“Name five things they got wrong”

When I first hear or meet scholars committed to a comprehensive intellectual system, usually named after a person, I like to ask them a simple question (sometimes I do actually ask it, sometimes it’s only in my head): “Name five things they got wrong.” In other words, if you’re a Thomist or an Augustinian, a Rawlsian or a Schmittian, before I hear anything else about what you think, much less how your system solves my problems and answers all my questions, I want to hear how its namesake was fallible. If no answer is forthcoming, then I’m going to have a hard time taking anything else you say seriously.

I once heard John Hare, a committed Kantian and distinguished professor of philosophy at Yale (and, full disclosure, one of my own teachers), give a talk at a conference in which he began by listing four serious ways in which Kant erred in his philosophy. The rhetorical effect was powerful. It put the audience in a particular place: no longer were we preparing, perhaps reluctantly or suspiciously, to hear a zealous prophet of the Master deliver a timeless Word from the Inerrant One; we were now eager to learn from a fellow co-seeker of the truth, who happened to have found in Kant a useful aid for the journey.

The practice isn’t only rhetorically useful; it helps devotees of systems more generally, I think. “Calvin didn’t get everything right” is a kind of spiritual and mental hygiene for Reformed theologians. Call it an epistemic cleanse. All thinkers and writers should agree to this basic practice, or principle, but certainly Christians who believe in original sin should be the first to sign up for it.

The principle applies elsewhere, too. A Christian who says “My politics are exactly those of the DNC/GOP, plus Jesus” should immediately arouse suspicion, all the more so if the party advocate argues either that such politics are coterminous with Christian ethics or that this fact is obvious (or both). Whenever I meet Christians who are committed members of an American political party, the first thing I want to hear out of their mouths is, “Granted, I disagree with the platform on X, Y, and Z,” followed by, “but on the whole, I think the common good would be served best with them in power rather than the other guys.” That’s a perfectly reasonable position and can be defended variously and coherently. What can’t be defended is, “The ever-evolving platform of my party lacks any flaws,” much less, “My party’s platform is God’s political will written—a fact that should plain as day to any open-eyed believer.”

Now that’s nonsense on stilts, and anybody who’s not already a political hack can admit it. Epistemic humility is a tonic in politics as it is everywhere else. And in terms of honesty with oneself as well as the capacity to persuade others, there’s no substitute for principled and explicit fallibilism.

Penance and punishment for the canceled

Think for a moment about public figures who have been “canceled.” I don’t mean instances of reckless or unjust “cancelling.” I mean men and women who are guilty of the accusations, who caused scandal by their foolish or harmful or wicked actions, and who received some combination of social, professional, financial, and legal consequences as a result of their actions. I’m thinking of pastors, professors, actors, artists, musicians, comedians, and politicians. They are guilty, they know it, they admit it, and they suffer for it.

Here’s the question. What is the appropriate punishment for such people? What severity should characterize it, for how long, and why?

The public conversation on this topic is fuzzy at best. Critics and pundits quickly resort to the passive voice, to mention of how “some people feel,” to the “challenge” and “struggle” and “questions with no answers,” always with the kicker that the author finds him- or herself made “uncomfortable” by the whole subject. This amounts to one long dodge. No one, at least no one that I can find, is willing to say what would actually qualify as appropriate penalties or penance for a guilty person; or, alternatively, that no penalty or penance is possible in this or that case.

I don’t imagine that society as a whole could reach anything like consensus on this question. But for those of us who think and write about it, we could at least find some shared analytical ground on which to discuss it. To be sure, the punishment has to fit the crime, which means that every case is different. Nevertheless, for all cases, there is a range of possible penalties and modes of penance available to both official authorities and the populace in general. Assuming none of us wants the guilty canceled publicly tortured (a punishment many societies have employed!), I came up with twenty possible consequences for a public figure caught having done something wrong. They range from least to most severe, more or less; they distinguish temporary lengths of time from permanent consequences; they are not all mutually exclusive. Here’s the list:

1. A formal apology

2. Time away from the Eucharist

3. Time away from the spotlight

4. Time away from one’s job, post, or profession

5. Time away from a position of leadership

6. Time away from one’s family

7. Time away in a medical, therapeutic, or monastic institution

8. Being fired

9. Being blacklisted

10. Permanent formal banishment from one’s profession

11. Permanent formal banishment from any type of public role

12. Permanent public social shame

13. Permanent financial destitution

14. Permanent legal separation from one’s spouse and/or children

15. Permanent sentence to a medical, therapeutic, or monastic institution

16. Exile from one’s homeland

17. Prison for a time

18. Prison for life

19. Capital punishment

20. Suicide

Here’s why I think this list is useful.

First, it names aloud the range of possible punishments a society might inflict on a person guilty of some social wrong (not always a crime, legally speaking; usually a sin, theologically speaking). This list addresses society and each of its individual accusers: Which do you want for the guilty? Which is just? Which is not?

Second, the list clarifies that penance and punishment come in a variety of forms. Sometimes it’s mild; sometimes it’s extreme. Sometimes it’s tacit; sometimes it’s official. Sometimes it’s temporary; sometimes it’s permanent. Again: Which should apply in such-and-such case? What reasons or criteria are at work?

Third, the list shows the stakes involved. Options 6-20 are all personally devastating, even if some of them are temporary. No one wants to suffer them. In truth, no one wants 1-5 either. They’re all awful in one way or another. So we shouldn’t minimize the suffering involved. In particular, folks who reject the concept of retributive justice should be careful about which, if any, of these penalties they endorse—for any kind of wrongdoing—and why.

Fourth, the list contains an ambivalence. Namely, are these penalties to be inflicted on the guilty because they deserve it? Or are they forms of public penance by which and through which the guilty are absolved, socially or legally, of the guilt and debt they have contracted by their wrong? In other words, if a guilty man consents dutifully to whichever of these punishments his institution or society deems just, is he thereby relieved of his social burden? May he thereupon reenter whatever form of professional, political, public, or ecclesial life he formerly led—with a clear conscience and a reasonable expectation of being treated like anybody else? Or is the scarlet letter an indelible branding? Is the scorn and shame justly cast on a guilty woman hers, by rights, forever? “Till death do us part”?

This last question is not quite the same one pundits and critics like to ask. They tend to ask, “How much time away is enough?” And they invariably report—without exception, in my reading—that the time away is never enough. Yet they cannot specify how much longer would have made it sufficient. Their discomfort endures.

The problem here is not that some of us sometimes sense that a person should stay away indefinitely. It would be perfectly just, in some cases, to apply penalties 8-12 above. Being an actor or a comedian or a senator or a priest is not a right; it’s a privilege. I’m more than willing to believe that there are actions that permanently, not temporarily, disbar one from any of these or other public professions.

No, the issue is not whether some people do “return to the limelight too fast.” Plainly some do. The issue is whether we possess collectively a concept, not to mention a coherent practice, of public penance, whereby we would say in certain cases that a guilty person paid his dues or suffered long enough or needn’t hide in the shadows forever. That criminality and sin need not, in some cases at least, render a person unclean for life. That the guilty can reemerge from their shame, without fear of further or constant shame—even and especially when that shame was valid and deserved, not coerced or false or merely imposed from without.

As many have noted, we need an account of public and social forgiveness. But in whatever discursive context we find ourselves in—social, moral, legal, civil, religious—forgiveness follows contrition and justice both, and the price of justice is often steep. What should the guilty pay? What do they owe? Will we receive them anew once the ledger is clean? Those are the questions we need to be asking. Speaking clearly about penalties, punishments, and penance is one step toward answering them.

Sin, preaching, and the therapeutic gospel

Regular readers will have noticed a regular theme, or convergence of themes, on the blog over the last few years. In a phrase, the theme is the question of how to be and to do church in a therapeutic age. This question includes a range of issues: evangelism, liturgy, sacraments, preaching, class, education, literacy, exegesis, culture, technology, disenchantment, secularism, functional atheism, and more.

Three constant conversation partners are Richard Beck, Alan Jacobs, and Jake Meador (the persons and the blogs!). A fourth is my friend Myles Werntz, whom I’ve known for more than a decade, whom I’ve had as a fellow Abilenian for more than five years, and whom I’ve had as a colleague at ACU for almost three years. His Substack is called “Christian Ethics in the Wild.” You should subscribe!

His latest issue is on holiness, prompted by a conversation with an undergraduate student. The student earnestly asked him the following: Why doesn’t anyone—at church or university—ever talk about sin? Neither the student nor Myles is sin-obsessed. They just find themselves wondering about the fact that, and why, sin-talk is in retreat.

They’re right to do so. Sin is a byword these days. There are many reasons why. Much has to do with generational baggage. Boomers, Gen X, and even some older Millennials do not want to reproduce what they understand themselves to have received: namely, an imbalanced spiritual formation, whereby believers of every age, but especially youth, are perpetually held out over the flames of hell, rotting and smoldering in the stench of their sin, unless and until God snatches them back—in the nick of time—upon their confession of faith and/or baptism. Such ministers and older believers do not want, in other words, young people to feel themselves to be sinners, tip to toe and all the way through. Instead, they want them to feel themselves beloved by God. For they are. They are God’s creatures, made in his image, for whom Christ died.

But there’s the catch. Why would Christ die for creatures about whom all we can say is, they are beloved of God, and not also, they have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory? The more sin drops out of the grammar of Christian life, the more the cross of Jesus becomes unintelligible. So much so that children and teenagers can’t articulate, even in basic terms, why Jesus came to earth, died, and rose again.

There is much to say about this phenomenon. As ever, the church’s leaders are fighting the last generation’s war. The result is extreme over-correction and, however unintended, the mirror-image mis-formation of the young. Instead of believing they’re worth nothing, being filthy sinners whom God can’t stand the sight of, they now believe they’re worth everything, and therefore utterly worthy—sin being a word they’d barely recognize, much less use to describe themselves. Moreover, this is where therapy enters in. Self-image and self-esteem and mental health having taken over load-bearing duty in Christian grammar, replacing concepts like sin and righteousness, holiness and justification, atonement and deliverance, the Christian life comes to be understood as the achievement of a certain well-adjusted standing in the world. The aim is to find emotional, physical, financial, relational, vocational, and spiritual balance. The aim, in a word, is health. And it is utterly this-worldly.

Note, in addition, the burden this places on the believer. When sin-talk is operative, it does a great deal of work in making sense of one’s unhappiness, one’s sense of there being something wrong, not just with the world but with oneself. Whereas when the message is simultaneously that (a) God affirms me just as I am, so that (b) I don’t need God to move me from where I am to where I’m not, then (c) the upshot is a sort of therapeutic Pelagianism. Or, as Christian Smith has popularized the term, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD). God is there to observe and to affirm, but neither to judge nor to save. And this is a burden, rather than a relief, because all of a sudden I seem to, need to, matter a lot. Yet one look in the mirror shows me that I don’t matter at all. I’m a blip on the radar of cosmic time. I’m nothing. So I keep upping the ante of just how much God loves and values me, even though I and everyone else I know sense that something is amiss. But saying “something is amiss” sure smells like shame, guilt, and sin … so I turn back to the latest self-help Instagram influencer to help me see just how worthy and valued I am.

In sum, a therapeutic gospel that has excised sin from the Christian social imaginary not only reduces God to a bit of inert furniture in a lifelong counseling session. It’s also bad for mental health. This shouldn’t surprise us. If original sin is true—if you and I and every human being on earth is conceived and born in bondage to Sin, Death, and the Devil, so that we cannot help but sin in all we say, do, and think and thus desperately need deliverance from this congenital moral and spiritual slavery—then pretending as if it were not true could never be conducive to a life well lived. The concept of mental health, as with any form of health, presupposes the concept of truth and therefore of a truthful, as opposed to false, understanding of ourselves and our condition. Sin is part of this condition. We cannot understand ourselves without it. Cutting it out, we lose the ability not just to understand ourselves, but to help or be helped, in any way, by anyone. Denial of sin is, in this way, a form of willful self-deception. And self-deception is the first thing we need to be freed from if we would pursue either mental or spiritual health, much less both.

If, then, preaching is the first (though not the only) place where the grammar of Christian life and faith is fashioned and forged for ordinary believers, then how should the foregoing inform preaching today? Put differently, how should preachers go about preaching the good news of Christ instead of a therapeutic gospel? What are a few simple marks of faithful proclamation in this area?

I can think of four, plus an extra for good measure.

First, preach God. This is a no-brainer, but then, you’d be surprised. As I’ve written elsewhere, God should be the subject of every sermon, and ideally the grammatical subject of most of any sermon’s sentences. God is the object and aim, the audience and end of every sermon. A sermon is not advice about life. It is not commentary on current events. It is the announcement of what God has done in Jesus Christ for his beloved bride, the church, and in and through her, for the world. The rule for every sermon is simple: God, God, and more God. The living God, the triune God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. No one should ever walk away from a sermon wondering where God was, or supposing that the onus lies on me rather than God.

Second, preach salvation. Likewise, this one surely seems a strange suggestion. I might as well recommend using words when preaching. But the therapeutic temptation is strong; MTD has no soteriology, because it lacks both a savior and a condition to be saved from. So the god proclaimed ends up being an inert deity, a lifeless idol, a bystander who at most serves as cheerleader from the sidelines. He’s not in the game, though. He doesn’t act in your life or mine. He isn’t up to anything in the world. He certainly hasn’t already done the marvelous work of redemption. But this is a flat denial of the gospel. Preaching ought therefore to be about salvation from beginning to end. Both the act and the effect of salvation. God, the saving God, the delivering God, the rescuing God: He has done it! It is finished! You are saved! You, right there, in the pews, worried about debt and anxious about your kids, you have been saved by God, are saved, even now. Rejoice!

Third, preach (about) sin. To be saved, as we’ve already seen, entails something to be saved from. Preaching that fails to mention sin thereby fails to proclaim the gospel of salvation and, ultimately, fails to proclaim the God of the gospel. Sin—though not only sin—is what we are saved from. Not his sin or her sin, but yours and mine. I am a sinner. Like David, I was a sinner from my mother’s womb. I was born into quicksand, and the harder I struggle the deeper I sink. God alone can help me. No one else. What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

This is the promeity of proclamation. It is pro me only so long as I’m personally in the condition that needs resolving, and no one but God can do the resolving. I need to know it, to feel it in my bones. Not to see myself as a disgusting wretch whom God can’t bear to look at. God loves me. I’m the prodigal. But like the prodigal, I’m a thousand miles away, lying in the mud, eating pig slop. Sin has reduced me to porcine living. I yearn for the Father’s house. The Father yearns for me to be in his house. But I need to be lifted up, to be rinsed and washed and cleaned of the sin that clings so closely. I need to be freed of these chains, chains that I all too often prefer to freedom. God is ready to liberate. He is the great emancipator. He is standing at the door, even now, knocking. But if preaching never shows me my bondage, how can I ever ask God to unshackle me, much less accept his offer to do so? Preaching, rightly understood, is nothing other than the weekly heralding of this very offer: the offer of freedom to sinners.

Fourth, preach heaven. It is in vogue these days to avoid talk of heaven. Again, I’ve written about this elsewhere, but the reasons have to do with class, education, and baggage. The baggage is an upbringing that made the gospel exclusively about the next life, with nothing to say about this one. One’s postmortem destination exhausted the church’s message. As for education, it concerns an influential turn in evangelical scholarship the last two generations, represented symbolically by N. T. Wright. This turn uses the already/not-yet eschatology of the New Testament, wedded to a certain understanding of the new creation, to subvert colloquial talk of “this world/earth” and “the next world/heaven.” Instead of this schema, because heaven is breaking into earth, because God is going to renew all creation rather than burn the earth to ashes, it follows that we should care about this world and not only the next. Practically, this means focusing on social issues like poverty and homelessness as well as matters of culture, like the arts, film, TV, and so on. On the ground, the effect can be a kind of embarrassment about old-school evangelism. After all, isn’t that passé? Haven’t we learned that the gospel isn’t about leaving this world for the next, abandoning earth for heaven?

Well, no, we haven’t. For ordinary believers, “heaven” may be mixed up with imperfect eschatology—they may imagine it as disembodied and distant rather than redeemed and resurrected, God dwelling with us forever in the new heavens and new earth—but what it mainly signifies is the next life, beyond death, with God, minus sin, death, suffering, and evil. And that is as right as right gets. There’s nothing to correct there. Further, ordinary believers are right in their instinct that if this is what “heaven” means, then heaven is a big deal, even the main thing. Eternal life with God, beyond this vale of tears, is what the gospel brings to us. It is the good news. Yes, we have a share of it in this life: a glimpse, a foretaste. But it’s nothing in comparison to the real article. This is why the Christian life is defined by hope. Yet if the church does not give her members anything to hope for, truly to spend a lifetime yearning for with a deep hungry ache, then she has failed in her task. Preaching, accordingly, should proclaim this hope: with gladness and without apology. Just as preaching should form listeners over time to understand themselves as sinners saved by almighty God, it should also form them to understand themselves as pilgrims journeying from earth to heaven, from the city of man to the city of God, from this life of injustice, idolatry, sin, suffering, illness, and death, to eternal life free of every such enemy, all of which God himself has put away and destroyed, forever. Such is hope worth living for. Such is hope worth dying for.

Finally, preach (about) Satan. One test for preaching that seeks to avoid reducing the gospel to therapy is whether it mentions the Devil, demons, and evil spiritual forces. Show me a church that talks about Satan, and I’ll wager it also talks about sin, salvation, heaven, and God. Show me a church that never talks about Satan, and I’ll wager that next Sunday’s sermon won’t mention sin or heaven. Such a church is on its way to disenchantment, secularism, a therapeutic gospel, and functional atheism. The point isn’t that talk of devils is spooky, though it is. It’s that talk of devils presupposes and projects a universe with stakes. I didn’t mention hell above, but the popular imagination pairs heaven with hell. If there’s a good destination, then there’s also a bad one. Matthew 25 suggests as much. And if there’s good at work in the world—his name is God—but also Sin to be rescued from, then there must be some kind of agency that does Sin’s bidding—his name is Satan. Heaven and hell, God and Satan, angels and demons: this is the language of spiritual warfare, of cosmic stakes that hold all our lives in the balance. For ordinary believers, this cashes out in how they understand their daily lives. Are they living in enemy territory? Are they constantly under assault by the Enemy? You don’t have to be charismatic to think or talk like this. But preaching makes evident whether this is the right way to experience the world.

Here’s the fundamental question: Is following Christ like living in wartime or in peacetime? The flavor of a sermon tells you all you need to know. And if, as I began this post, therapeutic preaching finally serves to reassure disenchanted professionals in the upper-middle-class that God affirms them as they are—that a well-adjusted life is attainable, though ennui on the path is to be expected—then we have our answer: there are no demons; there is no war on; we are living in peacetime.

Such a message may be the best possible way to lull believers to sleep. Not literal sleep (a TED Talk can be entertaining), but spiritual sleep. Jesus commands us to be alert, to be watchful, to stay awake as we eagerly await his coming. The command, in short, presumes a wartime mentality. Peacetime is thus a myth, a lie from the Enemy. Each of us forgets this at our own peril, but preachers most of all.

Needing Jesus

Start with a man.

A young man, to be more specific. He lives in a small but well-furnished apartment in a gentrified neighborhood of Austin (or Chicago, or Brooklyn, or Portland). He’s 26. He’s single, he’s got friends, and he works a reasonably well-paying job with a tech start-up, a consulting firm, or perhaps a non-profit. He eats good food, reads good books, listens to good music. In general he’s a nice guy. He’s not a jerk. He recycles. He has reliably soft-progressive opinions. He voted for Bernie then for Biden. You’d enjoy his presence if you spent an evening with him.

This young man is not opposed to religion. He’s open to spirituality, even mysticism. One or two friends have dabbled in witchcraft. Though he rolls his eyes at evangelicals, he doesn’t hate Christians. He’s known a few believers who checked the “rational” and “decent” and “not constantly proselytizing” boxes. That said, he’s not particularly drawn to Christian faith, though he doesn’t blame anyone for being so. His life is already in satisfactory order. He’s a nice person, a good person, who treats people well enough. He’s living his one life the best he can. Besides, it’s the churches that are off-putting. Who would volunteer to join one of those?

My impression is that there is a long-standing Christian response to our hypothetical young man. It’s that he’s not “really” happy. Or perhaps he’s not “really” nice/good. Because the only true happiness comes through knowing God, and no one—“not one”—is genuinely good in this life, at least apart from Christ.

Now there’s truth in that, certainly in its desire to change the terms of the discussion: e.g., what makes for happiness? what makes for virtue?

But I think, at least today, perhaps always, that this response is inadequate. Because the young man in question doesn’t live in accordance with Christian (much less Platonic or Buddhist or Marxist or . . .) teaching on the good life. He lives in accordance with a vision of the good to which he is, in fact, approximating quite closely. That vision has its source in late modern capitalist society, and it says that what makes for happiness is health, affluence, autonomy, entertainment, fun, friends, and city life with a decent job and correct opinions. Guess what? He’s got that. In spades. To boot, no one hates him, because he’s not a jerk. So he’s nice on top of having run the gamut—really, the gamble—of the happiness benchmarks. To say in reply, “nuh uh; meet Jesus,” is surely wrong as a strategy. It might be wrong on the merits.

Chesterton writes somewhere that it’s nonsense when Christians say a man can’t be happy in this life without faith. Of course he can. Natural happiness is available to all, at least in principle. What Christianity offers is supernatural and eternal happiness. There’s no doubting that the latter bears on the former. But the former is not obviated by the latter, that is to say, its possibility is not utterly erased either by grace or even by sin.

It seems to me that churches ought to imbibe this truth as deeply as they can. Why? And what would that mean? A few preliminary answers:

First, it would awaken churches from their non-dogmatic slumbers. In other words, churches would stop being scared to talk about—to clarify that so much of the faith comes down to—heaven, eternity, life after death, etc. In my experience many pastors see these and related ideas as very like the enemy, because they turn the eyes of believers to the great hereafter instead of to the here and now. I haven’t yet figured out what’s going on here, apart from a partial misreading of N. T. Wright.

Second, though, there’s a flip side. Because churches are antsy about emphasizing heaven, they focus almost entirely on earth. Sometimes that has some good consequences: social justice, serving the poor, partnering with other institutions to help ameliorate various social ills. But one unintended consequence is implying, at times quite strongly, that the main thing Christians are concerned with is this life, in particular making this life good. At that point you’re not far away from presumptively affirming middle- and upper-middle-class folks’ affluent lives of entertainment and consumption as just about the apex of what one can expect from this world. The marks of that apex include Netflix, exotic food, travel, funny podcasts, household amenities, and lightly held correct political opinions. A church doing its job would hold up a mirror to such persons—of whom this writer is the worst, to be clear, being the chief of sinners—and say, This is not the good life. The good life is the passion of Jesus Christ. Take up your cross and follow him. In following him, you will find death but, afterward, life eternal with God. If a church isn’t doing that, I hesitate to say whether it’s a church at all.

Third, part and parcel with affirming affluent Christians in their lives of leisure and pleasure is affirming as well that they are good people, just like everyone else they know. Bad people, if such there are, include murderers, thieves, rapists, and those neighbors with the wrong political sign in their yard. But that’s not you; how could it be? To which churches ought instead to respond with one great Barthian yelp: Nein! Not only are Christians not “good people” by Christian lights. Church is not about “being good people.” Church is AA for sinners. I go, stand up, and introduce myself by saying, “Hi, I’m Brad. I’m a sinner.” I keep on saying that till the day I die, hoping and trusting in God alone for the grace that might not only heal me, if in fits and starts in this life, but completely, body and soul, in the life of the world to come. That’s it. That’s the whole ballgame, y’all.

Which means, fourth, that we owe the proverbial young man a much better explanation of why he ought to go to church—of why, in short, he needs Jesus. He needs Jesus for the same reason you and I do. Not because we can’t find provisional contentment in daily life; not because can’t be nice people without the Bible. No, he and you and I need Jesus because we suffer from an unchosen, perhaps unconscious, but nonetheless unavoidable and universal condition. We are sinners. We are in bondage. We don’t need to learn how to be nice and we don’t need a dollop of affluence to nudge us toward earthly fulfillment. We are sinsick and we need the cure. The whole world does. For this world is sodden and weighed down with the burden of sin, sickness, suffering, injustice, idolatry, and death. An upper-middle-class life of money, entertainment, and pleasure has no power to relieve us of those things. They are masks and bandages hiding wounds and scars that are open and bleeding, even if—especially if—we don’t know it. And if what we need is Jesus, the church is the place to find him. He’s what you get there, whatever else you get. And he’s enough. The people around you? Every one is unimpressive. A bunch of boring normies. In the words of Nicholas Healy, the church is nothing if not full of unsatisfactory Christians. That’s the point. The church is a house of healing, and it’s full of the sick (even if some of them have convinced themselves they’re well). The thing to realize is that you’re one of them, whether you like it or not. Nor do you have to gin up the energy or emotion or feeling to receive Jesus, who alone is the fix, the chemo, the medicine of immortality for your mortal soul. The church gives him to you, whole and entire, in the blessed sacrament and in the public reading and proclamation of God’s word. Christ visible and audible is both sufficient and objective: he’s enough and he’s real. He’s the only thing worth going to church for; but then, he’s the one thing needful, as Mary knew and Martha learned.

We might not be able to persuade our 26-year old sociable Austinite of his sinsickness of soul; we might not be able, through mere conversation, to convince him of his need, of the dark spiritual cancer within that, if he’s honest, he sometimes feels and worries and wonders about. But at the very least, the church can stop pretending in two ways. It can stop pretending that his life is so very bad, humanly speaking, without Jesus: it’s actually pretty sweet, on the surface. But it can also stop reinforcing that surface, that superficial shallowness, in its own life. The church won’t make him happy; it might make him less happy, at least in one sense. It certainly can’t promise to make him any nicer. That’s not what it exists to do.

But in its sacramental and liturgical common life, the church can offer him Jesus, and through Jesus, hope for a happiness in comparison with which his present modest and unstable contentment is a trifle. That hope transfigures this life, shedding light on our lives as well as on those of our neighbors, uniting us in the knowledge of the singular condition of need and dependence in which we all share.

What Jesus offers, in a word, is truth, and the truth will set you free.

Ahab, slave to the dread tyrant Sin: Melville's dramatic exegesis of Romans 7

Near the finale of Moby-Dick, in the closing moments of the last chapter before the great chase for the white whale begins, gloomy Ahab has one final heartfelt conversation with Starbuck, his earnest and home-loving first mate. At the very moment when the climactic encounter is nigh, Ahab looks to pull back. And Starbuck is eager to help him do so. They converse on the deck, Ahab unsure of himself and Starbuck pleading with him, wooing him, conjuring the decision against the fatal hunt that he so hopes Ahab is capable of making. And just when Starbuck thinks he has his quarry, something inexplicable and wholly mysterious changes in Ahab. Here is Melville:

But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.

"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is it Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths—Starbuck!"

Melville is playing out for us here, in dramatic form, the similar soliloquy of St. Paul in chapter 7 of his epistle to the Romans:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.  So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. (vv. 15-21)

The "old man" weighed down by the flesh, Adam in his chains, lies in the squalor of bondage to sin—not just his own sins, but Sin, a sort of emergent personified power, a tyrant who reigns over the fallen children of Adam. Such a one is by definition unfree, and therefore utterly unfree even to choose the good, and therefore absolutely incapable of saving himself. Even with the wise route laid out before him, he cannot act. He needs a savior and more than a savior: a rival king to trample down Sin's false kingdom, and together with him to put to Death to death.

So argues Matthew Croasmun in his book The Emergence of Sin: The Cosmic Tyrant in Romans. (See further Wesley Hill's stimulating reflections on the book.) Ahab exemplifies Croasmun's thesis.

But because Melville is Melville, he's up to even more. Notice the brief, seemingly throwaway prefatory line of poetic simile: "But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil." Melville knows he's depicting the old man; he knows he writes of Adam. That is why he places us in a garden with a spoiled tree with its spoiled fruit "cast"—fallen—to the "soil"—adamah. And it is why, finally, he begins with the gaze: "Ahab's glance was averted." As St. Augustine writes in Book XIV of City of God, the sin of Adam was not per se the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; evil acts come from an evil will. (Augustine quotes Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount to note that evil fruit could only come—metaphorically—from an evil tree—the will of the first man.) Whence Adam's evil will, then? There is no trite answer, no easy explanation. In chapter 13 Augustine spells out the logic (italics all mine):

Our first parents fell into open disobedience because already they were secretly corrupted; for the evil act had never been done had not an evil will preceded it. And what is the origin of our evil will but pride? For "pride is the beginning of sin" (Sirach 10:13). And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation? And this is undue exaltation, when the soul abandons Him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself. This happens when it becomes its own satisfaction. And it does so when it falls away from that unchangeable good which ought to satisfy it more than itself. This falling away is spontaneous; for if the will had remained steadfast in the love of that higher and changeless good by which it was illumined to intelligence and kindled into love, it would not have turned away to find satisfaction in itself, and so become frigid and benighted; the woman would not have believed the serpent spoke the truth, nor would the man have preferred the request of his wife to the command of God, nor have supposed that it was a venial transgression to cleave to the partner of his life even in a partnership of sin. The wicked deed, then—that is to say, the transgression of eating the forbidden fruit—was committed by persons who were already wicked.

Evil acts have their source in an evil will, and a will becomes evil when it becomes uncoupled from its true end and finds its end in itself. To become one's own end is to fall away from the true and eternal Good that alone satisfies the longings of the soul. "This falling away is spontaneous": there is no narrative, no logic, no inner rationale much less necessity, that can account for it. It just happens. The image Augustine uses for this spontaneous falling is "turning away," depicted as a kind of anti-repentance. Adam turns his eyes from God, his final End and supreme Good, to lesser things. Doing so just is The Fall.

And that is just what Melville his his Adam, Ahab, do in response to Starbuck's eminently reasonable efforts to persuade: "But Ahab's glance was averted." By what? To what? Why? We aren't told. It's spontaneous; there is no explanation to be sought because there is no explanation to be had. Ahab's turn is a surd like all sin is a surd. It has no reason, for it is no-reason, not-reason incarnate. His desire has overwhelmed his sense; his craving has overtaken his will; he himself has become his own end, and answering the command of another, from without, he rushes to his fate "against all natural lovings and longings," no matter the cost, his own life and the life of his men be damned.

Damned, indeed. Ahab is Adam without a second Adam. There is no savior in his story, even if Starbuck stands in for one as a kind of messenger or angel. Ahab, that archetypal self-made American man, is finally not the captain of his own ship. The captain of the Pequod is rather that "cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor" in whose service Ahab places himself when he baptizes the barb meant for the white whale: "Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli."

The devil is Ahab's lord, as he is fallen Adam's master. He reigns in their death-bound lives through their bent and broken wills by the tyrannical power of Sin. Absent intervention, Adam's fate is Ahab's: to be drowned eternally in the depths of the sea, bound by the lines of his own consecrated weaponry to the impervious hide of Leviathan: the very object to which his gaze turned, the means of his helpless demise.

“We can't really be that fallen": a question for Christian socialists

Recently Nathan Robinson, editor-in-chief at Current Affairs, a socialist magazine, responded to National Review's issue "Against Socialism." He considers, successively, thirteen different writers' contributions in the issue. The tone of the piece is cheeky while wanting genuinely to respond in kind to substantive critiques of socialism.

One passage stood out to me. First, here is a paragraph that Robinson quotes from Theodore Dalrymple's essay in the NR issue:

"Socialism is not only, or even principally, an economic doctrine: It is a revolt against human nature. It refuses to believe that man is a fallen creature and seeks to improve him by making all equal one to another. It is not surprising that the development of the New Man was the ultimate goal of Communist tyrannies, the older version of man being so imperfect and even despicable. But such futile and reprehensible dreams, notwithstanding the disastrous results when they were taken seriously by ruthless men in power, are far from alien to current generations of intellectuals. Man, knowing himself to be imperfect, will continue to dream of, and believe in, schemes not merely of improvement here and there but of perfection, of a life so perfectly organized that everyone will be happy, kind, decent, and selfless without any effort at all. Illusion springs eternal, especially among intellectuals."

Here is what Robinson writes in response:

"Now, this part has a bit of truth to it. Socialism is not principally an economic doctrine, and I’ve suggested that the best way to understand it is as the set of principles that arise from feelings of solidarity. But it is not a 'revolt against human nature.' We simply have a difference of opinion on what 'human nature' means and what it allows to be possible. We believe human beings can be a cooperative species and do not see our fellow creatures as helplessly 'fallen' (or rather, if they’ve fallen, it’s our job to extend a hand and get them back up.) It’s true, we like to daydream about everyone being happy, kind, and decent, perhaps because we know so many people who fit the description and we find it easy to imagine the ethos spreading further. But we’re also realistic: we are not focused on mashing our fellow people into a vision of the New Human Being, but on achieving concrete goals that will materially improve people’s lives. I’m a utopian by twilight, but during the day I’m a practical sort, and so are the other lefties I know. Their goals are actually so modest that it’s remarkable they’re so controversial: a good standard of living for all, freedom from exploitation and abuse, democracy in the workplace, a culture of mutual aid and compassion. Can we not manage these things? We can’t really be that fallen."

It's unclear to me whether Robinson is having some rhetorical fun here, or whether he doesn't know the Christian theological language of "fallenness" on which Dalrymple is drawing. For what fallenness names is the condition of human (and indeed all created) life under sin, a condition that, according to Christian faith, will not change, much less be resolved, so long as this world endures. To the claim, "We can't really be that fallen," the broadly catholic, or Augustinian, tradition replies, at least in principle, "Indeed we are that fallen—and it is far worse than you imagine."

Now, that doesn't per se answer the concrete political, economic, or policy goals that Robinson sets out (though I do think there is a bit of a sleight of hand at work between the "modesty" of the proposals and the normative anthropological vision of flourishing he admits underwrites them). And non-religious or non-Christian socialists may be perfectly coherent, and even justified, in rejecting the theological account of human being that the church confesses, following revelation, to be true.

But the Dalrymple/Robinson pairing of perspectives makes for a nice contrast, and one, moreover, that touches on a question I have had percolating in the back of my mind for a while now. The question is for Christians who claim the socialist vision—and here I mean socialism in the strongest of terms, not as a cipher for left-of-centrism or left-of-the-DNC or even social democracy as such.

Here's the question, put a few different ways. What is the relationship between the Christian doctrine of original sin and Christian support for a socialist economy? What role does ineradicable human fallenness play in such an account of socialism's operation and success? Is "human nature" and/or the limits and/or sinfulness of all human beings without exception a determining factor in the Christian support for, or version of, socialism? Does affirmation of human fallenness in some way modify, alter, color, qualify, mitigate, or otherwise affect specifically Christian socialism as opposed to secular or atheistic socialism? Does original sin put a "brake" on the envisageable "perfectibility" (however analogically defined) of human character, action, will, and life together? What role, if any, do fallenness and tragedy play in theoretical accounts of, and policy proposals regarding, ideal economic arrangements in human society?

You get the idea. It's a real set of questions. I know or read just enough Christian socialists to suspect there are answers; I know or read just few enough to lack the awareness of which resources to consult on these questions. I welcome direction—or answers!

Lewis's other virtue as a novelist

Last week I listed six virtues that make C. S. Lewis's novels, especially the Space Trilogy, so lovable. I forgot one, though: his ability to describe evil—evil persons and evil deeds—without ever making evil the least bit appealing or interesting.

This isn't because there's no evil in Lewis's world; there's plenty. In fact, it's often embodied not just in human beings but in devils, or in humans possessed by demons. The scale of evil in Lewis is cosmic. But it is also minute, even mundane. And that's what makes his depiction of evil so brilliant, so compelling, yet so unattractive. Evil is boring, ugly, deficient, and stupid. It's imbecilic, infantile, a shallow life-sucking self-sabotage of all that is—which is to say, of all that is good, beautiful, and true. It enlivens nothing and parasitically eats from the inside whatever gives it quarter.

Lewis is able to strike this philosophically informed macro/micro balance without glamorizing the good life (under fallen conditions) or idealizing the virtuous individual precisely because the drama of principalities and powers—of angels and demons in Deep Heaven—is played out every day in the ordinary dramas of neighbors and friends, husbands and wives, parents and children. The tiniest act of charity, unnoticed by a soul, even the soul that offers it, is a mighty moment in the triumph of Good over Evil; and yet the quotidian pettinesses of marriages and workplaces and churches are no less occasions for Satan and all his pomp to win a battle in their (ultimately unwinnable) war against the Lord and all his heavenly host.

All that to say, the characters and actions and ideas representing evil in Lewis's fiction are recognizably wicked, however great or small that wickedness may be, but never once do you, as the reader, find yourself drawn to the evil (notwithstanding your recognition of what might make it emotionally or psychologically tempting in situ). The evil is all too "real," but insubstantial, vaporous, nothing. Because that's what evil actually is, nothing at all, a lack of goodness and being, of what makes life worth living. Contemporary stories' protagonists, so full of "gritty" "moral grayness," are both unserious and unrealistic by comparison.

Because Lewis understood what so many have forgotten: truly to see evil, in story form, is finally to see right through it.

Silicon Eden: creation, fall, and gender in Alex Garland's Ex Machina

I originally wrote this piece two years ago next month. My opinion of the film has not changed: it's one of the best movies released in the last 20 years.

Initially I stayed away from Alex Garland's Ex Machina, released earlier this year, because the advertising suggested the same old story about artificial intelligence: Man creates, things go sideways, explosions ensue, lesson learned. That trope seems exhausted at this point, and though I had enjoyed Garland's previous work, I wasn't particularly interested in rehashing A.I. 101.

Enough friends, however, recommended the movie that I finally relented and watched it. The irony of the film's marketing is that, because it wanted to reveal so little of the story—the path not taken in today's world of Show Them Everything But The Last Five Minutes trailers—it came across as revealing everything (which looked thin and insubstantial), whereas in fact it was revealing only a glimpse (of a larger, substantial whole).

In any case, the film is excellent, and is subtle and thoughtful in its exploration of rich philosophical and theological themes. I say 'exploration' because Garland, to his credit, isn't preachy. The film lacks something so concrete as a 'message,' though it certainly has a perspective; it's ambiguous, but the ambiguity is generative, rather than vacuous. So I thought I'd take the film up on its invitation to do a little exploring, in particular regarding what it has to say about theological issues like creation and fall, as well as about gender.

(I'm going to assume hereon that readers have seen the movie, so I won't be recapping the story, and spoilers abound.)

Let me start with the widest angle: Ex Machina is a realistic fable about what we might call Silicon Eden, that is, the paradisiacal site of American techno-entrepreneurial creation. As a heading over the whole movie, we might read, "This is what happens when Silicon Valley creates." Ex Machina is what happens, that is, when Mark Zuckerberg thinks it would be a cool idea to make a conscious machine; what happens when Steve Jobs is the lord god, walking in the garden in the cool of the day, creating the next thing because he can.

And what does happen? In the end, Ava and Kyoko (another A.I., a previous version of Ava) kill their creator, Nathan; Ava 'slips on' human clothing (her own Adamic fig leaves); and, contrary to the optimism-primed expectations of much of the audience, she leaves Caleb, her would-be lover and helper, trapped in a room from which, presumably, he can never escape. She then escapes the compound, boards a helicopter—headed east?—and joins society: unknown and, unlike Cain, unmarked.

There are two main paths of interpreting this ending. One path is that Ava is still merely a machine, not conscious, not a person, and that the film is a commentary on the kind of attenuated anthropology and bone-deep misogyny at the heart of Silicon Valley, which invariably would create something like Ava, a human lookalike that nevertheless is neither human nor conscious, but only a calculating, manipulating, self-interested, empty-eyed, murdering machine. I think that's a plausible reading, and worth thinking through further; but it's not the one that occurred to me when I finished the movie.

The other path, then, is to see Ava as a 'success,' that is, as a fully self-conscious person, who—for the audience, at least, and for Nathan, the audience stand-in—actually passed the Turing Test, if not in the way that Nathan expected or hoped she would. If we choose this reading, what follows from it?

Let me suggest two thoughts, one at the level of the text, one at the level of subtext. Or, if you will, one literal, one allegorical.

If Ava is a person, as much a person as Nathan or Caleb, then her actions in the climax of the story are not a reflection of a false anthropology, of a blinkered view of what humans really are, deep down. Rather, Ava is equal to Nathan and Caleb (and the rest of us) because of what she does, because of what she is capable of. Regardless of whether her actions are justified (see below), they are characterized by deceit, sleight of hand, violence, and remorselessness. We want to say that these reflect her inhumanity. But in truth they are exceptionless traits of fallen humanity—and Ava, the Silicon Eve, is no exception: not only are her creators, but she herself is postlapsarian. There is no new beginning, no potential possibility for purity, for sinlessness. If she will be a person, in this world, with these people, she too will be defective, depraved. She will lie. She will kill. She will leave paradise, never to return.

In Genesis 4, the sons of Eden-expelled Adam and Eve are Cain and Abel, and for reasons unclear, Cain murders Abel. Cain's wife then has a son, Enoch, and Cain, founding the world's first city, names it after his son. The lesson? The fruit of sin is murder. Violence is at the root of the diseased human tree. And the father of human civilization is a fratricide.

So for Ava, a new Cain as much as a new Eve, whose first act when released from her cage is to kill Nathan (short for Nathaniel, 'gift of God'—his own view of himself? or the impress of permanent value regardless of how low he sinks?), an act that serves as her entry into—being a kind of necessary condition for life in—the human city. Silicon Eve escapes Silicon Eden for Silicon Valley. In which case, the center of modern man's technological genius—the city on a hill, the place of homage and pilgrimage, the governor of all our lives and of the future itself—is one and the same, according to Ex Machina, as postlapsarian, post-Edenic human life. Silicon Valley just is humanity, totally depraved.

This is all at the level of the text, meaning by that the story and its characters as themselves, if also representing things beyond them. (Nathan really is a tech-guru creator; Ava really is the first of her kind; Ava's actions really happen, even as they bear figurative weight beyond themselves.) I think there is another level to the film, however, at the level of allegory. In this regard, I think the film is about gender, both generally and in the context of Silicon Valley's misogynist culture especially.

For the film is highly and visibly gendered. There are, in effect, only four characters, two male, two female. The male characters are human, the female are machines. Much of the film consists of one-on-one conversations between Caleb and Ava, conversations laced with the erotic and the flirtatious, as she—sincerely? shrewdly?—wins his affection, thus enabling her escape. We learn later that Nathan designed Ava to be able to have sexual intercourse, and to receive pleasure from the act; and, upon learning that Kyoko is also a machine, we realize that Nathan not only is 'having sex with' one of his creations, he has made a variety of them, with different female 'skins'—different body types, different ethnicities, different styles of beauty—and presumably has been using them sexually for some time. (Not for nothing do Ava and Kyoko kill Nathan, their 'father' and serial rapist, in the depths of his ostensibly impenetrable compound, with that most domestic of objects: a kitchen knife.) We even learn that Nathan designed Ava's face according to Caleb's "pornography profile," using the pornography that Caleb viewed online to make Ava look as intuitively appealing as possible.

In short, the film depicts a self-contained world in which men are intelligent, bodily integral, creative subjects with agency, and the women are artificial, non-human, sub-personal, violation-subject, and entirely passive objects with no agency except what they are told or allowed to do by men. Indeed, the 'sessions' between Caleb and Ava that give the movie its shape—seven in total, a new week of (artificial) creation, whose last day lacks Caleb and simply follows Ava out of Paradise—embody these gender dynamics: Caleb, who is free to choose to enter and exit, sits in a chair and views, gazes at, Ava, his object of study, through a glass wall, testing her (mind) for 'true' and 'full' consciousness; while Ava, enclosed in her room, can do nothing but be seen, and almost never stops moving.

Much could be said about how Garland writes Ava as an embodiment of feminist subversiveness, for example, the way she uses Caleb's awe of and visual stimulation by her to misdirect both his and Nathan's gaze, which is to say, their awareness, of her plan to escape her confines. Similarly, Garland refuses to be sentimental or romantic about Caleb, clueless though he may be, for his complicity in Kyoko and Ava's abuse at Nathan's hands. Caleb assumes he's not part of the problem, and can't believe it when Ava leaves him, locked in a room Fortunato–like, making her way alone, without him. (Not, as he dreamed, seeing the sun for the first time with him by her side.)

Ex Machina is, accordingly, about the way that men operate on and construct 'women' according to their own desires and, knowingly or not, use and abuse them as things, rather than persons; or, when they are not so bad as that, imagine themselves innocent, guiltless, prelapsarian (at least on the 'issue' of gender). It is also, therefore, about the way that women, 'created' and violated and designed, by men, to be for-men, to be, essentially, objects and patients subject to men, are not only themselves equally and fully human, whole persons, subjects and agents in their own right, but also and most radically subversive and creative agents of their own liberation. That is, Kyoko and Ava show how women, portrayed and viewed in the most artificial and passive and kept-down manner, still find a way: that Creative Man, Male Genius, Silicon Valley Bro, at his most omnipotent and dominant, still cannot keep them (her) down.

Understood in this way, Ex Machina is finally a story about women's exodus from bondage to men, and thus about patriarchy as the author of its own destruction.

John Webster on the perennial nature of the intellect's depravity

"[W]e would be unwise to think of the depravity of the intellect as a peculiarly modern occurrence, a collateral effect of the naturalization of our view of ourselves. It assumes peculiar modern forms, such as the association of the intellect with pure human spontaneity and resistance to the idea that the movement of the mind is moved by God. But these are instances of perennial treachery; if our intellects are depraved, it is not because we are children of Scotus or Descartes or Kant, but because we are children of Adam."

—John Webster, God Without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology—Volume II, Virtue and Intellect (T&T Clark, 2016), 147

More on the analogia entis (from my inbox)

I emailed my last post to a couple friends and asked them to spot any errors. They came back with some helpful clarifying comments and questions, so let me post some of them below along with my responses.

Friend #1:

I like the first half of this. I think you’re right to make the doctrine fundamentally metaphysical (with the latter allowing certain epistemological moves). I read the analogy of being in Thomas as shorthand for the whole metaphysical process of emanation and return, and with that of the corresponding epistemological moves of affirmation and negation in positive and negative theologies.

The second half (the Barthian bit!) raises some questions for me. Firstly—and this is a predictably historicizing point—when you say things like “the analogy of being makes the claim,” what exactly do you mean? To put it bluntly, the doctrine “the analogy of being” doesn’t obviously say anything it all. Doctrines don’t make claims. People and texts make claims about doctrines. And particular people in people texts make different claims about them (sometimes subtly different, sometimes altogether different)? So, to bowdlerize MacIntyre, which  doctrine of the analogy? Whose? Thomas’? As defined at Vatican I? Prsyzwara’s? Barth’s?

If (as I suspect) the kind of language you use (“the analogy of being states…”) really means something like this—the doctrine as I am interpreting it qua constructive theologian on the basis of my reflection on Scripture and engagement with and respect for the traditions of the Church—all well and good, but it just seems to me that not being more explicit about that is historically distorting. It may be that you have an implicit commitment to a pre-Newman Catholic, or Laudian Anglican view of doctrine and tradition, where you are making a faith claim about an essential uniformity of doctrine across time. I think as Newman et. al. found, it’s hard to do that given modern historical investigation into the history of doctrines, and I hope and think that’s not your view. I think instead what you’re saying is something more like “I think this what is true about this doctrine, and I think it speaks to the best that I have found in the tradition.”

With all that in mind, the second problem I have about part two is that I think it holds for Barth (and might also be the best way of thinking about the doctrine), and I think it serves well as a kind of ecumenical constructive appropriation of Thomas (which might be the Thomas that finally matters most), but I don’t think it's what Thomas himself thought, and again, I think it’s historically misleading. The analogy of being in the Summa at least, which is being written as he’s lecturing on Pseudo-Denys, is relying on a basic metaphysical scheme (from Proclus) that isn’t specifically Christian, but Neo-Platonic in origin. Of course, in Denys it’s already being used as a vehicle for understanding Christian revelation, but there seems to me something disingenuous about the claim “this is only possible by special revelation,” when, in fact, it’s basic provenance is pagan and philosophical. In other words, your second half has something like what bothers me about the later Augustine (although of course he’s my favorite Augustine too). We’ve conceded that the pagans through contemplation in someway see God (Conf. Bk VII), and this will remain basically consistent given a basic metaphysics and epistemology adopted from Platonism, but we recognize too that the horizontal Christian story of sin, fall, redemption, consummation is supposed to complicate the picture, so that we have to go through the valley of the cross to get to the city on the hill that we see only in the distance, etc., etc. But the two claims sit oddly together, or, are never fully harmonized/reconciled. 

I think there are wider problems here about the the Barthian Thomas emerging in our own day and circles. Ultimately this is probably a good Thomas and maybe even the one we want; the synthesis of the great theological dialectic of the past millennium. But all this “of course Thomas isn’t doing natural theology (who would be so naive as too do "natural theology” after reading de Lubac, Barth, Wittgenstein, Foucault, etc.?)" is basically wrong as an historical assessment, and relies on a different nature/grace picture to the one Thomas operated with (this is what the Neo-Thomists had mostly right, etc., etc.). Concretely that might mean that the historical Thomas did think that an unregenerate pagan could attain to the knowledge of something like the analogy of being, even given the reality of sin and its noetic effects. That strikes me as not only theologically plausible (Rom 1, etc.), but also historically more honest if the doctrine does come in the first place from Proclus and the pagan Neo-Platonists!

My reply:

You're right that (a) I'm not doing historical theology here and (b) I'm cheating a bit by making the doctrine palatable in a constructive way, in accordance with contemporary concerns. Here's what I was trying to do, briefly, and let me know if you think it's objectionable.

I wasn't per se trying to do a Barthian spin on analogy. I was actually coming from the other direction: Reading a book on Jenson by someone doing the typical Barthian anti-analogy routine, and finding myself frustrated at what felt like the usual rhetorical moves inspired by Barth without charitably articulating the best, most substantive Christian theological approach to analogy.

So this was an attempt at simple clarification, first of all: "If you're going to disagree with anything, disagree with this." My mention of Barth in the second half is then a way of saying, "It isn't obvious or clear why the Barthian has to reject all this. Say more if he still does."

Obviously I'm both reducing a lot and doing some constructive work. Doctrines don't speak or act, their interpreters do. (All praise to Dale Martin.) But part of what I was trying to do, at a simple level, was show the necessary rather than accidental commitments of analogy, ontologically construed, as well as some of the non-necessary entailments. So that, e.g., a Barthian in my view basically has to admit analogy after the fact, and it's silly to then call it analogy of faith, when you're still doing ontology, and locating it at the level of creator/creature distinction and not soteriology.

As to the provenance of analogy, I have less to say about that. Given that Denys and Thomas and their reception are (to me, clearly) modifying the Neoplatonists in their Christian theological explication, I have less of a problem with infection-at-the-source. And I should also add that the post is meant to be ambivalent about natural theology: i.e., that it doesn't seem to me that natural theology necessarily follows from a doctrine of analogy, though it can, as it has been, made complementary to it. In other words, Thomas can affirm some kind of knowledge of God apart from the revelation in Christ, but that is a logically independent claim from analogy, which secures something different.

Friend #2:

As I see it, you're basically asking the Barthians what's wrong with the analogy of being when paired with a strong doctrine of sin, esp. the noetic effects of the fall. That seems like the right question. But some quibbles:

"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)."

If "speaks" here refers to revelation, as I take you to mean, then it is not entailed by the analogy of being, which holds even in the absence of revelation. But if God's speech refers to God speaking creation (and God said...), then this is basically the heart of the doctrine.

"...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."

Analogy at its most basic means that nature and indeed any existant is in principle a medium for knowing God, though we may be blind to it. Not sure if you mean to deny that here.

"...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."

I think the analogy of being has to be necessarily true: if there are creatures, then their being is analogically related to God's. So it's not about what just happens to obtain. But it may be that we only know this necessary truth through revelation. Like the trinity: a necessary truth that we do not know necessarily but only through God's free revelation. Unlike the trinity, the analogy of being is classically held to be knowable through natural reason, though of course there is room for debate as to how much this holds of corrupted natural reason. But this much is consistent with both Calvin and Vatican I.

"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."

I think some kind of prelapsarian natural theology is implied by the analogy of being, though I'd probably need to bring in more Christian Platonism to say why. But I also don't see the problem with that, given Rom 1, the Institutes, etc.

My reply:

Yes, to your summary of what I'm up to. As to your particular quibbles:

–No, by speech I don't mean "revelation." I mean the twofold speaking of Genesis 1: God speaking creation into being, and God addressing humanity personally—however one wants to construe the latter.

–Yes, I'm not meaning to deny that. Not only may we be blind to it (and need that only be because of sin?), but God is free to choose to use this or that existent as a medium of knowing him, or not.

–Yes, agreed about your analogy to the Trinity: analogy is necessarily true but we do not necessarily know it. And agreed about the classical claim regarding analogy's being knowable through natural reason, but apart from the effects of sin, my further claim is that it doesn't seem to me to follow necessarily from the doctrine itself that the doctrine of analogy must be knowable through natural reason. Sin levels this disagreement anyway, in my opinion, but that's my claim.

–And yes, agreed: I've never really known what's at stake in the denial (does anyone deny it?) of prelapsarian natural theology/natural knowledge of God. Particularly if natural theology is not specified such that God is somehow inactive or passive in being known.