“Real” movies

There are movies and there are movies. There have always been hacks for hire, but these days it’s less hack directors than hack IP that you’ve got to be on the lookout for. Hack IP is prefab by definition. Not so much too many cooks in the kitchen as no cooks at all: pull off the plastic, nuke it, and you’ve got yourself a movie. The next step, namely eliminating directors altogether in favor of A.I.-generated “content,” is only logical.

Sometimes, though, you’re in the mood for a crowd-pleaser. So the other day, when I had a couple nights to myself, I watched the second and third Equalizer films. The trilogy stars Denzel Washington and all three entries were written by Richard Wenk and directed by Antoine Fuqua. I vaguely remembered the first one, and thought it would be a pleasant, if undemanding, way to pass the time. I thought, in other words, that this was a bit of hack IP, brought to life by a hack writer and a hack director.

To my shame! There are movies and there are movies: some are fake, prefab, assembled by committee, produced by a factory, mindless, visionless, voiceless, toneless; and some are not. The Equalizer 2 & 3 are not classics; they didn’t deserve an Oscar. But they’re not fake. They’re not prefab. They’re “real” movies. And I wasn’t expecting that. Fuqua, Wenk, and Denzel surprised me.

The action in both films is well-executed. It’s what happens in between, though, that upended my expectations. Long stretches of “down time” with seemingly stock characters who, all of a sudden, are shown to have an inner life. What appears to be a minor detour is actually a bona fide B plot pulling the A plot into itself.

Wenk and Fuqua care about characters who, in any other Hollywood blockbuster, would be throwaways and caricatures. Ashton Sanders, fresh off his Moonlight turn, plays a teenage boy in the second film drawn into drugs and violence. Through Denzel’s eyes, Wenk and Fuqua train the audience—many of whom might not identify with Sanders’s character; might dismiss him as a problem; might think they already know his fate—to see him as Denzel’s character does: a sweet young boy, full of promise, caught between worlds. I sort of wanted the action movie to stop entirely and just become about this kid’s future.

Anyway. As I say, these films aren’t all-time greats. But “real” movies, however flawed, are always preferable to fake movies, however technically expertly wrought. And these two made me want to take a second look at Fuqua’s filmography especially. I’ve always dismissed him as merely competent, a professional who can work well with stars for big-budget manly movies. That was a mistake on my part. At a minimum, it turns out that professionalism—not to mention perspective and patience—go a long way in a landscape dominated by hack IP.

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.

Four tiers and/in James Davison Hunter

A reader noted that my post on four tiers or levels of Christian/theological publishing last month owed a debt to James Davison Hunter. He’s right, though I didn’t realize it at the time. As the second half of that post explains, my arrival at the “four tiers” framework was rooted in long-term frustration with limited options of high-quality Tier 2 Christian books to assign to my students, especially books written by women and people of color. Teasing out the tiers helped me to see why I kept bumping up against a wall and where the distribution of sales, demography, audience, and accessible style lay.

But more than a decade ago, Hunter already explained all this in his book To Change the World. I should know, since I’ve written about the book in two different essays while teaching it to students annually since 2017. Consider this me acknowledging my debt!

Here’s hunter on pages 41-42 (brackets and bold are mine):

…the deepest and most enduring forms of cultural change nearly always occurs [sic] from the “top down.” In other words, the work of world- making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. Even where the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites.

The reason for this, as I have said, is that culture is about how societies define reality—what is good, bad, right, wrong, real, unreal, important, unimportant, and so on. This capacity is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain institutions and among certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well-developed networks and powerful institutions.

Over time, cultural innovation is translated and diffused. Deep-rooted cultural change tends to begin with those whose work is most conceptual and invisible and it moves through to those whose work is most concrete and visible. In a very crude formulation, the process begins with theorists who generate ideas and knowledge; moves to researchers who explore, revise, expand, and validate ideas; moves on to teachers and educators who pass those ideas on to others, then passes on to popularizers who simplify ideas and practitioners who apply those ideas. All of this, of course, transpires through networks and structures of cultural production.

Cultural change is most enduring when it penetrates the structure of our imagination, frameworks of knowledge and discussion, the perception of everyday reality. This rarely if ever happens through grassroots political mobilization though grassroots mobilization can be a manifestation of deeper cultural transformation. Change of this nature can only [!!!] come from the top down.

I’ve bolded the “levels” Hunter identifies: (1) popularizers and practitioners, (2) teachers and educators, (3) researchers, and (4) theorists. Pretty much exactly my four tiers. Glad to know I’m in good company on this one. As ever, whatever I know is just what I’ve forgotten I’ve remembered learning from someone else.

In addition, here is a (low-res) image of page 90 in the book, where Hunter lays out what he calls “The Culture Matrix.” It’s three columns of three rows: three tiers or levels (theoretical, higher-ed, and practical) of three types of cultural production (pertaining to the true, knowledge; the good, morality; the beautiful, aesthetics). He puts in bold the types of cultural production Protestant evangelicals focus on and/or excel in—his point being that they neither cultivate nor dominate anything at the level of theory and only some at the level of higher-ed. It’s at the grassroots or ground floor alone that they own substantial real estate:

It’s interesting that here Hunter reduces his number of “levels” from four to three. At least in Christian publishing, I find four more capacious. To use his terms, there’s definitely a difference between lowbrow, middlebrow, upper middlebrow (or low highbrow!), and highbrow simpliciter. In my post, I called these “universal,” “popular,” “highbrow,” and “scholarly.” Another reader suggested a few weeks back that perhaps my use of “highbrow” could be replaced by “professional.” I like that. In any case, the categories would cash out like this: universal/popularizers, popular/educators, professional/researchers, and scholarly/theorists. Some awkward semantic overlap, but nonetheless a general consonance or aptness between the two.

There should be, anyway, since I appear to have taken the idea from Hunter in the first place. For that reason this post should be understood as just one long hat tip to him.

Four tiers in preaching, denominations, other…

Two brief reflections on my post a month back about four tiers or levels in Christian/theological publishing.

First: I think the tiers/levels I identify there apply to preaching as well. But because preaching is different from writing and especially from the genres and audiences each publishing tier has in view, the levels apply differently. Put another way, it is appropriate and good that there is a scholarly level of writing that very few can or ever will read. It is neither appropriate nor good for there to be preaching like that. Perhaps, I suppose, a chapel connected to Oxford or Harvard could justify that sort of preaching—but even then, it should drop down to a level 3 or even a pinch lower.

The exception proves the rule, in any case. Preaching, in my view, should never be above level 2; and the best preaching hovers between levels 1 and 2. Preaching should not assume a college degree; should not assume much, if any, background knowledge; should not assume much, if any, familiarity with popular culture; should avoid jargon; should avoid mention of ancient languages; should not name drop authors; should not make erudite allusions to great literature. Instead, it should be intelligible, accessible, and immediately relevant to a high school dropout in her 60s who never reads and doesn’t watch much TV, whether Netflix or the news.

Does that mean such a sermon will lack substance, heft, weight, meat, sustenance? No. But it does mean faithful preaching, week in week out, is very difficult indeed.

Second: A friend sent me a link to someone on Twitter—his name is Patrick K. Miller—riffing on my four tiers in relation to both church conferences and church traditions/denominations. I don’t have a Twitter account so I’m not able to look at the whole thread, but (a) the conference tiers seemed both apt and funny, while (b) I don’t think the ecclesial analogues quite worked. Here’s why.

It’s true, in 2023, that American Christians self-sort into churches based on education, class, wealth, and culture. That’s a sad fact. Protestants with graduate degrees like high liturgy; whereas evangelicals on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum are more likely to attend charismatic, storefront, or prosperity churches. Granted.

The author’s implication, however, is flawed. I take Miller to be suggesting that the market comes for us all, churches included, and it’s best we accept this self-sorting and (for eggheads like me) avoid condescension. Agreed on the latter, less so on the former. Why?

Because this self-selection by class is neither inevitable nor universal. It’s contingent. It’s a product of a very particular moment in a very parochial ecclesial subculture. Catholicism and Orthodoxy and Anglicanism are all flies in the ointment here (I often group these together as “catholic” traditions). Both past and present, these traditions encompass high and low, rich and poor, over- and under-educated. Nothing could be “higher” liturgically than these communities, yet the type of person who regularly attends them is not indexed by income or number of diplomas.

It isn’t natural, in other words, it isn’t just the way of the world for well-off folks to go “high” and less-well-off folks to “low.” In fact, this very distinction doesn’t exist in many parts of the world. Go to Catholic Mass or Anglican liturgy in Africa and you’ll see charismatic gifts alongside smells and bells. Eucharistic liturgy is the common inheritance of all God’s people down through the centuries, not just the sniffy or effete. We err when we take our current passing moment as a kind of timeless law. Infinite sectarian fracturing, by doctrine and stye and personal preference, is not the rule in Christian history. Religious liberty plus capitalism plus consumerism plus the automobile plus evangelicalism plus populism plus seeker-sensitivity-ism plus so many other factors—all contingent, all mutable, all evitable—brought this situation to pass. We need not accept those factors. We can reject and oppose them, seek to overturn them.

We are not fated to the present crisis of Christian division. Our churches should not cater to it as a given, but fight it as an enemy. Self-sorting by class is only one way this enemy manifests itself. Let’s not pretend it’s a friend. Expel the evil from among your midst.

Biblical critical theory

This morning Comment published my long review essay of Christopher Watkin’s new book Biblical Critical Theory. Here’s a bit about him and the book from the review:

Watkin is a scholar of modern and postmodern French and German philosophy. He has written a number of studies on major contemporary theorists like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Serres. He earned his doctorate at Cambridge and teaches in Melbourne. This is not his first book for a popular audience, but it is certainly his biggest and boldest. Running more than six hundred pages and spanning the entire biblical narrative, the book closely follows the Augustinian blueprint. Watkin wrote the work he sought but couldn’t find in the library stacks: a biblical critical theory, in careful conversation with and counterpoint to the variety of secular critical theories on offer. Each of the scholars I mentioned above (MacIntyre et al.) is catholic in one form or another. Watkin saw this gap in the literature: an evangelical Protestant meta-response to (post)modernity. So he took up the task himself.

As I explain in detail in the review, I don’t think the book succeeds. Read on to find out why.

It’s always a pleasure to write for Comment. Thanks to Brian Dijkema and Jeff Reimer for ever-reliable editorial wisdom, and to unnamed friends who made the argument stronger in the drafting stage.

Decline and its possibilities

Is society in decline? Is our culture getting worse? Is the West less Christian by comparison to the past? And are these things a cause for lament?

Your answers to these questions do a lot of work in locating you in debates among Christians about the state of things today. I’m thinking in particular of anti-declinists, who resist and reject declension narratives as hysterical, overwrought, incomplete, or even unchristian. It occurred to me recently that anti-declinists confuse a number of concepts—which is not their fault, since their opponents often confuse them as well—that are distinct from one another.

First is decline. In what sense decline? In what area(s) of life? Religious in particular? Social, moral, aesthetic, political, economic? Or is the question a matter of net gain/loss? Claims about net loss are always going to be inordinately subjective. Countering a sense of loss in, say, church attendance with an equivalent gain in household wealth is a textbook instance of changing the subject. To be frank, Christians concerned about whether people have left church for good don’t care about the economy. It’s apples and oranges.

The second issue is blame. It’s often assumed that, if things have in some sense gotten worse (over the years, decades, or centuries), then those responsible are them, out there, the Bad Guys. But this doesn’t follow. It may well be the case that things have gotten worse because of us. The culprit, in other words, is Christians. Christians are on the hook for the things they bemoan. The church is culpable for social, moral, or religious decline. The proper response to recognition of genuine decline, then, is not pointing fingers at the world but donning sackcloth and ashes; fasting and prayer; contrition and repentance. (Next is figuring out a faithful path forward, but doing so is still an in-house affair.)

The third issue is judgment. Christians believe that God is Judge. And within history, God’s mysterious providence does not withhold all consequences of the actions of individuals, communities, and nations until the End, but enacts them, in part, in time, as anticipations of the Final Judgment. Our chickens do not always come home to roost. But sometimes they do. And when they do, it is the work of God. In the realm of social or cultural decline, then, Christians are inclined to see the hand of God. And often as not, it is against the church that his hand works. Judgment begins at the house of God. Nor is divine judgment a sneaky way of outsourcing blame back onto the culture. Well, this is God’s work—guess y’all will acknowledge him now! On the contrary, sometimes divine judgment works for the world to the detriment of God’s people. Assyria wins and Israel loses; Babylon wins and Judah loses. Not ultimately, but for quite a while. The gates of hell shall not prevail against the church. But Caesar made thousands of martyrs for a full three centuries before the bloodletting stopped.

The fourth issue is suffering. Not all suffering on the part of Christians is God’s judgment on our sins. But all of it is an opportunity to imitate Christ. That is, to unite out sufferings to his in patient endurance as a witness to the power of his resurrection. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Let us say, even, that the sweat of the saints—the smallest of pains in the mundane challenges of daily discipleship—is likewise the seed of God’s word scattered on the soil of our culture. It is God who gives the increase. All we can do is witness. We are not to seek after suffering. But when it comes, as it always will, in whatever form, our calling is to persevere. Not to whine. Not to complain. Not to eschew martyrdom for a martyr complex. Not, certainly, to feign bemusement at this strange disruption of how things should be, namely, life running smoothly. Life running smoothly is a blessed temporary relief from the ordinary run of things in a fallen world. So even and especially when society is in process of some kind of decline, even and especially if it is religious in nature, the task of the church is the same: faithful witness in suffering.

The fifth issue is hope. To spy decline is not to deny grounds for hope. Hope is in God alone. His promise is sure: the gates of hell will not prevail against the people whose God is the Lord. Nevertheless they will claim victories along the way: provisional victories, but victories all the same. Christian hope lies neither in the absence of decline nor in renewal following decline but in the ultimate victory of Christ above and beyond the waxing and waning of human civilizations. Behold, the nations are as a drop in a bucket. For the Lord, that is, and therefore for the church. A whole political theology is contained in that single verse. The peoples are like grass, which wither under the Lord’s breath; he makes nations rise and fall, but his word stands forever. Decline is both real and inevitable. It is also subordinate to the mission and worship of the church.

If I’ve been training my sights on the errors of the declinists, a few implications follow for anti-declinists as well.

First, decline is possible. To read some anti-declinists, you’d imagine they’ve sincerely bought into the myth of progress. They’re like film critics who tell you, every year, that the movies have never been better. Novels and music and all the other arts, too. Did I mention epic poetry and its public performance and memorization by children? Nothing ever changes, except when it does, and it’s for the better. That’s a mighty dollop of silliness no serious person should countenance. But it’s ruled out a priori for Christians. So for any Christian writer or thinker not driven by pessimism about our age, he or she must at least admit the possibility that decline may happen and perhaps even is happening.

Second, Christian decline is possible. Some anti-declinists read as though, even if a civilization might get worse, the state of the church within that civilization can never get worse. But we’ve already seen that this, also, is a red herring. I often think, in this respect, of Alan Jacobs’ marvelous review of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, which opens with a description of the extraordinary Christian culture of fifth-century Cappadocia created and fostered by saints like Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus. Yet no such culture exists there today. Here’s Alan:

If the complete destruction of a powerful and beautiful Christian culture could happen in Cappadocia, it can happen anywhere, and to acknowledge that possibility is mere realism, not a refusal of Christian hope. One refuses Christian hope by denying that Jesus Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, not by saying that Christianity can disappear from a particular place at a particular time.

Christianity can disappear from a particular place at a particular time. When I read non-declinists, I wish they would begin every paragraph with an affirmation of this possibility. Because most of the time, it sounds as though they do not believe it is possible. Yet we know it is possible, because it has happened time and again throughout history. Which means that people worried about it happening here are not fantasists; they are not hysterical just because they worry about it. Their worry may take the form of hysteria. They may be foolish in their response or ungodly in their lament or wicked in their prescriptions, not to mention their treatment of others. But the worry is valid in principle. The only question, ever, is whether it is a plausible worry given our time and place, and thence whether it is likely. It becomes a cultural question, a hermeneutical question, even in a sense an empirical question. That’s the arena for debate. Not its sheer possibility.

Third, non-declinists have to distinguish not just the mode of pessimism from its judgments but also the judgments from their implications. Bemoaning some particular religious or social loss is not ipso facto an endorsement of everything in the past (whether that past be the 1980s or ’50s or ’20s or 1770s or 1530s or 1250s or whenever the ostensible golden age is said to have occurred). Nor is it a denial that anything has improved. Declinists are on the hook for their rhetoric, which should be nuanced and accurate rather than generic and overblown. But anti-declinists are on the hook, too. They often write like to give an inch is to lose a mile. Any decline means total decline. Perhaps also despair. None of which follows.

The Christian theology of providence is an extraordinary analytical tool. It allows the soberest of diagnoses and the most confident of hopes. It’s always a delicate balancing act. Any Christian who writes about the state of society is going to fail in some way. But we can fail a little less, it seems to me, not least by being mindful of the distinctions I’ve elaborated above.

You can’t die for a question

I had some friends from quite different backgrounds do a bit of interrogation yesterday, following my post about biblicist versus catholic Christianity. Interrogation of me, that is. As is my wont, I sermonize and then qualify, or at least explain. Yesterday was the sermon. Today is the asterisk.

1. What I wrote has to do with a persistent conundrum I find myself utterly unable to solve. I cannot grasp either of two types of Christianity. The first lingers most in yesterday’s post. It is a form of the faith that never, ever grows; never, ever settles; never, ever stabilizes; never, ever knows. Its peculiar habit, rather, is always and perpetually to pull up stakes and go back to the beginning; to return to Go; to start from scratch; to question everything and, almost on purpose, to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Am I exaggerating? I’m not! Primitivist biblicism, rooted in nuda scriptura, affirms on principle that every tradition and all Christians, from the apostles to the present, not only may have gotten this or that wrong but did in fact get just about everything wrong. And this affirmation inexorably eats itself. For what the biblicist proposed yesterday is bound to be wrong tomorrow—that is, discovered by some other enterprising biblicist to belong to the catalogue of errors that is Christian history.

At the same time, this ouroborotic style of Christianity affirms a second principle: namely, the total sufficiency and perfect perspicuity of the canon. Come again? Didn’t we just say that everyone who’s ever read it got it wrong, until you/me? Indeed. Not only this, but the excavationist-reader of the clear-and-sufficient text somehow misses the fact that he is himself doing the very thing he chides the tradition for doing: namely, interpreting what requires no interpretation. The one thing we may be sure of is that his successor, following the example of his predecessor with perfect consistency, will fault him for his interpretation, while offering an alternative interpretation.

This whole dialectic makes me crazy. As evidenced by yesterday’s vim and vigor.

2. Let me put it this way. I understand that there are both people and traditions that embody this dialectic, that don’t see anything wrong with it. What I can’t understand is pastors and scholars wanting to produce such a viewpoint as a desirable consequence of ecclesial and academic formation. My goal as a teacher is to educate my students out of this way of thinking. Why would we want to educate them into it?

I will withhold comment on whether Protestantism as such is unavoidably ouroborotic. At the very least, we may say that the ouroborotic impulse is contained within it. Reformation breeds reformation; revolution begets revolution. Semper reformanda unmasks error after error, century after century, until you find yourself with the apostles, reforming them, too. And the prophets. And Jesus himself. And the texts that give you him. And the traditions underlying those texts. And the hypothetical traditions underlying those.

And all of a sudden, you find there’s nothing left.

Again, I’m not indicting Protestants per se. But there is an instinct here, a pressure, a logic that unfolds itself. And there are evangelical traditions that actively nurture it in their people. I’ve seen it my whole life. It’s not good, y’all! I, the ordinary believer, come to see myself, not as a recipient of Christian faith, but as its co-constructor, even its builder. It’s up to me:

Brad the Believer!
Can he build it?
Yes he can!
Can he fix it?
Yes he can!

And how do I do it? By reading the Bible, alone with myself, at best with a few others—albeit with final say reserved for me.

The faith here becomes a matter of arguing my way to a conclusion, rather than yielding, surrendering, and submitting to a teaching. Cartesian Christianity is DIY faith. It cannot sustain itself. It’s built for collapse. (The call is coming from inside the house.)

3. The second type of Christianity to which I alluded above, which was less visible in the post yesterday, is not so much a species of biblicism as its repudiation. In the past I’ve called it post-biblicism biblicism, though it doesn’t always entail further biblicism. A friend commented that what we need is an account of progressive biblicism, though that’s not what I have in mind either. What I have in mind is, I suppose, what I’ll call know-nothing Christianity. A Christianity of nothing but doubts. A faith reducible to questions.

I take it as given that I’m not talking about asking questions or having doubts, much less mysticism or apophatic spirituality. (Go read Denys Turner. All theology is apophatic, rightly understood.) No, I’m talking about a Christianity that has lost the confidence of the martyrs, the boldness of the apostles, the devotion of the saints.

Put it this way. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. But you can’t die for a question. Christianity is a religion of proclamation. It preaches a message. It announces tidings. It does not say, “Jesus might have been raised from the dead.” It says, “Jesus is risen.” You or I may well have intrusive mights in our struggles with faith. But the church is not a community of might and maybe. The church is a community of is, because she is a people of resurrection. What began in an empty tomb, she confesses, will be consummated before the whole world at the risen Lord’s return.

That’s something to die for. And therefore to live for. I can neither die nor live for a question mark. The church speaks with periods and exclamation points. She errs—her pastors miss the mark—when the faith is reduced to nothing but ellipses and questions.

4. It’s true that I exaggerated the catholic style of magisterial Protestantism. I also may have made it sound as though Christianity never changes; that whatever Christians have always said and done, they are bound always to say and do in the future, till kingdom come. (Though I think if you re-read what I wrote, I couched enough to give the Prots some wiggle room.)

In any case: granted. Preacher’s gonna preach. But here’s what I was getting at.

Christianity simply cannot be lived if, at any moment, any and every doctrine and belief, no matter how central or venerable, lies under constant threat of revision and removal. All the more so if the potential revision and removal are actions open to any baptized believer. Ouroborotic faith comes to seem a sort of vulgar Kantianism (or is it that Kant is vulgar Lutheranism?): heteronomy must give way to autonomy, lest the faith not be authentic, real, mine. The word from without becomes a word from within. The word of the gospel transmutes into a word I make, am responsible for making. I am a law unto myself; I am the gospel unto myself.

Who can live this way? Who can give themselves to a community for a lifetime based on a message (a book, a doctrine, an ethics) subject to continuous active reappraisal? and reappraisal precisely from below? The faith becomes a kind of democracy: a democracy of the living alone, to the exclusion of the dead. And just like any democracy, what’s voted on today will be up for debate tomorrow.

In a word: If Christianity is nothing but what we make of it—an ongoing, unfinished construction project in which nothing is fixed and everything, in principle, is subject to renovation and even demolition—then we are of all men most miserable.

To be sure, the skeptic and the atheist will see this statement as a précis of their unbelief. What beggars my belief is that, apparently, there are self-identified Christians who not only affirm it, but actively induce it in the young, in college students, in laypeople. I cannot fathom such a view.

5. A final thought. I am a student, in different ways, of two very different theologians: Robert Jenson and Kathryn Tanner. Much of what I’ve outlined here goes against what both of them teach regarding the church and tradition; or at least it seems to. Let me say something about that.

I am thinking of the opening two chapters of Jenson’s Systematics and of the whole normative case Tanner makes in Theories of Culture. In the latter, Tanner takes issue with both correlationists (to her “left”) and postliberals (to her “right”) regarding what “culture” is, how the church inhabits and engages it, and the honest picture that results for Christian tradition. There is a strong constructivist undercurrent in the book that would push back against what I’ve written here.

As for Jenson, he argues that the church is a community defined by a message. Tradition is the handing-on of the message, both in real time (from one person/community to another) and across time (from one generation to another). It is not a bug that causes the gospel to “change” in the process of being handed on. It’s a feature. We see this transmission-cum-translation project already in the New Testament. And it necessarily continues so long as the church is around, handing on the gospel anew.

Why? Because new questions arise, in the course of the church’s mission, questions that have not always been answered in advance. Sometimes it isn’t questions at all, but cultural translation itself. How should the gospel be incarnated here, in this place? Among gentiles, not Jews? Among rulers, not peasants? Among Ethiopians, not Greeks? Among polytheists, not monotheists? Among atheists, not polytheists? Among polygamists, not monogamists? Among liberals, not conservatives? Among capitalists, not socialists? Among democrats, not monarchists? In an age of CRISPR and cloning, not factories and the cotton gin? In a time when women are no longer homemakers only, but landowners, degree-holders, and professionals? When men are in offices and online and not only in fields and mines?

The gospel, Jenson says, doesn’t change in these settings. But how the church says the gospel, in and to such settings, does change. How could it not? We don’t speak the gospel in the same words as the apostles, or else we’d be speaking Aramaic and Greek; we’d be talking about idol meat and temple prostitutes and incense to Caesar and Artemis the Great. Now, we do talk about such things. But not as matters of living interest to our hearers. As, rather, samples of faithful gospel speech from the apostles, samples that call for our imitation, extension, and application. We say the selfsame gospel anew in diverse contexts, based on the apostolic example, in imitation of their model. As Barth says in the Church Dogmatics, theology is not a matter of repeating what the apostles and prophets said, but of saying what must be said here and now on the basis of what they said there and then.

In this way, “evangelical” tradition is simultaneously unchanging, fixed, stable and fluid, organic, growing. It’s why, as a friend once said after reading Theories of Culture, the church possesses a teaching office. Magisterial authority of some sort is necessary in a missionary community defined by a historical message expressed in written documents. Someone’s got to do the interpreting, not least when questions arise that the apostles neither answered nor even foresaw.

Hence my roping the magisterial Protestants into the “catholic” version of Christianity. Try as they might, they cannot deny that the doctrine of the Trinity formulated and codified by Nicaea and Constantinople is dogma for the church. It is irreversible, irrevocable, and therefore irreformable. Semper reformanda does not apply here. (And if not here, then not elsewhere, too.) Not because the Bible is crystal clear on the subject. Not because trinitarian doctrine is laid out in so many words on the sacred page. Not because no reasonable person could read the Bible differently.

No: It is because the church’s ancient teachers, faced with the question of Christ and the Spirit, read the Bible in this way, and staked the future of the faith on it; and because we, their children in the faith, receive their decision as the Spirit’s own. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us… It is thus neither your job nor mine to second guess it, to search the Bible to confirm that Saint Athanasius et al did, in fact, get the Trinity right. It’s our job to accept it; to confess it; to believe it. Any other suggestion misunderstands my, our, relationship to the church and to her tradition.

6. A final-final thought; a conclusion to my conclusion.

In my graduate studies I came to be deeply impressed by the underdetermined character of Scripture. The text can reasonably be read by equally reasonable people in equally reasonable ways. “Underdetermined” is Stephen Fowl’s word. It doesn’t mean indeterminate. But neither does it mean determinate. Christian Smith calls the result “PIP”: pervasive interpretive pluralism. Smith is right. His point is downstream from the hermeneutical, though, which is downstream in turn from the theological and ecclesiological point.

I’ve tried to unpack and to argue that point in my two books: The Doctrine of Scripture and The Church’s Book. Together they’re just short of 250,000 words. I wouldn’t force that much reading (of anyone, certainly not of me!) on anybody. Nor can I summarize here what I lay out there. I simply mean to draw attention to a fundamental premise that animates all of my thinking about the Bible and thus about the church, tradition, and dogma. That premise is a rejection of a strong account of biblical perspicuity. On its face, the Bible can be read many ways; rare is any of these ways obvious, even to the baptized. If I’m right, then either the Bible can never finally be understood with confidence (a position I reject, though I have learned much from scholars who believe this) or we ordinary Christians stand under that which has been authorized by Christ, through his Spirit, to teach the Bible’s word with confidence, indeed with divine assurance. Call the authority in question the church, tradition, ecumenical councils, bishops, magisterium—whatever—but it’s necessary for the Christian life. It’s necessary for Christianity to work. And not only necessary. But instituted by Christ himself, for our benefit. For our life among the nations. For our faith, seeking understanding as it always is. For our discipleship.

We are called to live and die for Christ. The church gives us Christ. She does not give us a question. She gives us a person. In her we find him. If we can’t trust her, we can’t have him—much less die for him. They’re a package deal. Accept both or neither. But you can’t have one without the other.

Defining “culture”

I’ve been grateful for the responses I’ve seen to my Mere O essay “Once More, Church and Culture.” Andrew Wilson was particularly kind in a post about the piece.

I’ve especially appreciated folks understanding what I was (and was not) trying to do in it. Not to suggest Hunter’s typology is bad or discreditable. Certainly not to suggest an alternative singular image or approach. Rather, to suggest that the very search for one dominant or defining posture is a fool’s errand, not to mention historically and culturally parochial. I was worried the length and wending nature of the essay would mislead readers. I was wrong!

Alan Jacobs also liked the essay, but was left with one big question: What is “culture,” and why did I—why does anyone, in writing on the topic—leave it undefined? More to the point, “there is no form of Christian belief or practice that is not cultural through-and-through.” In which case it sounds rather odd to pit the church against something the church herself includes and which, in turn, includes the church.

Alan’s criticism is a legitimate one, and I don’t have any full-bodied defense of my unspecified use of the term. I do have a few quick thoughts about what I had in mind and why folks use the word generically in essays like this one.

First, “culture” is one of those words (as Alan agrees) that is nigh impossible to pin down. You know it when you see it. You discover the sense of what a person is referring to through their use. The term itself could call forth an entire lifetime’s worth of study (and has done so). In that case, it’s reasonable simply to get on with the discussion and trust we’ll figure out what we’re saying in the process.

And yet—this intuition may well be wrong, and its wrongness may be evidenced in the very interminability of the post-Niebuhrian conversation. Granted! I’m honestly having trouble, however, imagining everyone offering a hyper-specific definition of “culture” or avoiding the term altogether.

In any case, second, it may be true that Niebuhr made various errors in his lectures that became Christ and Culture, but I’m surprised that Alan thinks—if his tongue is not too far in cheek—that the book should be dismissed. My surprise notwithstanding, I engage Niebuhr in the essay not to defend him but to take up the ideas he put into circulation through his typology; or rather, to display the pattern in his approach, which became the template for so many who followed him.

Third, I would like to point out how I actually use the word “culture” in the essay. I do in fact mention it in the opening sentence, along with similar items in a grab-bag list meant to suggest a kind of comprehensive civic repertoire: “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.” After that, I use the term exclusively in four ways: in scare quotes, in actual quotations, in paraphrase of an author’s thought, or in generic reference to “church and culture” writing—until the final few paragraphs. Here they are:

• “…Niebuhr, Hunter, and Jenson are right to see a dialectic at work in the church’s encounter with various cultures.”

• “As I see it, there is no one ‘correct’ type, posture, or model. Instead, the church has four primary modes of faithful engagement with culture.”

• “God is the universal Creator; the world he created is good; and he alone is Lord of all peoples and thus of all cultures.”

• “When and where the time is right, when and where the Spirit moves, the proclamation of the gospel cuts a culture to the bone, and the culture is never the same.”

• “…[my approach] does not prioritize work as the primary sphere in which the church encounters a culture or makes its presence known.”

• “The mission of the church is one and the same wherever the church finds itself; the same goes for its engagement with culture.”

• “Sometimes … the Spirit beckons believers, like the Macedonian man in the vision of St. Paul, to cross over, to enter in, to settle down, to build houses and plant vineyards. In other words, to inhabit a culture from the inside. Sometimes, however, the Spirit issues a different call…”

In my humble opinion, these uses of the term are clear. Either they are callbacks to the genre of “church and culture”/“engage the culture”/“church–culture encounter” writing, which I am in turn riffing on or deploying for rhetorical purposes (without any need for a determinate sense of the word). Or they are referring to a society or civilization in all its discrete particularity, as distinct from some other society or civilization.

Had Alan been the last editorial eye to read my essay before I handed it in, I would have cut “culture” from the first sentence and replaced most or all of these final mentions with “society” or “civilization.” I don’t think I would have defined “culture” from the outset, though I might have included a line about the term being at once inevitably underdetermined and unavoidable in writing on the topic, that is, on the church’s presence within and mission to the nations.

At the very least, I’ll be mindful of future uses of the term. It’s a slippery one, “culture” is, and I’m grateful to Alan for reminding me of the fact.

Publication promiscuity

Every writer has to make decisions about where to publish. Not just where she would like to be published, but also where she would be willing to be published. All publications have a certain flavor or character, a back catalogue of writers, an ideological bent, an editorial slant, a reputation with readers and other writers.

I often get asked about why I publish with X or Y. I’m not nearly as well or as widely published as others, but here’s what I say in reply.

I am utterly promiscuous in my publishing habits. I would allow something I’d written—taking for granted that I wrote it, I was happy with it, and nothing more than the usual editorial oversight and revising was involved—to be published just about anywhere.

“Just about” rules out a tiny sliver of obviously objectionable venues: nothing, say, that calls or stands for armed rebellion, or racial supremacy, or some philosophy or politics so worthy of contempt that one could not possibly be associated with it or its adherents, much less aid and abet its cause. So if there’s a local chapter of some terrorist militia group with in-house literature, then no, I won’t answer any of their calls.

But beyond that, I’m very likely to say yes, and not with a tortured conscience but with a shrug. Moreover, even my definition begs for clarification. Because whether or not a viewpoint is contemptible is itself baked into the question of where to publish.

For precisely that reason, though, I think writers (and academics and journalists more broadly) shouldn’t worry so much about publication purity. Here’s why.

First, because there is no publication free of error. There’s always going to be some argument or position on offer in the venue with which you would take issue—perhaps serious issue. That’s just called writing in public.

Second, because every publication has skeletons in the closet. No magazine or journal has a blameless, infallible history. They’ve all issued corrections, errata, and apologies. Every one. (Those that haven’t, if they exist, should have; and the episode of their not having done so probably remains a stain on their reputation.)

Third, because no publication knows the future of any writer it publishes at the time of publishing him. So he goes on to be a wicked public personage, infamous for this opinion or that behavior. Editors don’t see the future. All they have to go on is the past in making judgments for the present.

Fourth, because writers are all wicked anyway. My tongue is in cheek, yes, but the claim also happens to be true, in more ways than one. Great writers are often awful people. More to the point, we Christians know that anyone you’ve ever read was a sinner. Every beautiful poem or essay or novel you’ve loved came from a wretched and damnable mind and heart. This doesn’t make the artifact any less lovely, nor does it excuse anyone’s actual sins (great or small). But it puts things into perspective.

Fifth, because publications don’t have cooties. Writing for X won’t infect you; reading Y isn’t contagious. You don’t contract uncleanness by reading or writing for a certain magazine. That’s not the way reading and writing work. Such a mindset is all too common among writers and intellectuals, but it’s childish and unwarranted. It’s the high school cafeteria all over again. Don’t fall for it.

Sixth, because writing for a given venue is not an endorsement, either of the venue’s usual views or of the particular views of any one of its writers or editors. I have no idea why anyone would suppose this, but many do, although typically only selectively—that is, with the “bad” outlets, whichever those may be. Such unthinking (often unreading) guilt by association isn’t worth a second’s thought.

Seventh, because great writers are themselves promiscuous. Some of my favorite writers today are fantastically diverse in where and with whom they will publish, including the most successful and respected. Off hand, I’m thinking of folks like Eve Tushnet and Phil Christman, Christopher Caldwell and David Bentley Hart, George Scialabba and Samuel Moyn, B. D. McClay and Paul Griffiths, or Wendell Berry and Christopher Hitchens in their younger days. Part of the discipline of publishing promiscuity is that it requires you, the writer, to be interesting enough and independent enough that editors at a bewildering variety of venues would kill to feature you, even though you “might not quite fit” with the norm there. Well done then. That means you’re doing something right.

Eighth and last, because writing wants to be free. It wants to get out. If someone wants to publish you, take them up on it. It’s unlikely you’ll regret it. Nor, if you do regret it, do you have to do it again; look elsewhere. But you’ll never be a writer if you don’t get your writing out in the world. Take some chances and don’t be picky, certainly not with active suitors.

In fact, go ahead and consider this post as good as giving you my card: if you want to publish me, you already know my answer.

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.

Malick and Scorsese on confession and martyrdom

The two people to read on Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019) are Jon Baskin (in NYRB) and Alan Jacobs (in The Point as well as his blog). One thing I assume others have noted but that struck me in my viewing is the likeness to and contrast with Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016).

Both directors are 1970s auteurs. Both are Americans born during World War II. Both are Roman Catholic in one sense or another. Both have made multiple films featuring explicitly Christian themes. In fact, within the next year or two, both will have directed films about Jesus of Nazareth himself.

Moreover, both A Hidden Life and Silence are rooted in historical events, though the latter is an adaptation of a novel fictionalizing something that happened centuries prior, while the former is an imaginative evocation of a real man’s life and martyrdom, based on his personal correspondence. As it happens, the execution of Franz Jägerstätter occurred less than four months before Malick’s birth.

Finally, both films are about faith under conditions of persecution, the meaning (or meaninglessness) of suffering, the command of Christ under duress, and martyrdom. Scorsese and Malick come to very different conclusions, however.

To be sure, neither film imposes a particular interpretation on the viewer. Personally, I read Silence against what are Scorsese’s evident intentions: namely, to vindicate Rodrigues’s ultimate decision to step on the fumie, i.e., to repudiate and blaspheme the image and name of Christ. He does so, under impossible pressure, not only from Japanese authorities, who are torturing Japanese Christians before his very eyes, but also from Ferreira, a fellow priest who preceded Rodrigues’s time in Japan. Ferreira wants Rodrigues to see that nothing is gained by not giving in. He is the voice of “reason” absolving Rodrigues in advance of his betrayal. At last Rodrigues does the deed. In a long epilogue, we see him going about his life aiding the Japanese in keeping Christianity out of the country. But when he dies and is given a customary burial, his wife slips a crucifix into his hands—on which Scorsese zooms in the final image of the film.

Again, Scorsese is clear: he wants us to approve of Rodrigues, who saved the lives of believers under his care, relieving their suffering, while keeping the faith quietly, privately, silently. Here Scorsese is wrong both in his theological instincts and in his artistic instincts—he need not try to stack the deck so obviously—yet the film remains patient of other readings, including readings wholly contrary to Scorsese’s own intentions.

Now consider A Hidden Life. Over and over, Franz is asked a variety of the same question: “What are you wanting to accomplish? Your death will do nothing. It will make no difference. No one will even know of it. The only result will be the suffering and shame brought upon your widow, your orphaned daughters, your mother, and your village.” Franz’s calculus, however, is not consequentialist. It’s a matter of principle. He cannot do what he believes to be wrong, even if it will make no difference whatsoever. (And it’s worth noting that basically no one knew his story for decades after his death.)

In a pivotal scene late in the film, Franz’s wife Fani visits him in prison. As they face each other across a table, his lawyer gives him one last chance: if he signs a piece of paper, the execution will be stayed, and he will be permitted to work in a hospital—he won’t even have to fight as a soldier. The only price is the oath of loyalty to Hitler.

With the paper before him, Franz’s parish priest joins Fani at the table and makes the following appeal (this is a quote, not a paraphrase):

God doesn’t care what you say, only what’s in your heart. Say the oaths and think what you like.

This is precisely Ferreira’s advice to Rodrigues. And here it is likewise a Catholic priest meaning well. It doesn’t matter what you do. It doesn’t matter if you repudiate Christ; it doesn’t matter if you deny his lordship and pledge yourself instead to Der Führer. What matters is your heart. Think, feel, believe what you like—quietly, privately, silently—so long as you step on the image; so long as you swear the oath.

Franz refuses. And he never sees his wife again. Soon thereafter he is taken to the guillotine. He is killed “for no reason,” “senselessly,” by his own stubborn refusal to do the “sensible” thing, for the sake of others—his own beloved family. The Nazis kill him in a windowless room away from witnesses or crowds. He dies alone. For what?

The film as a whole is the answer. The rationale underlying it, though, highlights the contrast with Scorsese. Who you are is not separate from what you say and do. “You” are not “within.” “You” are your words and actions—full stop. The distinction between the inner self and external behavior is not a division, much less a chasm separating the real from the ephemeral. As Christ promises: “Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven.”

Confession manifests the self. There is no you except the you who acts in the world. The life and death of Franz Jägerstätter—beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007—reveals this truth, and Malick understands it. Based on the evidence of Silence, Scorsese does not.

Beliefs of the post-Christian West

Early on in Mark Sayers’ 2016 book Disappearing Church he outlines, in the form of propositions, the social imaginary or set of presuppositions that suffuse and animate the contemporary post-Christian context in the West. Sayers is sophisticated; he doesn’t suppose that millions of people wake up in the morning, sign a form with these beliefs outlined in black and white, then go through their day consciously attempting to put them into practice. Rather, they form the tacit backdrop of our common life, the largely (though far from entirely) unquestioned and presumed fabric of society. It’s the water we swim in, the are we breathe. We are certainly able to recognize, articulate, revise, and/or reject them. But they’re there, in us, whether we like it or not.

Here they are:

1. The highest good is individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression.

2. Traditions, religions, received wisdom, regulations, and social ties that restrict individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression must be reshaped, deconstructed, or destroyed.

3. The world will inevitably improve as the scope of individual freedom grows. Technology—in particular the Internet—will motor this progression toward utopia.

4. The primary social ethic is tolerance of everyone’s self-defined quest for individual freedom and self-expression. Any deviation from this ethic of tolerance is dangerous and must not be tolerated. Therefore social justice is less about economic or class inequality, and more about issues of equality relating to individual identity, self-expression, and personal autonomy.

5. Humans are inherently good.

6. Large-scale structures and institutions are suspicious at best and evil at worst.

7. Forms of external authority are rejected and personal authenticity is lauded.

This seems basically right to me, with three amendments: (a) I would make the comment about technology its own separate thesis; (b) I would nix the faith in the internet and leave it more broadly as a comment about technology as such; (c) I would rewrite #6. The pervading spirit of the age is suspicion about structures and institutions, yet a sizable percentage of the population hopes not to abolish their sheer existence, but to seize, conquer, colonize, and control them from within. That’s violent language, to be sure, but the vision underlying the aim is sincere and, for its adherents, benign: if the institutions that guide and govern society are doing so poorly, then we ought to reform them (whether modestly or radically) so as to administer justice rather than injustice, righteousness rather than corruption, flourishing rather than oppression.

With those minor changes, I’d readily sign off on this list as a reliable description of the Zeitgeist. Nor are spheres of life defined by the contrary of this list immune to the beliefs it comprises. Churches imbibe and embody these views as much as and sometimes more than other institutions. This list’s name is Legion, and the exorcisms it calls forth are never a completed task but a daily necessity.

Having said all that, I do wonder to what extent the smoothness with which this list goes down as a diagnosis of our social context is a sign of living in an echo chamber—or at least, reading and writing among like-minded folks, especially Christians of a certain sort. Yet it seems to me that even secular (classical) liberals, non-religious folks, and members of the Left could and, in many cases, would and do agree with this list, granting that they might use different words or strike a different tone than Sayers (or, as the case may be, offer different solutions to the problems it presents). That’s the appeal, I think, of the work of scholars like Bellah, Berger, Lasch, MacIntyre, Taylor, Milbank, Stout, Casanova, Asad, Mahmood, Žižek, and so many others. Sayers is attempting to summarize, synthesize, and render in plain English, for a lay Christian audience, an account of what the church is facing in the West that is not merely, and preferably not at all, a defensive reaction from a newly embattled minority. (He’s writing from Australia, it’s worth noting.) Yet how would others respond to this list? What would they add? The book has me curious to know.

UPDATE: A friend writes to add a fourth amendment: Strike through “tolerance” in #4 and substitute “recognition.” Checks out.

One note on “negative world”

I’ve written twice on the minor internet dust-up over James Wood’s essay last month on the political witness of the church, an essay that contains some modest criticisms of Tim Keller. There Wood uses a framework taken from an essay published last February by Aaron Renn, which was an expanded version of a piece he originally proposed a full five years ago. Many folks have written about Renn’s framework, including (to my mind) most incisively and critically by Jake Meador a few weeks ago.

A simplified version of the framework is that there are three dominant modes of Christian experience in any given social and political context, in this case the American context. These are positive, neutral, and negative. Each concerns the public profession of Christian identity. The question is: On balance, do the nation’s elite institutions together with the persons who lead and occupy them reward, ignore, or penalize the public profession of Christian identity? If the first, then this makes for a “positive world”; if the second, then a “neutral world”; if the third, then a “negative world.”

Renn has a timeline, relatively compressed, whereby before the mid-1990s, America was—again, in the aggregate, on balance, and concerning the mainstream culture as influenced and governed by elite spheres, professions, persons, and institutions—a “positive world.” Then this ambient context shifted into a “neutral world” for a couple of decades before, sometime in the last decade, another shift occurred and we entered a “negative world” for public profession of Christian identity.

In my view, this proposal should not be controversial. The reasons why it has been taken to be controversial are numerous; here’s a guess at a few of them.

First, the focus seems overdetermined by recent history, in particular the fortunes of white evangelicals. Second, the issues that signal loss of status are culture-war fodder like gender and sexuality rather than, say, racism, poverty, and immigration. Third, the framework is liable to being interpreted as one more American-Christian decline narrative: once things we great (because “we” were on top), now they aren’t (because “we” no longer are). Fourth, some of the examples of writers and pastors held up for critique are beloved or perhaps not worthy of it, as with Keller. Fifth, the descriptive nature of the framework is taken to be normative in character, thereby implying that Renn and Wood want to argue that it is harder to be a faithful Christian today than it ever was before in America.

As I said above, I don’t take Renn’s framework to be especially controversial, because if you don’t worry about haggling over the details, it’s self-evidently true; indeed, unless I’m seriously misunderstanding and therefore misrepresenting it, something like it is taken for granted in all sociology and history of American religion published in the last century.

The framework has nothing—I repeat, nothing—to do with the challenge of living faithfully as a Christian, now or at any time in the past. Likewise it has nothing to do with the nature of the gospel or the demands of Christian discipleship. It is not and does not involve any substantive moral or theological claim whatsoever. It is a purely sociological observation about the public status of Christian identity in American life. What it says is simply this:

• Once, it was reasonable to suppose that, broadly speaking, if you claimed in America to be a Christian (or church-affiliated), then that public claim was more likely than not to enhance your reputation and/or social status and/or professional-political-familial-marital-financial prospects;

• now, it is reasonable to suppose the opposite;

• some complex set of factors led from the first situation to the second;

• doubtless a sort of intermediate period covered the time of transition.

That’s it. That’s the framework. Is it false? I confess I’m not even sure what it would mean to say that it could be false.

Note that the proposal as summarized here has nothing at all to do with the substance of Christian faith and morals—nothing to do with orthodoxy. It makes no claim to the “Christianness” of the American republic (or its antecedent colonies) at any point in its history. It’s not about anyone’s heart, mind, feelings, or sincerity. It’s not about a golden age. It’s not about a time we ought to recover or reestablish. It doesn’t even entail that those matters of traditional teaching for which one might be socially or legally disciplined today are either true or of first order importance relative to prior contested issues in American church history.

(It’s worth observing that theological liberalism a century ago would have entailed denial of creedal doctrines—bodily resurrection, virginal conception, divinity of Christ—alongside affirmation of moral doctrines regarding marriage, sexual ethics, and divorce, whereas today the reverse is the case. In other words, the transition from “positive” to “negative” world isn’t per se a transition from “conservative” or “traditional” to “liberal” or “progressive” theology. That particular fight, or dialectic, has been a live one for a full two hundred years, with no signs of abating. For that reason it doesn’t map onto the Renn framework under discussion.)

To take a concrete example, one offered by Alan Jacobs, it was damn hard to be a faithful Christian in the Jim Crow South. A lot harder by comparison to today, with far harsher penalties for following Christ (whatever one’s race) than nearly anyone faces at present. I take that as read. Nevertheless it remains true at the descriptive level, as a sociological fact that publicly professing to be a Christian in the 1950s was—on balance, no matter who you were or where you lived, with relatively minor exceptions—more likely than not to enhance your reputation and/or social status and/or professional-political-familial-marital-financial prospects.

Consider, finally, that this claim does not of itself require approbation (nostalgic, reactionary, or otherwise) of the erstwhile “positive world.” Plenty of Christians might suppose the “positive world” was, on the whole, a bad bet for Christians and/or a raw deal for Jews, Muslims, agnostics, and other non-Christians. Perhaps it created pressure for countless businessmen and politicians to voice aloud a fake faith or a merely civil religion all the while living as pagans in their personal lives. Perhaps this sullied the church’s witness. Perhaps Christians should be grateful to inhabit a “neutral” or “negative” world. Perhaps!

My only point is that it doesn’t matter what one makes of these shifts, nor how one might revise the minor details (dates, epochal events, how hostile contemporary “negative world” really is, and so on). The shifts are real. I’d go so far as to say they’re undeniable. It’s only once we agree about that that we can hold a meaningful conversation—or argument—about the significance, implications, challenges, and opportunities created by the shifts in question.

Inoculation

Over the last year I’ve noticed something of a theme emerging on this blog. The theme is what people, especially Christians, and most of all well-educated Christians, feel permitted or pressured to believe (or not). I think a good deal of my experience of this phenomenon is a function of having lived for eight years outside of Texas or even the Bible belt—three years in Atlanta (technically the South but not exactly a small rural town in Louisiana) then five years in New Haven, Connecticut. At least weekly and sometimes daily a friend, a colleague, a pastor, or a student will remark in my presence about some topic, and invariably the remark reveals that s/he understands it to be outdated, unenlightened, or outlandish. As I wrote yesterday, usually the topic is one I care about and, indeed, the belief presumed to call for nothing so much as an eye-roll is one I myself hold.

I wrote last year about the existence of angels as a case study. At the very moment that certain aspirationally progressive (in west Texas “progressive” means “moderate-to-slightly-left-of-center on certain issues”) seminarians and pastors unburden themselves of belief in superstitious follies like angels—having belatedly received the decades-old message from third-rate demythologizers that celestial beings belong to a mythological age—at this moment, as I say, angels and demons are sexy again in academic scholarship. I could walk through the hallways of the most liberal seminaries in the country holding a sign that read “I believe in angels!” and from most professors it would elicit no more than a shrug. One more reminder that being intellectually in vogue is a moving target; best not to make the attempt in the first place.

But that’s not my point at present. I’ve already written about all that. Here’s my point.

I understand why people feel pressure to believe, or to cease to believe, in this or that old-fashioned thing. Likewise I understand why they assume that I—returning from a half-decade sojourn among the coastal elites, having pitched my tent in the Acela corridor, now with an Ivy doctorate in hand—not only share their up-to-date beliefs but will do them a solid by confirming them in their up-to-date-ness. I get it.

But the secret about having gotten my PhD at Yale isn’t that I learned the cutting edge and now live my life teetering on it. The opposite is the case. I didn’t journey to the Ivy League only to be disabused of all those silly beliefs I came in the door with—about God, Christ, Scripture, resurrection, and the rest. What I received was far better, if wholly unexpected.

What I received was inoculation.

What do I mean? I mean that I learned the invaluable intellectual lesson that knowledge, intelligence, and education are not a function of fads. I learned that substituting social trends for reasoned conviction is foolish. I learned that no one else can do your thinking for you. I learned that coordinating one’s own beliefs to the beliefs of an ever-changing and amorphous elite is a fool’s errand and a recipe for spiritual aimlessness. I learned that smart people are often wicked, and that sometimes even smart people are stupid—in the sense that raw intelligence is no match for wisdom, prudence, and practical reason.

Most of all, I learned that there are no “outdated” beliefs in Christian theology. As Hauerwas might put it, passé is not a theological category. Think of any doctrine or conviction that is particularly unhip today, or rarely spoken of, or even that you might be embarrassed to admit you believe in mixed company. At Yale, and in the circles of folks who criss-cross Ivy campuses and circuits and conferences, I met people who believed in every single one of those unfashionable doctrines, and they were the smartest, most well-read people I’ve ever met in my life. Certainly smarter and better read than I’ll ever be. To be clear, that fact alone doesn’t make them right: their frumpy beliefs may be erroneous. But the lesson isn’t that prestige or scholarly caliber validate theological ideas. The lesson, rather, is that the notion of some threshold of intelligence or erudition beyond which certain beliefs simply cannot across is a lie. Such a threshold does not exist.

In short, if what you want is for folks with an IQ above X or a PhD from Y to tell you what you’re allowed to believe while remaining a reasonable person, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that you can be a reasonable person and believe just about anything. No one above your rank is going to set the terms for what you’re permitted to suppose to be true about God, the world, and everything else. The good news is just a reiteration of these same truths, only in a different register: No one gets to make you feel bad for believing what you do. That’s not a license to believe untrue or foolish or evil things. It’s a liberation from feeling like personal conviction is a matter of not being made fun of by the Great and the Good peering over your shoulder, looking down their noses at you. Truth is not a popularity contest. Right belief does not follow from peer pressure. Be free. Be inoculated, as I was. Ever since leaving I’ve found myself blessedly rid of that low gnawing anxiety that someone is going to find me out, and what they’re going to find is that I’m a deplorable—not because what I believe is actually risible or indefensible, but because for about fifteen seconds of cultural time something I’d be willing to stake my life on (as I have, however falteringly) has become intellectually unstylish.

Style is deceptive, and the approval of the world is fleeting; but the one who fears the Lord will be praised. Fear God, not unpopularity. Your life as a whole will be happier, for one, but more than anything your intellectual life will benefit. Seek the truth for its own sake, and the rest will take care of itself.

Four loves loss

More than sixty year ago C. S. Lewis wrote a book called The Four Loves. Ever since, his framework has proven a reliable and popular paradigm for thinking about different aspects or modes of love. The terms he uses are storge, eros, philia, and agape; we might loosely translate these as kinship, romance, friendship, and self-giving to and for the other. They denote the love that obtains between members of a family, between spouses in a marriage, between close friends, and between humans and God. (This last category is my own gloss; agape is, for Lewis and for the Christian tradition, the love God displays in Christ and thus the exemplary cause of both our love for him and our love for others.)

A thought occurred to me about these four loves, and I wonder if anyone else has written about it.

Our society is awash in loneliness, apathy, despair, and even sexlessness. The youngest generations (“Gen Z” and Millennials) are marrying later or not at all, and (thus) having fewer children or none at all. Divorce is rampant. Kin networks are declining in both quantity and quality, and what remains is fraying at the seams. Regular attendance of church (or synagogue, or mosque) reached historically low numbers before Covid; the pandemic has supercharged these trends beyond recognition. Even friendship, the last dependable and universal form of love, has seen drastic reductions, especially for men. I heard one sociologist, a middle-aged woman, remark recently that our young men are beset by “the three P’s: pot, porn, and PlayStation.” You can’t open an internet browser without stumbling upon the latest news report, study finding, or op-ed column on opioids, deaths of despair, hollowed-out factory towns, fatherless children, lethargic boys, screen-addled kids, housebound teens, risk-averse young adults, social awkwardness, and all the other symptoms of a sad, isolated, and unloved generation. They are like a car alarm ringing through the night. Eventually you get used to it and go back to sleep.

I don’t have anything especially insightful to say about any of this. But I found that, as Lewis’s book came to mind in conjunction with these trends, his framework suggested itself as a useful analytical grid. Perhaps one way to judge whether an individual is flourishing today is whether she can point confidently to the presence of all four loves in her life. A dense and supportive familial network of parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles; a spouse and children of her own; concentric circles of friends who know her well, whom she sees regularly in a variety of settings, and on whom she can rely; a church to she belongs and where she consistently worships and enjoys the presence of the God who created her and continues to sustain her, day by day.

In a sense it’s all too obvious: this description simply transposes into the vernacular the native grammar of the sociologist. We’ve been “bowling alone”—not to mention working alone, dating alone, praying alone—for some decades now; this is nothing new.

Granted! At least for me, though, using the four loves is a helpful way to identify the different ways in which certain loves are present or absent in one’s own life or in the lives of others. I can think off hand of any number of folks who can only count one or two or three of the four loves in their lives. Most of the twentysomethings I know who aren’t uber-churchgoers (as some of my students are—glory be) lack agape, storge, and eros; all they have are friends, and even then, those friends are good for little more than happy hour drinks after work or a concert or club on the weekend. In other words, they barely amount to friends at all.

The Lewis framework also helps us to see the feedback loop of love. Kinship, marriage, friendship, and church (again, feel free to substitute some other religious tradition; I admit readily that I am identifying the institution of religious piety with love for God, for it is in institutions that we embody our loves) each and all reinforce the others. And where one love is absent by unchosen fact—as for those who wish they were married, or whose parents are abusive, or who wish they had more or better friends—the other three loves (a) offer support for what is lacking or lost and (b) provide durable structures in which to persevere and, hopefully, to rectify or supplement the absent love in question.

Peter Maurin once remarked that we ought to labor to forge a society “where it is easier to be good.” That is, the laws and norms, institutions and habits of our common life ought to conduce to virtue—honesty, courage, prudence, kindness, justice, piety—rather than vice. We are social creatures, after all. Likewise we ought to make it our collective aim to build a culture where it is easier to discover, to receive, and to share in the four loves. A world in which the four loves “came easier” would be a world worth living in and working for. Unfortunately, we seem to have done the opposite.

Perennial Lewis

As I’ve written about previously, I’ve spent the last 10-12 months rereading the major works of C. S. Lewis by listening to them on audio. That has meant nearly 20 books, split evenly between fiction and nonfiction. I’m on my last one now (I finished my romp through Chesterton earlier this month), which means 2022 will be wide open for my post-podcast listening habits.

In any case, a few final reflections on Lewis. In particular, on Lewis the apologist and why (a) there has not been a genuine successor to his genius or his stature and (b) why he remains so popular as we approach the 60th anniversary of his death.

1. The first answer is simple: they don’t make ’em like they used to. Lewis describes himself as a converted pagan among apostate puritans, and that’s the right way to read him. Even if he weren’t a first-rate stylist and multifaceted writer (novels, children’s stories, science fiction, literary criticism, poetry, memoir, philosophy, ethics, apologetics), his sheer learning sets him apart. Nor did he gain that learning as part of a strategy for something called “outreach” or intellectual evangelism. He came to the faith ready-made, the product of an extraordinary mind molded by an extraordinary education. I wonder sometimes whether there’s even one Anglophone Christian scholar today under 45 years old who does not spend his or her time regularly on the internet, social media, and/or streaming television. The sheer time given to such trifles (I’m looking at myself here) means ipso facto that one could not hope to reach one-tenth of Lewis’s erudition.

2. The next answer is obvious: the disciples of Lewis are not like Lewis, nor do they aspire to be. They do not come from where he came from; they do not share his education; their overlap with his literary and intellectual affections is minimal. Lewis came to Christ by way of myth and romance, epic poetry and the drama of pagan pleasures. These are foreign to Lewis’s foremost admirers, above all American evangelicals. This is a man who was (until the end) a bachelor who loved rich beer, good tobacco, other men, and talk of dragons. Preferably with a shared knowledge of half a dozen languages, ancient and modern. Whereas those who love Lewis most love him for his side hobby (which, granted, we may assume was his calling from God): putting the complexities of the faith into plain language for common people, against powerful cultural trends. None of them, in other words, is going to have a chance of becoming him.

3. But that’s a negative way of putting the matter. So let me say this. Going back over books I first read twenty years ago, now on the far side of a more or less continuous theological education in college and graduate school, I see now more clearly than ever Lewis’s brilliance. He really was a one of one. As I listen to his most popular—by which I mean not his most successful or beloved but his most vulgar or common—speeches and writings, I am consistently struck by how little has changed (at least, between postwar England and contemporary America), but more so by how excellent his answers are to the questions of the time. By and large they need not, because they cannot, be improved upon. There is no Lewis 2.0 because eight times out of ten, if an honest skeptic asks you a question, you should just point him to the essay or book that Lewis already wrote. If it ain’t broke, etc.

4. There are subjects that Lewis did not address or articulate as well as he did others; these remain for others to elaborate or expand upon. He is not, it seems to me, especially trustworthy on politics. His ecclesiology is thin. Though he can be quite good on sex and gender, at other times he is bad, and occasionally he is plain weird. In his time he was on the threshold—knowingly—of a truly post-Christian society. It was already present in the people, but the trappings remained in law, education, and culture. No longer. What does it mean to take up the baton from him? That is, to evangelize a re-paganized West at once post-Christian and anti-Christian yet also somehow formally and thus morally and spiritually Christian (without knowing or acknowledging it)?

That, so far as I can tell, is the question to ask. Not least because it’s the question he’d be asking. I don’t have hope that there will be another like him anytime soon. But God has done stranger things. At any rate, we can give God thanks for doing the altogether strange thing of converting Lewis to Christ. Lord knows Lewis is on the short list of reasons why I am a believer. How many others can say the same?

Evangelical addenda

As soon as I hit “Publish” on the last post, I felt some unease about how it might come across. I re-read it, and let me offer a few further comments, especially before I go read what anybody else makes of it.

1. My remarks there are meant primarily in a descriptive register. I’m trying to get at a dynamic I feel like I constantly observe, whether in person, in conversation, or in written form.

2. In that sense my post is one more mini-entry in a sort of sociology of American evangelicalism. What is going on with this community? is the founding question. Given that I live in Evangelical Land, I have a few thoughts.

3. I’m continually thinking about this question, since my students are mostly evangelicals, and I want to teach them well. Evangelicalism also (obviously) interacts with our politics and culture in significant ways. I’m thinking of this recent essay, as well as this one from a few years back; the latter essay I take to be one of the best and most succinct analyses of evangelicalism in the past few decades.

4. I imagine my rhetoric sounds more critical in tone than I meant it to be. I’m all aboard for educating anyone, not to mention evangelicals, in the faith and doctrines and ethics of historic Christianity. What I was wanting to recommend, though, is twofold. On the one hand, an awareness, on the part of those who belong or half-belong or once belonged to evangelicalism, that letting go of the evangelical hermeneutic just is to let go of a crucial, perhaps a fundamental, piece of what it means to live and move and have one’s being as an evangelical Christian. If that hermeneutic is a sine qua non of evangelical being, then it is worth admitting and accepting that the loss of one is the loss of the other.

5. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean a chasm separates former from current evangelicals. It doesn’t mean conversation is impossible. What it means it that, even more than awareness, what is required is explicit acknowledgement that one’s aims in teaching, writing, and argument are ordered to, or dependent upon, the student, reader, or listener rejecting the evangelical hermeneutic. It entails as well that one’s arguments that do not operate in accordance with that hermeneutic will just to that extent fail, falling on dear ears, at least for dyed-in-the-wool evangelicals; and thus that if one’s arguments are to succeed, even with the goal of persuading one’s audience to reject said hermeneutic, they must operate on its terms.

6. I am not myself an evangelical, though once or twice I’ve been mistaken for one. But because my own ecclesial tradition is currently in process of being absorbed by evangelicalism; because most of my students and neighbors are evangelicals of one sort or another; because I’ve gotten to know some thoughtful evangelicals over the years; because my research focuses on the doctrine and interpretation of Scripture (a hobbyhorse of evangelical scholarship); and because evangelicalism is such a potent force in American culture and politics, I find myself reflecting, even perseverating, on evangelicalism just about every day. Hence these observations.

7. Evangelicalism is undergoing what appears to me an epochal fracturing in our time, before our very eyes. One sees it everywhere. I see it especially in the relationship between church leaders (pastors, professors, writers) and church members, i.e., the rank and file. That relationship is frayed and fraying. It is often a function of class and/or education. Running parallel with those divisions is theology. Over and over I see the theology and ethics of leaders and of members drifting apart. Neither reflects or represents the other. In effect you have two different churches within a single church: the faith and morals of leadership versus the faith and morals of the pews. That is a real problem. In the case of the original post, I was trying to put my finger on the, or at least one, source of that divide. The presence or absence of the evangelical hermeneutic in leadership/membership is one such source, or so it seems to me.* My goal was to draw attention to that. If I didn’t, allow this post to rectify that error.

*A related but distinct problem that I see is not that either party rejects the evangelical hermeneutic, but that each holds to it on paper but in fact adverts to some other hermeneutic (typically, though not always, experiential, political, or cultural in nature) as determinative of theological judgments. If the second essay I linked to above is right, this dynamic follows the trajectory of Protestant liberalism overtaking, eventually, all churches and Christian institutions, however traditional or evangelical they may have begun as or may continue to claim to be. That phenomenon is worth reflecting on further in greater detail some other time.

A Christian university

What makes a Christian university Christian? Phrased differently, what’s the difference between a Christian university, a “Christian In Name Only” university, and a post-Christian university?

A friend put that question to me recently. I won’t answer in substantive terms (i.e., the sort of beliefs and practices that make a claim to being Christian “truly” Christian). But here’s a stab at a formal answer, in zigzag order.

1. A post-Christian university is one that was founded as a Christian institution, or still technically contains an element of Christian identity (for example, through the presence of an ineliminable but terribly embarrassing seminary on campus), but otherwise exists for all intents and purposes as if none of that were true, or at least that it exists solely in the distant past. Such a university does not advertise itself as Christian, does not encourage its faculty to profess Christian faith or to perform piety in the classroom or with students, and when and where appropriate publicizes its non-Christian bona fides through student life, faculty scholarship, courses offered, and issues and causes supported.

2. A Christian university is the inverse of a post-Christian university (or vice versa). Its Christian identity is up front and center; that is why a family or student would desire attendance there, and the university actively seeks to elicit such desire on that basis. The faculty is entirely or mostly Christian (confirmed through local church membership or the signing of a statement of faith); the staff and administration are as well; the curriculum reflects and incorporates biblical and theological teaching, just as student life does the same with holistic spiritual formation. Chapel is sometimes required and nearly always offered in some form. Professors are encouraged to be involved in students’ lives beyond the classroom and are expected to make their faith known in the classroom through various means (prayer, personal stories, connecting the faith to their discipline). A Christian university’s employees would, in general, affirm the statement that, granting the diversity of doctrinal convictions and moral and political opinions across campus, the institution as a whole is sincerely and legitimately working toward a common end: the formation of mature Christian adults ready to enter the world of work and family with as much knowledge, skills, and faith that the university could impart.

3. A CINO university is somewhere in between these two options, and invariably on a journey from the second to the first. (The transition only happens in one direction.) A CINO university maintains the trappings of its former Christian identity without the full force of its institutional muscle behind it. Its administration largely, though not wholly, lacks either personal faith or the institutional desire to make faith central to the university’s mission. Vestiges of the old way remain—a semblance of chapel, certain curricular oddities, a seminary or religious studies department—but no one quite knows what to do with them (and that includes their members): they are neither resented nor beloved, just there. A CINO university absolutely continues to permit and, at times and in certain departments, solicit and encourage the presence of faith in the classroom, or the integration of faith and learning. But many departments discourage and even look down on this as sub-scholarly practice, bad pedagogy, and/or coercive religious imposition. Above all a CINO university has the feel of a certain momentum, a wind at the back of those key figures leading the charge away from “Christian” toward “post-Christian,” while a small but noble band of resisters—call them reactionaries if you want—fights tooth and nail to preserve the “Christian” as long as possible. But most of this latter group’s allies sees the futility of their cause and can’t quite bring themselves to expend the sort of energy required to support them; best to keep one’s head down and do one’s work. Which, to be sure, they are left perfectly free to do, including if that work is explicitly Christian, theological, or contrary to the moral or cultural zeitgeist. That’s part of what makes the university CINO and not (yet) post-Christian.

In any case, that was, or rather is, my answer to my friend’s question. No doubt the definitions are fuzzy, and real-life cases would either split my terms or call for the overlap of a Venn diagram. But that’s how the situation appears to me at the moment.

The adventure of history

This week I’ve been listening to Ernst Gombrich’s A Little History of the World on Audible. I’ve had it on my shelf for a while but I decided it might be good in audio form. I was right: it is wonderful. I’m a little over halfway through, and it’s been sheer pleasure. Since the original German edition of the book is nearly a century old, it’s been translated into dozens of langues, and the English version came out to wide acclaim almost 20 years ago, I take for granted that I have nothing new to say about the glories of this happy wee volume. But listening this week did bring one thought to mind that’s possibly worth sharing: Gombrich has something to teach us about what it means to tell history as a cultural and pedagogical practice.

God help me from wading into the treacherous waters of recent debates over how we do history, in general and in the classroom. But, if I am going to get wet, let me at least avoid wading and just dip a toe or two in from above.

Here’s Gombrich’s lesson, in all its simplicity: For all its many faults and crimes, errors and sufferings, human history is an adventure. And if you don’t tell it as an adventure, you’re doing it wrong. Why? For two reasons.

First, because unadventurous history is boring—one damn thing after another—and no one, not adults and certainly not children, wants to hear about ancient people in faraway lands doing one damn thing after another. Besides, history isn’t boring, so to make it boring is the hard thing, the perpetual own goal of perhaps the most fascinating subject in the world. In this case, the straight route is the best: make the telling as absorbing as the thing itself.

Second, history should be told as an adventure because nearly everyone and everything (and every time and every place) in history is, by comparison to those who are learning or studying history and their immediate surrounding contexts, different—foreign, alien, strange, exotic: all the words you’re supposed to avoid. And what Gombrich succeeds at most, besides making history both accessible and exciting, is rendering the difference of his subjects to such a degree that, no matter what he is talking about, it sounds attractive, appealing, unimaginably magnificent.

Already by the book’s midpoint, for example, Gombrich has discussed China, India, Greece, Rome, Persia, Israel, and the Arabs, as well as Confucius, Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Aristotle, and Muhammad. Guess what? Every single one of them shines like the sun. Gombrich constantly poses rhetorical questions to the reader, ostensibly a child of 10 or 12 years, questions like “Isn’t that wonderful?” or “Don’t you think that’s marvelous?” or “What must it have been like to be there?” or “Beautiful, don’t you agree?” We hear of a sage’s austere simplicity or a general’s peerless courage or a prophet’s irresistible charisma or a governor’s prudent planning, and we nod along with sympathetic understanding. Even when he is recounting what might appear to modern ears as immoral, cruel, or bizarre, Gombrich maintains a light touch, asking the reader, whether explicitly or implicitly, Why might he have done that? Why might others have celebrated it? Can you imagine living at such a time? What unintended benefits redound to us? There isn’t a high horse in sight. Gombrich knows that history is human, and he never lets you forget that the cultures and peoples and individuals and actions recounted in history are wholly of a piece with you and me, today, because we here and now, like they then and there, are human through and through. That means deception and violence and pain, even as it means glory and love and virtue, too. Above all, in the wide sweep of historical perspective, it means realizing the incalculable debt we owe to our forebears, none of whom we can thank, but a few of whom we can come to know, if belatedly. Mathematics from Arab scholars, architecture from Roman builders, theater from Greek dramatists, justice from Jewish prophets, compassion from Christian preachers, manuscripts from cloistered monks: the gifts keep on stacking up, one on top of another. A child, upon closing this book, apart from wanting to learn more more more about all this fascinating material, will feel in her heart nothing so much as bottomless gratitude, rooted in an unquestionable conviction that the ancients are simultaneously entirely different from her and yet the very same.

That is how history should be taught, or it seems to me. Critique follows understanding; deconstruction follows the building of sturdy foundations. In a word, everything turns on affection. Speaking for myself, as I listen to each chapter coming to a close, it is affection more than anything that wells up in me—at times to the point of tears.

On “anti" films that succeed, and why

More than one friend has pointed out an exception or addendum to my last post on "anti" films, which makes the claim that no "anti" films are successful on their own terms, for they ineluctably glorify the very thing they are wanting to hold up for critique: war, violence, misogyny, wealth, whatever.

The exception is this: There are successful "anti" films—meaning dramatic-narrative films, not documentaries—whose subject matter is intrinsically negative, and not ambiguous or plausibly attractive. Consider severe poverty, drug addiction, or profound depression. Though it is possible to make any of these a fetish, or to implicate the audience as a voyeur in relation to them, there is nothing appealing about being depressed, addicted, or impoverished, and so the effect of the cinematic form does nothing to make them appealing: for the form magnifies, and here there is nothing positive to magnify, only suffering or lack.

So, for example, The Florida Project and Requiem for a Dream and Melancholia are successful on their own terms; my critique of "anti" films does not apply to them.

But note well a few relevant features that distinguish these kinds of movies.

First, no one would mistake such films for celebrations of poverty, drug abuse, or depression. But that isn't because they're overly didactic; nor is it because other "anti" films aren't clear about their perspective. It's because no one could plausibly celebrate such things. But people do mistake films about cowboys, soldiers, assassins, vigilantes, gangsters, womanizers, adulterers, and hedge fund managers(!) as celebrations of them and their actions.

Second, this clear distinction helps us to see that films "against" poverty et al are not really "anti" films at all. Requiem is not "anti-hard drugs": it is about people caught up in drug abuse. It's not a D.A.R.E. ad for middle schoolers—though, as many have said, it certainly can have that effect. In that film Aranofsky glamorizes nothing about hard drugs or the consequences of being addicted to them. But that is more a critique of the way most films ordinarily bypass such consequences and focus on superficial appurtenances of the rich and famous, including the high of drugs but little more.

Third, this clarification helps to specify what I mean by "anti" films. I don't mean any film that features a negative subject matter. I mean a film whose narrative and thematic modus operandi is meant to be subversive. "Anti" films take a topic or figure that the surrounding culture celebrates, enjoys, or prefers left unexamined and subjects it to just that undesired examination. It deconstructs the cowboy and the general and the captain of industry. Or it does the same to the purported underbelly of society, giving sustained and sympathetic attention to the Italian mafia or drug-runners or pimps or what have you. In the first case, the lingering, affectionate gaze of the camera cannot but draw viewers into the life of the heretofore iconic figure, deepening instead of complicating their prior love. In the second, the camera's gaze does the same for previously misunderstood or despised figures. Michael Corleone and Tony Montana and Tommy DeVito become memorialized and adored through repeated dialogue, scenes, posters, and GIFs. Who could resist the charms of such men?

Fourth, the foregoing raises the question: Why are bad things like crime and violence and illicit sex plausibly "attractive" to filmmakers and audiences in a way that other bad things are not? I think the answer lies, on the one hand, with the visual nature of the medium: sex and violence, not to mention the excitement and/or luxury bound up with the life of organized crime, are visual and visually thrilling actions; in the hands of gifted directors, their rendering in film is often gorgeous and alluring to behold. Bodies in motion, kinetic choreography, beautiful people doing physically demanding or intriguing or seductive deeds: the camera was made for such things. Depression and deprivation? Not so much. (A reminder that film is not a medium of interiority; psychology is for print.)

On the other hand, the perennial topics of "anti" films are, as I said in my first post, not wholly bad things. War, needless to say, is a deeply complex phenomenon: just causes and wicked intentions, wise leaders and foolish generals, acts of heroism and indiscriminate killing, remarkable discipline and wanton destruction. War is a force that gives us meaning for a reason. But sex and westerns and extravagant wealth and even organized crime are similarly ambivalent, which is to say, they contain good and bad; or put differently, what is bad in them is a distortion of what is good. The Godfather is a classic for many reasons, but a principal one is its recognizable depiction of an institution in which we all share: family.

One friend observed that, perhaps, films cannot finally succeed in subverting vices of excess, but they can succeed in negative portrayals of vices of privation. I'll have to continue to ruminate on that, though it may be true. Note again, however, the comment above: vices of privation are not generally celebrated, admired, or envied; there is no temptation to be seduced by homelessness, nor is the medium of film prone to glorify it. Which means there is nothing subversive, formally speaking, about depicting homelessness as a bad thing that no one should desire and everyone should seek to alleviate. Whereas an "anti" film, at least in my understanding of it, is subversive by definition.

Fifth, another friend remarked that the best anti-war films are not about war at all: the most persuasive case against a vice is a faithful yet artful portrait of virtue. Broadly speaking, I think that is true. Of Gods and Men and A Hidden Life are "anti-war" films whose cameras do not linger on the battlefield or set the audience inside the tents and offices of field generals and masters of war. Arrival is a "pro-life" film that has nothing to do with abortion. So on and so forth. I take this to be a complimentary point, inasmuch as it confirms the difficulty (impossibility?) of cinematic "anti" films, according to my definition, and calls to mind other mediums that can succeed as subversive art: literature, poetry, music, photography, etc. I think the phenomenon I am discussing, in other words, while not limited to film, is unique in the range and style of its expression—or restriction—in film.

A simple way to put the matter: no other art form is so disposed to the pornographic as film is. The medium by its nature wants you to like, to love, to be awoken and shaken and shocked and moved by what you see. It longs to titillate. That is its special power, and therefore its special danger. That doesn't make it all bad. Film is a great art form, and individual films ought to be considered the way we do any discrete cultural artifact. But it helps to explain why self-consciously "subversive" films continually fail to achieve their aims, inexorably magnifying, glamorizing, and glorifying that which they seek to hold up to a critical eye. And that is why truly subversive literary art so rarely translates to the screen; why, for example, Cormac McCarthy's "anti-western" Blood Meridian is so regularly called "unfilmable." What that novel induces in its readers, not in spite of but precisely in virtue of its brilliance, is nothing so much as revulsion. One does not "like" or identify with the Kid or the Judge or their fellows. One does not wish one were there. One is sickened, overwhelmed with the sheer godforsaken evil and suffering on display. No "cowboys and Indians" cosplay here. Just violence, madness, and death.

Can cinema produce an anti-western along the same lines? One that features cowboys and gorgeous vistas and heart-pounding action and violence? Filmmakers have tried, including worthy efforts by Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, and Kelly Reichardt. I'd say the verdict is still out. But even if their are exceptions, the rule stands.