New article published: “Is Scripture a Gift?”

As of this morning, I have a new article published in the journal Religions. It’s called “Is Scripture a Gift? Reflections on the Divine-Ecclesial Provision of the Canon.” Here’s the abstract:

This article investigates whether the canon of Christian Holy Scripture is properly understood as a gift and, if so, what theological implications this might entail. Following the introduction, the article has three main sections. The first section proposes an expanded grammar by which to describe the production and reception of the canon in and by the church, under the superintending sovereignty of the divine will and action. The second section offers a guide to recent inquiry into “the gift” in the fields of philosophy and theology, particularly those theories that might prove useful for applying the concept of “gift” to Scripture. The third section unfolds a normative account of the Christian canon as a gift of the triune God to his people and through his people, thus making sense of the long-standing liturgical practice of responding to the reading of the sacred page in the public assembly with a cry of thanks to God.

The article arose out of research I conducted as part of the “Gratitude to God” project at Biola University, which was funded by the Templeton Foundation. The article is only one part of a whole special issue dedicated to the question of gratitude to God. Most of the other articles are either social-scientific or philosophical; contributors include Christopher Kaczor, Kent Dunnington, and Matthew Lee Anderson, among others.

As part of the same “G2G” project, I also wrote a popular essay for Comment published this past January titled “Grace Upon Grace.” It distills some of the broad contours of a theological conception of grace or “the gift” with respect to the total grammar of Christian doctrine, whereas the article homes in on a particular locus: namely, whether “the gift” applies to the canon and, if so, how and with what theological implications.

It was a pleasure spending more than two years reading up on the literature—theological, philosophical, historical, economic, literary, and biblical—on gift, gratitude, grace, and exchange. It was always on the edge of my interests but never at the center of them. I didn’t come close to a comprehensive investigation. But I learned enough to realize how fascinating the subject is, and I’m glad I did.

A few other odds and ends:

• I already spotted a typo, for what it’s worth: page 21, endnote 45: “field yield” should be “first yield.” (UPDATE: I found a few more, alerted the editors, and they fixed them all.)

• The article is—how should I put it?—long. As in: 19,000 words, if you include endnotes and the list of works cited. It’s a very small book, in other words. Take a deep breath before plunging in.

• This article completes, not a series, but at least an ad hoc sequence of articles on the doctrine and interpretation of Scripture. I’ve been waiting for it to come out so that I could gather together links to all of them in one place, along with links to books, reviews, and occasional writings. All together I imagine they amount to 400,000 words on this single locus, give or take 50,000. And that’s not even to mention the Big Book I hope to publish on the subject in a decade or so. At this point, though, I’ll admit I feel somewhat spent. I’ll gladly take a little break from writing about this doctrine. That word count is high enough as it is; nobody needs more from me on the topic for the moment.

• Religions has a practice more common to the soft and hard sciences (as far as I understand it), that is, of publishing the comments of blind peer reviews; here’s the page for all of them, along with my replies.

• Three of the reviewers’ comments came in all at once; all had good things to say, and approved publication without need for revision. So I made final revisions, submitted it, and we were good to go. Then a fourth reviewer’s comments came in belatedly, and s/he judged the article in need of some more work. Both the editor of the special issue and the journal’s editors decided that the three “yay” votes qualified the article to be worthy of publication, hence its coming out today. But I wanted to flag this reviewer’s comments (a) because this is my first time with “open” reviewer comments and (b) because the comments in question are rich, substantive, and worthy of further reflection. Indeed, granted all the work that went into the article as it stands, I don’t doubt that incorporating this feedback into another version of it would have improved it even more; and if I end up doing any further work on the topic of Scripture and the gift, I will doggedly pursue the lines of inquiry raised by this reviewer, since they demand more attention that I was able to grant them. For that reason, whoever the comments’ author is, he or she has my thanks.

New essay published in Comment

I’m in Comment today with an essay on gratitude to God. It’s called “Grace Upon Grace,” and here’s how it starts:

Gratitude to God is at the heart of Christian faith and theology. One comes to see the specific character of Christian gratitude—or rather, of Christian talk about gratitude—through an examination of the role it plays within, and the shape it receives from, the doctrine of God. For the doctrine of God is not only of God but extends to all things in relation to God. What it means to speak of God truthfully thus bears directly on our understanding of creation, redemption, humanity, virtue, and the church. Gratitude becomes a sort of red thread common to these topics, descending from the heights into the nooks and crannies of our daily lives.

The essay traces the role of thanksgiving through the whole dogmatic corpus, displaying its internal grammar and its intrinsic connection to Christ. Read on for the whole thing.

Bezos ad astra (TLC, 4)

In his latest newsletter—is it the best going? It’s up there—L. M. Sacasas writes about what he calls “earth alienation.” He uses Arendt and McLuhan’s distinct reflections on the significance of Sputnik as a frame for considering Jeff Bezos’s recent comments about space exploration and colonization. Here’s where he quotes and unpacks Bezos:

During his portion of the proceedings . . . Bezos articulated a vision for the creation of space colonies that would eventually be home to millions of people, many of who would be born in space and would visit earth, Bezos explained, “the way you would visit Yellowstone National Park.”

That’s a striking line, of course. It crystalizes the earth-alienation Arendt was describing in Prologue of The Human Condition. It is, in fact, a double alienation. It is not only that these imagined future humans will no longer count the earth their home, it is also that they will perceive it, if at all, as a tourist trap, a place with which we have no natural relation and know only as the setting for yet another artificial consumer experience. And, put that way, I hope the seemingly outlandish nature of Bezos’s claims will not veil the more disturbing reality, which is that we don’t need to be born in space to experience the earth in precisely this mode.

To be sure, Bezos makes a number of statements about how special and unique the earth is and about how we must preserve it at all costs. Indeed, this is central to Bezos’s pitch. In his view, humanity must colonize space, in part, so that resource extraction, heavy industry, and a sizable percentage of future humans can be moved off the planet. It is sustainability turned on its head: a plan to sustain the present trajectories of production and consumption.

Sacasas comments:

Arendt believed, however, that the modern the desire to escape the earth, understood as a prison of humanity, was strikingly novel in human history. “Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age,” Arendt wondered, “which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky?”

We’ll return to that Arendt quote. After meditating on the set of issues it raises, Sacasas concludes:

What alternative do we have to this stance toward the world that is characterized by a relation of mastery and whose inevitable consequence is a generalized degree of alienation, anxiety, and apprehension?

We have a hint of it in Arendt’s warning against a “future man,” who is “possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.”  We hear it, too, in Wendell Berry’s poetic reminder that “We live the given life, not the planned.” It is, I would say, a capacity to receive the world as gift, as something given with an integrity of its own that we do best to honor. It is, in other words, to refuse a relation of “regardless power, ” in Albert Borgmann’s apt phrase, and to entertain the possibility of inhabiting a relation of gratitude and wonder.

Go read the whole thing. I can’t do it justice in a few quotes, not to mention the way in which every one of Sacasas’s newsletters is part of a larger, coherent whole. It brought something to mind, though, a recent film that seems to me a perfect example of the phenomenon he is describing, precisely in existential and aesthetic terms. Whether or not it is an illustration or a critique of that phenomenon is an open question.

The film is Ad Astra, which somehow was released only two years ago. (Every pre-pandemic cultural artifact feels much older than it is.) Written and directed by the great James Gray, Ad Astra (“to the stars”) tells of an astronaut, played by Brad Pitt, who goes on a mission to find his father near the planet Neptune, who may or may not have finally discovered extraterrestrial life. Pitt plays his character, Roy, with a perfectly controlled flat affect: his stoic courage is actually the surface of a dying, or dead, inner life. He lacks what he most desires, namely presence: to himself, his ex-wife, his estranged father. Haunted by his mental monologue, Roy’s voyage to the stars to find his father and/or life beyond the human is at once a metaphorical and literal, allegorical and spiritual journey into the heart of darkness.

When the film came out I didn’t write about it in a formal venue, but I did tweet about it. So let me take the opportunity to unfold one of my “Twitter loci communes.” First read Alissa Wilkinson’s excellent review for Vox, then Nick Olson’s lovely thread. (Also a bit from the indispensable Tim Markotos: “Penal Substitutionary Atonement: The Movie flirts with Freud and Nietzsche before finally settling on Beauty will save the world.” LOL.) Now here’s what I said:

Grateful to @alissamarie for this beautiful review of Ad Astra. Couldn't agree more. I'll have to keep pondering whether there's something potentially transcendent there, or if it's as deeply immanent-humanist as Gray's oeuvre suggests.

She's also right that this is the sort of a-theological spiritual art that religious people should celebrate, contemplate, and (quite possibly) read against itself. I mean, what a beautiful film.

It's also something of an anti-Interstellar. What finally doomed that film was its navel-gazing: when we look at the stars, we see ourselves blinking back. Here, Gray's vision is subtly different: the stars are “empty,” but beautiful in their sheer existence for all that.

And that very beauty and wonder of the ostensible nothingness—that the cosmos exists at all rather than nothing—generates not only awe at the mystery of life but love for those closest to us. That's what Nolan sought to accomplish, I think, but failed where Gray succeeds.

The next day I read Nick’s thread and riffed on this tweet of his in particular:

The TOL [Tree of Life] parallels come easily. One way of putting it is that this is TOL without Mother. Maybe in spite of itself, it winds up being a film that’s in search of Mother in lieu of distant Father. AD ASTRA’s “we’re all we’ve got” is also that TOL cut from the universe to the infant.

Here’s what I wrote:

This is good too. If you can accept the father/mother // nature/grace symbology of Tree of Life then apply them to Ad Astra, what you have in the latter is nature without grace, because a creation without a creator.

Then you can read it one of two ways: 1. The father's despair is a proper response to the realization that the universe is bereft of Logos (much less a Logos incarnate), and the son in effect embraces a false consciousness in the face of a potential nihilism.

2. The son's affective embrace of an "empty" cosmos is the proper response because "Man" has been searching for meaning (or ratio) apart from "Woman" (here, a figure for concrete love, rather than abstract wanderlust).

Again, you've got to accept that gendered symbology on the front end, but if you do, and you import it from Malick (and other sources!), then Gray is doing a lot here with his choice of characters. (Also makes me think of what role Ruth Negga serves in the story . . .)

Having said all that, though what I most want is to read the film in the vein of #2, inflected theologically, I have to admit that if I'm going to read the film against itself, #1 is the more penetrating as well as the more provocative route.

The next day I expanded on this line of thought, using an interview of Gray on one of The Ringer’s podcasts, The Big Picture:

In that James Gray podcast interview, he says he wanted it to star someone like Brad Pitt, who brings with him a “myth” or “mythology” that he, Gray, could then deconstruct in the film—referring to Ad Astra as “a deconstruction of masculinity.” Pairs well with the thread below.

Not only is Brad Pitt a global icon of “manhood” or “masculinity.” In Tree of Life he literally plays “Father/masculine” (=nature), as opposed to “Mother/feminine” (=grace) (Jessica Chastain). Gray then makes him a Son who spurns Woman while searching for the absent Father.

And in the process (again, literally) cutting the umbilical cord (in the heavens!) connecting him to the Father, thence to return to Mother Earth—now no Fall but a reditus of the aboriginal pilgrim-exitus—to reunite masculine (nature) with feminine (grace) via the bond of love.

I also had the following “aha” moment:

Somehow it only just occurred to me that Ad Astra opens with ha-adam, the royal Man (Brad Pitt)—husband of Eve (Liv Tyler), whose name (Roy) means "king" (le roi)—literally falling from heaven to earth.

Now I realize Brad Pitt's character's name, Roy, has not only royal connotations (Leroy, le roi, the king) but also a biblical-theological connection (el-roi, Hagar's naming of the Lord as God-who-sees). Roy wants truly to be seen by his father/God—a hope left unfulfilled.

Now recall that Arendt quote from above:

Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age, which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky?

It seems to me that Ad Astra is, from start to finish, one long cinematic meditation on this question. And whereas my initial reading of the film leaned immanent-cum-nihilistic, I feel prompted to revise that reading in a more hopeful, if still humanist, direction.

Sacasas writes of “Arendt’s warning against a ‘future man,’ who is ‘possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.’” In this respect Pitt’s Roy might be construed as that “future man” who goes beyond himself by his own means but, ultimately, reaches the end of his tether—again, this happens quite literally in the film—before returning to earth to accept the limits of finite human life for what it is: a gift. As given, it is not subject to the manipulations or technologies of man, but as what it is it is good in itself, howsoever concrete, delimited, and therefore subject to loss. The gift is a mystery from without and can only be accepted with gratitude or spurned with ingratitude. Though Gray insists on an immanent frame—indeed, we are given to understand that going beyond that frame is itself a rejection of the gift of finite existence—the film’s closing scene is less a period than a question mark. Roy accepts the gift in love, and as love. But if a gift, then a Giver? If love, then a Lover?

The question is apt for Bezos and his ilk. To escape the immanent as immanent is a rejection of transcendence, not its embrace; the technological sublime is a substitute for the beatific vision, not a means of reaching it. Accept earth as the gift that it is, and you will gain heaven with it. Renounce earth for the stars, and you will lose it all.

My dissertation acknowledgements

Dissertations are strange creatures: written by many, read by few, important to none but the authors. In a way, dissertations are like the angels of St. Thomas Aquinas, not species of a genus but each a genus unto itself.

And yet many years, blood, sweat, and tears go into dissertations; and so the acknowledgements at their beginning are often a moment to step back and thank those who have made finishing the (by then) cursed thing possible. So far as I can tell, there are two different types of acknowledgements: minimalist and maximalist. Either the author thanks only those who contributed materially and directly to the dissertation's production (one friend thanked, if I recall correctly, only about a dozen individuals), or she mentions more or less every single human being she has met along the way—anyone from whom she has received as much as a cup of cold water. I fall in the latter category, both by temperament (being prolix in life and in prose) and by conviction (a lot of people helped me get to the point of completing this thing!).

But because one is lucky if the readership of one's dissertation exceeds single digits, the writing of acknowledgements can seem somewhat narcissistic, or at least futile. Wherefore I have opted to share my acknowledgements here on the blog. Though I completed and submitted the manuscript last May, it wasn't approved until October and I didn't officially graduate until December. So the proverbial ink has yet to dry, and while it does so, let me share with y'all the many names and institutions and communities—each and every one—that made possible, by God's grace, my earning a PhD in theology from Yale University in the Year of Our Lord 2017.

Acknowledgements

It was Thanksgiving 2011, in a living room in Starkville, Mississippi, that the idea for this dissertation came to me. ‘Came to me’ is the right phrase: the idea was not mine, but my brother Garrett’s. He, my brother Mitch, and I were killing time in between meals, talking theology as brothers do. And Garrett said, “You know, you’ve been talking about this Webster a lot lately, and before that it was Jenson, and before that it was Yoder. Maybe you should write your dissertation on their theologies of Scripture.” Five and a half years later, here we are. So my first word of thanks goes to Garrett for giving me the idea for this project, to my sister-in-law Stacy for her relaxed toleration of our weakness for the rabies theologorum, and to Garrett and Mitch together for serving as soundboards, sparring partners, and friends throughout this process—and at all other times.

Thanks to my advisor, Kathryn Tanner, for constant encouragement, support, help (not least in saving me from featuring a fourth primary figure!), availability, theological wisdom, practical insight, and (what is not native to me) love of concision and economy of prose.

Thanks to the rest of the committee: Miroslav Volf, David Kelsey, and Steve Fowl. I could not have dreamed of a more fitting, or a more formidable, group of readers for a dissertation on this topic (they wrote the books on it, after all), and their kindness, generosity, and feedback have meant a great deal.

Thanks to the other faculty members from whom I learned or with whom I worked during my time at Yale: Christopher Beeley, John Hare, Linn Tonstad, Jennifer Herdt, Denys Turner, Dale Martin, Adam Eitel. If I have learned anything during my studies, I learned it primarily by osmosis from these brilliant, friendly scholars.

Thanks to my fellow students, in the Theology cohort and in other sub- disciplines: Awet Andemicael, Liza Anderson, Laura Carlson, Justin Crisp, Ryan Darr, TJ Dumansky, Jamie Dunn, Matt Fisher, Andrew Forsyth, Janna Gonwa, Justin Hawkins, Liv Stewart Lester, Mark Lester, Samuel Loncar, Wendy Mallette, Natalia Marandiuc, Sam Martinez, Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Ross McCullough, Luke Moorhead, Stephen Ogden, Devin Singh, Erinn Staley, John Stern, Graedon Zorzi. When I rave about the program at Yale, I am raving about these people.

Thanks to other friends, teachers, and colleagues, near and far, who were a part of my academic journey. In Abilene: Randy Harris, Tracy Shilcutt, Jeanene Reese, Wendell Willis, Glenn Pemberton, Josh Love, Reid Overall. In Atlanta: Ian McFarland, Luke Timothy Johnson, Steffen Lösel, Ellen Ott Marshall, Carol Newsom, Tim Jackson, Mark Lackowski, Leonard Wills, Don McLaughlin, Patrick and Karen Gosnell, Jimmy and Desiree McCarty, Matt and Stephanie Vyverberg, Seth and Kaci Borin, Daron and Margaret Dickens, Adam and Susan Paa. And elsewhere: Junius Johnson, Ben Langford, Andrew and Lindsey Krinks, David Fleer, Lauren Smelser White, David Mahfood, Fred Aquino, and Tyler Richards.

Thanks to the Christian Scholarship Foundation, from which I received a financial lifeline two years in a row, and to Carl Holladay and Greg Sterling, who oversee it.

Thanks to the Louisville Institute, from which I received a generous 2-year doctoral fellowship, and to the new friends and colleagues I made there: Ed Aponte, Don Richter, Terry Muck, Pam Collins, Kathleen O’Connor, Aaron Griffith, Kyle Lambelet, Amanda Pittman, Leah Payne, Derek Woodard-Lehman, Tim Snyder, Lorraine Cuddeback, Layla Kurst, Christina Bryant, Gustavo Maya, and Arlene Montevecchio.

Thanks to those I have come to know because of the issues or figures of this project: Steve Wright, Chris Green, Lee Camp, Peter Kline, Kris Norris, Kendall Soulen, Tyler Wittman, David Congdon, Myles Werntz. Thanks especially to Stanley Hauerwas, Robert Jenson, and the late John Webster, all of whom took the time to encourage this project and my work in general.

Thanks to friends in New Haven: Ross and Hayley (in more than one sense: nemo nisi per amicitiam cognoscitur), Matt and Julia, Mark and Laura, Ryan and Katie, Andrew and Josh, Mark and Liv, Laura, Val, Kelly, Kayla Beth, Roger and Elizabeth, Stephanie and Jeremiah, Stephen and Amanda. What a joy to share life with y’all these last six years. If only it could continue.

Thanks to my zealous and cheerful proof readers: Zac Koons and Lacey Jones.

Thanks to the communities that have taught and formed me in the faith: Round Rock Church of Christ, Highland Church of Christ, North Atlanta Church of Christ, St. John’s Episcopal Church, Trinity Baptist Church.

Thanks to Star Coffee and Round Rock Public Library, where much of this work was written, along with room S217 at Yale Divinity School, now (alas) a faculty office.

Thanks to Spencer Bogle, who is the reason I am in this business in the first place.

Thanks to my parents, Ray and Georgine East, who have never flagged in support or faith in me—beginning at age 17, when I declared my desire to pursue academic theology. What sort of people affirm such a vocation? Thanks especially to my mom, who over the years has read a steady stream of theology supplied by her eldest son. Apart from her I might doubt that this dissertation will be read by someone not paid to do so.

Thanks to Toni Moman—“Miss Toni”—to whom this work is dedicated, a lifelong servant and lover of God’s children. All ministers are theologians, and only God knows how many children have had their first dose of theology from Miss Toni. They are all of them better for it, as am I. Years ago I told Miss Toni that, if and when I had the chance to write a book, I would dedicate it to her. Well: it’s finally here!

Thanks to my three children, Sam, Rowan, and Paige, all of whom were born during my studies at Yale, and who make it all worth it. Sam and Row, especially, will be delighted to hear a different answer than usual to the oft-repeated question, “Daddy, are you done with work yet?”

Thanks, lastly, and most of all, to my wife Katelin, who has been my partner, companion, and best friend for nearly 13 years. We have traveled from central to west Texas, to Atlanta, Georgia, to New Haven, Connecticut, and back again. I cannot imagine doing so without her. Under God, I owe everything to her.

Soli Deo Gloria.