Reunion

Reading theology from the previous century has the power to trick you into thinking that reunion between the divided communions was, and remains, a live possibility. As late as 1999, when Robert Jenson published the second volume of his systematic theology, the bulk of which is a fulsome ecclesiology in close conversation with both Vatican II and the most recent ecumenical dialogues, you would be forgiven for getting the impression that reunion—between Rome and Wittenburg, between Rome and Canterbury, even between Rome and Constantinople—was conceivable within our lifetime, even right over the horizon.

More generally, reading about church division and the need for church unity on the page can make the matter seem rather simple, certainly from a low-church or Protestant perspective. It inevitably reduces the problem to disagreements over theology; accordingly, once those disagreements are resolved, unity becomes achievable.

To my readerly mind, it made the most sense that, if any communions were to reunite in our lifetime, it would be Rome and the East. After all, on the page, very little in terms of substantive theological disagreements obtain between them. (I can defend that claim another time!) On the page, Rome is willing to meet the East halfway—and then some. On the page, these things can be worked out. The unity of God’s people is at stake, after all! The very truth of Jesus’s prayer for his church in John 17!

On the page, all of this seems eminently plausible. Until, that is, you meet an actual, flesh-and-blood Orthodox Christian. Until you read an actual Orthodox writer who is neither American nor trained in American institutions. Until you visit an actual Orthodox country. Until you attend the Divine Liturgy or visit an Orthodox monastery.

And then it hits you. This is a pipe dream. Reunion between Rome and the East will never happen. Not ever. Not until the Lord’s return. Rome could meet the East 99% of the way, and the East would look at that 1% and say: Thanks, but no thanks. We’re good.

Perhaps that sounds hyperbolic. Or perhaps it sounds like I’m indicting the East or endorsing the West. That’s not at all what I mean, though. As David Bentley Hart wrote a few years back, Eastern Orthodoxy has always been skeptical of the ecumenical movement, for at least two reasons intrinsic to and coherent with its own teachings and history. The first is that ecumenism waters down the faith to a few core beliefs beyond which all else, especially liturgical form and sacred tradition, is adiaphora. In other words, ecumenism Protestantizes the faith. But if you think that Protestantism is wrong about the faith, why would you do that? The second reason is that the East does not believe the church is divided, or that it lacks the fullness of Christ’s promise to his one church. It does not believe, as Rome does, that it suffers a “wound.” Rather, the East believes wholeheartedly and without apology that it is and forever shall be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church that Christ founded by his Spirit on Pentecost some two thousand years ago. It has kept the faith whole and entire; it has preserved the faith once for all delivered to the saints; it has not wavered; it has not broken; it has not failed. It cheerfully welcomes all, including schismatics and heretics (i.e., Romans and Protestants), to join its ranks. But it is unbroken, undivided, and complete. Ecumenism, on this view, is at once an affront, a contradiction, a threat, and a solvent to this crucial truth. To admit it, to engage it, to accept it, would be to deny the fact of Orthodoxy itself.

So, as I say, I’m not writing in critique of the East. I’m writing with a bird’s-eye view on the total matter of church unity, in global perspective. And after a century of optimism, things don’t look good. Despair is a sin, so we aren’t allowed that route. But it is hard to see, for me it is impossible to see, what it might mean to hope and work for the unity of the church across both the world and millennia-long divisions. For those divisions have become cultural, deeply ingrained in the folkways and forms of life that define distinct peoples, such as Greece or Russia. What would, what could, reunion mean for such people on the ground (and not on the page)? I have no answer.

Jenson, following Ratzinger, notes at the beginning of volume one of his systematics that theologians under conditions of ecclesial division can only write for the one church that God will, by his grace, someday bring about. He says further that such unity must be a work of the Spirit—and the Spirit may act tomorrow. I believe these words. I follow that vision. But I worry, sometimes, that they are merely marks on a page. For the letter kills; the Spirit gives life.

In a word, in the matter of our impossible division, we are reduced to prayer. So I pray:

How long, O Lord? How long will your people be separated one from another? Come, Spirit, come! Restore your people. Make them one as you are one. Hear our prayer, and hear your Son’s, on our behalf, and for his sake: Amen.

NOPE, BCS, TOM, MCU

Some pop culture odds and ends…

Nope. I’ve got little to add to the Discourse here, just a few scattered thoughts. (I saw the film with friends and processed it with them; I’ve not done any online reading besides skimming—and being disappointed with—this article.) First, Daniel Kaluuya remains Jordan Peele’s not-so-secret super-weapon. What an actor. Second, it’s nothing but good for the movies that Jordan Peele productions have become events unto themselves. That’s a happy world to live in, even when Peele doesn’t quite hit the mark, as here. Third, the problem with Nope is the opposite of what ailed Us. Where Us worked at the visceral level of story and characters, it failed at the symbolic or metaphorical level. In Nope, by contrast, the allegory is what’s potent and compelling, whereas the literal narrative has gaps and questions. At times it feels like the plot does X or Y because that’s what the Meaning requires, rather than the significance arising organically from the story. When the allegory calls for the same signifier to mean two or more contrary things at once, the plot becomes unmoored. Having said that, fourth, a couple minor interpretive ventures. What’s up with that shoe? What came to my mind was the monolith in 2001, whose presence always signals a powerful evolutionary or technological shift in a group or species’ agency—and whose first appearance involves apes, tools, violence, and a jump to spaceships (re the last, the dad in the sitcom appears to be space-related in interests or profession). I wonder if, on a re-watch of Nope, mention or flashback or appearance of the shoe would similarly signal not only Gordy’s turn but also key turns in the narrative and/or Jean Jacket’s behavior. I’ll also add, mostly tongue in cheek, that when wondering aloud about the title of the film, what came to mind was Knope, as in Leslie. If Get Out (still his most successful film) was Peele’s rejoinder to the fantasies of well-meaning Obama-era white-liberal post-racism—though it understandably took on new force when someone other than Hillary was elected—perhaps Nope is a rebuttal of the same phenomenon, only applied to Hollywood instead of Washington, D.C. It’s Peele’s Nope to Poehler’s Knope.

Better Call Saul. I’ve been on the BCS bandwagon from the beginning. I’ve written about it briefly before, but mostly I’m just here to stand in awe. Like MBD, I anticipate these final episodes like each is Game 7 of the NBA Finals. Be sure to be reading what Alan Jacobs writes about it. Even DBH is in on the glories of Saul:

I became genuinely addicted, however, to Breaking Bad, which was so much better written than any of the television of my youth—and better written than just about every studio film made since the 1970’s—that it astonished me. It was the perfect balance of Dostoyevsky and Ed McBain, with just a hint of Lawrence Sanders here and Charles Portis there. I did not even mind the somewhat fantastic conclusion of the series. When, however, its sequel (or “prequel”) Better Call Saul came out, I was hesitant to watch it, fearing it would prove to be an inferior product that would only diminish my memory of the original program. But I watched. Now, in its final season, having just returned from its mid-season break, the show is dwindling down to its end over half a dozen episodes; and I am prepared to say not only that it is the better of the two programs, but that it may be the finest wholly original program ever to grace American television (or television anywhere). Like its predecessor, it is a grim portrayal of the gradual destruction of a soul, though now perhaps with somewhat greater subtlety and nuance, and with a richer range of characters. Comparisons aside, though, the quality of the writing has proved consistently astounding, and never more so than in these concluding chapters. Anyone who has followed the story—and I will give nothing away—will know that the final episode before that mid-season break was at once shocking and brilliant. It arrived in its closing minutes at a denouement (ominously announced by the slight flickering of a candle’s flame) that made perfect sense of the entire narrative of the series up to that point, and of the current season in particular, but that was (for me, at least) wholly unexpected until the moment just before it occurred. The construction of the story was so ingenious, and its moral and emotional power so unexpectedly intense, that I was left amazed. I do not know what it tells us about the current state of our culture that good writers have more or less been banished from the movie industry and have had to take their wares instead to television; but I am glad the medium as it now exists can make room for them. I also do not know what to make of the reality that there are television programs so much more competently written than most novels today. But, whatever the case, I can at least assure my three correspondents that, yes, I do watch television, even sometimes when something other than baseball is on; and that, moreover, in the case of Better Call Saul I feel positively elevated by having done so, because the program is a genuine work of finely wrought art.

I’ll add that, though Alan Sepinwall is usually reliable, his most recent recap of the show is strange, and it worries me he might know something about the final three episodes and be unintentionally telegraphing it to readers. He’s done this in the past, where he interprets an episode’s implications in ways no normal viewer would, because screeners or confidential information tugs his mind in an unpredictable direction. All that to say, he suggests over and over both (a) that this is probably our last glimpse of Gene’s future story and (b) that it provides a “happy ending” to Jimmy/Saul/Gene’s story.

A happy ending? What could that possibly mean? Deceiving and abusing an elderly woman and her loser son with a meaningless heist that could get the latter sent to jail, thereby reminding Jimmy of “the good old days” when—wait for it—theft, fraud, drugs, and murder were part of his daily life … this is a “happy ending”? Huh? The story is explicitly and intrinsically a fall narrative, a decline into moral squander and misery. The eminently wise and trustworthy writers and showrunners of BCS may or may not have more Gene in store for us. But even if we don’t return to him, his ending is as far from happy as one could possibly imagine.

The Old Man. Shows like The Old Man are more or less factory-produced for my tastes: The Honourable Woman, The Night Manager, The Americans, Fauda, even season five of Homeland—self-contained, stylish cocktails of spycraft, action, and character, realistic enough to be taken seriously, unrealistic enough to be fun. Le Carré lite, in other words. I was disappointed by the finale of TOM, however, because I thought it was a seven-episode miniseries, not the first of two seasons. I also didn’t realize Jeff Bridges’ battles with lymphoma and Covid brought production to a halt multiple times. Imagine being 70 years old, cancer in remission, Covid finally beaten, and the next day you’re hanging out a window at 70mph playing grandpa-Bourne, shooting back at the bad guys chasing you (and grandpa-driver John Lithgow). Not a bad capstone to a remarkable career.

Marvel. By my count, between May 2008 and November 2025, if Disney has its way, there will have been at least thirty-nine official “Marvel Cinematic Universe” movies. By the time the fifth and sixth Avengers films come out (six months apart) in 2025, my bet is that there will have been even more than what’s currently announced, which means the number will likely cross the threshold of forty movies in a little over seventeen years. And that’s not counting any Marvel characters produced by Sony outside of the MCU. Nor is it counting the Marvel TV shows, which in the same time span should amount to at least twenty-six in toto, which on average run two to three seasons each. So again, in less than two decades, we’re talking one hundred movie hours and hundreds of TV hours.

Now look at quality. From 2019 to the present there have been nine MCU movies. Two have been very bad (Captain Marvel and Eternals), three have been middling (Black Widow, Shang-Chi, and Thor 4), and four have been solid (Avengers 4, Spider-Man 2 & 3, and Doctor Strange 2). People love the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, but they’re actually pretty forgettable; and although the final Avengers entry provided a cathartic conclusion to the previous two dozen films’ worth of story lines, it was bloated and even sort of boring in the middle act.

All that to say, that’s three and a half years of the world-bestriding Marvel Universe, the most successful film franchise of our (all?) time … and it’s a pretty mixed record, when you step back and look at it. Add in the deluge of Disney+ series and their even spottier quality, plus a narratively unclear and mostly uncompelling “multiversal” saga connecting these films to the coming ones in the next few years, and it makes sense that people are writing about Marvel’s “problem” or “crisis.”

Nevertheless, I think that sort of language overstated. Between one pole, which suggests the MCU will keep on breaking records forever, and the other pole, which suggests the MCU is about to crash, I think the correct position lies somewhere in the middle. When characters and properties that people love are featured in a Marvel movie, people will keep buying tickets; see Black Panther 2, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Blade, etc. When people don’t care, or the movies are bad, people will start to drift away. Instead of seeing 2019 as a peak followed by a steep cliff, we should see it as the highest peak, followed by only very slowly diminishing returns, with many subsequent slightly smaller peaks, with a cliff awaiting only after 2025. At that point, unless they nail revivals of Fantastic Four and X-Men, which somehow spark another wave, a new generation, a seventh “phase,” and thus a third decade of MCU fandom and culture-wide mania, I think that’s when it all, finally, comes to an end—where “end” doesn’t mean “no more popular comic book movies” but “everyone and their mom ceases to reflexively see most MCU movies in the theater.”

Then again, the almighty Kevin Feige has been doubted before. He knew something no one else did fifteen years ago. Maybe he knows something we don’t today. But count me skeptical.

A+ DBH

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

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

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

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

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

On the historical present

David Bentley Hart's translation of the New Testament came under criticism for many things, but one of them continues to puzzle me: namely, his literal translation of the so-called "historical present." In his latest volume of essays, published just a few months ago, he defends his decision persuasively, to my mind.

What I'm left wondering, though, is whether biblical critics' disagreement with Hart is one of fidelity to the original sense or contemporary judgments of linguistic style. That is, do biblical scholars think the historical present ought to be translated in English past tense because "that is the sense in which it would have struck the ear of a native Greek speaker in 70 AD"? Or because "that is the style that native speakers of American English are used to in 2020"?

The question struck me while reading two novels this summer. One was Melville's Moby-Dick, published in 1851. The other was John le Carré's Agent Running in the Field, published in 2019.

Both novels toggle constantly back and forth (in, respectively, 170-year old American English and 1-year old Queen's English) between past tense and present tense, sometimes on the same page or even in the same paragraph, and always regarding events that have already happened, that is, events located in the past. "While he was speaking, the ship turned: and all of a sudden, I see the whale": that sort of thing.

So if it is the case that well-written and popular English novel-writing about "past" events employs the "historical present" style intermittently with the past tense proper; and if it is the case that ancient writers in Koine Greek, such as St. Mark, did the same; then why not translate it that way? Why not opt for the more literal translation (at least, that is, in translations that aim for formal rather than dynamic equivalence)?

There may be a good answer to that question. I just haven't stumbled across it yet.

New essay published at the LA Review of Books: "Public Theology in Retreat"

I've got a new essay available over at the Los Angeles Review of Books called "Public Theology in Retreat." It's ostensibly a review essay of three books published by David Bentley Hart in the last year, but I use that occasion to ask about the role of public theology in contemporary U.S. intellectual culture, using Hart as a sort of Trojan horse. Alan Jacobs's essay in Harper's last year serves as a framing device, and I look at Hart as an exception that proves the rule—even while portraying Hart's thought to a largely non-theological audience as a kind of specimen, to intrigue and possibly attract unfamiliar and potentially hostile minds. We live in perilous and fickle times, after all. Why not give theology a try? There have been stranger bedfellows.

My thanks to the editors at LARB for publishing a work of straightforward theological exposition like this; I know it's not their usual cup of tea. I confess that I have steeled myself for more than one failure to read the actual argument of the piece, but so it goes. Mostly I'm excited to see what charitable readers make of it, from whatever perspective. So check it out and let me know what you think.

David Bentley Hart on contemporary versus premodern allegorization

"Historians or hermeneuticians frequently assert that what most alienates modern readers from the methods of premodern exegetes is the latter’s passion for allegory. But this is false. If anything, we today are much more culturally predisposed than our forebears to an unremitting allegorization of the tales we tell or books we read, no matter how elaborate or tedious the results. True, we may prefer to discover psychological or social or ­political or sexual narratives 'encoded' in the texts before us, rather than spiritual or metaphysical mysteries; we might find it impossible to believe that a particular reading could be 'inspired' in a more than metaphorical sense; but the principle of the metabolism of the fictions we read into the 'meanings' we can produce is perfectly familiar to us. The same critic who might prissily recoil at the extravagances of a patristic figural reading of the Book of Numbers might feel not the slightest dismay at the transformation of Prospero into an ironic indictment of ­colonialism, or of Horatio Hornblower into an inflexibly erect emblem of the 'phallic signifier.' What makes the spiritual allegories of ancient pagan, Jewish, and Christian exegetes so alarming to modern sensibilities is not that they were allegories but that they were so disconcertingly spiritual."

—David Bentley Hart, "Ad Litteram" (now collected in A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays, 274-277). This is absolutely correct, and the entire (brief) essay should be required reading for biblical scholars, whether disposed to historical criticism or any other scholarly hermeneutic.

A stab at the analogia entis

The analogy of being does not analogize God and creatures under the more general category of being, but is the analogization of being in the difference between God and creatures.

—David Bentley Hart 

What is the analogy of being? Here's my stab at a clear, sympathetic description.

The analogy of being is a Christian theological claim about the relationship between God and creatures and the ontological conditions of the possibility for the latter to know and/or speak about the former. As I understand it, it entails three core claims.

First, God is and creatures are;
Second, God is the creator of all that is that is not God, that is, creatures have the source and sustenance of their being in the one triune God;
Third, God speaks to human beings, as the rational embodied creatures they are, thus eliciting their reply and constituting a unique relationship (compared to other creatures' relationship to God).

The analogy of being makes the claim that the ontological condition of the possibility for human knowledge of and speech about God is this threefold set of affairs. If this is a fair summation, what follows about what it is not?

The analogy of being is not first of all an epistemic principle: it does not say how creatures come to know God or anything true about God; it offers no criteria for measuring claims about God; it does not insert itself explicitly into the process by which theological claims are made. Further, not being an epistemic principle, it is not concerned with the source or medium of knowledge of God, whether through revelation or nature or anything else. Further still, it does not make a claim to be itself a generic or universally perspicuous or philosophical doctrine: it is a Christian theological claim about the ontological conditions "on the ground," so to speak, that in fact obtain, conditions necessary for knowledge of and speech about the triune God to occur.

Finally, the analogy of being does not make any positive claim about the human capacity for speech about God, whether it is pre- or post-lapsarian humanity in view. Humans must be addressed by God—admittedly my own semi-innovation on analogy—in order to reply to him, but even once addressed, God remains the enabling condition of their speech about and to him. Moreover, after sin, all true knowledge of God may indeed be wiped out apart from wholly gracious divine revelation. The analogy of being still obtains, because humans remain creatures and God remains their creator; it is simply that the human reply to God's initial speech fails so utterly that the possibility of faithful speech is eliminated, unless and until God intervenes to make it possible again. Barth's analogy of faith may indeed enter in at this point, and it may reserve to itself exclusive claim to truthful knowledge of and speech about God—but just as the economy of grace reconciles lost creatures to God—it does not make new creatures ex nihilo—so divine revelation reestablishes and renews the proper relationship of creator and creature, so that creatures may offer their reply to God's initiating address in Spirit and in truth. But the ontological conditions never changed; and if they did not obtain, there would be no speech about God on humans' behalf.

Put differently, and in the context of theological language, the analogy of being is an analysis of how speech about God works in the first place—but note, Christian speech, from a Christian theological perspective, assuming the truth of the gospel, working within and not (hypothetically) without the event and domain of revelation. It is not a denial of the necessity of faith to know and speak truthfully about God. It is faith's reflection on how the language of faith succeeds, given that God is and believers are and that God is the creator of all, how faith's words work one way when applied to God and another way when applied to creatures.

I said it was a stab, and so it was. Where I've erred, I welcome correction.