Twenty texts for twenty centuries

Suppose you knew someone who wanted to read broadly in the Christian tradition. Specifically, this someone requested twenty Christian texts—no more, no less—one from each century of the church’s existence (present century excluded).

What would you assign? Who would be on your list?

For the purposes of this hypothetical, the texts are not supposed to be “the best” or the most influential or the most significant or what have you. Nor need they represent the full gamut or spectrum of Christian faith, doctrine, practice, and liturgy—as if that were possible.

At the same time, while the someone in question is a sharp reader, they are an Anglophone normie, not a polyglot scholar. You’re not, for example, going to assign the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas. You’re aiming for reasonably accessible texts by great Christian writers that, together, offer a snapshot of what it means to be Christian; what it means to live as a Christian; what it means to believe as a Christian; and so on.

You could tweak the rules as you please. These are my rules. Here are my answers.

*

First century: The Gospel According to Saint John.

Second century: Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Letters.

Third century: Origen, An Exhortation to Martyrdom.

Fourth century: Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation.

Fifth century: Saint Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ.

Sixth century: Pope Saint Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Gospels.

Seventh century: Saint Maximus Confessor, The Lord’s Prayer.

Eighth century: Saint John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith.

Ninth century: St. Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons.

Tenth century: Saint Gregory of Narek, Festal Works.

Eleventh century: Saint Anselm, Cur Deus Homo?

Twelfth century: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God.

Thirteenth century: Saint Bonaventure, Journey of the Mind Into God.

Fourteenth century: Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love.

Fifteenth century: Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ.

Sixteenth century: John Calvin, Book II of Institution of Christian Religion.

Seventeenth century: Saint Francis de Sales, An Introduction to the Devout Life.

Eighteenth century: Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits.

Nineteenth century: Saint Thérèse of Liseux, Story of a Soul.

Twentieth century: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship.

*

I will confess, I almost trolled the Prots by leaving out Calvin, Edwards, and Bonhoeffer for Saint Teresa, Saint Alphonsus Liguori, and Simone Weil. That would still be a good list! But I had to be honest. I also somewhat cheated with Julian, whose visions and writing spanned the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Were she to be moved ahead, I would remove Kempis and add Dante or Saint Catherine.

It goes without saying that, for most centuries—though curiously not for all, at least from my vantage point—you could choose a dozen or more texts. It hurts not to include Saint Augustine; but then, neither are there any Cappadocians. The fourth and fifth centuries are rich beyond compare.

It’s clear what I’m prioritizing here: brevity, clarity, piety, devotion, faith, love, prayer, discipleship. With, granted, an emphasis on the person and work of Christ. I also wanted a relative balance between East and West, Greek and Latin. It seems to me that an open-hearted reader of these twenty texts would walk away with a beautiful picture of the meaning of lived Christian faith, told from the inside. I almost envy such a person the experience.

The great Christian divide

There are two kinds of Christian, by which I mean, there are two ways of being Christian nourished by two types of Christian tradition. Each is defined by its stance or posture toward the Bible and the resulting formation of ordinary believers.

You could think of many names for both. Most are biased, polemical, prejudicial. It’s hard to give a neutral name to something you believe is either absolutely right or dead wrong.

Call the first one biblicist. Sometimes this view comes wrapped in the label of sola scriptura, but nuda scriptura seems more apt. Biblicism forms its adherents to believe, at least tacitly but usually consciously, three major things.

First, nothing but the Bible’s clear, explicit teaching is authority for the church. What is not laid out verbatim, in so many words, cannot be decisive for Christian faith and morals. Second, the Bible’s clear, explicit teaching is best read without the mediation, guidance, or interposition of extra-biblical teaching. Whether you call this latter teaching “sacred tradition” or “church doctrine” or something else, it is bound to obstruct, distort, and/or mislead the reader of Scripture. Third and finally, the Bible’s clear, explicit teaching is meant to be read, understood, and put together by individual believers. The Bible, that is, should be read “alone” in more than one sense: unaccompanied by tradition or by other people. What is tradition, after all, except other people? (Sartre tells the biblicist what other people are.) More to the point, you are not supposed to be relying on or placing your trust in something or someone other than God, and God has said all that needs saying in the Bible. Biblicism isn’t per se anti-church—though it fails mightily in avoiding being anti-authority—but its ecclesiology is individualist at bottom. The Christian is a spiritual Descartes: alone in a room with a Bible, because alone in life with God. God’s relationship to each is immediate, except as mediated by faith, the presence of the Spirit, and the living word of the scriptures.

This is why, in biblicist settings, no doctrine—none whatsoever—is ever safe from challenge. If the biblicist is Descartes in practice, the ideal-type is Luther’s Here I stand, I can do no other. Every Christian and church in history may have taught and believed X, but if someone in the room believes the Bible teaches not-X, then that belief gets a hearing. Not only gets one, but is encouraged to have one. Is encouraged, spiritually and imaginatively, to suppose that Christianity is the sort of thing that an individual believer, thousands of years after the fact, might discover, or re-discover, for the first time. Christianity as such does not preexist me, the Christian. The Bible alone does.

“What the church believes” and “what tradition teaches” and “what Christians have always held” are therefore category errors on such a view. It’s not just that doctrine and tradition are secondary to Scripture. They don’t have a seat at the table. They lack any and all standing, no matter how ancient, venerable, unanimous, or important. This is simply taken for granted by the biblicist. Occasionally, when the premise must be defended, a laundry list of historic errors on the part of the church is trotted out as dispositive proof. It’s half-hearted at best, though. The biblicist premise isn’t primarily negative. It’s positive. It’s rooted in claims about what the Bible is, what it is for, and how it should be read. Those are the foundation of biblicism, not the consequent denials and prohibitions.

The second, contrary view I’ll call catholic. It encompasses far more than the Roman church. It includes also the Orthodox, global Anglicanism, and most magisterial Protestants. For the catholic position, church doctrine is of momentous significance. If X has been believed always, everywhere, and by everyone, then at a minimum X is presumed by the church to be true, and is taught as such. Sometimes X arises to the level of formal irreversibility (being, that is, beyond reform); more often it is functionally irrevocable. Either way, there is a set of teachings that are nonnegotiable for Christian faith. They aren’t up for debate. If you dispute them, you aren’t a Christian; if you accept them, you are a Christian. This is not because the faith is exclusive (though, rightly understood, it is). It is because Christianity preexists you. It isn’t plastic, ever-newly malleable to each generation that arises. If it were, Christianity wouldn’t be anything at all; wouldn’t stand for anything at all; wouldn’t be worth joining in the first place. It’s worth joining because it’s solid, stable, reliable: a something-or-other.

I don’t join the local basketball league hoping to convert it to pickleball. That’s what pickleball leagues are for. Although at least switching from one sport to another would be intelligible. More often, the objection to Christianity’s immutability assumes the only good sports league would be one that changed constantly, randomly, and according to no rhyme or reason. Such an objection does not actually like sports. Or rather, it likes one sport only: Calvinball. And every league should be Calvinball or be shut down. Mutatis mutandis for world religions and Christianity.

I don’t mean to suggest that Christianity, in its actual historical expressions, is unchanging. It’s not. Tradition, if it isn’t dead, is living. Tradition means not only preservation and conservation but adaptation, even mutation. All granted. I merely mean that, on the catholic view, Christianity does not await existence until you or I come along to build it from scratch from the blueprints of the Bible. It’s already there, before I’m born. I join it as it is or I don’t. I don’t get to make it in my image. If I do—that is, if I try—I’m doing it wrong. I’ve failed to understand the very thing I want to become a part of. And I’ve changed it beyond recognition in the process.

The catholic understanding of the Bible isn’t a denial or qualification of the Bible’s authority. On the contrary. There is no Christianity apart from the word of God. But the same Spirit that inspired the scriptures indwells God’s people. God has delegated authority to God’s people. I, the individual believer, do not presume to know—much less to decide—what Christianity is based on my private reading of the Bible. I defer to the church. The church tells me what Christianity is. The church tells me what to believe, because the church gives me the faith once for all delivered to the saints. In a catholic context, “this is what the church teaches” is a statement both (a) intelligible and (b) decisive, even as it is not (c) competitive with “this is what the Bible teaches.” For what the first means is: “this is what the church teaches the Bible teaches.” Who would imagine himself competent to discover what the Bible teaches on his own? What individual believer possesses the wherewithal, the holiness, the wisdom, the hermeneutical chops to sit down with the Bible and, all by her lonesome, figure it out? I’ve not yet met one myself.

This, it seems to me, is the great Christian divide. Not between Catholics and Protestants. Not between conservatives and liberals. Not between Western and global. But between biblicist and catholic. I can do business with catholic Christians, whatever our differences or disagreements. Whereas I increasingly find myself adrift with biblicists. I don’t mean I doubt their faith, their integrity, their commitment to Christ. I mean we find each other unintelligible. Each thinks the other is talking gibberish. It becomes clear that we lack shared first principles. The biblicist’s working premise and mine are opposed, and this make understanding difficult, not to mention collaboration or agreement. We are speaking different languages. And each of us supposes our language to be Christianese. Yet one of us is right and one of us is wrong. I doubt we can get very far without figuring that out. Until then, we’re doing little more than spinning our wheels.

CoC: evangelical, not catholic

I’ve had a number of readers reach out to me about my reflection on the churches of Christ as catholic rather than evangelical. I’m gratified to learn that what I was trying to put my finger on is something others resonate with. Some wrote as still-CoCers to say that it helped them articulate “the difference” they had always felt but had never been able to name; others wrote to say that, yes, indeed, they were raised CoC but were now a part of one of the three great episcopal branches of catholic tradition: Anglican, Eastern, or Roman.

So that’s the good news: what I identified is real and recognized as such by others. More good news: CoC theology of the church and her sacraments is both good on the merits and in line with patristic and medieval teaching, rather than merely a recent innovation. Best of all, at least for some: We’re not evangelicals, like we’ve been saying all along!

Now for the bad news.

The bad news comes in two forms, one about CoC past and one about CoC future.

Regarding the former, the thing about CoC virtues, which broadly overlap with catholic tradition, is that they are the flip side of CoC vices. These vices likewise sometimes overlap with catholic vices. A high ecclesiology all too often trades on a sectarian ecclesiology: no one outside this church (rather than the church) will be saved. Hence the CoC’s justly earned reputation for supposing all other Christians to be damned, or at least very unlikely to be saved. The same goes for sacramental practice, which can verge on the obsessive, the mechanical, or both. If it’s even thinkable for a well-formed member of your ecclesial tradition to wonder seriously whether a person who died in a car accident on the way to being baptized would, as a result of thus not being baptized, go to hell, then you can be sure that something has gone terribly wrong. Doubly so if your catechesis generates rather than relieves this anxiety. (My students are shocked to learn how open-handed actual Catholic doctrine is on this question: not only are unbaptized martyrs saved, but any person with the sincere intention to be baptized, who for reasons outside her control is kept from being baptized, is received by the Lord in death as though she had been baptized.) The same obsessive-compulsive severity can be found in “re”-baptizing someone whose hand or foot didn’t go all the way under during the first try—taking to a literal extreme the understanding of baptism as total immersion, and just thereby undermining the very point of once-for-all believers baptism.

I could go on: the granular scholasticism of kitchens in church buildings, church buildings in general, instruments in worship, paid parish preachers, and the rest. Anyone who was raised in churches of Christ or who grew up in an area with one on every corner knows what I’m talking about.

No church is perfect, however, nor any church tradition. The wheat and the tares grow together, as do the virtues and vices of any particular movement. That’s to be expected.

The second element of the bad news, though, is related to the first, which is why I mentioned it. It is true to say, as I did in my original post, that the CoC is more catholic than evangelical. That catholic sensibility still lingers on in some congregations, especially in members over 50. But it is dissipating, and fast. As I wrote, churches of Christ are currently in process of being absorbed into American evangelicalism, a process that, if not already finished, will be completed in the next decade or two. It’s a fait accompli; the only question is the timing.

This CoC future is a function of CoC past. There is a reason why churches of Christ are becoming indistinguishable from non-denominational churches. Well, there are many reasons, but here’s one big one: The oldest three generations of CoC-ers finally got fed up with the sectarian fundamentalism in which they were raised. They saw that they were not the only Christians; that church history was not misery and darkness until 1801; that Stone-Campbell tradition was just that, a tradition, one like many others; that “being right” was not synonymous with “doing what we’ve always done”; and that “what we’ve always done” was not sufficient as a reason to keep on doing it.

Those are all true insights, and their fruit, across the last thirty years, has been lifting up mainstream churches of Christ from the sectarian muck in which it had been mired. Many experienced that lifting-up as a deliverance, even a liberation. They were in the light, having been in shadow and twilight for so long. They were grateful for the tradition they’d received; they were willing to remain in it; but they would contribute to its healthy evolution: from sect to tradition, from exclusivism to ecumenism, from dogma to generous orthodoxy. This would, in a way, honor the Stone-Campbell roots of churches of Christ, since those roots were about prioritizing Christian unity above all else.

Many welcomed, and continue to welcome, the resulting changes. But there were unintended consequences. Chief among them was the loss, on one hand, of the features that made churches of Christ distinctive in the larger ecclesial landscape; and, on the other, of the practical means of maintaining and handing on those very features to the next generation.

Here is the great irony. The upshot of rescuing the CoC from its worst vices was the loss of its greatest virtues—of what made it it in the first place.

Hence the CoC’s absorption into evangelicalism. And try as some might, there’s no arresting this process. Why? For the following reasons.

First, the CoC began as an anti-tradition tradition. This means there are no organs of authority for any one congregation besides the Bible, its elders, and its ministry staff. There is, in a sense, no tradition to which such a congregation might be faithful. It doesn’t exist. There’s no “there” there.

Second, even granting that, in one sense, there obviously is a “there” there—after all, churches of Christ have a history and founders and influential leaders—there are no reasons, internal to the tradition, why anyone should care. In a theological debate between two Orthodox theologians, it is valid and weighty to assert that St. Irenaeus, St. Basil, and St. Maximus are on one’s side. They’re not quite Scripture, but they’re close. Not so in a CoC context. If someone in a local congregation says, “I hear what you’re saying, but Stone-Campbell Movement Leader X once wrote Y,” the only reply necessary is, “So?” Moreover, the very point of “moving” the CoC beyond its sectarian postwar malaise was for it to be changed. But if such change is both possible and desirable, then crying “Halt!” because Proposed Change Z doesn’t accord with CoC tradition is nonsensical. You can’t sit on the branch you’ve already sawed off yourself.

Third, there is only one way of being anti-tradition (indeed, anti-creedal) with a congregationalist polity in America: it’s called evangelicalism. By definition you do not belong to a larger ecclesiastical body. By definition you have no larger set of authoritative canons or confessions or doctrines. By definition you are making it up as you go. We have a name for that in this here frontier land. It’s the E-word, God help us all. American evangelicalism is DIY religion through and through, and that’s the only route available to a tradition without a history, a church without a creed, a polity without authority—that is, authority beyond the Bible as read by a local group of staff and elders.

This is why flagship and even normie churches of Christ today look like carbon copies of their next-door-neighbor non-denom churches. (It’s why some of them have dropped the “…of Christ” from their buildings and websites, and why others are soon to follow.) Increasingly they’re ditching a cappella singing for CCM praise music; they’re placing far less of an emphasis on baptism as restricted to adults or as a sacrament of divine action, much less as necessary for salvation; and I’d be willing to wager that weekly communion, already felt to be gumming up the liturgical works, will be the last domino to fall in the coming years. What’s holding all of this together, anyway, is the oldest two generations. Once they pass away, and once younger people start asking (as they already are), “Why does this have to be weekly? Won’t it be more meaningful if we make it monthly instead?” you can set a timer for the eventual change. Remember, “we’ve always done it this way” no longer holds water as an answer.

For CoC leaders who don’t like the look of this trajectory, there are limited options. You can’t bootstrap an ecclesiastical hierarchy into existence ex nihilo. Nor can you DIY yourself out of DIY-ness. That’s the DIY trap. If you make yourself just-a-little-progressive-mainline, you’re not mainline, you’re just progressive evangelical—the worst of all possible worlds. Besides, if the point was to avoid being evangelical, you’ve failed. If, by contrast, you make yourself just-a-little-traditional-catholic, you’re not catholic, you’re just traditional—but what does that mean? You can’t be “traditional” as an optional extra chosen by lay vote or ministerial preference; tradition either is or is not authoritative. And if it just happens to be a congregation’s preference today, who’s to say it will remain their preference tomorrow?

In short, the question isn’t whether churches of Christ already are, or soon will be, one more tributary in the great evangelical delta. They are and they will be. It’s whether they will even exist once the process of absorption is complete. For many congregations are closing their doors, as the CoC rolls in the U.S. decline; many others are dropping the name; others still are dropping the distinctives that make them CoC (whether or not they still claim the name). Doubtless a few will remain, repping the old line. But they won’t amount to a statistically significant number in the scene of American Christianity. At that point—2045? 2060?—this whole conversation will be moot. Mostly there won’t be churches of Christ around anymore; and those that exist won’t look like they once did, a century prior. The transmutation to evangelicalism will be total.

I know plenty of folks in churches of Christ who see this as either a good thing or, at most, neutral. Their CoC catechesis was weaker on the catholic stuff and stronger on low-church ecumenism, marked by things like missionary flexibility, freedom from the authority of tradition, aversion to creeds and confessions, openness to change, inattention to history, an entrepreneurial spirit, and a high priority on spiritual unity and personal faith. American evangelicalism has all these in spades. This helps to explain the curious fact that, for most CoC congregations, the shift from catholic to evangelical has been so swift, so striking, yet so smooth, devoid (for the most part) of dispute and strife. Arguments have centered on culture-war flashpoints like gender rather than creedal doctrine or sacramental theology.

Yet this shift leaves the decidedly non-evangelical folks who remain in churches of Christ more or less homeless, exiles in their own spiritual household. But because the writing’s on the wall—because there’s no putting the evangelical cat back in the catholic bag—there’s nothing, really, to do. You can accept the trend lines, hunker down, and grin and bear it. Or, as I concluded in the previous post, you can leave.

As I see it, by and large those who stay will be those who resonate with evangelicalism, and those who leave will be those who long for catholic doctrine and practice. The sorting has already been happening, quietly, the last twenty years; it should be done, I’d say, in the next twenty. Some will leave who’d prefer to stay, and vice versa. But for the most part, that’s how it’ll shake out.

Inegalitarian Acts

For various reasons I’ve been reading and re-reading Acts a lot this year. One reason is that I’m co-leading a Sunday School class through the book, slowly, chapter by chapter. This past Sunday I had Acts 15: the climactic moment in the story, the hinge of the great gentile missions of the Jewish churches in Jerusalem and Antioch.

In the process of reading and teaching Acts I’ve acquired many unfounded and decidedly unsexy opinions about it. My sense of its dating has been moving steadily earlier and earlier (like Harnack), and I enjoy mentally fiddling with authorship questions (St. Luke? St. Titus? Another?). Since I’m not a New Testament scholar, I’m freed from worrying about being found out with this or that frumpy position on these questions. Theologians are allowed to speculate, no?

In any case, teaching Acts 15 brought home to me one thing in particular in a new way: namely, just how inegalitarian it is. By this I don’t mean to refer to contemporary Christian debates about gender. I’m referring instead to structures of leadership and authority. I’ve seen this chapter used countless times as a paradigm for how a local church should practice corporate discernment, or come to a decision on some contested matter. But reading the chapter, you realize that that’s a fundamental misconstrual of the Jerusalem council.

For the council is not, nor is it about, a local matter. It’s quite explicitly about a distant matter, prompted by events and experiences hundreds of miles away. The Jerusalem church isn’t full of uncircumcised converts to The Way. Rather, Jerusalem is the origin and abiding center of The Way, housing its primatial leaders and authoritative spokesmen. The matter of gentiles and circumcision is taken from Asia Minor and Antioch through Phoenicia and Samaria to Jerusalem. And even those who bring it to Jerusalem have only a testimonial role to play; it is St. Peter, the chief apostle of the Twelve, and St. James, the head of the Jerusalem community, who declare (with the only speeches reported to us) the Spirit’s will in the dispute.

To be sure, we are told that the declaration involves the unanimous consent of the whole church (cf. v. 22); but even the most stubborn conservative will admit that the author is synthesizing and perhaps theologically airbrushing what continued, for some time, to be a question of considerable dispute among the churches—not least because they were spread far and wide, and technologies of communication meant that it took years of testimony, explanation, and persuasion to ensure that the faithful came to one mind on the matter. Note further, too, that it is not the people in general who gather for deliberation, but “the apostles and elders” (a phrase repeated no fewer than five times: vv. 2, 4, 6, 22, 23; following these mentions, the word apostolos does not appear in the remaining 13 chapters of the book, only presbyteroi—quite a fascinating lexical signal to the reader, when you think about it). Which means it is not only the formal, appointed leaders of the church who gather to discern and decide a contested question for “the” church; it is those leaders who reside in and speak from a location of recognized authority, in this case Jerusalem.

That sounds a whole lot like an ecumenical council, and not at all like a particular congregation practicing communal discernment. It’s neither local nor democratic. Some people’s voices bear authority, and others’ do not. Some are tasked with discovering the Spirit’s will, and others are not. Once the matter is decided, a document is issued, and the dispersed churches are tasked with receiving, obeying, and implementing the decision, not disputing or modifying it.

Again, isn’t this precisely what the episcopal synods of the fourth and fifth centuries, which set the template for subsequent councils, sound like? It’s not mere PR when the church fathers compare Nicaea and Constantinople and the rest to the blueprint of Acts 15. The Jerusalem gathering is the proto–ecumenical council, and thus the paradigm for all future attempts by the church’s supra-congregational hierarchy to respond to, and when necessary settle, volatile questions of major scriptural, theological, or moral import. Accordingly, the promulgations that proceed from such councils are rightly prefaced by, and received as justifiably asserting, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…”

All the more so if, as the church claimed from the beginning (and, so far as I am aware, continued to claim universally and unanimously from the third century through the fifteenth), her episcopoi are appointed, or ordained, as successors to the apostles. So that, in an ecumenical council beyond the apostolic age, episcopoi and presbyteroi gather on the model of Acts 15, hear testimony, deliberate, argue, pray, interpret Scripture, and render a judgment—with authority.

Perhaps there are reasons not to think such an action desirable, possible, or otherwise worth pursuing, whether in the past or in the present (after, for example, the Great Schism or the Reformation). At a minimum, it’s difficult to deny that the pattern is in strict imitation of the Jerusalem council, or that seeing in the Jerusalem council a pattern for local congregational discernment is a poor interpretation indeed.

If not inerrancy or tradition … then what?

Earlier this year I wrote a couple of posts about what I call Post-Biblicism Biblicism, or PBB, a phenomenon I’ve observed among professors in theological higher ed. Briefly described, PBB is the view that (a) the Bible is the church’s sole source and authority (to the exclusion of creeds, dogmas, sacred tradition, formal confessions, etc.) and (b) the Bible is at once historically, morally, and theologically flawed, such that it is not entirely trustworthy as a book (sometimes so much so that to call it “God’s word” full stop would be a “fundamentalist” mistake). Yet persons who hold this view not only (c) remain Christian in (d) low-church, evangelical, or non-denominational ecclesial traditions, but (e) spend their entire lives studying, teaching, and attempting to “accurately” interpret every jot and tittle of the biblical text.

You can go read the original posts for my confusion about and critique of this phenomenon. It seems obvious to me that one of those five aspects has to give way for the sake of any kind of personal or theological coherence. Mostly I experience PBB as a source of befuddlement.

Recently a friend made an observation about a similar trend, only this time from the perspective of the pews. And I think he’s right. This phenomenon, moreover, is more than befuddling. It’s troubling, saddening, and urgent in its pastoral need.

Suppose you’re a normie biblicist Christian. You partake of what scholars call a “first naïveté” in relation to the Bible. It’s an open book. It’s crystal clear. Any sincere literate person could sit down with the Bible and understand it for himself. And either (a) all Christian communities do thus correctly understand it, at least in terms of the basics, or (b) your community (your denomination, your congregation) has got the goods—i.e., the proper understanding of the Bible’s essential teaching about God, Christ, the gospel, etc. Let’s call this general posture Perspicuous Inerrant Biblicism, or PIB for short.

Now let’s say your PIB-ness gets complicated, by honest means. Either (a) you come to believe that the Bible isn’t so clear as you once thought. Not that it’s unclear per se; but you realize that you, the individual layman, are not in a position to answer some of the most pressing—and contested—moral and theological questions about which Christians turn to the Bible for answers. Or (b) you come to believe that inerrancy, understood as factual-error-free, documentary-style verbatim historical reportage, isn’t plausible as an account of what the Bible is or how it works. In short, having lobbed off the P and the I, the B goes with them: no more biblicism for you.

It seems to me there are only three or four routes to go from here. One is to lose your faith: if it’s PIB or bust, then you’ve just read your way out of Christianity. Another is to DIY it: Christianity becomes whatever you say it is, because the meaning of your unclear-cum-imperfect Bible is up for grabs, and no one else is in a position to say you’re wrong. A third route is to glom onto a charismatic, entrepreneurial, but ultimately arbitrary pastor or personal figure who presents a version of Christian faith that you find appealing. (Now is this person, even if sincere, also DIY-ing it? Yes. So options two and three are variations on the same approach.)

The fourth and final option is to turn to the church. On this view, the church is both mater et magistra: mother and teacher of all the baptized. She, in the person of her ordained leaders, is authorized by Christ to speak on his behalf, vested with his authority. She it is who has passed on the gospel from the apostles to you, down through the centuries. She it is who has kept inviolate the faith once for all delivered to the saints. She it is who stands as mediator between you and the apostolic preaching of the good news. Indeed, she it is who stands as mediator between you and Christ. (She is, after all, his body and bride.) And when, not if, you or anyone else has questions about the faith or about the teaching of Scripture, she is there to answer them.

The term for this role is magisterium, or the teaching office of the church. To turn or submit to this fourth option, beyond biblicism, is to recognize that the church has the authority, by the power and guidance of the Spirit of Christ, to speak decisively and definitively on matters of faith and morals, particularly when these concern disputed interpretations of Scripture and/or pressing questions of the day. This understanding of ecclesial authority was axiomatic for the church before the sixteenth century, and since then then has remained the majority view of the global church.

Leave to the side whether it is true. Here is the point I want to make.

Is there any serious option for someone who no longer affirms Perspicuous Inerrant Biblicism, but who nevertheless wants to remain a morally and intellectually serious Christian, other than this last, fourth route—i.e., submitting to sacred tradition and entrusting oneself to the Spirit-derived and Spirit-led authority of the historic magisterial church?

I don’t see how there is. Because if biblicism isn’t true, and/or strict inerrancy isn’t true, and/or strong perspicuity isn’t true—and remember, we’re merely stipulating these as possibilities—then either Christianity isn’t true, or Christianity can be whatever you want it to be, or Christianity is already something solid, defined, and given, and where you find it is in the authoritative church of magisterial catholic tradition.

I’m trying to be as ecumenical as possible here; at the very least, not only Rome but Constantinople and (I think) Canterbury could affirm the account so far. Perhaps others. In any case, I’m looking in the other direction.

I know countless books, together with countless friends, neighbors, pastors, and family members who’ve read said books, that suppose what I’ve outlined here so far is untrue. That is, they not only recognize but actively engender the loss of ordinary believers’ first naïveté in relation to the Bible. They want to rid lay Christians of their commitments to inerrancy and perspicuity. And yet, for reasons I cannot discern, they appear to continue to be bound by a sort of persistent or lingering biblicism—even though they have explicitly kicked out the legs of the biblicist stool. For biblicism doesn’t work if the Bible is not radically perspicuous and absolutely inerrant. Yet these writers offer their books for the edification of the faithful, only (apparently) to be surprised when their readers understand them perfectly well, and accordingly leave the faith.

Christians, in order to be Christians, have to put their trust in something. And that “something” must include what is intermediate and not only what is immediate. Obviously our ultimate hope and faith are in God alone. But we only have God through the work of mediation, and thus through concrete mediators. PIB-ers insist on that mediator being the Bible alone. Absent that extreme form of sola scriptura, the church is the only other candidate for such trust. That is, on this latter view, the baptized trust that the community to which they belong is the divinely appointed and preserved vehicle of the truth of Jesus Christ, kept and carried through the vicissitudes of history by the Holy Spirit. That is where the gospel is found, together with the scriptures, the sacraments, the saints, and all the rest.

I see no alternative. Further, apart from these two paths I see no way forward for the transmission of the faith across the generations. Either a biblicist church faithfully communicates a biblicist faith to its members and children (and it’s straightforward to see how laypeople might participate in that process); or a magisterial church faithfully communicates the teaching of sacred tradition to its members and children (and it’s likewise plain to see how such a process might work). But how is a typical Christian adult supposed to train up his children in the faith if his church simultaneously rejects sacred tradition and repudiates Perspicuous Inerrant Biblicism? He lacks tradition to hand down, and he lacks the-Bible-alone to hand down. He’s also hip to the fact that the-Bible-alone just isn’t going to get the job done for him, because he’s brim-full of vertiginous confusion regarding how to interpret the Bible in the first place—in other words, he needs someone to answer his questions. But his pastor is just one more dude; he claims no special authority. And normal-adult-Christian-parent here knows that even if he likes Pastor 1’s answer, Pastor 2 at the church next door will give a substantially different answer. So, again, he’s left to his own devices. What’s he supposed to do?

He knows one thing at least. Those pop-evangelical books hawking post-biblicism biblicism aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. Whichever way is right, they’re not it.

“X is not in the Bible”

In an annual course I teach on moral philosophy I assign a textbook that contains a chapter on X. The author of the textbook is an ethicist, and the ethics he seeks to present to his readers (imagined as college students) is general or universal ethics; though he doesn’t out himself as a Kantian, those with ears to hear spy it from the opening pages. In the chapter on X the author has a sidebar dedicated to religious, by which he means Christian, arguments about X. He observes blithely that the Bible doesn’t mention X, though he allow that one or two passages have sometimes been trotted out as containing implicit commentary on X. Accordingly, he deploys a few perfunctory historical-critical tropes (without citation, naturally) to show how and why the original canonical authors in their original cultural context could never have meant what contemporary readers of the text sometimes take them to mean with respect to X.

I always dedicate time in class to discuss this sidebar with students. It is a perfect encapsulation of the naive inanity of non-theological scholars commenting on Christian thought. So far as I can tell the author is utterly sincere. He really seems to think that Christian thought, whether moral or doctrinal, is reducible to explicit assertions in the Bible, double-checked and confirmed by historical critics to have been what the putative author(s) could have or likely would have meant by the words found in a given pericope.

I used to think this sort of stupidity was willful and malicious; I’ve come to see, however, that it is honest ignorance, albeit culpable in the extreme.

A few days ago I was reminded of this annual classroom discussion because I read an essay by a scholar I otherwise enjoy and regularly profit from, who used the exact same argument, almost identically formulated. And he really seems to have meant what he wrote. That is, he really seems to believe that if he—neither a Christian nor a theologian nor a scholar of religion not a religious person at all—cannot find mention of X in the Bible, then it follows as a matter of course that:

1. Christians have no convictions about X;

2. Christians are permitted no convictions about X, that is, convictions with a plausible claim to be Christian;

3. no Christian teaching about X exists, past or present; and

4. Christianity as such neither has, nor has ever had, nor is it possible in principle that Christianity might have (or have had), authoritative doctrinal teaching on X.

All this, because he, the erudite rando, finds zero results when he does a word search for “X” on Biblegateway.com.

So far as I can tell, this ignorance-cum-stupidity—wedded to an eager willingness to write in public on such matters with casual authority—is widespread among folks of his ilk. They are true believers, and what they truly believe in is their own uninformed ineptitude.

The answer to the riddle of what’s going on here is not complicated. Anti- or post-Christian scholars, writers, and intellectuals in this country who spurn theological (not to mention historical) learning—after all, we don’t offer college courses in alchemy or astrology either—are sincerely unaware that American evangelicalism in its populist form is not representative of historic Christianity. They don’t realize that the modernist–fundamentalist debate is itself a uniquely modern phenomenon, and thus bears little relationship either to what Christianity is or to what one would find in Christian writings from any period from the second century to the seventeenth. They don’t know what they don’t know, and they’re too incurious to find out.

Were they to look, they would discover that Christianity has a living body of teaching on any range of topics. They would discover that over the centuries Christianity has had a teaching office, whose ordained leaders speak with varying degrees of authority on matters of pressing interest, including moral questions. They would discover that, in its acute American form, radical biblicism—the notion that Christians have beliefs only about things the Bible addresses directly and clearly—is one or two centuries old at most. They would discover that, even then, said biblicism describes a vanishingly small minority of global Christianity today. They would discover that the modernism on offer in Protestant liberalism is but the mirror image of fundamentalism, and therefore that to ape claims like “X isn’t even in the Bible—QED,” even intended as secular critique of conservative Christians, is merely an own goal: all it reveals is one’s own historical and cultural parochialism and basic theological incomprehension. They would discover that the church has never read the Bible the way either fundamentalists or historical critics do, in which case the word-search proof-text slam-dunk operation is not only irrelevant; in light of exegetical and theological tradition, it is liable to induce little more than a suppressed snort laugh.

They would discover, in a word, that the Bible does contain teaching about X, because the Bible contains teaching about all things (you just have to know where to look, that is, how to read); that the church’s tradition likewise contains considerable and consistent teaching about X, as any afternoon in a library or quick Google search would reveal; that Christianity is a living, not a dead thing; that Christian moral doctrine did not fossilize with the final breath of the last apostle; that postwar American evangelicalism is not the center of any universe, much less the Christian church’s.

They would discover—rather than learning the hard way—that asking someone in a position to know before writing about something of which one is wholly ignorant is a wise and generally admirable habit. But then, owning the fundies is a lot harder to do if you treat them as adults worthy of respect. This way is much more fun.

It’s all just a game anyway, right?

Creatura verbi divini

On the Mere Fi podcast earlier this week, both Derek and Alastair pressed me on the question of whether the church is “the creature of God’s Word.” The theological worry here is that if one affirms, with catholic tradition, that the church creates the canon, then the proper order between the two has been inverted, since the people of God is the creatura verbi divini, not the other way around. How, after all, could it be otherwise?

You can listen to my answer on the pod. My reply was simple, though I can’t speak to how well I articulated it there. Here, at least, is what I would say in expanded form.

The word of God creates the church; but the church creates the canon. This is not a contradiction because, even though Holy Scripture mediates and thus is the word of the living God to his people, the canon of texts that Scripture comprises is wholly (though not only) human, historical, and just so a product of the church. Moreover, the canon as such does not exist at the church’s founding, traditionally identified with Pentecost. No apostolic writing is extant at that moment. Apostolic writings begin to be written a decade or two following; they are not completed for at least a half century hence (maybe more); and the canon or formal collection or list of apostolic writings received as authoritative divine Scripture on the part of the church does not exist in any official way for some centuries. And even once the canon is explicit, unanimity and universality of its acceptance take even more centuries to arrive. (If one agrees with the Protestant reformers regarding the excision from the canon of such deuterocanonical books as the Wisdom of Solomon and Tobit, then in point of fact the canon takes a full fifteen centuries to come into its final, public form.)

In my view, magisterial Protestant doctrines of Scripture elide this crucial distinction in their claim that the church is created by the word of God and, thus, that Scripture creates the church. The word of God does indeed found the church, both (1) in the primary sense that the risen incarnate Logos from heaven pours out the Spirit of the Father on his apostles and (2) in the secondary sense that the apostles’ proclamation of the word of the gospel convicts and converts sinners to Christ wherever they travel, bearing witness to the good news. This is the running theme of the book of Acts. Nevertheless it remains the case that, within the very narrative of Acts, no canon of Scripture exists. Recall that St. Luke does not record the writing of any canonical text! Those texts he does record, such as the letter of St. James and the Jerusalem council to gentile believers, are not found elsewhere in the canon, but only here, as reported speech.

In our conversation, Alastair pressed a different point, an important one with which I agree but which, I think, I understand differently than he does. He observed that what doctrines of Scripture often overlook is the manifold and altogether material ways in which the production and dissemination of graphai influenced and shaped the early messianic assemblies dotting the shoreline of the Mediterranean basin. Apart from and prior to any theological redescription, that is, we can see just how letter-centric and letter-formed the early Christian communities were, evident in the extraordinary literary production of St. Paul alone. Letters (and homilies, and histories, and apocalypses, and …) are written, copied, distributed, shared, read aloud in worship, studied by the saints, transmitted and republished, so on and so forth, and this diverse and fascinating process is up and running, at the absolute latest, by the end of the second decade of the church’s existence.

As I say, I agree wholeheartedly with this observation. And it certainly bears on our theological and not only our historical understanding of the church’s origins. But, so far as I can tell, it doesn’t bear on the specific point raised by the question of whether the canon creates the church or vice versa.

That is to say: Granting the existence and influence of Pauline and other literatures in the first century of the church’s life (and on, indefinitely, into the future), this phenomenon seems to me to confirm rather than to contradict or even to complicate my original answer offered above. Yes, God’s word founds the church, both from heaven and through the spoken and, later, written words of the apostles. But from this undeniable fact we may not draw the conclusion that the canon—or even the apostolic writings eventually canonized—“create” the church, and for the same reasons. The canon does not exist in the time of the apostles. And although, intermittently and somewhat haphazardly, written apostolic documents begin circulating in the second half of the first century AD, these are far from universally shared by ekklesiai around the known world. There are churches in Africa and India and Spain and elsewhere that simply lack all or most of the apostolic writings later canonized until the second and even sometimes into the third or fourth centuries. The church simply cannot be said to be a creature of the canon or even of the apostolic texts subsequently included in the canon. The church predates both by decades, even centuries. Certain churches do receive and benefit from certain texts authored or commissioned by apostles. But for some time they are in the minority, and even they (i.e., the churches in question) preexisted their reception of any apostolic text whatsoever. Not that they preexisted apostolic teaching—but then, this question concerns graphai, not oral doctrina.

I hope this clarification is responsive to both Derek’s and Alastair’s questions and concerns. I hope especially that it is cogent. I look forward to hearing from them or others regarding where I might be wrong.

More on post-biblicism biblicism

A few more points in addition to yesterday’s reflection.

1. The odd thing about the post-biblicism biblicism phenomenon is not that there are people in the pews, raised to be Christian, who now find themselves lacking trust either in tradition or in Scripture. That’s a common enough experience today, one we ought to be exquisitely pastorally sensitive toward. No, the oddity is that it’s a phenomenon in people who have devoted their lives to the truth of the gospel, whether in the pulpit or in the classroom. But why would one give one’s life to the study and exposition of the Bible and/or sacred tradition if one believes that neither entity gives one divine truth, the very truth that sets the captives free and imparts eternal life?

2. Lacking a reliable source for divine teaching in either the church’s kanon or the church’s doctrina, where do post-biblicism biblicists go instead? Where do they look for authoritative wisdom and instruction regarding what to believe and how to live? Let’s avoid the ascription of false consciousness. It seems to me the simple truth that they look inward, they look outward, and they look forward. That is, they consult their own intuitive sense of truth and morals; they read books and listen to podcasts from trusted authors and like-minded thinkers; and they project onto the future where the culture (or “history”) is headed, thereby discerning the work of God in their time. Set aside whether this conjunction of sources is a trustworthy repository of truth. Even bracketing that question, one can understand why post-biblicism biblicist church leaders and church planters suffer a predictable twofold sequence. On one hand, there is an initial wave of enthusiasm and interest. On the other, there is a rapid loss of attention, buy-in, and commitment. The reason is obvious. What such persons and their churches are selling is just whatever the wider culture is already offering, only without the trappings of “church” or “organized religion.” Why not get the real thing straight from the source, rather than mediated by these still-attached-to-Jesus oddballs?

3. Perhaps the strangest feature of all that marks PBB (why haven’t I been using initials this entire time?) is a sort of rhetorical reflex. It goes like this. If fellow Christians are talking about X, the PBB is liable to retort, “The Bible doesn’t talk about X.” Now here’s why that is strange. First, often the Bible does talk about X. The PBB in question usually means something like, “What the Bible says about X isn’t so cut and dry, or calls for interpretation.” True enough, but then you should have said that initially.

Second, sometimes the PBB is right that the Bible doesn’t talk about X, but then even more bizarre implications follow. For does the PBB mean that Christians shouldn’t talk about anything the Bible doesn’t talk about? That would be a rather extreme biblicism, even more extreme than the most biblicist biblicist I’ve ever encountered. The bizarreness is amplified, though, because the one thing that unites PBB adherents is that they love to wax dogmatically about issues the Bible doesn’t talk about.

Now, anyone who is not a biblicist agrees that we, that is to say, Christians, must talk about things the Bible does not mention: social media, cloning, CRISPR, extraterrestrial life, nuclear weapons, marijuana, secularism, Kant, comic books, CCM, movies, blogs, the academy, evolution, Wordle—you name it. In fact, one of the principal nudges of former biblicists into a full-hearted embrace of Christian tradition (saints, doctors, martyrs, dogmas, councils, creeds, synods, social encyclicals, and the rest) is that the living church must have a living voice about ten thousand matters the Bible is silent about. So finding occasions and causes to speak about that the Bible doesn’t speak about is the most ordinary, the most Christian, the most intellectually justified thing in the world.

What doesn’t make sense is castigating fellow Christians for doing so while doing so oneself. More, how could it possibly be just to do so as a biblicist while criticizing fellow biblicists? It’s as though post-biblicism biblicists find themselves in rarefied air, from whence they are able to see which subjects unmentioned by the Bible are worth caring and talking about today and which are not. Put more bluntly, PBB affords its members an arbitrary standpoint or tribal identity by which to say who’s Good and who’s Bad, who’s In and who’s Out. And if that’s all it is, then to hell with it.

What do I want for my students?

I teach theology to undergraduates. That means, on one hand, that I’m not teaching them a skill. Many professors pass on a set of concrete skills meant for a job or some other professional activity: how to interview a client; how to detect a speech impediment; how to parse a verb; how to mix solutions. Not me. That’s not what theology is about.

On the other hand, I’m not teaching my students a discrete collection of facts, such that they might memorize them and, having done so, be assessed for their (or my) success. To be sure, theology contains facts—the date of the seventh ecumenical council, the name of the angelic doctor, the location of the crucifixion—but these are not the point of theology; they are necessary but relatively unimportant elements along the way.

Moreover, nine out of ten students register for a class with me because it is part of a menu of courses they are required to take. In other words, they’re with me because they have to be, not (necessarily) because they want to be. I cannot assume either prior knowledge or present interest.

Finally, professors should be honest with themselves. Whatever a student learns from me, she will almost certainly forget within five to fifteen years. No student is going to see me at a restaurant in 2035 and say, “Dr. East! Chalcedon! Theotokos! St. Cyril and the Tome of St. Leo!” Even if they did, they wouldn’t remember what those words meant. It would be an impressive student who did.

I imagine it’s hard for some teachers to accept this. Why teach if they’re going to forget it all?

Well, to contradict myself for a moment: I remember verbatim a line from a professor in a course on teaching my senior year of college. He said: Learning is what you remember when you’ve forgotten everything you were taught. (Or something like that.) That is, you do take something with you, even if you forget all the facts and figures. So what is that something?

The answer will vary based on the teacher and the topic. Here’s mine.

My principal task as a teacher of theology is the act of exposure. I want to expose my students, usually for the first time, to the Christian theological tradition. I want to show them that it exists, that it makes a claim on their lives, that it is of crucial importance to understanding God, and that it is supremely intellectually interesting. If I do nothing else whatsoever, and students walk out of my classroom having imbibed those lessons, I will have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.

Put from a different angle, and more simply, my goal is for students to understand—or at least to see a visceral instance of someone who believes—that God matters. There is nothing more important than God, nothing more interesting, nothing more vital, nothing more imperiously imposing, nothing more existentially significant.

Further, I want my students to see that the person in front of them not only believes this to be true but has staked his life on it. More, that this person is morally and intellectually serious and—for this very reason, not in spite of it—believes it to his core. In other words, having taken me, no student will be able to say, for the rest of his or her life, that he or she never met an educated, intelligent, committed Christian adult. I’ve got all the credentials. I’ve got the knowledge. In worldly terms, I’ve got the goods. Not the goods that matter, mind you—like the fruit of the Holy Spirit or the cardinal virtues or any meaningful sign of holiness—but the goods that the world cares about. The Ivy PhD, the books and articles, the whatever other superficial symptoms of success that are meant to impress on social media and dust jackets.

If the students listen to my teaching, then they will know that the point about the gospel is that these things don’t matter. They are means to other ends, often little more than filthy lucre and in any case full of temptations—not least to seek after prestige or to be impressed with one’s own resume. Nevertheless, one thing they communicate is that the person bearing them cannot be dismissed as a country bumpkin or a dime-a-dozen fundie. Even if I’m wrong, it’s not because (as they say) I haven’t done the reading. No student finishes a semester with me and thinks I haven’t done my homework. That’s the one thing I make sure to rule out.

In that sense, then, I use what’s to hand as a tool for amplifying what I’ve judged to be most important for them to hear. For the most part, they won’t remember the grammar of orthodoxy as I’ve tried to spell it out for them. What they’ll remember is that there is such a thing as orthodoxy. And whether or not they were raised on it in their home church, now they can’t claim ignorance: it exists, it’s grand, it’s rich and wide and deep—the sort of thing one might give one’s life to, as their (somewhat excitable and quite strange) professor seems to have done and (even stranger) seems to think they should, too.

My courses, in a word, remove plausible deniability. They can’t say they weren’t told. Through sheer relentless heartfelt passion, energy, and love, I give all that I have and use all that I know to show forth the truths of the gospel of God. The assignments aren’t onerous, but the reading is. I want to saturate them in the wisdom and beauty of the doctors and saints and martyrs of the church. (I want them, secondarily, to imagine that reading might be a habit worth acquiring.) I want them to see themselves in the writings of the tradition, by which I mean, I want them to see the Christ they already know in the words of ancient and unknown forebears. They knew Christ, too! Perhaps, as a result, they might have something to teach us of Christ in the here and now.

More than anything, I want my students to see in the sacred tradition of the church what Rilke saw in the torso of Apollo: A peremptory and inescapable word from beyond, addressing them by name: You must change your life.

That’s what I want for my students. I want them to know Christ, and to keep on knowing him for the rest of their lives. They can do that while eventually, or even quickly, forgetting all I ever said. And that would be just fine with me.

No fads, please

Writing about angels last week, I had in mind not just garden-variety demythologizers but specifically the sort of MDiv-in-hand pastor who reports having “matured” or “evolved” beyond the simple pieties of his upbringing, his denomination, or his own flock. In my experience, nine times out of ten this maturation or evolution, falsely so called, is not the result of actual wide reading in the church’s tradition but rather a function of moving up in the world, as a matter of education, class, or status. That is to say, it’s the product of peer pressure. “Believing in angels” comes to be seen as the sort of thing unenlightened persons do, and so you, the two-semesters-in seminarian, drop it like a bad habit. That’s not the sort of thing “we” go in for around here, you know. At most, the banished belief comes after a rough skim of half an assigned textbook—not exactly drinking broadly and deeply from the wellspring of the church’s wisdom down the ages.

This phenomenon reminded me of a pet peeve of mine. The sort of pastors I have in mind—and I want to be clear that they are far from all, perhaps not even a majority of, church leaders—fall hard for theological fads. They’re all in for the latest thing, whatever that thing may be. Sometimes it’s a thinker: Barth, Bultmann, Moltmann, Spong, Brueggemann, Hauerwas, Jenson, Milbank, Tanner, Wright, Coakley, Boyd, Zahnd, Sonderegger, whoever. Sometimes it’s a buzzword: story, Christus Victor, virtue, passibility, “being missional,” “being incarnational,” intentional community, new creation, postcolonialism, sacramentalism, natural law, classical theism, and the like. Whatever or whoever it is, it’s where the action is. And if you hear the name or catchphrase once you hear it a thousand times: it’s the lodestar, the church’s true north, the siren song of the contemporary minister.

Don’t get me wrong: some of these ideas, many of these thinkers, are well worth the attention. Fads are rarely fads for no reason. And like everyone else, I’ve been susceptible myself to the temptation to thinking that she or he or it is the Big New Thing, the Solution to All Our Problems.

Here’s where things get off track.

First, theological fads are a puff of smoke. To say they are ephemeral would be a slight to ephemerality. Blink and you miss them. Marry one of them (as the saying goes) and you’ll be a widow before you make it back down the aisle.

Second, it’s difficult to over-emphasize the belated character of theological fads. Such fads usually originate overseas, in Germany or France or Great Britain, sometimes here in the States at an elite R1 university. Often enough their true paternity lies in another discipline: philosophy, critical theory, sociology, anthropology. In any case, once it’s been disseminated to second- and third-tier universities and thence to seminaries, it’s already passé. But it hasn’t even reached pastors at this point. Whether they hear about it in school or from a trade book or via a blog (these days, I suppose, replace “blog” with “Twitter”), the hip new thing that’s blowing their minds is likely decades old. It’s so far downstream from its true origin that the traces of its parentage are minimal at best. But the way the plebeian pastors talk about it, it was born yesterday.

Now, is this their fault? No, at least not for the most part. How are they supposed to know better? Presumably they imbibed the now-defunct fad from a professor or a mentor or a conference or a trusted writer. This is the way new ideas and perspectives get distributed in society ordinarily, as a matter of course. There’s no way around that.

No, the problem isn’t the pastors themselves. The problem is the cult of the new. In particular, the problem is the cult of the new in the realm of faith, ministry, and theology.

Whatever the cause—be it capitalism, the nature of the research university, mass culture, all of the above—ministers are trained to suppose that the answers to their questions, the reservoir of resources to support their lives of service to the church, are sure to be found in living writers and thinkers who are producing “original” and “cutting-edge” work. If a pastoral or theological author pens an idea, the extent to which it is innovative is the extent to which it is likely to be good, true, or (most of all) relevant. Put differently, the degree to which it presents itself as a departure from, or in contrast to, what came before is just the degree to which it can be trusted.

Needless to say, this is a bad way to think about either ministry or the gospel.

There are many reasons why this is the case. For one, it invariably implies, or actively encourages, what Ratzinger famously termed “a hermeneutic of rupture.” What we believe now is by definition not what they believed then. But this is trapdoor thinking. To set up Our Truth Today as the arbiter of what we may be received from the past and (thus) as a far-reaching dissent from forebears in the faith is both short-sighted and self-defeating. It’s a fool’s game. After a while believers will begin asking themselves what, after all, they have in common with the church that came between Jesus and themselves. As the answer approaches “little to nothing,” people will naturally start to wonder why they’re a part of this thing in the first place. If that’s the problem looking toward the past, there’s another problem looking toward the future. For “innovative rupture” (à la creative destruction) thinking simultaneously sets you, the vanguard of enlightened opinion, up for obsolescence and replacement. For there is no reason in principle to suppose that either you or your views are the end of theological history. A successor awaits. There’s always one just out of sight, lurking in the shadows. You and your big ideas have nowhere to go but the proverbial dustbin of history.

Beyond the merits, considered at a purely social level, there’s a sort of embarrassment involved in making “not being behind the times” a measure of theological or pastoral wisdom. Think back to angels. It’s true that in the 19th and 20th centuries it was a sign of liberal learning and upper-class status to roll one’s eyes at “mythological” belief in “literal” spiritual beings. (We’ve gotten past all that, haven’t we?) But guess what? That’s no longer the case. At least in elite theological circles, it’s perfectly typical to affirm a populated celestial reality; in some circles, the weirder the better. The same goes for miracles. The air one breathes in Anglophone theological writing circa 2000–2020 is strikingly different than, say, the years 1965–1985. But that shift at the elite level takes a while to trickle down to normal folks. Which means that you’ve got pastors going about their daily lives whose deepest desire is for others to know that they know how silly it is to believe, for example, in angels or miracles, when the ultimate “others” they want to impress—in this case, by proxy—are in fact no longer impressed by such posturing. It’s pure fashion, and pastors are never in style.

The lesson should be clear: avoid theological fads like the plague. That doesn’t mean avoid contemporary writing. Nor does it mean new ideas are always bad. Rather, it means, on the one hand, that pastors (and Christians in general) should not treat faith as a matter of “up-to-date-ness.” Doctrine is not set by the clock. Theology is not fashion. The church is indeed meant to grow in knowledge across time, and the church’s mission means that it will always and of necessity encounter and engage and respond to new questions, challenges, and ideas. The church did not have standing teaching on nuclear weapons or IVF or cloning or CRISPR or extraterrestrial life or climate change until those technologies and eventualities appeared on the (social, conceptual, political) scene. Nevertheless, the terms of the church’s teaching are set by the gospel, and the gospel is itself one and the same as the announcement made by the apostles in the first generation. It is that gospel—the faith once for all delivered to the saints—that at once norms and generates whatever the church has to say anew in the present day.

On the other hand, what resistance to fads entails, positively speaking, is a certain emphasis or approach to learning and rooting oneself in the meaning of the faith. The best antidote to the cult of the new is devotion to the old. If you want to be inoculated against theological fads that appear today and vanish tomorrow, then dedicate yourself to the lifelong task of mastering (not that you can master) sacred tradition in all its breadth and depth. Read Christian texts from every century of the church’s existence. Read Christian texts from every region and locale and culture where the church has been planted. Read multiple texts by every one of the doctores ecclesiae (to which venerable list St. Irenaeus will be added soon!). Read church fathers and medievals, reformers and moderns and postmoderns. Read mystics and missionaries, monks and ministers, bishops and beggars, evangelists and academics. Read Catholics and Orthodox, Anglicans and Anabaptists, Methodists and Moravians, Calvinists and Campbellites. Read them on every doctrinal locus under the sun. Read three of them for every newly written book you open. If you’re lucky, you won’t only be immunized against the pathogen of whatever happens to be trending at the moment. You might just fall in love.

The truth is, the things a newfangled fad might lead you to doubt—Jesus died on the cross as a sacrifice for my sins; angels and demons are real; when I die my soul will go to heaven to be with the Lord; the Holy Spirit works miracles; the Bible tells us about things that really happened—are beliefs so basic that in any given church you might not be able to find a child or a grandparent who ever thought to question them. It usually takes a Master’s degree to do that. But pastors don’t go to seminary to learn why the simple beliefs of ordinary Christians are wrong. They go to learn, among other things, how and why they’re right. It’s a privilege to go beneath the surface, to see more than the tip of the iceberg. But that privilege comes with responsibilities. One of them is to repel every inclination to snobbery and condescension. Another is to report on the glories of what you’ve glimpsed in your deep-sea exploring (which is to say, your theological education). Above all it is your responsibility to use your knowledge to serve the people of God. One of the best ways to do that is to learn the people of God: first by loving them, then by listening to them. Listen to them as they speak today, but most of all listen to them as they speak from the past. Their voices, inscribed in countless texts, are a beacon in the darkness, if only you’ll look for the light.

100 theologians before the 20th century

Earlier this summer I set myself the task of creating a list of 100 theologians before the 20th century. Partly for myself, since I'm an inveterate list-maker and lists help me organize my reading habits; in this case, I would see where my training had left gaps and blind spots that I needed to fill in. But partly, also, for my students, who regularly ask me who they should read from the tradition—not only where to start, but a kind of curriculum or "who's who." So I set out to answer that very question: who's who?

The current list has 153 entries on it. I still want to cull it down to a clean 100, but I figured I would share it here in its unfinished, bloated form. I covet your corrections: Who am I missing? Who have I misnamed? Who is or is not a saint? Whose dates are mistaken? If you had to cull the list down to 100, which dozen (or more) figures would you nix?

I've separated the list into four groups, ranging from 32 to 50 theologians per period: patristic, medieval, reformation, and modern. The cut-offs, naturally, are bound to be arbitrary, but they're roughly accurate, I think. I'm a Westerner making a list in the West, so the Protestant Reformation is a meaningful period in a way that it isn't for the East—but then, I conclude that "age" with Dositheus II, who is a fitting representative of the East's encounter with reformed faith.

As for my goals and criteria:

First, the list is ecumenical; Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestants of every stripe are included.

Second, influence is important; I want the "relevant" names who decisively drove events, doctrines, controversies, etc.

Third, substance is important, too; indeed, on the final list I'm willing to opt for quality over legacy, if it comes down to that.

Fourth, I want epochs, traditions, regions, cultures, and languages to be disparate and representative of the church catholic at any one slice of time in history.

Fifth, orthodoxy is preferable but not required. Partly that's the nature of an ecumenical list (plenty of folks here have anathematized one another!), but even in terms of loose small-o orthodoxy, there a few whose credentials are questionable. So be it—if their thought is significant and worth engaging.

Sixth, candidates for the list have to have left substantial theological writings: St. Benedict, St. Lawrence, and St. Francis are all left off for that reason.

Seventh, I've included a few poets, but only those whose theological imaginaries have decisively informed the church's grammar and devotional practices, such as Dante and Milton; doubtless Herbert, Donne, and Hopkins, among others, could also be included, but I've left them off for now.

Eighth, the cut-off for the 20th century is difficult. What if your someone's straddles both sides of the dividing line? One criterion I used was whether a theologian's writing was equally distributed, or weighted toward the 19th century; another was whether a theologian's major work came before the year 1900. In the end, though, since (a) World War I ended in 1918, (b) Barth's Römerbrief came out in 1919, and (c) the current year is 2020, I used the "hard" cap of 1920.

Finally: Why theologians before the 20th century? First, because almost to a person, these are figures my students have never heard of and certainly have never read. Second, because duh, these are the fathers and mothers of the faith, who handed it down for 19 centuries to the present; they are worth attending to for their own sake. But third, because if I were to make a list of theologians worth reading from the last 100 years, I'd come up with at least as many names, and probably more. That's the job most seminaries and classrooms presuppose as the relevant task, apart from the stray history class or two. But that ends up sidelining the thinkers below. Imagine instead a graduate program in theology that ensured that students would read 2-4 major works by each of the theologians below (or at least by 100 of them). Imagine the theological range and depth, indeed the spiritual formation, that students would receive. Some programs are in fact trying that out. May their tribe increase.

In any case: to the list. Again, I welcome feedback. Leave a comment or drop me a line directly (brad DOT east AT acu DOT edu). Enjoy. [Update: suggested additions follow the list.]

Patristic Period

1. St. Ignatius of Antioch (d. 108)
2. St. Justin Martyr (100-165)
3. St. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130-202)
4. St. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-215)
5. Tertullian (c. 155-240)
6. Origen (c. 184-253)
7. St. Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258)
8. Eusebius of Caesarea (265-339)
9. St. Athanasius (c. 297-373) 10.
   
10. St. Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306-373)
    
11. St. Hilary of Poitiers (c. 315-368)
    
12. St. Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 315-386)
    
13. St. Basil the Great (c. 329-379)
    
14. St. Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 330-390)
    
15. St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-395)
    
16. St. Ambrose (c. 340-397)
    
17. St. Jerome (c. 343-420)
    
18. St. John Chrysostom (c. 347-407)
    
19. St. Augustine of Hippo (c. 354-430)
    
20. St. John Cassian (c. 360-435)
    
21. St. Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376-444)
    
22. St. Peter Chrysologus (c. 400-450)
    
23. Pope St. Leo the Great (c. 400-461)
    
24. St. Severinus Boethius (477-524)
    
25. St. Gregory the Great (c. 540-604)
    
26. St. Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636)
    
27. Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 565-625)
    
28. St. John Climacus (c. 579-649)
    
29. St. Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662)
    
30. St. Isaac of Nineveh (c. 613-700)
    
31. St. Bede the Venerable (c. 673-735)
    
32. St. John Damascene (c. 675-749)

Medieval Period

1. Theodore Abu Qurrah (c. 750-820)
   
2. St. Theodore of Studium (c. 759-826)
   
3. St. Photius the Great (c. 810-893)
   
4. John Scotus Eriugena (c. 815-877)
   
5. St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022)
   
6. St. Gregory of Narek (951-1003)
   
7. St. Peter Damian (1007-1072)
   
8. Michael Psellos (1017-1078)
   
9. St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109)
   
10. Peter Abelard (c. 1079-1142)
    
11. St. Bernard of Clairvaux (c. 1090-1153)
    
12. Peter Lombard (c. 1096-1160)
    
13. Hugh of St. Victor (c. 1096-1141)
    
14. St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)
    
15. Nicholas of Methone (1100-1165)
    
16. Richard of St. Victor (1110-1173)
    
17. Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202)
    
18. Alexander of Hales (1185-1245)
    
19. St. Anthony of Padua (1195-1231)
    
20. St. Albert the Great (c. 1200-1280)
    
21. St. Bonaventure (c. 1217-1274)
    
22. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
    
23. Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1328)
    
24. Dante Alighieri (c. 1265-1321)
    
25. Bl. John Duns Scotus (1265-1308)
    
26. William of Ockham (c. 1287-1347)
    
27. Bl. John van Ruysbroeck (c. 1293-1381)
    
28. Bl. Henry Suso (1295-1366)
    
29. St. Gregory Palamas (c. 1296-1357)
    
30. Johannes Tauler (1300-1361)
    
31. St. Nicholas Kabasilas (1319-1392)
    
32. John Wycliffe (c. 1320-1384)
    
33. Julian of Norwich (c. 1343-1420)
    
34. St. Catherine of Siena (c. 1347-1380)
    
35. Jan Hus (c. 1372-1415)
    
36. St. Symeon of Thessaloniki (c. 1381-1429)
    
37. St. Mark of Ephesus (1392-1444)
    
38. Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464)
    
39. Denys the Carthusian (1402-1471)
    

Reformation Period

1. Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)
   
2. Thomas Cajetan (1469-1534)
   
3. St. Thomas More (1478-1535)
   
4. Balthasar Hubmaier (1480-1528)
   
5. Martin Luther (1483-1546)
   
6. Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531)
   
7. Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566)
   
8. Thomas Müntzer (1489-1525)
   
9. Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556)
   
10. St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556)
    
11. Martin Bucer (1491-1551)
    
12. Menno Simmons (1496-1561)
    
13. Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560)
    
14. Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562)
    
15. St. John of Ávila (1500-1569)
    
16. Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575)
    
17. John Calvin (1509-1564)
    
18. John Knox (1514-1572)
    
19. St. Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582)
    
20. Theodore Beza (1519-1605)
    
21. St. Peter Canisius (1521-1597)
    
22. Martin Chemnitz (1522-1586)
    
23. Domingo Báñez (1528-1604)
    
24. Zacharias Ursinus (1534-1583)
    
25. Luis de Molina (1535-1600)
    
26. St. John of the Cross (1542-1591)
    
27. St. Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621)
    
28. Francisco Suárez (1548-1617)
    
29. Richard Hooker (1554-1600)
    
30. Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626)
    
31. Johann Arndt (1555-1621)
    
32. Johannes Althusius (1557-1638)
    
33. William Perkins (1558-1602)
    
34. St. Lawrence of Brindisi (1559-1619)
    
35. Jacob Arminius (1560-1609)
36. Amandus Polanus (1561-1610)
    
37. St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622)
    
38. Jakob Böhme (1575-1624)
    
39. William Ames (1576-1633)
    
40. Johann Gerhard (1582-1637)
    
41. Meletios Syrigos (1585-1664)
    
42. John of St Thomas (1589-1644)
    
43. Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661)
    
44. John Milton (1608-1674)
    
45. John Owen (1616-1683)
    
46. Francis Turretin (1623-1687)
    
47. Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706)
    
48. Philipp Spener (1635-1705)
    
49. Thomas Traherne (c. 1636-1674)
    
50. Patriarch Dositheos II of Jerusalem (1641-1707)
    

Modern Period

1. August Hermann Francke (1663-1727)
   
2. St. Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787)
   
3. Nicolaus Zinzendorf (1700-1760)
4. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)
   
5. John Wesley (1703-1791)
   
6. St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain (1749-1809)
   
7. St. Seraphim of Sarov (1754-1833)
   
8. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834)
   
9. St. Philaret of Moscow (1782-1867)
   
10. Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860)
    
11. Johann Adam Möhler (1796-1838)
    
12. Charles Hodge (1797-1878)
    
13. St. John Henry Newman (1801-1890)
    
14. John Williamson Nevin (1803-1886)
    
15. Alexei Khomiakov (1804-1860)
    
16. F. D. Maurice (1805-1872)
    
17. David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874)
    
18. Isaak August Dorner (1809-1884)
    
19. Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903)
    
20. Heinrich Schmid (1811-1885)
    
21. St. Theophan the Recluse (1815-1894)
    
22. J. C. Ryle (1816-1900)
    
23. Philip Schaff (1819-1893)
    
24. Heinrich Heppe (1820-1879)
    
25. Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889)
    
26. John of Kronstadt (1829-1909)
    
27. Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920)
    
28. B. B. Warfield (1851-1921)
    
29. Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900)
    
30. Herman Bavinck (1854-1921)
    
31. Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923)
    
32. St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897)

Suggested additions [last updated 24 July 2020]:

1. Evagrius Ponticus
   
2. The Cloud of Unknowing
   
3. Theologia Germanica
4. Francisco de Vitoria
5. Jose de Acosta
   
6. Gerard Winstanley
   
7. Blaise Pascal
8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
9. David Walker
   
10. Søren Kierkegaard
11. Rauschenbusch
12. Alcuin of York
    
13. Rabanus Maurus
14. Paschasius Radbertus
15. Cassiodorus
16. G. W. F. Hegel
17. George MacDonald
18. Ignaz von Döllinger
19. Tobias Beck
20. Adolf von Harnack
21. Giovanni Perrone
22. Franz Overbeck
23. August Vilmar
24. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
25. Léon Bloy

Exorcising theological demons

Over the last few semesters, teaching both upper-level Bible majors, most of whom plan on going into some kind of formal ministry, and freshman non-majors, who are required to take a sequence of two courses on the New Testament, I've noticed a number of assumptions shared among them. My students are by and large low-church Texans: non-denominational evangelicals, Baptists, Church of Christ-ers, and the like. They are diverse in terms of race and ethnicity and socioeconomic background, but quite similar in terms of ecclesial and theological identity and commitments.

By the end of last year I realized there were two primary "isms"—but let's call them theological demons—I was implicitly seeking to exorcise in class: biblicism and Marcionism (or supersessionism). Upon reflection, as I plan to teach some upper-level majors this semester in their one and only Theology course before graduation (it all comes down to me!), I realized I have a lot more theological demons in view. Ten, in fact. Here's a brief rundown of what this pedagogical exorcist has in his sights this spring.

(I should add, before starting, that these are specifically intellectual-theological: they aren't moral or political. So, e.g., nationalism is ripe for mention, and that comes up in a different class I teach; but it's not in view here.)

1. Biblicism

By this term I mean the view that the one and only factor for any and all matters of faith and Christian life is the Bible. Think of this as sola scriptura, only with "sola" in all caps. It isn't that the Bible is sufficient for faith and morals, or the final arbiter of church teaching and practice. It's that, in a real sense, there is nothing but the Bible. This can lean in the direction of fundamentalism, but it can also lean toward hollowed-out, seeker-sensitive non-denominationalism: if teaching X or practice Y isn't explicitly commanded/forbidden in Scripture, then not only is it automatically permissible; there is no other relevant theological factor for consideration. The market wants what the market wants.

2. Primitivism

Here I mean the idea that the ultimate goal for Christians is to approximate whatever the church looked like during the time of the apostles. Just to the extent that our worship, doctrine, or practices look different from that of the "early church" (however plausibly or implausibly reconstructed), we are departing from what God wants of us.

3. Individualism

This is in the DNA of each and every one of us, so I don't fault my students for this. Nevertheless, I do my very best, across the 15 weeks I have them, to interrogate the received notion that the individual is the locus of ultimate significance, and propose alternatively that there is a way of being in the world that gives priority, or at least equal significance, to the community. They rarely bite, but the attempt is worth it. This particular demon manifests as religious autonomy: faith is a private business between me and my God, and the church is an optional add-on that I am free to accept or reject as I see fit.

4. Subjectivism

Each of these is cumulative, and subjectivism builds on the foregoing through the implicit belief that the primary, or even sole, criterion for an action is how it affects me, or how I experience its effect on me. So, e.g., certain styles of worship are self-validating because I, or the worshipers in question, self-report a positive experience. Combined with biblicism, this becomes the working principle that everything is licit that (a) produces reportage of positivity and (b) is not expressly forbidden by the New Testament.

5. Presentism

What I mean is twofold: on the one hand, the view that what is new is prima facie superior to what is old; and, on the other hand, a widespread historical amnesia to the church's past, bordering on an active, principled ignorance about and opposition to "tradition," understood as whatever the church has believed, taught, or practiced between the death of the last apostle and the day before yesterday. The former is often explicit: innovation and creativity are chief virtues in all areas of life, including religion. The latter is almost always implicit, merely inherited from church leaders and teachers who inculcated it in them, wittingly or not. I find a great deal of success in using this latter assumption as the point of entry for introducing students to a different way of thinking about the church, faith, theology, and tradition. It's hard to overstate how receptive students are to that conversation.

6. Constructivism

Here I mean what I describe for my students as "DIY Christianity." No one fancies him or herself a proponent of the view that "Christianity is whatever I make it to be," but an astonishing number belong to churches that come very close to suggesting it. As you can tell, all six of these theological assumptions are varying forms of anti-catholicity: the church is not a living community with a rich storehouse of wisdom, knowledge, and teaching built up across the centuries; it is the sort of thing a pastor with entrepreneurial ambition can found, alone, in a local abandoned warehouse, with not a single concrete connection to either actual existing churches or the manifold saints and doctors long departed. Doctrine, statements of faith, liturgical rituals: they're built from the ground up, each and every year, each and every generation starting from scratch.

7. Anti-intellectualism

Christian faith, for most of my students, is a matter of the heart, a feeling expressed in an intimate relationship with the Lord. So far, so good. But as such, it is adamantly not a matter of the mind. Theology might be relevant to pastors—though, on the evidence, their pastors disagree—but, at best, it is optional for the laity and, at worst, is a dangerous and irrelevant abstraction. "Irrelevance" captures the heart of it: if I don't have a clear answer to the question of what I can do with a doctrine, what its practical implications for daily life are, then what could it be good for? Practicality trumps the theoretical every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

8. Marcionism

Switching gears, it is perhaps my principal goal, in every one of my classes, to exorcise my students of this ancient, wicked demon. Again, rarely consciously held, the idea is nevertheless pervasive that there is some sort of disconnect or disjunction between "the God of the Old Testament" and "the God of the New Testament." Or, the church replaces the Jews as God's people. Or, Jesus came to save us from the Law (which was, hands down, the worst). Or, God is finally loving and forgiving rather than violent and wrathful. Etc., etc. The sheer volume of times I refer to Abraham's election, or "the God of Israel," or "Jesus, the Jewish Messiah," is meant as a rhetorical corrective to what I'm sure are years of marinading in supersessionist and even at times full-on Marcionite language in their churches.

9. Gnosticism

Just as all Americans, Christian or not, are individualists, so they are Gnostics of one variety or another. In this case it manifests in one of two ways. Either none of "this" (i.e., creation, materiality, the body) "matters," since we're all going to heaven anyway (and, as I say, putting words in their mouths, nuking the earth as we depart). Or what "really" matters in Christian faith and spirituality is "the heart" or "the soul" or "the inside," not the body or what we do with the body. Fortunately, this doesn't usually lead to flat-out libertinism, though I do think there's an element of that informing behavior outside of sex. But it does inform a kind of anti-ascesis, that is, the view that spiritual disciplines are dead routines, and the notion of self-imposed (not to mention externally imposed!) periods of self-restraint in food, labor, entertainment, or sex is a conversation-stopper. It's not even intelligible as an idea.

10. Anti-ritualism

Last but not least, building on individualism, subjectivism, and Gnosticism, hostility to ritual as such rules the day. Ritual means "going through the motions," which is always and everywhere a bad thing. Hence why innovation is so important, not least in worship: what we do needs to be new lest we slip into dead routines, which we would then do "just because" rather than because "our hearts are in the right place." One's relationship with God is modeled on the early courtship or honeymoon period of young lovers: it's always summer, always sunshine, and you only spend time together—doe-eyed, deeply in love—spontaneously, because spontaneity signifies the depth of true love. (Think about contemporary Christian worship songs.) Rituals, on this picture, are what middle-aged spouses do when they schedule dates and have "talks" and even "fights." That's not what faith is like—which means we know what's happening when it starts to look routinized and ritualistic. Something's the matter.