksgiving, anyway. I don't envy those making these decisions, not least when making alternative choices would mean firing scores of people. Everyone in my orbit here is extending one another a lot of grace. My bosses are the best in the business, and understand what it means to have two children in elementary school and two others in preschool while teaching undergraduates with a 4/4 load in the midst of a pandemic. Few are as fortunate as we are, and I am profoundly grateful to be here, now, even amid so much uncertainty. (Did I mention there's an election in November? And perhaps another mutation of the virus awaiting us in the winter? Oh, and a summer-long nation-wide reckoning with a centuries-old legacy of systemic racism? And protests and riots and institutional upheaval? And an as-yet-unreckoned-with crisis of childcare and education facing us down in the public school system this fall? And, and, and, and ... )

It's been a year, in other words. And we're only halfway through. Lord have mercy on all of us. Blessings on each of y'all in these bewildering and trying times.

New essay published: “Be Fearful as Christ Was Fearful"

Over at Mere Orthodoxy, Jake was kind enough to publish a reflection I wrote on life in a pandemic. I actually wrote it all the way back in March, just as Covid was ramping up, when there were all kinds of calls from Christian writers, pastors, and thinkers to "not be afraid" or to be "free from fear." I use St. Maximus to discuss the role of fear in the Christian life, rooted in the presence of natural fear in the life of Christ. It's called "Be Fearful as Christ Was Fearful," and here's a taste of what I'm up to:

In other words, what we see in the Garden is not for show. It is not fantasy or fiction. Christ, because he is truly and naturally human, fears death the way any bodily creature might: for to be destroyed is not good, does not belong to an unfallen world. His humanity recoils from the prospect of the passion, not out of lack of trust in the Father or uncertainty in his vocation, but because he is like unto us in every respect apart from sin. As God with us, he is one of us. And it is only human to shrink before death, even death on a cross.

But Maximus wants us to see that that is not the end of the story, because Christ’s solidarity with us is always redemptive, and so it is here, too. His fear is part of his saving work in that it is exemplary for us. For, far from obstructing his obedience to God, Christ’s natural fear becomes the occasion for it. 'Not my will but thine' is the cry of a heart faithful to God in the presence of fear, not in its absence. It is the cry of courage, which is the virtue that knows the right thing to do, and wills to do it, when disavowal of fear would mean self-deception or recklessness. In this Jesus is our pioneer, the trailblazer of truly human courage, precisely in that moment when fearlessness would be foolish. For the will of the Lord outbids even our rational fears.

In this way, Maximus helps us to see what Christian fear might mean. All of Christ’s action is our instruction, as Aquinas says. Here too: we live as Christ lived, die as he died, suffer as he suffered, fear as he feared. If we are to grieve as those with hope, but still to grieve, so are we to fear as those with faith, but still to fear.

Read the whole thing here.

A prediction for post-pandemic life

Very little, if anything, will change.

That's my prediction. Let me clarify what I don't mean, before I say what I do.

What I don't mean is that there won't be personal, economic, structural, and political consequences. There will be, in all kinds of ways we can and can't predict. Many people will have had Covid-19 symptoms and lived to tell the tale; many more will know someone, or know someone who knows someone, who died as a result of the virus. The U.S. and other Western nations may indeed pursue "conscious uncoupling" from the Communist regime in China; that spells uncertainty and international friction for decades to come. Supply lines, products, and consumer convenience may grow volatile and change substantially in only a handful of years. Perhaps most lasting of all, individuals and families forced into joblessness will have had to live (and may continue living) on a combination of unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, and private charity. Whole institutions, such as higher education, may be utterly transformed as a result of the global pandemic and economic shutdown. Many of my friends will be out of a job and devoid of prospects. I might be among them.

Those features are sufficient to describe a world objectively changed in the interval between "before" and "after." And perhaps this is what writers mean when they speak of how "nothing will ever be the same" or "there is no going back to normal" or "everything will be different on the other side of this."

But when I read pieces that assert variations on that theme, I discern something else. The meaning is both more specific and more general. Something like: Each of us will never be the same; the world as experienced by all of us will be utterly different. And though understandable, I think this is one of those moments that, because we cannot see to the end of it, much less beyond it, our imaginations fail when they attempt to reach forward to "life afterward."

It is true that what we are experiencing is unique. But that uniqueness won't last. Unless the death rate were to unexpectedly and rapidly spike, or the economic shutdown were to last half a decade, life will return to normal in two or three years. Again, that won't mean the conditions of our common life will be good. The financial aftershock may be devastating—but lack of jobs, awful wages, and a bad economy are, unfortunately, mundane features of ordinary life.

What I mean is that you and I won't be different. We will remember what it was like to shelter in place. But life will simply resume, mostly the way it was. The virus hasn't forced us into digging bunkers or sleeping on rooftops; neither the electric grid nor even the internet have gone down; we're not piling ten families into a single domicile, rationing scraps and burning books for warmth. We're living our lives at home—which may be bad or good, claustrophobic or monastic, abusive or supportive, lonely or bustling with multiple generations—but still home, the place to which we retire to eat or sleep on a normal day. And what we're doing when we're not working is cooking, streaming, teaching, cleaning, reading, building, going stir crazy, forming pacts with like-minded neighbors, whatever—we're not hiding in our bathrooms, or tearing down the walls for wood, or boarding up the windows out of fear.

I predict, and it's only a prediction, that in a few years this will have become a strange and somewhat surreal memory. If the economy recovers quickly, that will make it recede into the past even faster than it otherwise would. Either way, we'll be the same people we were before we quarantined ourselves. Our attention will be drawn to the next thing, however smaller or less interesting by comparison to our current moment. This will be this, and that will be that, and we'll move on. We ourselves, and the world we experience around us, will for the most part prove unchanged.

New essay published: “Sacraments, Technology, and Streaming Worship in a Pandemic"

I've got a new piece published over at Mere Orthodoxy called "Sacraments, Technology, and Streaming Worship in a Pandemic." In it I use the work of Neil Postman and Robert Jenson to think about the meaning and "communicability" of sacramental liturgy via mass media and digital technology, then draw some conclusions for streaming worship online today, separated as we are from public gatherings of Christ's body. I also come down pretty hard against celebrating the Lord's Supper during this unusual time of "social distancing." I hope it's useful for others, even and especially those who disagree. Blessings, and stay safe out there y'all.

A clarification on streaming worship

Earlier today I wrote a post reflecting on the phenomenon of churches streaming worship to their members quarantined at home and the difference that catholic and evangelical traditions of worship make for what that means. My brother, who is a pastor, called me up and shared that he thought either that the post was in poor taste or that it was hastily and unclearly written, and might communicate the opposite of what I was intending. So I took it down, and I'll be thinking here in the next few days about whether there's a way to revise or rewrite what I had in mind. But let me say a few things about what I was attempting to articulate, especially for those who read the original post while it was up.

1. I wanted to think theologically about what is happening when Christians live-stream worship, whether that means a sermon, a praise band, mass, or the divine liturgy.

2. I wanted to observe how catholic traditions represent one rationale for streaming worship: the need for a priest and the consecration of the elements—which creates an irony, since those streaming at home cannot partake of the holy sacrament.

3. Whereas evangelical or non-sacramental traditions represent another rationale, lacking the need for an ordained person to preside at worship or consecrate the bread and wine. This suggests a different irony, namely, that such traditions permit households to conduct worship "all on their own," indeed they have long-standing histories of doing so. Which raises the question of why such churches might decide to live-stream worship, and why their members might tune in.

4. Constructively, then, I wanted to encourage these latter traditions to consider looking to their histories of "domestic devotion" and thinking about how to renew them in the minds and habits of their church members. Let a hundred thousand household churches bloom!

5. Critically, though, I wanted to express the concern that when "worship" means "a praise band leading believers in singing," and when live-streaming is mostly centered on that, then low-church traditions and their members have appeared to lose the muscle memory necessary to "do church" together in local, even household, contexts. Which can create, or might reflect, a kind of codependency that is worth recognizing for what it is, which then becomes the condition of the possibility for unlearning such codependency in the coming weeks or months of quarantine.

I hope that helps. Christians, churches, and ministers of every kind are doing all that they can in the face of an unprecedented crisis. Nothing but grace and gratitude to every one of them, including my own.