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.

What Christian parents hope for their children

Not wealth or health. Not success. Not intelligence or skill or talent. Not safety per se. Not freedom from suffering. Not a long life for its own sake. Not goodness, considered as a moral achievement. Not even happiness, in the popular sense.

No, each of these things is secondary. Naturally, every Christian parent prays for all or most of them. But they’re not primary. What’s primary, what a Christian parent hopes above all as most important for his children, is that they know Christ. And knowing Christ, apart from having priority, cuts against those secondary desires in two important respects.

The first is this. To know Christ is not to have it all together. Far from it. To know Christ is to know that, far from having it all, one has nothing. Having it all is the illusion from which Christ delivers us. There is no one righteous, not one. Like our children, we sometimes imagine the world is divided between good and bad people. But those aren’t the basic Christian categories. The basic Christian category for human beings is sinner, and we all belong to it. The aim of the Christian life isn’t to avoid being Peter, the betrayer of Christ; Paul, the persecutor of Christ; Thomas, the doubter of Christ. For we are all, every one of us, Peter and Paul and Thomas. The aim instead is to be the Peter and Paul and Thomas we already are on the far side of Christ—on the far side of seeing and recognizing Christ for who he is: the lover of our souls, the One who forgives seventy times seven, the grace of God incarnate. The aim is to know Christ, as the One who sees us for who we are and forgives us as the sinners we are. Kichijiro, in the novel Silence, is not the paradigmatic “bad” Christian. He’s the paradigmatic Christian full stop. His perpetual failure is ours. We are all Kichijiro: believing, confessing, failing, betraying, and in sincere contrition falling prostrate before the Lord, begging mercy once again. And receiving it.

That is the shape of the Christian life. That, therefore, is what a Christian parent hopes for her children. She knows in advance that the shape of human life is failure, so she doesn’t kid herself that her children might escape such a fate. What she prays for instead is that her children’s inevitable failure might be cruciform, that is, formed and defined by the cross of Christ. For when our failures are united to his, then his triumph becomes ours. Per crucem ad lucem. Only by darkness, light; only by death, life; only by the cross—by suffering, shame, rejection, and humiliation—comes resurrection life, which is the life of God: eternal life.

This is the second element of knowing Christ. To know Christ is to follow Christ, taking up our crosses in his wake. For the way of Christ is the way of the cross. To follow him is to be conformed to his image, to the pattern of his life, death, and resurrection. Far from the path of passivity or unrighteousness, this is the path of holiness. What it means, in a word, to follow the Christ, the Anointed One, is to become holy as he is holy. It is to become a saint.

As Léon Bloy famously remarked, “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.” Few of us, alas, become saints in this life, though all the baptized are bound for it, here or in the life of the world to come. But what does it mean to be a saint?

The answer to that question is found in the lives of the saints. And as C. S. Lewis wrote, “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints.” Their fundamental differences doesn’t mean there is no commonality, however. The commonality is their proximity to Christ: their having been seized, captured, and won by Christ and for Christ to serve his will alone. What he wants, they want; what he does, they do; what he commands, they obey. The heart of the saint is the prayer of St. Augustine: “Command what you will, and will what you command.” A saint, therefore, is someone whose total life and being are utterly transparent to the desires and actions of the Lord.

The thing about the Lord’s will, though, is that it, too, is not primarily interested in wealth, health, success, intelligence, skill, talent, safety, long life, mortal righteousness, earthly happiness, or freedom from suffering. To be a saint, as the lives of the saints suggest, is as a rule to be asked to relinquish or avoid such things. For the crown of sainthood is martyrdom, and all saints are called to be martyrs in one form or another. A saint is likely, as a result, to be marked not by worldly signs of flourishing but, instead, by ostracism, loneliness, pain, mockery, ill health, poverty, neither spouse nor children, a brief life, and, on the part of the wider society, either befuddled neglect or outright repudiation. I might as well be describing St. Paul, after all. Or Jesus.

And that’s the point. To raise children to be Christians is to raise them to follow Christ; to raise them to follow Christ is to unclench one’s parental fists, entrusting them to the Lord’s care, with the full knowledge that the Lord may lead them to where he himself was led: Gethsemane, Golgotha, a garden tomb. The reason why a parent might even consider this is, on one hand, because we know what follows that sequence: an empty tomb. And, on the other hand, because Jesus says that even in this world, even in this life, the only true life is following his way, wherever it may lead. Resurrection life looks like cruciform life even before one arrives in Jerusalem.

“I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.” As parents, we either take Jesus at his word or we don’t. If we do, our prayers and hopes for our children will look wildly, even scandalously different than our neighbors’. If we don’t, then of all people we are most to be pitied. If Jesus can’t be trusted, we should let our children know as soon as possible, and quit all this church business for good.

Church for normies

In his book Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction, Nicholas Healy raises an objection with Hauerwas’s ecclesiology. He argues that Hauerwas’s rhetoric and sometimes his arguments present the reader with a church fit only for faithful Christians—that is, for heroes and saints, for super-disciples, for the extraordinarily obedient, the successful, the satisfactory. By contrast, Healy argues that the church ought to be a home and a haven for “unsatisfactory Christians,” and that our doctrine of the church ought to reflect that.

That phrase, “unsatisfactory Christians,” has stuck with me ever since I first read it. It’s often what I have in mind when I refer to “normie” Christians: ordinary believers most of whose days are filled with the mundane tasks of remaining decent while doing what’s necessary to survive in a hard world: working a boring job, feeding the kids, getting enough sleep, paying the bills, not getting too much into debt, occasionally seeing friends, fixing household or familial problems, maybe taking an annual vacation. Into this all-hands-on-deck eking-out-a-survival life, “being a Christian” is somehow supposed to fit, not only seamlessly but in a transformative way. So you go to church, share in the sacraments, say your prayers, raise your kids in the faith, and generally try to fulfill the duties and roles to which you understand God to have called you.

I used to be Hauerwasian (or Yoderian, before that moniker assumed other connotations) in my ecclesiology, but over the years I’ve come to think of that style of construing Christian discipleship as a well-intended error, though an error all the same. To be clear, I’m not talking about Hauerwas himself—who defends himself against Healy’s critique in a later book—but about the sort of ecclesiology associated with him and with those who have developed his thought over the decades. I’m thinking, that is, of an approach to church that sees it as a small band of deeply committed disciples whose life together is aptly described as an “intentional community.” These are people who know their Bibles, who have strong and well-informed theological opinions, who are readers and thinkers, who have college degrees, who are white collar and/or middle-/upper-middle class, who make common cause to found or form or join a local community defined by a Rule of Life and thick expectations and rich, shared daily practices. Often as not they meet in homes or move into the same neighborhood or even purchase a plot of land for all to live on together.

I would never knock such communities. Extending the monastic vision to include lay people in all walks of life is a lovely development. Though I do worry that such communities are usually short-term arrangements lacking longevity, and that they are typically idealized and overly romantic, nonetheless they represent a healthy response to the vision of the church in the New Testament and sometimes even work out. Nothing but kudos and blessings upon them.

My disagreement is with the view that this vision of church just is what any and every church ought to be, as though all other versions of church must therefore be (1) pale imitations of the real thing, (2) tolerable but incomplete attempts at church, or even simply (3) failed churches. That’s wrong. It’s wrong for many reasons, including exegetical, historical, and theological reasons. But let me give one closer to the ground, rooted in human experience.

The radical church is not a church for normies. To use Healy’s terminology, it’s not a community meant for unsatisfactory Christians. It’s for Christians who have their you-know-what together: Christians who are both able and willing, given their background, education, financial status, temperament, moral and intellectual aptitude, and personal desire, to enter the monastic life, only here as laypersons. It’s certainly possible to make a case, based on the Gospels and the teaching of Christ, that the church exists solely for such Christians, since the condition for faith is discipleship to Christ, and discipleship to Christ is costly. I believe this to be a profound misunderstanding, however, not least because the rest of the New Testament exists. Just read St. Paul. He’ll disabuse you rather quickly of the notion that the church consists of satisfactory Christians. It turns out the church is nothing but unsatisfactory Christians. And if your Christian community is such that no normie would ever dream of visiting or joining it, because it’s clear that he or she is not and would never be up to snuff, then—allow me to suggest—you’re doing it wrong.

The church has to make room for the unsatisfactory, exactly in the manner I described above: the just-getting-by, the I’m-barely-paying-the-bills, the it-took-all-I-had-to-show-up-this-morning, the I’m-doing-my-best, the just-give-me-a-break folks. The holly-ivy Christians, who begrudgingly show up twice a year. The Kichijiros and Simon Peters and doubting Thomases. The addicts who relapse, the gamblers in debt, the porn-addled who can’t quit, the foreclosed-on and laid-off, the perennially fired and out of work, the ex-cons and adulterers and fathers of five kids by three different moms. Is the church not for such as these? “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.”

Our churches may not, must not, fall prey to the temptation that such people have no place in them, because if we believe that, then we will make them such places. Worse, we will inadvertently make them havens for a different kind of person: neither “the least of these” (whom Jesus loves) nor the radical types who flock to intentional communities, but the sort of credentialed professionals who want that sweet, sweet upper-middle-class life alongside others who look and talk and live just like them. Such folks are all unsatisfactory to a person—that’s just to say they’re human—but they present the opposite on the outside. Either way, the undisguised unsatisfactory have nowhere to lay their heads: the well-to-do don’t want them and the radicals can’t receive them.

Does this mean our churches should expect less of their members? Does it mean our churches should restructure their common life? Does it mean churches should function to permit and even welcome the straggler, the good-for-nothing, the failed disciple, the I’m-just-here-to-take-the-Eucharist-and-run type?

Yes. That is exactly what I’m saying. Radicals hate the medieval distinction between the evangelical counsels of perfection and the “lower” universal teachings of Jesus meant for all Christians. But the distinction arose for a reason, and it’s an essential one. Further, it’s why the church, especially in patristic and medieval periods, developed such a strong account of the sacraments as the heart of lay Christian life. The sacraments are pure reception, pure gift: grace upon grace. That’s what a sacrament is, the material sign and instrument of God’s grace, and it’s what the Blessed Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood enacts and encapsulates. God willing, the Spirit so moves in the regular, daily and weekly, reception of Holy Communion that a believer is drawn into a lifelong journey of sanctification, what is unsatisfactory (this plain and unimpressive water) being transformed into that which pleases the Lord and edifies his body (the miraculous wine saved best for last). But that’s up to God, and it begins, it does not end, with initiation into and partaking of the liturgical and sacramental life of God’s people.

We need churches that offer and embody and invite people to that, making clear all the while that the summons is for all—especially normies.

Double literacy loss

Last week I was asked by a graduate student the following question: In today’s culture, what is the biggest challenge for Christians in attempting to steward and share the scriptures with the next generation—whether within the church or without?

This was a very helpful question to be forced to face head on. I’m not especially good at apologetics, either in practice or at the level of theory. But a concise answer occurred to me that I’ve been reflecting on since I gave it.

The biggest challenge, it seems to me, is a sort of double loss of literacy.

First is biblical literacy. For centuries this has been the ambient culture of Western societies, including the United States. Whether or not this or that individual was a Christian, the default setting around him or her was inflected by the Bible: its stories, its characters, its plots, its very verbiage. Read public speeches from the nineteenth century. They are positively studded with allusions to the Bible. A Bible nerd from 2022 wouldn’t catch them all. But a barely literate teenager in 1822 might have. That’s what “biblical literacy” means. Even a generation ago at my own institution, students came in with impressive knowledge of the Bible. Today, not so much—even from students who are committed Christians, having attended church all their lives.

But that’s not the only challenge, or rather, the only loss of literacy.

The second is literal literacy. People under 25 today, including those who earn high school and college and even graduate degrees, including those who get A’s and B’s and generally “succeed” at school, do not read. That is to say, they are not readers. For most of them, perhaps nearly all of them, sitting still with a book for 30 minutes, much less two or three hours, is either wishful thinking or a nightmare. One gets itchy after five minutes at most. Check for mentions, check for texts, check for DMs, refresh the feed, refresh the inbox, send a Snap, send a Polo, stream a video, play a game—the options are endless. This presumes one is already sitting down, book in hand, ready and even eager to read. That’s too much. Nine times out of ten down time is the same as it always is, every evening and late into the night: watching a show on a streaming service and/or YouTube, assuming all the social media and communication with friends are turned off (which they aren’t).

None of this is meant as criticism. Don’t (yet) imagine me as an old man waving my cane at the youngsters to get off my lawn. My register here is not pejorative. It’s purely descriptive. Teenagers and twentysomethings today, by and large, are not readers. By which I mean, they are not readers of books. They read endlessly, as a matter of fact, but their reading takes place in 5-15 second chunks of time on a glowing device, before the next image or swipe or alert restarts the clock. Minds trained on this from a young age simply lack the stamina, not to mention the desire, to read for pleasure for sustained stretches of time.

In a prior age of mass education and biblical literacy, one largely devoid of screens, literal literacy was crucial for apologetics as well as evangelism and discipleship, because it meant that the necessary conditions for coming to have a direct experience of and relationship with the Bible were in place. It meant too that, often if not always, a primary entry point for reaching someone with the gospel was studying the Bible with them. For their own preexisting habits, as well as their inherited mental atmosphere, conduced to support the reception of Bible reading in their daily lives. Getting to know the God of Christian faith and reading the sacred book of Christian faith were convertible; to do one was to do the other.

No longer. And it seems to me a profound error—the older generation “always fighting the last war,” as the saying goes—to assume that this once apt or successful strategy is a fitting approach moving forward. Even if you were to convince a 17-year old curious about Jesus that the Bible is the way to learn about Jesus, why assume that she will now do something she never otherwise does, namely spend hours in deliberate demanding literary study, in order to keep learning about him on her own? That’s a bad bet. Assume rather that she likes the idea of doing so but will never quite find the time to get around to it.

What does this mean for evangelism and discipleship today? For reaching the next generation with the riches and truths of Holy Scripture?

An answer to the second question will have to wait for another day. Partly I simply don’t know; partly a proper answer is too big for this blog post, perhaps for any such post.

As for evangelism and discipleship: What it means, negatively, is that the Bible will not, for most young people, be the principal means thereof. Which means, positively, that something else will be. Not that the Bible will be uninvolved. Only that it won’t (usually) be the point of entry, and it won’t (directly) play the starring role.

What will? So far as I can tell, the answer is liturgy, friendship, witness, and service. That is to say, the sacramental life of tight-knit Christian community in mutual support and external care. The Bible will and must saturate such a life, from top to bottom and beginning to end. Such a life will be dead on arrival if the testimony of the apostles and prophets does not animate it from within and at all times.

Nevertheless this role is different than the role the Bible has had in churches, especially “low” Protestant churches, these last two or three centuries. It will take some getting used to. It’s time we got started, though. The double loss of literacy is a fait accompli. It’s a done deal and already in the rear view mirror. The only question is whether we respond, and how. We can mourn and bemoan the loss, recalling the good old days. Or we can get to work.

I say let’s get to work.

Two new essays on the long Lent of Covidtide

Last week in Mere Orthodoxy I wrote about Tish Harrison Warren's terrific new book, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep.

Today I’m in First Things reflecting on what it means to celebrate the Triduum in Covidtide.

The essays are, in a way, companion pieces. Both are about persisting in Lent as we approach Easter Sunday; both reflect on the long Lent of the last year (the emergency liturgical season of "Covidtide"); both insist that resurrection is coming; both remind us that the passage to Sunday runs through the passion of Jesus. Some of us need to know in our bones that Jesus is risen; some of need to recall that Holy Saturday comes first.

Yesterday I read St. Luke's account of Jesus's final hours with his disciples. The passage in 22:31-34 is almost too much to bear:

“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren.” And he said to him, “Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.” He said, “I tell you, Peter, the cock will not crow this day, until you three times deny that you know me.”

The Lord calls us and prays for each of us by name. Like St. Peter, we will fail (vv. 56-60), and beneath the gaze of the Lord (v. 61), we will weep bitterly (v. 62). But borne up by his prayers and the power of his cross, we will turn again, strengthened and ready to strengthen (John 21:15-17). Only then will we be truly ready to take up our own cross and follow him (vv. 18-19).

A blessed Triduum to all of you.

Must theologians be faithful? A question for Volf and Croasmun

In their new book, For the Life of the World: Theology That Makes a Difference (Brazos Press, 2019), Miroslav Volf and Matthew Croasmun make the argument that the lives of theologians matter for the writing and evaluation of theological proposals. Reading through chapter 5, though, where they make the argument, I was left unsure about what exactly they were claiming. Let me offer a sample of quotations and then offer a range of interpretations of the claim or claims they are wanting to make.

(Full disclosure: Miroslav and Matthew are at Yale, and were there when I earned my doctorate; the former was a teacher, the latter a fellow student and friend. Take that for what it's worth. Here on out I'll call them V&C.)

Consider the following quotes (bolded emphases all mine):

• "execution of the central theological task requires a certain kind of affinity between the life the theologian seeks to articulate and the life the theologian seeks to lead." (118)
• "an affinity between theologians' lives and the basic vision of the true life that they seek to articulate is a condition of the adequacy of their thought." (119)
• "It would be incongruous for theologians to articulate and commend as true a life that they themselves had no aspiration of embracing. They would then be a bit like a nutritionist who won't eat her fruits and vegetables while urging her patients to do so." (120)
• "Misalignment between lives and visions ... is prone to undermine the veracity of [theologians'] work because it hinders their ability to adequately perceive and articulate these vision." (120)
• "living a certain kind of life doesn't determine the perception and articulation of visions, but only exerts significant pressure on them." (120)
• "Just as reasons, though important, don't suffice to embrace a vision of the good life, so reasons, though even more important, don't suffice to discern how to live it out. Our contention is that an abiding aspirational alignment of the self with the vision and its values is essential as well." (122)
• "[it is a requirement] that there be affinity between the kind of life theologians aspire to live and the primary vision they seek to articulate." (122)
• "Only those who are and continue to be 'spiritual' can ... perceive 'spiritual things.'" (125)
• "[An ideal but impossible claim would be] that only the saints can potentially be true theologians." (129)
• "Consequently, we argue for an affinity, rather than a strict homomorphy, of theologians' lives with the primary Christian vision of flourishing (always, of course, an affinity with the primary vision as they understand it)." (129)
• "Imperfect lives, imperfect articulations of the true life—yet lives that strive to align themselves with Christ's—and articulation that, rooted in this transformative striving, seek to serve Christ's mission to make the world God's home: this sort of affinity of life with the true life is what's needed for theologians to do their work well." (134)
• "Truth seeking is a constitutive dimension of living the true life; and living the true life—always proleptically and therefore aspirationally—is a condition of the search for its truthful articulation." (137)

It seems to me that there are a number of claims, actual or potential, interlaced and overlaid in these quotes. Consider the following, all of which are technically compatible but only some of which, I'm convinced, V&C want to affirm:

1. The best theologian will be a saint, i.e., a baptized believer whose life is maximally faithful to Christ.
2. All theologians ought to strive to be saints.
3. All theologians ought to strive to align their lives with their articulated vision of faithfulness to Christ.
4. Saints are likelier to be better theologians than those who are not.
5. A necessary but not sufficient condition of faithful theology is sainthood, that is, faithfulness to Christ.
6. A necessary but not sufficient condition of faithful theology is imperfect but real alignment between the life of a theologian and his or her articulation of faithfulness to Christ.
7. One of the criteria for evaluating a theologian's proposals and arguments is the lived faithfulness to Christ on the part of the theologian in question.
8. One of the criteria for evaluating a theologian's proposals and arguments is the alignment between that theologian's life with his or her articulation of faithfulness to Christ.

 It seems to me that the mainstream or majority Christian theological tradition would affirm claims 1 through 4. Some today would quibble with one or more of them, especially claim 4 (e.g., Paul Griffiths would say that, in via at least, those who are not yet sanctified may either have intellectual gifts greater than the saint—which is true—or have a perspective on the faith, say, as an outsider or a sinner, that the saint lacks—which, prima facie, seems more questionable). But the questions really come with claims 5 through 8.

Is it truly a condition of theology done well that the person making the theological proposals be herself (even somewhat) faithful either to Christ or to her understanding of Christ's will? Is such faithfulness, moreover, a legitimate criterion for evaluating said proposals—so that, if we knew of the theologian's utter unfaithfulness (even attempted), such knowledge would thereby falsify or disqualify her proposals outright?

I remain unpersuaded either that V&C really mean to make either of these claims or that either of them is a good idea.

It seems to me that V&C are making a materially prescriptive argument—"this is how theology ought to be done and how theologians ought to understand their work"—underwritten by a generically descriptive argument—"the sort of practice theology is and the sort of subject it is about means necessarily that it is self-involving in a manner different from algebra or astronomy"—but not anything more. We should not, I repeat not, include our judgments of the character of theologians' lives in our evaluation of their ideas, proposals, and arguments. If a serial adulterer were to write an essay against adultery, and meant it (i.e., it was not an exercise in deception), the thesis, the reasons offered in support, and the argument as a whole would not be correctly evaluated in connection with the author's sins. They would stand or fall on the merits. Such an author is precisely analogous to the comparison V&C make to the nutritionist: she is not wrong to recommend fruits and vegetables; she is merely a hypocrite.

And here's the kicker: All theologians are hypocrites. That's what makes them uniformly unsaintly, even those canonized after the fact. For saints are recognized postmortem, not in their lifetime. And that for good reason.

(I should add: It's even odder, in my view, to say that theologians' work should be judged in accordance with the affinity between their lives and their ideas, rather than their lives and the gospel as such. Barth and Tillich and Yoder, for example, all offered ample justification in their work for their misdeeds. Properly understood, however, their actions were wrong and unjustifiable regardless of the reasons they offered, precisely because they are and ought to be measured against that which is objective—the moral law, the will of God—not their own subjective understanding of it or their rationalization in the face of its challenge.)

So it is true that there should be an affinity between theologian's lives and ideas. Theologians of Christ should imitate Christ in their lives. And it is plausible to believe that their theology might improve as a result: that their vision into the things of God might prove clearer as a consequence.

But the unfaithful write good and true theology, too, and have done so since time immemorial. We ought to consider such theology in exactly the way we do all theology. For it is up to us to judge the theology only. God will judge the theologian.

What does holiness look like?

The Protestant account of vocation smooths out the hierarchies of office (the priesthood of all believers) and of holy living (monastic life is no "better" than life working a farm). From one point of view, this is a good thing: no special religious caste; it flattens out "quality" of life: God calls each to his or her own station in life; holiness is democratized. From another point of view, this is a problem: it treats everything and everyone "the same," thus losing all differentiation; it lacks honesty, since in fact church ministry or serving the poor are, and will be treated as, more important than, say, working as a notary or drilling for oil; and worst of all, it loses the eschatological dimension of Christ's call, draining it of radical disorientation through the cross and resurrection and replacing it with the simple pleasures of local, family, and/or bourgeois life.

One way to frame the disjunction is to ask the question: Is the good life—that is, the faithful life of discipleship to Christ—taught by and embodied in a particular church tradition best exemplified by (1) the philosophy of Aristotle, (2) the Book of Proverbs, or (3) the Sermon on the Mount?

It seems to me that there is a problem if the answer, more or less full-stop, is (2).

My older, more Anabaptist self thought the answer, more or less full-stop, should be (3). And that's still true, in one sense.

But I find myself increasingly drawn to the long-standing catholic answer, which I would formulate this way: In terms of what we may reasonably expect and ordinarily teach, the common good ought to be ordered to (1); the average believer ought to be ordered (at a minimum) to (2); while the church as such, particularly in the form of its saints and martyrs (past), ordained and religious (present), ought to be ordered to (3). So that, even if those grouped in (2) never move from natural sapience to supernatural Chokmah—from the way of things to the Way of Wisdom Incarnate—the latter is held before their eyes as their eventual destination, not only the Way but the End, where all roads lead: to Christ, crucified, risen, glorified, and his Kingdom of little Christs. And in the process, perhaps those of us lesser saints, baptized as we are, will in fact move beyond our bourgeois comforts to the higher paths of harder, but better, living.

I'm mostly thinking out loud. And thinking in the midst of having my mind changed, or realizing it has changed. What I am convinced about is that, e.g., the moral vision of Wendell Berry is both good and beautiful and not sufficiently converted to the gospel. And if some forms of Christian political theology don't recognize that, then so much the worse for them.