Aping the Inklings

Who are the most-quoted, oft-cited authors in popular (American Protestant) Christian writing from the last half century?

The names that come to my mind are Lewis, Chesterton, Tolkien, Guinness, Chambers, Schaeffer, Henry, Graham, Kuyper, Piper, Keller, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Brueggemann, Stott, Packer, Machen, Niebuhr, Hauerwas. Also (from philosophy) MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, James K. A. Smith. For more academic types, you’ll see Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Hauerwas. For Reformed folks, you’ll see Piper and Keller, Kuyper and Schaeffer. For biblical scholars, you’ll see Packer and Stott and Brueggemann. For Catholic-friendly or philosophical sorts, you’ll see Chesterton or Tolkien, MacIntyre or Taylor.

I’m sure I’m missing some big names; I’m pretty ignorant about true-blue evangelical (much less bona fide fundie) writers and sub-worlds. And I’m not even thinking about American Catholicism. But with those qualifiers in place, I’d say this sampling of names is not unrepresentative.

I’m also, by the way, thinking about my “four tiers” of Christian writing outlined in another post. Not professional (level 3) or scholarly (level 4), but universal (level 1) or popular (level 2) writing. What types of names populate those books? The list above includes some big hitters.

That’s all by way of preface. Here’s what I want to say—granting that it’s a point that’s been made many times by others. I’m also, it should be clear, addressing the following to myself as a writer above all. Here it is, in any case:

Popular American Christian writing would benefit from taking a break from constantly quoting, self-consciously imitating, rhetorically centering, or otherwise “drafting” off these figures.

Why? Here’s a few reasons.

First, it generates an unintended homogeneity in both style and perspective. When everyone’s trying to ape the Inklings, even the most successful attempts are all doing the same thing as everyone else. The result is repetition and redundancy. My eyes start rolling back into my head the moment I see that line or that excerpt quoted for the umpteenth time. We all know it! Let’s call a ten-year moratorium on putting it in print. Deal?

Second, it ensures a certain derivative character to popular Christian writing. Whereas, for example, Lewis and Chesterton and Barth and Niebuhr had their own domains of learning in which they were masters, and on which they drew to write for the masses, Christian writers whose primary “domain” is Lewis, Chesterton & co. never end up going to the (or a) source; all their learning is far downstream from the classics (not to mention unpopular or unheard-of texts) that directly informed the more immediate sources they’re consulting.

Put it this way: Evangelicals are to the Inklings as J. J. Abrams is to George Lucas. Lucas, whatever other faults he may have had, was creating an epic cinematic myth based on Akira Kurosawa, Joseph Campbell, and countless other (“high” and “low”) bits of source material. Abrams and his “remake as sequel” ilk don’t play in the big boy sandbox, creating something newly great out of old great things. They play in the tiny sandbox Lucas and others already created. That’s why it feels like cosplay, or fan fiction. They’re not riffing on ancient myths and classic archetypes. They’re rearranging toys in Lucas’s brain.

At their worst, that’s what evangelical and other Protestant writers do when they make the Inklings (or similar popular modern classics) their north star.

This is a problem, third, because the evangelicals in question mistake the popularity of the Inklings as a sensibility or strategy that can be emulated rather than the unique result of who the Inklings were, when and where they lived, and what they knew. Maybe we should set the rule: If you are an Oxbridge don or Ivy League prof, and if you are a polymath who has read every book written in Greek or Latin or German or Old English published before the birth of Luther, and if you are a world-class writer of poetry, fiction, and apologetics, then you may consider the Inklings’ path as one fit for walking. Otherwise, stay in your lane.

Now, I trust it is obvious I’m being facetious. As I said earlier, I’m talking to myself before I’m thinking of anyone else—I’ve quoted most of these figures in print, and I have books for a Tier 2 audience coming out next year that cite Barth, Hauerwas, Lewis, and Bonhoeffer! Nor do I mean to suggest that a Christian writer has to be as brilliant as these geniuses to write at all. In that case, none of us should be writing. Finally, there do continue to be scholars and writers (few and far between though they be) who have useful and illuminating things to say about the actual Inklings—Alan Jacobs comes to mind—not to mention the other authors in my list above.

All I mean to say is this. On one hand, the way to imitate these masters is by doing what they did in one’s own context and realm of knowledge, not by becoming masters of them and making them the sun around which one’s mental planet orbits. On the other hand, if you want your writing to be original, creative, distinctive, stylish, thoughtful, and punchy—if you want it not only to be good but to stand out from the crowd—then the number one thing to do is not make these guys the beating heart of your writing. Doing that will render your work invisible, since such writing is a dime a dozen, and has been for three generations.

What then should your writing be like? Who or what should it “draft” off of? That’s for you to discover.

Well-adjusted

C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960):

Medicine labors to restore “natural” structure or “normal” function. But greed, egoism, self-deception, and self-pity are not abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney. For who, in Heaven's name, would describe as natural or normal any man from whom these failings were wholly absent? “Natural,” if you like, in a quite different sense; archnatural, unfallen. We have only seen one such Man. And he was not at all like the psychologist's picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can't really be “well adjusted” to your world if it says “you have a devil” and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.

Stanley Hauerwas, “Being with the Wounded: Pastoral Care Within the Life of the Church” (2019):

I have little sympathy for clergy who think their ministry of pastoral care to be the expression of a more general stance identified as a helping profession. Admittedly those who so understand their ministry may often manifest pious pretensions necessary to justify their self-proclaimed identity as someone who responds to a crisis “pastorally,” but I do not think such piety is sufficient to justify describing what they do as a church practice.

There is the problem, moreover, when the ministry becomes just another helping profession, and those who occupy that office discover they have no protection from those they are supposed to help. People think they can ask those who identify as “helpers” to do anything because those committed to be a “helper” do not work for a living. As a result, it does not take long before those in the ministry who identify as “helpers” soon discover they feel like they have been nibbled to death by ducks. A little bite here and a little bite there, and before they know it they have lost an arm. Hence, those that started out wanting to be “of help” often end up violently disliking those they are allegedly helping.

Insofar as the ministry is understood as a helping profession, it is difficult to avoid an alienation between those who help and those that need help. One of the great gifts of being in the ministry is the permission it gives to be present to people in crisis when they are often at their most vulnerable point in their life. They are often appreciative that you are present during the crisis, but after the crisis is over they prefer that you be kept at a distance. They excommunicate those who have been present during the crisis because they fear those that have seen them when they were so vulnerable. That they do so makes the up building of the community difficult, to say the least. . . .

I think we get some idea of the character of contemporary understandings of pastoral care by attending to the account that Alasdair MacIntyre provides in After Virtue of the main characters that have authority in modernity ― that is, the rich aesthete, the manager and the therapist. Each, in their own way, is an expression of a culture of emotivism which is based on the presumption that, insofar as our lives makes sense, they do so only by the imposition of our arbitrary wilfulness. Such wilfulness is required because it is assumed that our lives have no end other than what we can create and impose by the sheer force of our arbitrary desires. As a consequence, it becomes impossible to avoid the reality that all our interactions are manipulative.

In such a context, the task of the therapist, as MacIntyre puts it, is to “transform neurotic symptoms into directed energy, maladjusted individuals into well-adjusted ones.” The therapist must do so, moreover, assuming that there is no normative framework other than respect for their clients' autonomy that can shape their interactions.

To be a moral agent in such a culture entails that we can never be fully present in our actions because if we are to be free we must always be able to stand back from our actions, as if someone other than ourselves did what was done. Such a perspective is the only way to avoid being determined by particularistic narratives that would constrain our choices. The therapist cannot avoid reflecting these conditions because the therapist cannot assume a narrative that can help us make sense of the moral incoherence of our lives. Thus MacIntyre's claim, in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, that any challenge to these modern habits of thought faces the difficulty of only being able to think about our lives in terms that exclude those concepts needed for any radical critique.

What MacIntyre helps us see is how the eclectic character of the various psychological theories that so often inform pastoral care reflects liberal political theory and practice. That many people in advanced industrial societies suffer from a sense that they are alone because no one — including themselves — understand who they are is expected result of living in a time when freedom is assumed to be found in having a unimpeded choice. . . .

The account of the development of pastoral care I have just given does not do justice to the complexity of much of the work done under the headings of “pastoral care” and “pastoral theology.” I am not apologizing because I think, as Stephen Pattison has argued, that the pastoral care movement, particularly in America, has ignored the theological tradition that makes the care given through the church Christian. It is not at all clear that Christians are called to be mature or well-adjusted, but it is surely the case that the care Christians give one another ― and particularly the care that is thought to be the province of those that occupy the pastoral office ― will and should depend on being an expression of the fundamental convictions that make Christians Christian.

A therapeutic church is an atheist church

Two friends of mine, Richard Beck and Jake Meador, have been beating similar drums lately, and it occurred to me today that their drums are in sync.

For some time, Richard has been writing about churches that function as though God does not exist. These churches advocate for forms of life, perspectives on the world, and political activism that often are, and certainly may be, good, but which do not in any way require God. God is an optional extra to the main thing. Needless to say, the children of these churches correctly imbibe the message, and eventually leave behind both church and God. After all, if you can have what the church is selling without either faith in God or, more important, the demands God places on your life, then it is only prudent to keep the baby but throw out the bathwater.

There’s much more to say than this, and Richard is very eloquent on the subject. Summarizing the point: The only reason to be a Christian is if (a) the God of Israel has raised Jesus the Messiah from the dead and (b) this event somehow does for you and for me what we could never do for ourselves, while being the singular answer to our most desperate needs. The only reason to be a Christian, in other words, is the gospel. And if the gospel is rendered redundant by a congregation’s life, worship, and teaching, then said congregation has put itself out of business, whether or not it knows it, whether or not it ever intended to do so. It has become, for all intents and purposes, an atheist church.

As for Jake, he has been writing recently about the therapeutic turn in the American church. A church has become therapeutic if the gospel is reduced, and reducible, to the premises and vocabulary, concepts and recommendations of therapy. A therapeutic church does not speak of sin, judgment, guilt, shame, wrath, hell, repentance, punishment, suffering, crucifixion, deliverance, salvation, Satan, demons, exorcism, and so forth. It takes most or all of these to be in need of translation or elimination: the latter, because they are outmoded or harmful to mental health; the former, because they are applicable to contemporary life but only in psychological, not spiritual, terms. A therapeutic church speaks instead, therefore, of wellness, health, toxicity, self-care, harm, safety, balance, affirmation, holding space, and being well-adjusted.

A church is not therapeutic if it endorses therapy and counseling offered by licensed professional as one among a number of potentially useful tools for people in need; any more than a church in favor of hospitals would be “medicalized” or a church promoting the arts would be “aestheticized.” The question is not whether mental health is real (it is), whether medication is sometimes worth prescribing (it is), or whether therapy can be helpful (it can be). The question is whether mental health is convertible with spiritual health. The question, that is, is whether the work of therapy is synonymous with the work of the gospel; whether the task of the counselor is one and the same as that of the pastor.

Answer: It is not.

This is where Jake’s point intersects with Richard’s. If the gospel is interchangeable with counseling, then people should stop attending church and hire counselors instead. Why not go straight to the source? Why settle for second best? If a minister is merely a so-so therapist with Jesus sprinkled on top, then parishioners can sleep in on Sundays, drop Jesus, and get professional therapy as they please, whenever they wish. I promise you, if what you’re after is twenty-first century quality therapy, neither Holy Scripture nor the Divine Liturgy is the thing for you.

Hence: a therapeutic church is an atheist church. Not because therapy is anti-gospel. Not because therapeutic churches are consciously atheistic. No, a therapeutic church is atheist because it has lost its raison d’être: it preaches a gospel without God. Which is not only an oxymoron but a wholesale inversion of the good news. The gospel is, as St. Paul puts it, “the good news of God.” And if, as he puts it elsewhere, God has not raised Jesus from the dead, we of all people are most to be pitied.

A therapeutic church has, in this way, lost its nerve. It simply does not believe what it says it believes, what it is supposed to be preaching. It does not believe that the God revealed in Jesus Christ is the best possible news on planet earth, meant for every soul under heaven. It does not believe that the problems of people today, as at all times, have their final answer and ultimate fulfillment in the Word made flesh. Or, to the extent that it does believe this, it is scared to say so, because the folks in the pews do not want to hear that. They want to be affirmed in their identities, in their desires, in their blemishes and failures and foibles. They do not want to be judged by God. They do not want to be told they need saving by God. They do not want to learn that their plight is so dire that the God who created the universe had to die for their sins on a cross. They want to be told: I’m okay, you’re okay, we’re all okay—so long as we accept our imperfections and refuse the siren songs of guilt and shame. They want, in a word, to be heard, to be seen, and to be accepted just as they are.

There is a reason people are going to churches looking for that, why churches are increasingly offering it to them. It’s near to the gospel. But the overlap is incomplete. God is not a therapist, and his principal goal in Christ is not to ensure a high degree of mental health in the context of a larger successful venture in upper-middle class professional/family life. God, rather, is in the business of holiness. And as Stanley Hauerwas has observed, vanishingly few of the saints would qualify as “well-adjusted.” The risen Lord without warning struck Paul blind and subsequently informed Ananias, “I will show him how much he must suffer for my name” (Acts 9:16). Has anyone read a Pauline epistle and thought, Now this is a picture of stable mental health? The flame of holiness knows no bounds; it leaves burns and scars painful to the touch; it scorches the mind no less than the body:

And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor 12:7-10)

I cannot say whether the author of these words was entirely well. But he was an apostle, and then a martyr, and now a saint. To say the same thing another way, his life was and remains unintelligible if the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is a fiction. No God, no Paul. The same should be said (should be sayable) of every church and every Christian in the world—at least by aspiration, at least in terms of what they say about themselves, whatever the extent to which they succeed or fail to meet the goal.

The more, however, a congregation becomes therapeutic, in its language, its liturgy, its morals, its common life, the more God recedes from the picture. God becomes secondary, then tertiary, then ornamental, then metaphorical, then finally superfluous. The old-timers keep God on mostly out of muscle memory, but the younger generations know the score. They don’t quit church and stop believing in God because of a lack of catechesis, as if they weren’t listening on Sundays. They were listening all right. The catechesis didn’t fail; it worked, only too well. The twenty- and thirty-somethings were preached right out of the gospel—albeit with the best of intentions and a smile on every minister and usher’s face. They smiled right back, and headed for the exit sign.

I’m in LARB on Hauerwas, Barth, and Christendom

This morning Los Angeles Review of Books published an essay review of mine on Stanley Hauerwas’s latest book, which came out earlier this year, titled Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth. Here is the opening paragraph:

THIS YEAR STANLEY Hauerwas turns 82 years old. To mark the occasion, he has published a book on Karl Barth, who died at the same age in 1968. The timing as well as the pairing is fitting. Barth is the greatest Protestant theologian of the 20th century, and probably the most widely read of any theologian over the last 100 years. As for Hauerwas, since the passing of Reinhold Niebuhr in 1971, he has been the most prolific, influential, and recognizable Christian theological thinker in American public life. Barth somehow graced the cover of Time magazine in 1962, even though he was a Swiss Calvinist whose books on technical theology are so thick they could stop bullets. Hauerwas has never made the cover, but in 2001 Time did call him “America’s best theologian.” That fall, Oprah even invited him onto her show. In short, given Hauerwas’s age and stature, Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth has the inevitable feel of a valediction.

Click here for the rest.

This is now my fifth time writing for LARB; the first came in the fall of 2017. It is never not a pleasure. It’s a challenge writing about Christian theology for a highbrow audience that is neither religious nor academic—but one I’ve learned to relish. Usually my essays there come in between 4,000 and 5,000 words, but this one is shorter, at about 2,000. I hope it does both Hauerwas and Barth honor; I try to use the occasion to raise some important issues. Enjoy.

Tech for normies

On Monday The New Atlantis published my review essay of Andy Crouch’s new book, The Life We’re Looking For. The next day I wrote up a longish blog post responding to my friend Jeff Bilbro’s comment about the review, which saw a discrepancy between some of the critical questions I closed the essay with and an essay I wrote last year on Wendell Berry. Yesterday I wrote a seemingly unrelated post about the difference between radical churches (urban monastics, intentional communities, house churches, all to varying degrees partaking of the Hauerwasian or Yoderian style of ecclesiology) and what I called “church for normies.”

That last post was of a piece with the first two, however, and provides some deep background to where I was coming from in answering some of Jeff and Andy’s questions. For readers who haven’t been keeping up with this torrent of words, my review of Andy’s book was extremely positive. The primary question it left me with, though, was (a) whether his beautiful vision of humane life in a technological world is possible, (b) whether, if it is possible, it is possible for any but the few, and (c) whether, however many it turns out to be possible for, it is liable to make a difference to any but those who take up the costly but life-giving challenge of enacting said vision—that is, whether it is likely or even possible to be an agent of change (slow or fast) in our common social and political and ecclesial life.

I admit that my stance evinces a despairing tone or even perspective. But let’s call it pessimistic for now. I’m pessimistic about the chances, here and now, for many or even any to embody the vision Andy lays out in his book—a vision I find heartening, inspiring, and apt to our needs and desires if we are to flourish as human beings in community.

Given my comments about church for normies yesterday, I thought I would write up one final post (“Ha! Final!” his readers, numbered in the dozens, exclaimed) summing up my thoughts on the topic and putting a pinch of nuance on some of my claims—not to say the rhetoric or metaphors will be any less feisty.

Here’s a stab at that summing up, in fourteen theses.

*

1. Digital technology is misunderstood if it is categorized as merely one more species of the larger genus “technology,” to which belong categories or terms like “tool,” “fire,” “wheel,” “writing,” “language,” “boat,” “airplane,” etc. It is a beast of its own, a whole new animal.

2. Digital technology is absolutely and almost ineffably pervasive in our lives. It is omnipresent. It has found its way into every nook and cranny of our homes and workplaces and spheres of leisure.

3. The ubiquity of Digital (hereafter capitalized as a power unto itself) is not limited to this or that sort of person, much less this or that class. It’s everywhere and pertains to everyone, certainly in our society but, now or very soon, in all societies.

4. Digital’s hegemony is neither neutral nor a matter of choice. It constitutes the warp and woof of the material conditions that make our lives possible. Daycares deploy it. Public schools feature it. Colleges make it essential. Rare is the job that does not depend on it. One does not choose to belong to the Domain of Digital. One belongs to it, today, by being born.

5. Digital is best understood, for Christians, as a principality and power. It is a seductive and agential force that lures and attracts, subdues and coopts the will. It makes us want what it wants. It addicts us. It redirects our desires. It captures and controls our attention. It wants, in a word, to eat us alive.

6. If the foregoing description is even partially true, then finding our way through the Age of Digital, as Christians or just as decent human beings, is not only an epochal and heretofore unfaced challenge. It entails the transformation of the very material conditions in which our lives consist. It is a matter, to repeat the word I use in my TNA review, of revolution. Anything short of that, so far as I can tell, is not rising to the level of the problem we face.

7. At least three implications follow. First, technological health is not and cannot be merely an individual choice. The individual, plainly put, is not strong enough. She will be overwhelmed. She will be defeated. (And even if she is not—if we imagine the proverbial saint moving to the desert with a few other hermits—then the exception proves the rule.)

8. Second, modest changes aren’t going to cut it. Sure, you can put your phone in grayscale; you can limit your “screen time” as you’re able; you can ask Freedom to block certain websites; you can discipline your social media usage or even deactivate your accounts. But we’re talking world-historical dominance here. Nor should we kid ourselves. Digital is still ruling my life whether or not I subscribe to two instead of six streaming platforms, whether or not I’m on my phone two hours instead of four every day, whether or not my kids play Nintendo Switch on the TV but not in handheld mode. Whenever we feel a measure of pride in these minor decisions, we should think of this scene:

Do we feel in charge? We are not.

9. Third, our households are not the world, and we live in the world, even if we hope not to be of it. Even if my household manages some kind of truce with the Prince of this Age—I refer to the titans of Silicon Valley—every member of my household departs daily from it and enters the world. We know who’s in charge there. In fact, if you don’t count time sleeping, the members of my own house live, week to week, more outside the home than they do inside it. Digital awaits them. It’s patient. It’ll do its work. Its bleak liturgies have all the time in the world. We just have to submit. And submit we do, every day.

10. But the truth is that the line between household and world runs through every home. We bring the world in with us through the front door. How could it be otherwise? Amazon’s listening ears and Netflix’s latest streamer and Google’s newest unread email and Spotify’s perfect algorithm—they’re all there, at home, in your pocket or on the mantle or in the living room, staring you down, calling your name, summoning and inquiring and inviting, even teaching. Their formative power is not out there. It’s in here. Every home I’ve ever entered, It was there, whose name is Legion, the household gods duly honored and made welcome.

11. Jeff rightly pushed back on this “everyone” and “everywhere” line in my earlier post. I should be clear that I’m not exaggerating: while I have read of folks who don’t have TVs or video games or tablets or smartphones or wireless internet, I haven’t personally met any. But I allow that some exist. This means that, to some extent, tech-wise living is possible. But for whom? For how many? That’s the question.

12. The fundamental issue, then, is tech for normies. By which I mean: Is tech-wise living possible for ordinary people? People who don’t belong to intentional communities? People without college or graduate degrees? People who aren’t married or aren’t in healthy marriages, or who are parents but unmarried? It is possible for working-class families? For families whose parents work double shifts, or households with a single parent who works? For kids who go to daycare or public school? For folks who attend churches that themselves encourage and even require constant active smartphone use? (“Please read along on your Bible app”; “Please register your child at this kiosk, we’ll send a text if we need you to come pick her up.”) From the bottom of my heart, with unfeigned sincerity, I do not believe that it is. And if it is not, what are we left with?

13. This is what I mean when I refer to matching the scale of the problem. Ordinary people live according to antecedent material conditions and social scripts, both of which precede and set the terms for what individuals and families tacitly perceive to characterize “a normal life.” But the material conditions and the social scripts that define our life today are funded, overwritten, and determined by Digital. That is why, for example, the child of friends of mine here in little ol’ Abilene, Texas, was one of exactly two high school freshmen in our local public high school who did not have a smartphone—and why, before fall semester was done, they bought him one. Not because the peer pressure was too intense. Because the pressure from teachers and administrators and coaches was insurmountable. Assignments weren’t being turned in, grades were falling, rehearsals and practices were being missed, all because the educational ecosystem had begun, sometime in the previous decade, to presuppose the presence of a smartphone in the hand, pocket, purse, or backpack of every single student and adult in the school. It is now the center around which all else orbits. The pull, the need, to buy a smartphone proves, in the end, irresistible. It doesn’t matter what you, the individual, or y’all, the household, want. Resistance is futile.

14. Now. Must this lead to despair? Does this imply that resistance to evil is impossible? That there is nothing to be done? That we are at the end of history? No. Those conclusions need not follow necessarily. I don’t think that digital technology as such or in every respect is pure evil. This isn’t the triumph of darkness over light. My children watching Encanto or playing Mario Kart is not the abomination of desolation, nor is my writing these words on a laptop. My point concerns the role and influence and ubiquity of Digital as a power and force in our lives and, more broadly, in our common life. It is that that is diabolical. And it is that that is a wicked problem. Which means it is not a problem that individuals or families have the resources or wherewithal to address on their own—any more than, if the water supply in the state of Texas dried up, this or that person or household could “choose” to resolve the issue on their own. This is why I insisted in my original review that there is something inescapably political, even top-down, about a comprehensive or potentially successful response to Digital’s reign over us. Yes, by all means we should begin trying to rewrite some of the social scripts, so far as our time and ability permit. (I’m less sanguine even here, but I grant that it’s possible in small though important ways.) Nevertheless the material conditions must change for any such minor measures to take hold, not just at wider scale but in the lives of ordinary people. If you’re willing to accept the metaphor of addiction—and I think it’s more than a metaphor in this case—then what we need is for the authorities to turn off the supply, to clamp down on the free flow of the drug we all woke up one day to realize we were hooked on. The thing about a drug is that it feels good. We’re all jonesing for one more hit, click by click, swipe by swipe, like by like. What we need is rehab. But few people check themselves in voluntarily. What most addicts need, most of the time, is what most of us, today, need above all.

An intervention.

Church for normies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The slow death of the Protestant churches”

Fifteen years ago, in a journal article on Karl Barth’s christology and Chalcedonian doctrine (among other things), Bruce McCormack concluded his article with the following paragraph (my emphasis):

It remains only to say a word about the situation—and the motives which have led me to elaborate precisely this form of Christology in the present moment. The situation in which Christian theology is done in the United States today is shaped most dramatically by the slow death of the Protestant churches. I have heard it said—and I have no reason to question it—that if current rates of decline in membership continue, all that will be left by mid-century will be Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and non-denominational evangelical churches (the last named of which will include those denominations, like the Southern Baptists, which are non-confessional in doctrinal matters and congregationalist in their polity). The churches of the Reformation will have passed from the scene—and with their demise, there will be no obvious institutional bearers of the message of the Reformation. What all of this means in practice is that it will become more and more necessary, for the sake of the future of Christianity, to establish stronger ecumenical relations with the Catholics and the Orthodox. And that means, too, coming to agreements with churches supportive of the classical two-natures scheme in Christology. The question is not, it seems to me, whether the two-natures doctrine has a future. That much seems to have already been decided. The only real question is what form(s) it can take. So it is for the sake of an improved understanding of the potential contained in the two-natures doctrine that I offer my ‘Reformed’ version of kenoticism.

To magisterial Protestant ears, that prediction must sound dire indeed. Dire or no, it seems on the nose to me. In my next book I lay out a threefold typology of the church for heuristic purposes: catholic (=Eastern, Roman, Anglican), reformed (=magisterial Protestant), and baptist (=low-church, congregationalist, non-confessional, believers baptism, etc.). What’s astonishing is simultaneously how much “the reformed” dominate Anglophone theology across the last 200 years and yet how institutionally and demographically invisible actual reformed churches are today, certainly on the North American scene. To the extent that that already-invisible presence is continuing to shrink, it is not unreasonable to suppose that it will continue to dwindle to statistical insignificance. That doesn’t mean there won’t be Lutherans or Calvinists in America four decades from now. But it may mean that they have little to no institutional form or heft—at least one that anybody is aware of who doesn’t already live inside one of their few remaining micro-bubbles.

To be clear, I don’t mean these words as a happy prophecy, dancing on the grave before the body’s interred. Some of my best friends are magisterial Protestants. (Hey oh.) And I wish those friends every success in their ongoing efforts to revivify the American Protestant community. History isn’t written until after the fact; perhaps McCormack and the rest of us naysayers will be proven wrong.

The lines aren’t trending in the direction of renewal, though. So it’s worth reflecting on what the future of American Christianity looks like: either catholic or baptist, which is to say, either “high” (liturgical, sacramental, episcopal, conciliar, creedal, etc.) or “low” (non-creedal, non-confessional, non-sacramental, non-denominational, non-doctrinal, in short, biblicist evangelicalism). To my inexpert eyes, that also seems to be the global choice, not least if you include charismatic traditions under the “low” or “free” category.

The question then is: Do the latter communities have what it takes to weather the storm? Do they, that is, have the resources, the roots, the wherewithal to sojourn, unbending and unbent, in the wilderness that awaits? As Stanley Hauerwas once remarked, the evangelicals have two things in spades: Jesus and energy. What more do they have?

Fred Sanders, in a blog post commenting on McCormack’s programmatic prediction at the time of its publication, thinks evangelicals are possessed of that “more,” or at least are possessed of the relevant potential for the right kind of “more.” He runs a thought experiment, thinking “back” from the perch of 2047 when the dire prophecies of the death of American Protestantism have come to fruition. He writes:

It’s 2047: Bruce McCormack is just over 100 years old and is trying to figure out where to go to church. He’s not picky, he just wants a place that teaches justification by faith and sola scriptura. There are no mainline Protestant churches to choose from, no “obvious institutional bearers of the message of the Reformation.” Everywhere he goes, there are non-denominational evangelicals, and Roman Catholics, and the Orthodox. Who’s got the Reformation theology, where can I go to get it?

Jumping back to 2006, and back to my own evangelical (just barely denominational) context, I can see the advantages of doing what McCormack ’06 recommends: “for the sake of the future of Christianity, to establish stronger ecumenical relations with the Catholics and the Orthodox.” But as an evangelical theologian committed to the theology of the Reformation, I think my more pressing task is to work for a clearer theological witness in evangelical congregations and institutions. I think it’s possible for evangelicalism to function as a much more “obvious institutional bearer of the message of the Reformation.” Indeed, with the mainline keeling over and dropping the Protestant baton, the people most likely to pick it up are people like my people, or maybe Pentecostals in the developing world. Everything hinges on greater theological sophistication and stronger commitment to doctrines like sola scriptura and justification. I actually wonder why McCormack pointed instead to Roman Catholic and Orthodox dialogue partners. Probably it’s because his speech was about reinvigorating traditional Chalcedonian christology, and he (rightly) thinks he’s more likely to find conversation partners about that among Catholics than among evangelicals.

To evangelical theologians (Baptists, non-denominationals, etc.) I would take a hint from McCormack and say: The baton is being dropped, the mainline churches are going down. Study harder, learn the great tradition of Christian doctrine (from the Catholics and Orthodox perhaps), and keep your hands ready to take up the baton of Protestant teaching. Plan for mid-century, when there will be a crying need for an “obvious institutional bearer of the theology of the Reformation.”

That is laudable and wise advice. I do wonder: After what has happened in and to American evangelicalism in the last 15 years, what, if anything, would Sanders (or his Protestant comrades in arms) say about the prospects of such a vision? Can evangelicalism as it stands be reformed—that is, converted to the confessions and doctrines of the magisterial Reformation—from within? Is the rot not yet too deep? Is the form of evangelicalism—that is, its bone-deep opposition to extra-biblical doctrinal formulations and practices, to formal institutional organization and authorities, to anything that might mitigate the frontier revivalist spirit—open to the sheer degree of ecclesial, liturgical, and theological change that would be required to conform to actual magisterial teaching and practice?

My questions are leading, and in the extreme. Granted. I’m open to being wrong. Ratzinger’s oft-quoted words from half a century ago, about the church shrinking in size and prestige but becoming purer and more faithful as a result, may well apply to the churches of the Reformation as much as to Rome. Nor do the trend lines mean anything, literally anything, with respect to whether or not Christians who find themselves in true-blue Protestant churches ought to seek to be faithful as best they can in the time and place in which God has placed them. Obviously they should.

But at the macro level, looking at the big picture, I can’t escape the sense that McCormack is right, and hence that in the coming decades the ecclesiological choice we face, and our children face, will be between two options, not three. If true, that makes a big difference—for church conversations, for theological arguments, for political debates. We ought therefore to face it head on, with courage, clarity, and honesty, and most of all without pretense. Collective denial is not going to make the present crisis disappear. Let’s be thinking and talking now about what it is the times, which is to say the Holy Spirit, requires of us. Let’s not wake up in 2047 and realize we missed our only opportunity to avert disaster.

Blessed are the heretics

I have always attributed the line "blessed are the heretics" to Stanley Hauerwas, who in his typical fashion goes on to say (paraphrasing from memory) that without the heretics the church would not be instigated into growing ever more deeply into the truths of the faith. Indeed, a quick Google search found this quote, which I'm sure is a regularly repackaged line:

"In truth, we are never quite sure what we believe until someone gets it wrong. That is why those we call heretics are so blessed because without them we would not know what we believe."

There he goes on to discuss the Apollinarian heresy as an instance of the church establishing, through hard-win effort, a more rigorous christological grammar than it previously had.

Re-reading the Confessions the other day, though, I saw that St. Augustine says something similar. In Book VII, while discussing the "books of the Platonists" and their relationship to the faith, he writes first of his friend, then of himself:

"[Alypius's] move towards the Christian faith was slower. But later when he knew that this was the error of the Apollinarian heretics, he was glad to conform to the Catholic faith. For my part I admit it was some time later that I learnt, in relation to the words 'The Word was made flesh,' how Catholic truth is to be distinguished form the false opinion of Photinus."

He continues:

"The rejection of heretics brings into relief what your Church holds and what sound doctrine maintains. 'It was necessary for heresies to occur so that the approved may be made manifest' among the weak." (VII.xix.25)

I'm curious: Who first spoke this way about heretics in the tradition, and after Augustine, did it become a mainstay? My reading in medieval heresiology is vanishingly small. I suppose I'm interested less in the general sentiment (which I'm sure is common) and more in poetic or providential or even positive language about heretics and their heresies as occasions for growth in catholic truth.

Rest in peace: Robert W. Jenson (1930–2017)

I first read Robert Jenson in the summer of 2009, following the first year of my Master of Divinity studies at Emory University, on a sort of whim. I had been introduced to him through an essay by Stanley Hauerwas, originally published in a festschrift for Jenson but republished in the 2004 collection of Hauerwas's essays called A Better Hope. Oddly, I had the impression that Hauerwas didn't like Jenson, but at a second glance, I realized his great admiration for him, so I not only read through Jenson's whole two-volume systematics that summer, but I blogged through it, too—in extensive detail. In fact, it was the first systematic theology I ever read.

Eight years later, and I am a systematic theologian. Fancy that.



Jenson passed away yesterday, having been born 87 years earlier, one year after the great stock market crash of 1929. He lived through the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, Roe v. Wade, the rise and fall of the Religious Right, the fall of the Soviet Union, September 11, 2001, the election of the first African-American U.S. President, and much more. He also lived through, and in many ways embodied, a startling number of international, ecclesial, and academic theological trends: ecumenism; doctrinal criticism; analytic philosophy of language; Heidegerrian anti-metaphysics; French Deconstructionism; the initially negative then positive reception of Barth in the English-speaking world; the shift away from systematics to theological methodology (and back again!); post–Vatican II ecclesiology; "death of God" theology; process theology; liberation theologies (black, feminist, and Latin American); virtue ethics; theological interpretation of Scripture; and much more.

Jenson studied under Peter Brunner in Heidelberg and eventually spent time in Basel with Barth, on whose theology he wrote his dissertation, which generated two books in his early career. He was impossibly prolific, publishing hundreds of essays and articles as well as more than 25 books over more than 55 years.

Initially an activist, Jenson and his wife Blanche—to whom he was married for more than 60 years, and whom he credited as co-author of all his books, indeed, "genetrici theologiae meae omniae"—marched and protested and spoke in the 1960s against the Vietnam War and for civil rights for African-Americans. His politics was forever altered, however, in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. As he wrote later, he assumed that those who had marched alongside him and his fellow Christians would draw a logical connection from protection of the vulnerable in Vietnam and the oppressed in America to the defenseless in the womb; but that was not to be. Ever after, his politics was divided, and without representation in American governance: as he said in a recent interview, he found he could vote for neither Republicans nor Democrats, for one worshiped an idol called "the free market" and the other worshiped an idol called "autonomous choice," and both idols were inimical to a Christian vision of the common good.

In 1997 and 1999, ostensibly as the crown and conclusion to 70 years' work in the theological academy, Jenson published his two-volume Systematic Theology, arguably the most read, renowned, and perhaps even controversial systematic proposal in the last three decades. There his lifelong interests came together in concise, readable, propulsive form: the triune God, the incarnate Jesus, the theological tradition, the nihilism of modernity, the hope of the gospel, and the work of the Spirit in the unitary church of the creeds. Even if you find yourself disagreeing with every word of it, it is worth your time. As my brother once told me, he wasn't sure what he thought about the book when he finished the last page, but more important, he felt compelled to get on his knees and worship the Trinity. Surely that is the final goal of every theological system; surely nothing could make Jenson more pleased.

Happily, those of us who loved and benefited from Jenson's work were blessed with nearly two more decades of output from his mind and pen following the systematics. Some of this work was his most playful and provocative; it also included two biblical commentaries, on the Song of Songs and Ezekiel. There are treasures not to be overlooked in those lovely works.

If Hauerwas was my gateway to theology as a world, Jenson was my guide, my Virgil. I didn't know the names of Irenaeus and Origin and Cyril and Nyssa and Damascene and Radbertus and Anselm and Bonaventure before him; or at least, I had no idea what they had to say. And I certainly hadn't considered putting Luther and Edwards and Schleiermacher and Barth together in the way he did. Perhaps most of all, I didn't know what systematic theology could be, the intellectual heights that it could reach and that it necessarily demanded, or the way in which it could be conducted as an exercise in spiritual, moral, and mental delight: bold, wry, unflinching, assertive, open-handed, open-ended, argumentative, humble, urgent, sober, at peace. Jenson knew more than most that theology is simultaneously the most and the least serious of tasks. It is of the utmost importance because what it concerns is the deepest and most central of all realities: God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the creator, sustainer, and savior of all. But self-seriousness is a mistake precisely because of that all-encompassing subject matter: God is in charge, and we are not; God, not we, will keep the gates of hell from prevailing against the church; God alone will steward the truth of the gospel, which we do indeed have, but only as we have been given it, and which we understand only through a glass darkly. Jenson knew, in other words, that in his theology he got some things, even some big things, wrong. And he could rest easy, like his teacher Barth, because God's grace reaches even to theologians. Although it is true that the church's teachers will be judged more harshly than others, the judgment of God is grace, and it goes all the way down.

God's grace has now been consummated in this one individual, God's servant and theologian Robert. He is at rest with the saints in the infinite life of God—the God he called, with a wink in his eye, both "roomy" and "chatty." May his rest be as full of talk as his life was on this earth, as eloquent and various as the eternal conversation of Jesus with his Father in their Spirit. And, God be praised, may he be raised to new and imperishable life on the last day, as he so faithfully desired and bore witness to in his work in this world. May that work give glory to God, and may it remind the church militant of the God of the gospel and the life we have been promised in Jesus, the life we can taste even now, the life of the world to come.