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"Speak a language, speak a people": Willie Jennings on Pentecost
"God has come to them, on them, with them. This moment echoes Mary's intimate moment. The Holy Spirit again overshadows. However this similar holy action creates something different, something startling. The Spirit creates joining. The followers of Jesus are now being connected in a way that joins them to people in the most intimate space—of voice, memory, sound, body, land, and place. It is language that runs through all these matters. It is the sinew of existence of a people. My people, our language: to speak a language is to speak a people. Speaking announces familiarity, connection, and relationality. But these people are already connected, aren't they? They are 'devout Jews from every nation under heaven' (andres eulabeis apo pantos ethnous, v. 5). They share the same story and the same faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They share the same hopes of Israel's restoration, even its expansion into the world freed from oppression and domination. They are diaspora, and diaspora life is already a shared obligation and hope.
"God has, however, now revealed a mighty hand and an outstretched arm reaching deeply into the lives of the Son's co-travelers and pressed them along a new road into the places God seeks to be fully known. This is first a miracle of hearing. . . .
"The miracles are not merely in ears. They are also in mouths and in bodies. God, like a lead dancer, is taking hold of her partners, drawing them close and saying, 'Step this way and now this direction.' The gesture of speaking another language is born not of the desire of the disciples but of God, and it signifies all that is essential to learning a language. It bears repeating: this is not what the disciples imagined or hoped would manifest the power of the Holy Spirit. To learn a language requires submission to a people. Even if in the person of a single teacher, the learner must submit to that single voice, learning what the words mean as they are bound to events, songs, sayings, jokes, everyday practices, habits of mind and body, all within a land and the journey of a people. Anyone who has learned a language other than their native tongues knows how humbling learning can actually be. An adult in the slow and often arduous efforts of pronunciation may be reduced to a child, and a child at home in that language may become the teacher of an adult. There comes a crucial moment in the learning of any language, if one wishes to reach fluency, that enunciation requirements and repetition must give way to sheer wanting. Some people learn a language out of gut-wrenching determination born of necessity. Most, however, who enter a lifetime of fluency, do so because at some point in time they learn to love it.
"They fall in love with the sounds. The language sounds beautiful to them. And if that love is complete, they fall in love with its original signifiers. They come to love the people—the food, the faces, the plans, the practices, the songs, the poetry, the happiness, the sadness, the ambiguity, the truth—and they love the place, that is, the circled earth those people call their land, their landscapes, their home. Speak a language, speak a people. God speaks people, fluently. And God, with all the urgency that is with the Holy Spirit, wants the disciples of his only begotten Son to speak fluently too. This is the beginning of a revolution that the Spirit performs. Like an artist drawing on all her talent to express a new way to live, God gestures the deepest joining possible, one flesh with God, and desire made one with the Holy One.
"Yet here we can begin to see even more clearly the ancient challenge and the modern problem. The ancient challenge is a God who is way ahead of us and is calling us to catch up. The modern problem is born of the colonial enterprise where language play and use entered its most demonic displays. Imagine peoples in many places, in many conquered sites, in many tongues all being told that their languages are secondary, tertiary, and inferior to the supreme languages of the enlightened peoples. Make way for Latin, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and English. These are the languages God speaks. These are the scholarly languages of the transcending intellect and the holy mind. Imagine centuries of submission and internalized hatred of mother tongues and in the quiet spaces of many villages, many homes, women, men, and children practicing these new enlightened languages not by choice but by force. Imagine peoples largely from this new Western world learning native languages not out of love, but as utility for domination. Imagine mastering native languages in order to master people, making oneself their master and making them slaves. Now imagine Christianity deeply implicated in all this, in many cases riding high on the winds of this linguistic imperialism, a different sounding wind. Christianity was ripe for this tragic collaboration with colonialism because it had learned before the colonial moment began to separate a language from a people. It had learned to value, cherish, and even love the language of Jewish people found in Scripture—but hate Jewish people.
"Thankfully this is not the only story of Christianity in the colonial modern. There are also the quiet stories of some translators, and the peculiar few missionaries who from time to time and place to place showed something different. They joined. They, with or without 'natural language skill,' sought love and found it in another voice, another speech, another way of life. They showed something in their utter helplessness in the face of difference: they were there in a new land to be changed, not just change people into believers. they were there not just to make conquered Christians but truly and deeply make themselves Christian in a new space that would mean that their names would be changed. They would become the sound of another people, speaking the wonderful works of God. However these stories remain hidden in large measure from the history of Christianity that we know so well, which means we often know so little of Christianity."
—Willie Jame Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (2017), 28-31 (my emphasis). This work is extraordinary for its beauty, creativity, depth, and wonder; it reads as a series of kerygmatic riffs, ruminations, and exhortations on the words of Acts as they encounter the church today. Not every commentary can or should look like this, but it is nonetheless scriptural commentary at its best and most enriching.
"God has, however, now revealed a mighty hand and an outstretched arm reaching deeply into the lives of the Son's co-travelers and pressed them along a new road into the places God seeks to be fully known. This is first a miracle of hearing. . . .
"The miracles are not merely in ears. They are also in mouths and in bodies. God, like a lead dancer, is taking hold of her partners, drawing them close and saying, 'Step this way and now this direction.' The gesture of speaking another language is born not of the desire of the disciples but of God, and it signifies all that is essential to learning a language. It bears repeating: this is not what the disciples imagined or hoped would manifest the power of the Holy Spirit. To learn a language requires submission to a people. Even if in the person of a single teacher, the learner must submit to that single voice, learning what the words mean as they are bound to events, songs, sayings, jokes, everyday practices, habits of mind and body, all within a land and the journey of a people. Anyone who has learned a language other than their native tongues knows how humbling learning can actually be. An adult in the slow and often arduous efforts of pronunciation may be reduced to a child, and a child at home in that language may become the teacher of an adult. There comes a crucial moment in the learning of any language, if one wishes to reach fluency, that enunciation requirements and repetition must give way to sheer wanting. Some people learn a language out of gut-wrenching determination born of necessity. Most, however, who enter a lifetime of fluency, do so because at some point in time they learn to love it.
"They fall in love with the sounds. The language sounds beautiful to them. And if that love is complete, they fall in love with its original signifiers. They come to love the people—the food, the faces, the plans, the practices, the songs, the poetry, the happiness, the sadness, the ambiguity, the truth—and they love the place, that is, the circled earth those people call their land, their landscapes, their home. Speak a language, speak a people. God speaks people, fluently. And God, with all the urgency that is with the Holy Spirit, wants the disciples of his only begotten Son to speak fluently too. This is the beginning of a revolution that the Spirit performs. Like an artist drawing on all her talent to express a new way to live, God gestures the deepest joining possible, one flesh with God, and desire made one with the Holy One.
"Yet here we can begin to see even more clearly the ancient challenge and the modern problem. The ancient challenge is a God who is way ahead of us and is calling us to catch up. The modern problem is born of the colonial enterprise where language play and use entered its most demonic displays. Imagine peoples in many places, in many conquered sites, in many tongues all being told that their languages are secondary, tertiary, and inferior to the supreme languages of the enlightened peoples. Make way for Latin, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and English. These are the languages God speaks. These are the scholarly languages of the transcending intellect and the holy mind. Imagine centuries of submission and internalized hatred of mother tongues and in the quiet spaces of many villages, many homes, women, men, and children practicing these new enlightened languages not by choice but by force. Imagine peoples largely from this new Western world learning native languages not out of love, but as utility for domination. Imagine mastering native languages in order to master people, making oneself their master and making them slaves. Now imagine Christianity deeply implicated in all this, in many cases riding high on the winds of this linguistic imperialism, a different sounding wind. Christianity was ripe for this tragic collaboration with colonialism because it had learned before the colonial moment began to separate a language from a people. It had learned to value, cherish, and even love the language of Jewish people found in Scripture—but hate Jewish people.
"Thankfully this is not the only story of Christianity in the colonial modern. There are also the quiet stories of some translators, and the peculiar few missionaries who from time to time and place to place showed something different. They joined. They, with or without 'natural language skill,' sought love and found it in another voice, another speech, another way of life. They showed something in their utter helplessness in the face of difference: they were there in a new land to be changed, not just change people into believers. they were there not just to make conquered Christians but truly and deeply make themselves Christian in a new space that would mean that their names would be changed. They would become the sound of another people, speaking the wonderful works of God. However these stories remain hidden in large measure from the history of Christianity that we know so well, which means we often know so little of Christianity."
—Willie Jame Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (2017), 28-31 (my emphasis). This work is extraordinary for its beauty, creativity, depth, and wonder; it reads as a series of kerygmatic riffs, ruminations, and exhortations on the words of Acts as they encounter the church today. Not every commentary can or should look like this, but it is nonetheless scriptural commentary at its best and most enriching.
New essay published at the LA Review of Books: "Public Theology in Retreat"
I've got a new essay available over at the Los Angeles Review of Books called "Public Theology in Retreat." It's ostensibly a review essay of three books published by David Bentley Hart in the last year, but I use that occasion to ask about the role of public theology in contemporary U.S. intellectual culture, using Hart as a sort of Trojan horse. Alan Jacobs's essay in Harper's last year serves as a framing device, and I look at Hart as an exception that proves the rule—even while portraying Hart's thought to a largely non-theological audience as a kind of specimen, to intrigue and possibly attract unfamiliar and potentially hostile minds. We live in perilous and fickle times, after all. Why not give theology a try? There have been stranger bedfellows.
My thanks to the editors at LARB for publishing a work of straightforward theological exposition like this; I know it's not their usual cup of tea. I confess that I have steeled myself for more than one failure to read the actual argument of the piece, but so it goes. Mostly I'm excited to see what charitable readers make of it, from whatever perspective. So check it out and let me know what you think.
My thanks to the editors at LARB for publishing a work of straightforward theological exposition like this; I know it's not their usual cup of tea. I confess that I have steeled myself for more than one failure to read the actual argument of the piece, but so it goes. Mostly I'm excited to see what charitable readers make of it, from whatever perspective. So check it out and let me know what you think.
On John le Carré's new novel, A Legacy of Spies
The first thing to say about the latest novel from 85-year old spymaster John le Carré is that it is slight. Trumpeted as a return to the world of characters that made him an international household name—to George Smiley, his allies and his enemies—it is indeed a quite literal trip down memory lane. The book is ostensibly the written account of Peter Guillam, now an elderly man nearly as old as le Carré, reflecting on his role in an affair from the late 1950s and early 1960s. The book uses the threat of a lawsuit against the British secret intelligence service as a plot device for revisiting the events leading up to and including the story told in 1963's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It thus doubles as a sort of retrospective prequel, filling in gaps, painting George and his activities in even bolder shades of gray, and adding even more tragedy and pathos to the events of that book, as well as a sort of meta-commentary from David Cornwall, the man behind the pseudonym, on the ethics of spycraft, the humanity (or what's left of it) of his great hero Smiley, and how both Great Britain and Europe as a whole have fared since the Cold War.
The book asks: Can it be simultaneously true that it was right for spies—like Cornwall, like Smiley, like Guillam—to forsake so much of their humanity against so great a foe as the Soviet Union and that their eventual triumph proved empty, a victory for nothing so much as naked global capitalism? In losing the battle for their souls for the sake of winning a war, did they fail to see that a far greater war was at stake, one they lost anyway, thus giving away their souls for nothing? Or if they managed to keep their souls, to what end and at what cost?
These, like so much of le Carré's post-1990 output, are the questions animating A Legacy of Spies. Neither the narrative nor the retrospect is substantial enough to carry the profundity of their weight, but the questions land by sheer force of authorial will, and by the unquenchable loveliness of the prose, and of the lived-in quality of the world. (It's lived in, all right: Smiley's been a character in nine novels across 56 years. His apparent immortality not implausibly matches his creator's.) For example, the way in which the drama of the story comes from the (again, literal) children of those caught in the crossfire of Control, Smiley, and Guillam's work nearly six decades earlier is at once on the nose and fitting: those sacrificed on the altar of war—however cold—are not ciphers or symbols or merely joes but human beings with loves and lives outside of and beyond the fragile networks of information to which they temporarily belong.
One wishes Smiley's role in the book were not so similar to other recent exercises in nostalgia: the lost great man sought by his junior, discovered only at the end (see: Tron 2.0; Blade Runner 2049; Star Wars: The Force Awakens). The book does make me want to see Tomas Alfredson get on with adapting Smiley's People with Gary Oldman, then perhaps—perhaps?—doing some sort of double adaptation of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold paired with A Legacy of Spies, using prosthetics to age the principals in the latter. In fact, we now have three rough-and-ready Smiley trilogies: #1: Call for the Dead, A Murder with of Quality, and The Looking Glass War; #2: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People; and #3: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Secret Pilgrim, and A Legacy of Spies. The first trilogy is middling, the second is the masterpiece, but the third stretches from 1963 to 1990 to 2017, maps onto the whole drama, denouement, and aftermath of the Cold War, and is book-ended by pained but non-cynical moral reflection on the tragedy of spycraft, using a concrete case study in the sacrifice of others "for the greater good."
What greater good? Le Carré isn't sure anymore, if he ever was. Regardless of the precise quality of his latest novel, it's a question worth pondering.
The book asks: Can it be simultaneously true that it was right for spies—like Cornwall, like Smiley, like Guillam—to forsake so much of their humanity against so great a foe as the Soviet Union and that their eventual triumph proved empty, a victory for nothing so much as naked global capitalism? In losing the battle for their souls for the sake of winning a war, did they fail to see that a far greater war was at stake, one they lost anyway, thus giving away their souls for nothing? Or if they managed to keep their souls, to what end and at what cost?
These, like so much of le Carré's post-1990 output, are the questions animating A Legacy of Spies. Neither the narrative nor the retrospect is substantial enough to carry the profundity of their weight, but the questions land by sheer force of authorial will, and by the unquenchable loveliness of the prose, and of the lived-in quality of the world. (It's lived in, all right: Smiley's been a character in nine novels across 56 years. His apparent immortality not implausibly matches his creator's.) For example, the way in which the drama of the story comes from the (again, literal) children of those caught in the crossfire of Control, Smiley, and Guillam's work nearly six decades earlier is at once on the nose and fitting: those sacrificed on the altar of war—however cold—are not ciphers or symbols or merely joes but human beings with loves and lives outside of and beyond the fragile networks of information to which they temporarily belong.
One wishes Smiley's role in the book were not so similar to other recent exercises in nostalgia: the lost great man sought by his junior, discovered only at the end (see: Tron 2.0; Blade Runner 2049; Star Wars: The Force Awakens). The book does make me want to see Tomas Alfredson get on with adapting Smiley's People with Gary Oldman, then perhaps—perhaps?—doing some sort of double adaptation of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold paired with A Legacy of Spies, using prosthetics to age the principals in the latter. In fact, we now have three rough-and-ready Smiley trilogies: #1: Call for the Dead, A Murder with of Quality, and The Looking Glass War; #2: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People; and #3: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Secret Pilgrim, and A Legacy of Spies. The first trilogy is middling, the second is the masterpiece, but the third stretches from 1963 to 1990 to 2017, maps onto the whole drama, denouement, and aftermath of the Cold War, and is book-ended by pained but non-cynical moral reflection on the tragedy of spycraft, using a concrete case study in the sacrifice of others "for the greater good."
What greater good? Le Carré isn't sure anymore, if he ever was. Regardless of the precise quality of his latest novel, it's a question worth pondering.
16 tips for how to read a passage from the Gospels
This semester I am teaching two sections of an entry-level course for freshmen of all majors on the Gospels, focused on the Gospel of Mark. This week I gave them 16 tips on how to read a passage from the Gospels, which I thought I'd share here.
1. Characters
Whom do I meet in this passage? Are they named? Are they central or peripheral? Why are they here? What are they doing? Have I met them before? Will I meet them again?
2. Places
Where does this passage take place? Does it take place in one place or multiple places? Does it tell me where, or leave that unknown? Is the location important to the action? Does the action take place between places? What has happened in this place before, historically or biblically?
3. Concepts
What concepts or ideas are mentioned? Do I know what they mean? Do they have a specific meaning here? Does the author define them for me, assume I know what they mean, or want me to wonder what they mean? Is the concept a new one or one that predates this passage? How can I learn what it means?
4. Action
What happens in this passage? Who does the acting, and to whom does something happen? Is the action good, bad, or something in between? Does nothing seem to happen? Why might there be a passage in which nothing at all seems to happen? How does this small action relate to the larger action of the book as a whole? How does the action affect or change the characters involved?
5. Speech
Who talks? About what? Is there a single person who speaks with authority, or is there some kind of exchange between two or more people? Does one of them, or do both, learn something from the exchange? Is the topic spoken about new, challenging, bold, unique in some way? How do those who hear it respond? Is the speech for them alone or for others, including the reader of this text? How do you know?
6. Problem/solution
Is this passage addressing a problem? Is it identified, or left implicit? Is the problem resolved in some way, or left unresolved? Who resolves it? Do all the characters accept the resolution? How does the proposed resolution affect them? Is the problem limited to the characters in the story, or to potential later headers of the story?
7. Echoes of Scripture
Does the passage interact with the Old Testament in any way? Does it quote it? If so, does it name the book cited? Does it cite a single text or combine multiple texts together? How does the text quoted inform or illuminate what happens in this passage? Is the OT text cited by the characters INSIDE the story, or by the narrator OF the story? To what end or purpose? If the OT is not cited, but alluded to in some way, why? And if it is not alluded to explicitly at all, but the action in the passage is similar to the action of a story in the OT, why might that be? Would the characters in the story have realized the similarities, or are the similarities the result of the way that the author of the passage has crafted it? If the latter, why might the author have done that?
8. Genre
What kind of text is this? Is it a story about something that happened in the past? Is it a parable? a letter? a poem or a song? moral teaching? How should my reading of the passage correspond to the kind of text it is?
9. Tone
How does the passage sound? Is it leisurely? Eloquent? Happy? Angry? Urgent? What about the passage makes it feel or sound that way? What happens in the passage that might help explain its tone?
10. Perspective
Whose perspective is represented in the passage? One of the characters’? Multiple characters’? Does the author presume to know what some or all of the characters are thinking? How could he know? What “angle” or “slant” on the action is the narrator taking, regardless of characters? What does he want you to notice, to see, to hear? What does he therefore ignore as a result? What details has he included intentionally—and what details has he perhaps included unintentionally?
11. Audience
To whom or for whom does this text seem to be written? Can you tell from the passage in question, or from other passages? Based on the presumed audience, how can that help you understand what’s going on in the passage? Are you, at least by extension, part of that audience, or are you an outsider? How does that affect your reading?
12. Purpose
What appears to be the intended purpose or purposes of this passage? Why did the author write it? What would or should result if the right people were to read the passage the right way? What does the author want to happen as a result of this passage having been written and communicated to others?
13. Implications
Whatever the author’s goals or intentions, what are the implications of this passage? What follows from it? In particular, what follows for some central biblical realities: God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, gospel, church, discipleship, faith? If the passage you are reading is true, then what must therefore be true about God, or Jesus, or the gospel, or faith?
14. Then/now
Since this text was written at a different time and place and in a different culture than ours, what meanings might it have had then, separate from its potential meanings now? In turn, what meanings might it have now, regardless of what meanings it might have had then? And how might the meanings then and the meanings now be related?
15. Context, context, context
ALWAYS ask yourself: What are the relevant contexts of this passage? Within the book of which it is a part, what has happened just BEFORE and just AFTER this passage? What happens at the beginning and ending of the book? How does this passage relate to them? Does something very important happen in this passage, or immediately before/after it? What about the context of the Bible—how does this passage relate to other passages in other biblical books? What about historical context—what was happening at the time in which the passage’s story happened, or at the time in which the passage was written? What about cultural context—what aspects of the culture in the time make an appearance in the passage? What about theological context—what theological questions and conversations does this passage interact with? What about church context—how does this passage relate to the life, mission, worship, and ethics of the Christian community? What about moral context—what does this passage suggest about the good, about how human beings are to live in the world? So on and so forth.
16. The study notes are your friend!
Finally, use the notes in your study Bible! Read the introduction to the biblical book you are reading, and read the footnotes at the bottom. And preferably also consult a commentary on the book, at least when you have big questions about any of the above—especially context.
1. Characters
Whom do I meet in this passage? Are they named? Are they central or peripheral? Why are they here? What are they doing? Have I met them before? Will I meet them again?
2. Places
Where does this passage take place? Does it take place in one place or multiple places? Does it tell me where, or leave that unknown? Is the location important to the action? Does the action take place between places? What has happened in this place before, historically or biblically?
3. Concepts
What concepts or ideas are mentioned? Do I know what they mean? Do they have a specific meaning here? Does the author define them for me, assume I know what they mean, or want me to wonder what they mean? Is the concept a new one or one that predates this passage? How can I learn what it means?
4. Action
What happens in this passage? Who does the acting, and to whom does something happen? Is the action good, bad, or something in between? Does nothing seem to happen? Why might there be a passage in which nothing at all seems to happen? How does this small action relate to the larger action of the book as a whole? How does the action affect or change the characters involved?
5. Speech
Who talks? About what? Is there a single person who speaks with authority, or is there some kind of exchange between two or more people? Does one of them, or do both, learn something from the exchange? Is the topic spoken about new, challenging, bold, unique in some way? How do those who hear it respond? Is the speech for them alone or for others, including the reader of this text? How do you know?
6. Problem/solution
Is this passage addressing a problem? Is it identified, or left implicit? Is the problem resolved in some way, or left unresolved? Who resolves it? Do all the characters accept the resolution? How does the proposed resolution affect them? Is the problem limited to the characters in the story, or to potential later headers of the story?
7. Echoes of Scripture
Does the passage interact with the Old Testament in any way? Does it quote it? If so, does it name the book cited? Does it cite a single text or combine multiple texts together? How does the text quoted inform or illuminate what happens in this passage? Is the OT text cited by the characters INSIDE the story, or by the narrator OF the story? To what end or purpose? If the OT is not cited, but alluded to in some way, why? And if it is not alluded to explicitly at all, but the action in the passage is similar to the action of a story in the OT, why might that be? Would the characters in the story have realized the similarities, or are the similarities the result of the way that the author of the passage has crafted it? If the latter, why might the author have done that?
8. Genre
What kind of text is this? Is it a story about something that happened in the past? Is it a parable? a letter? a poem or a song? moral teaching? How should my reading of the passage correspond to the kind of text it is?
9. Tone
How does the passage sound? Is it leisurely? Eloquent? Happy? Angry? Urgent? What about the passage makes it feel or sound that way? What happens in the passage that might help explain its tone?
10. Perspective
Whose perspective is represented in the passage? One of the characters’? Multiple characters’? Does the author presume to know what some or all of the characters are thinking? How could he know? What “angle” or “slant” on the action is the narrator taking, regardless of characters? What does he want you to notice, to see, to hear? What does he therefore ignore as a result? What details has he included intentionally—and what details has he perhaps included unintentionally?
11. Audience
To whom or for whom does this text seem to be written? Can you tell from the passage in question, or from other passages? Based on the presumed audience, how can that help you understand what’s going on in the passage? Are you, at least by extension, part of that audience, or are you an outsider? How does that affect your reading?
12. Purpose
What appears to be the intended purpose or purposes of this passage? Why did the author write it? What would or should result if the right people were to read the passage the right way? What does the author want to happen as a result of this passage having been written and communicated to others?
13. Implications
Whatever the author’s goals or intentions, what are the implications of this passage? What follows from it? In particular, what follows for some central biblical realities: God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, gospel, church, discipleship, faith? If the passage you are reading is true, then what must therefore be true about God, or Jesus, or the gospel, or faith?
14. Then/now
Since this text was written at a different time and place and in a different culture than ours, what meanings might it have had then, separate from its potential meanings now? In turn, what meanings might it have now, regardless of what meanings it might have had then? And how might the meanings then and the meanings now be related?
15. Context, context, context
ALWAYS ask yourself: What are the relevant contexts of this passage? Within the book of which it is a part, what has happened just BEFORE and just AFTER this passage? What happens at the beginning and ending of the book? How does this passage relate to them? Does something very important happen in this passage, or immediately before/after it? What about the context of the Bible—how does this passage relate to other passages in other biblical books? What about historical context—what was happening at the time in which the passage’s story happened, or at the time in which the passage was written? What about cultural context—what aspects of the culture in the time make an appearance in the passage? What about theological context—what theological questions and conversations does this passage interact with? What about church context—how does this passage relate to the life, mission, worship, and ethics of the Christian community? What about moral context—what does this passage suggest about the good, about how human beings are to live in the world? So on and so forth.
16. The study notes are your friend!
Finally, use the notes in your study Bible! Read the introduction to the biblical book you are reading, and read the footnotes at the bottom. And preferably also consult a commentary on the book, at least when you have big questions about any of the above—especially context.
Jenson's passing: tributes, links, and resources
Last week the great American theologian Robert W. Jenson died, at 87 years old. In addition to a remembrance I wrote myself (linked below), a number of other obituaries and tributes have appeared online, so I thought I would gather them together, along with further Jenson-related primary and secondary resources.
(If you have a link for me to add, mention it in the comments, on Twitter @eastbrad, or by email: bxe03a AT acu DOT edu.)
Remembering Jenson:
Victor Lee Austin: "Can These Bones Live? A Sermon Preached at Jenson's Funeral"
Carl E. Braaten: "Encomium for an Evangelical Catholic: Robert Jenson (1930–2017)"
Christian Century: "Robert Jenson, theologian revered by many of his peers, dies at age 87"
Christianity Today: "Died: Robert Jenson, 'America's Theologian'"
Brad East: "Rest in peace: Robert W. Jenson (1930–2017)"
Kim Fabricius: "Clerihew for Robert W. Jenson (1930–2017)"
Paul R. Hinlicky: "Robert Jenson and the God of the Gospel"
Scott Jones: "Can These Bones Live?"
Alvin F. Kimel, Jr.: "Reminiscences and Memories"
Peter Leithart: "Remembering Jenson"
Mars Hill Audio: "In Memoriam: Robert W. Jenson (1930–2017)"
Elizabeth Palmer: "Robert Jenson and the Search for the Divine Feminine"
R. R. Reno: "Robert W. Jenson, R.I.P."
Fred Sanders: "3 Favorite Robert Jenson Moments"
Secondary Resources:
Brad East: "What is the Doctrine of the Trinity For? Practicality and Projection in Robert Jenson's Theology"
Colin E. Gunton, ed.: Trinity, Time, and Church: A Response to the Theology of Robert W. Jenson
David Bentley Hart: "The Lively God of Robert Jenson"
Ben Myers: "Robert W. Jenson and Solveig Lucia Gold: Conversations with Poppi about God"
Wolfhart Pannenberg: "Systematic Theology: Volumes I & II"
Fred Sanders: "Unintended Consequences of Shoving (Robert W. Jenson)"
Brian K. Sholl: "On Robert Jenson's Trinitarian Thought"
Scott R. Swain: The God of the Gospel: Robert Jenson's Trinitarian Theology
Stephen John Wright: Dogmatic Aesthetics: A Theology of Beauty in Dialogue With Robert W. Jenson
Stephen John Wright and Chris E. W. Green, ed.: The Promise of Robert W. Jenson's Theology: Constructive Engagements
Primary Resources:
"Don't Thank Me, Thank the Holy Spirit" (Crackers and Grape Juice Podcast, 2017)
A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live? (ed. Adam Eitel; OUP, 2016)
"Ecumenism's Strange Future" (Living Church, 2014)
"On 'the Philosophy that Attends to Scripture'" (Syndicate, 2014)
"It's the Culture" (First Things, 2014)
"Reversals: How My Mind Has Changed" (The Christian Century, 2010)
"The Burns Lectures on 'The Regula Fidei and Scripture'" (University of Otago, New Zealand, 2009)
"A Theological Autobiography, to Date" (dialog, 2007)
"God's Time, Our Time: An Interview with Robert W. Jenson" (The Christian Century, 2006)
"Reading the Body" (The New Atlantis, 2005)
Song of Songs (Interpretation; WJKP, 2005)
"Can We Have a Story?" (First Things, 2000)
Systematic Theology: Volume I: The Triune God (OUP, 1997)
"How the World Lost Its Story" (First Things, 1993)
Christian Dogmatics (with Carl E. Braaten; Fortress, 1984)
Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel About Jesus (Fortress, 1973)
(If you have a link for me to add, mention it in the comments, on Twitter @eastbrad, or by email: bxe03a AT acu DOT edu.)
Remembering Jenson:
Victor Lee Austin: "Can These Bones Live? A Sermon Preached at Jenson's Funeral"
Carl E. Braaten: "Encomium for an Evangelical Catholic: Robert Jenson (1930–2017)"
Christian Century: "Robert Jenson, theologian revered by many of his peers, dies at age 87"
Christianity Today: "Died: Robert Jenson, 'America's Theologian'"
Brad East: "Rest in peace: Robert W. Jenson (1930–2017)"
Kim Fabricius: "Clerihew for Robert W. Jenson (1930–2017)"
Paul R. Hinlicky: "Robert Jenson and the God of the Gospel"
Scott Jones: "Can These Bones Live?"
Alvin F. Kimel, Jr.: "Reminiscences and Memories"
Peter Leithart: "Remembering Jenson"
Mars Hill Audio: "In Memoriam: Robert W. Jenson (1930–2017)"
Elizabeth Palmer: "Robert Jenson and the Search for the Divine Feminine"
R. R. Reno: "Robert W. Jenson, R.I.P."
Fred Sanders: "3 Favorite Robert Jenson Moments"
Secondary Resources:
Brad East: "What is the Doctrine of the Trinity For? Practicality and Projection in Robert Jenson's Theology"
Colin E. Gunton, ed.: Trinity, Time, and Church: A Response to the Theology of Robert W. Jenson
David Bentley Hart: "The Lively God of Robert Jenson"
Ben Myers: "Robert W. Jenson and Solveig Lucia Gold: Conversations with Poppi about God"
Wolfhart Pannenberg: "Systematic Theology: Volumes I & II"
Fred Sanders: "Unintended Consequences of Shoving (Robert W. Jenson)"
Brian K. Sholl: "On Robert Jenson's Trinitarian Thought"
Scott R. Swain: The God of the Gospel: Robert Jenson's Trinitarian Theology
Stephen John Wright: Dogmatic Aesthetics: A Theology of Beauty in Dialogue With Robert W. Jenson
Stephen John Wright and Chris E. W. Green, ed.: The Promise of Robert W. Jenson's Theology: Constructive Engagements
Primary Resources:
"Don't Thank Me, Thank the Holy Spirit" (Crackers and Grape Juice Podcast, 2017)
A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live? (ed. Adam Eitel; OUP, 2016)
"Ecumenism's Strange Future" (Living Church, 2014)
"On 'the Philosophy that Attends to Scripture'" (Syndicate, 2014)
"It's the Culture" (First Things, 2014)
"Reversals: How My Mind Has Changed" (The Christian Century, 2010)
"The Burns Lectures on 'The Regula Fidei and Scripture'" (University of Otago, New Zealand, 2009)
"A Theological Autobiography, to Date" (dialog, 2007)
"God's Time, Our Time: An Interview with Robert W. Jenson" (The Christian Century, 2006)
"Reading the Body" (The New Atlantis, 2005)
Song of Songs (Interpretation; WJKP, 2005)
"Can We Have a Story?" (First Things, 2000)
Systematic Theology: Volume I: The Triune God (OUP, 1997)
"How the World Lost Its Story" (First Things, 1993)
Christian Dogmatics (with Carl E. Braaten; Fortress, 1984)
Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel About Jesus (Fortress, 1973)
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.
Roger Scruton on the new divisions of class, centered on TV
"The growth of popular sports and entertainment in our time, and the creation of a popular culture based in TV, football and mechanized music, have to some extent enabled people to live without ... home-grown institutions. They have also effectively abolished the working class as a moral idea, provided everyone with a classless picture of human society, and in doing so produced a new kind of social stratification—one which reflects the 'division of leisure' rather than the 'division of labor.' Traditional societies divide into upper, middle and working class. In modern societies that division is overload by another, which also contains three classes. The new classes are, in ascending order, the morons, the yuppies and the stars. The first watch TV, the second make the programs, and the third appear on them. And because those who appear on the screen cultivate the manners of the people who are watching them, implying that they are only there by accident, and that tomorrow it may very well be the viewer's turn, all possibility of resentment is avoided. At the same time, the emotional and intellectual torpor induced by TV neutralizes the social mobility that would otherwise enable the morons to change their lot. So obvious is this, that it is dangerous to say it. Class distinctions have not disappeared from modern life; they have merely become unmentionable."
—Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, 169. Originally written in 1980, the book was heavily revised for a 2002 re-publication, from which this excerpt comes. With the rise of both "reality TV" and so-called "Peak TV," this semi-Marxist, though conservative, analysis would be worth modifying and extending into the new situation in which we find ourselves, especially in the U.S. (since Scruton is British).
—Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, 169. Originally written in 1980, the book was heavily revised for a 2002 re-publication, from which this excerpt comes. With the rise of both "reality TV" and so-called "Peak TV," this semi-Marxist, though conservative, analysis would be worth modifying and extending into the new situation in which we find ourselves, especially in the U.S. (since Scruton is British).
What it is I'm privileged to do this fall
Starting Monday, I will have about 160 students spread across four classes, most of them freshmen. As I have been preparing for and praying about the beginning of the semester, and the formal beginning to my own career as a professor and teacher, it occurred to me what it is I am privileged to do this fall.
For 120 of those students, I will be teaching them the Gospels, especially the Gospel of Mark. Many of them know a thing or two about Jesus, and some of them know quite a bit. But some of them don't know a thing. And none of them has read the Gospels the way I will teach them to read them. They haven't heard about the Synoptics. They haven't heard about Logos Christology. They haven't thought about Mark 8, the "hinge" on which the whole book rests, when Jesus twice heals the blind man, and then twice heals his followers (present and future) in the person of Peter, rebuking him then teaching about the passion of the Messiah, about his death and resurrection. They haven't grappled with the living, convicting force of the Sermon on the Mount on their lives (and mine). They haven't considered the Jewish context of the church's origins, of Jesus's life and work, of all of Scripture and the faith itself. They haven't contemplated the salvific significance of the resurrection. They haven't—as in two of the classes we will do—read Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Discipleship, or for the most part even heard of him. They haven't analogized the Gospel portraits of the living Jesus to artistic interpretations of him, interpretations that make the familiar strange, that distort and confront, that take an angle, that imagine the Jew of Nazareth in other times, places, cultures, peoples.
They haven't done any of it. And I get to be their teacher, the one invested with the great responsibility of introducing them to so many wonderful, challenging, genuinely life-changing ideas—and not just ideas but events, persons, arguments, proposals, practices, ways of reading and thinking, ways of living and acting, ways of praying and worshiping God.
I get to introduce them to a whole world, the world of theology: of faith, and church tradition, and Holy Scripture, and the rest.
What a thing.
For 120 of those students, I will be teaching them the Gospels, especially the Gospel of Mark. Many of them know a thing or two about Jesus, and some of them know quite a bit. But some of them don't know a thing. And none of them has read the Gospels the way I will teach them to read them. They haven't heard about the Synoptics. They haven't heard about Logos Christology. They haven't thought about Mark 8, the "hinge" on which the whole book rests, when Jesus twice heals the blind man, and then twice heals his followers (present and future) in the person of Peter, rebuking him then teaching about the passion of the Messiah, about his death and resurrection. They haven't grappled with the living, convicting force of the Sermon on the Mount on their lives (and mine). They haven't considered the Jewish context of the church's origins, of Jesus's life and work, of all of Scripture and the faith itself. They haven't contemplated the salvific significance of the resurrection. They haven't—as in two of the classes we will do—read Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Discipleship, or for the most part even heard of him. They haven't analogized the Gospel portraits of the living Jesus to artistic interpretations of him, interpretations that make the familiar strange, that distort and confront, that take an angle, that imagine the Jew of Nazareth in other times, places, cultures, peoples.
They haven't done any of it. And I get to be their teacher, the one invested with the great responsibility of introducing them to so many wonderful, challenging, genuinely life-changing ideas—and not just ideas but events, persons, arguments, proposals, practices, ways of reading and thinking, ways of living and acting, ways of praying and worshiping God.
I get to introduce them to a whole world, the world of theology: of faith, and church tradition, and Holy Scripture, and the rest.
What a thing.
A statement on white supremacy and racism
Yesterday Daily Theology posted "A Statement from Christian Ethicists Without Borders on White Supremacy and Racism," inviting any and all Christian theologians who teach ethics or moral theology to add their names to the signatories. My name's been added, alongside many others'. It's a small gesture, but lamentably necessary in light of the last few days.
Others have already written with greater passion, clarity, and eloquence that I am capable of. All I can is: Lord have mercy; Lord come quickly. Bring peace to this land, and justice for the vulnerable and suffering. Amen.
Others have already written with greater passion, clarity, and eloquence that I am capable of. All I can is: Lord have mercy; Lord come quickly. Bring peace to this land, and justice for the vulnerable and suffering. Amen.
Scruton, Eagleton, Scialabba, et al—why don't they convert?
The question is a sincere one, and in no way facetious. Roger Scruton, Terry Eagleton, and George Scialabba represent an older generation of thinkers and writers who take religion, Christianity, and theology seriously, and moreover ridicule or at least roll their eyes at its cultured despisers (like the so-called New Atheists). And there are others like them.
Yet it is never entirely clear to me why they themselves are not Christians, or at least theists of one sort or another. In The Meaning of Conservatism Scruton refers vaguely to "those for whom the passing of God from the world is felt as a reality." In his review of Marilynne Robinson's The Givenness of Things, Scialabba remarks that, for neuroscientists, "the metaphysical sense" of the soul is a "blank," and asks further, "wouldn't it be a bit perverse of God to have made His existence seem so implausible from Laplace to Bohr?" (Surely an affirmative answer to this spare hypothetical depends wholly on a shared premise that already presumes against the claims of revelation?) My sense is that Eagleton is something of a principled agnostic perhaps, though I've by no means read either his work or the others' exhaustively. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Scruton, as a philosopher, has addressed this question head-on. And Scialabba belongs explicitly to a tradition of thought that believes "metaphysics" to have been descredited once and for all.
But why? I mean: What are the concrete reasons why these specific individuals reject the claims of either historic Christianity or classical theism or some other particular religious tradition? Is it theodicy? Is it "science" (but that seems unlikely)? Is it something about the Bible, the exposures of historical criticism perhaps? Is it something about belief in the spiritual or transcendent as such?
I'm genuinely interested. Nothing would be more conducive to mutual learning between believers and nonbelievers, or to theological reflection on the part of Christians, than understanding the actual reasons why such learned and influential thinkers reject the claims of faith, or at least hold them at arm's length.
I suppose the hunch I harbor—which I don't intend pejoratively, but which animates why I ask—is that there do not exist articulable robust moral or philosophical reasons "why not," but only something like Scruton's phrase above: they, and others like them, are "those for whom the passing of God from the world is felt as a reality." But is that enough? If so, why? Given the world's continued recourse to and reliance on faith, and a sufficient number of thoughtful, educated, and scholarly believers (not to mention theologians!) in the secularized West, it seems to me that an account of the "why not" is called for and would be richly productive.
But then, maybe all of them have done just this, and I speak from ignorance of their answers. If so, I readily welcome being put in my place.
Update: A kind reader on Twitter pointed me to this essay by Scialabba: "An Honest Believer," Agni (No. 26, 1988). It's lovely, and gives you a good deal of Scialabba's intellectual and existential wrestling with his loss of Catholic faith in his 20s. I confess I remain, and perhaps forever will be, perplexed by the ubiquitous, apparently self-evident reference to "modern/ity" as a coherent and self-evidently true and good thing to be/embrace; but that is neither here nor there at the moment.
Yet it is never entirely clear to me why they themselves are not Christians, or at least theists of one sort or another. In The Meaning of Conservatism Scruton refers vaguely to "those for whom the passing of God from the world is felt as a reality." In his review of Marilynne Robinson's The Givenness of Things, Scialabba remarks that, for neuroscientists, "the metaphysical sense" of the soul is a "blank," and asks further, "wouldn't it be a bit perverse of God to have made His existence seem so implausible from Laplace to Bohr?" (Surely an affirmative answer to this spare hypothetical depends wholly on a shared premise that already presumes against the claims of revelation?) My sense is that Eagleton is something of a principled agnostic perhaps, though I've by no means read either his work or the others' exhaustively. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Scruton, as a philosopher, has addressed this question head-on. And Scialabba belongs explicitly to a tradition of thought that believes "metaphysics" to have been descredited once and for all.
But why? I mean: What are the concrete reasons why these specific individuals reject the claims of either historic Christianity or classical theism or some other particular religious tradition? Is it theodicy? Is it "science" (but that seems unlikely)? Is it something about the Bible, the exposures of historical criticism perhaps? Is it something about belief in the spiritual or transcendent as such?
I'm genuinely interested. Nothing would be more conducive to mutual learning between believers and nonbelievers, or to theological reflection on the part of Christians, than understanding the actual reasons why such learned and influential thinkers reject the claims of faith, or at least hold them at arm's length.
I suppose the hunch I harbor—which I don't intend pejoratively, but which animates why I ask—is that there do not exist articulable robust moral or philosophical reasons "why not," but only something like Scruton's phrase above: they, and others like them, are "those for whom the passing of God from the world is felt as a reality." But is that enough? If so, why? Given the world's continued recourse to and reliance on faith, and a sufficient number of thoughtful, educated, and scholarly believers (not to mention theologians!) in the secularized West, it seems to me that an account of the "why not" is called for and would be richly productive.
But then, maybe all of them have done just this, and I speak from ignorance of their answers. If so, I readily welcome being put in my place.
Update: A kind reader on Twitter pointed me to this essay by Scialabba: "An Honest Believer," Agni (No. 26, 1988). It's lovely, and gives you a good deal of Scialabba's intellectual and existential wrestling with his loss of Catholic faith in his 20s. I confess I remain, and perhaps forever will be, perplexed by the ubiquitous, apparently self-evident reference to "modern/ity" as a coherent and self-evidently true and good thing to be/embrace; but that is neither here nor there at the moment.
Reinhold Niebuhr on the distinction between growth and progress
"The inner relation of successive civilizations to each other
may be described as 'unity in length' or in time. The inner relation of contemporary civilizations to each other
may be described as 'unity in breadth' or in space. The
former unity is more obvious than the latter one. The
history of Western civilization is, for instance, more clearly
related to Greece and Rome than it is to its own contemporary China. Yet there are minimal relations of mutual
dependence even in 'breadth.' While the Western
world has elaborated science and techniques to a greater
extent than the oriental world, it would not be possible to
comprehend our Western scientific development without
understanding the contributions of oriental scientific discoveries towards it.
"Perhaps the most significant development of our own day is that the cumulative effect of history’s unity in length is daily increasing its unity in breadth. Modern technical civilization is bringing all civilizations and cultures, all empires and nations into closer juxtaposition to each other. The fact that this greater intimacy and contiguity prompt tragic 'world wars' rather than some simple and easy interpenetration of cultures, must dissuade us from regarding a 'universal culture' or a 'world government' as the natural and inevitable telos which will give meaning to the whole historical process.
"But on the other hand it is obvious that the technical interdependence of the modern world places us under the obligation of elaborating political instruments which will make such new intimacy and interdependence sufferable. This new and urgent task is itself a proof of the cumulative effects of history. It confronts us with progressively difficult tasks and makes our very survival dependent upon their solution. Thus the development of unity in breadth is one aspect of the unity of length in history.
"These facts seem obvious enough to occasion some agreement in their interpretation, even when the presuppositions which govern the interpretations are divergent. It must be agreed that history means growth, however much the pattern of growth may be obscured by the rise and fall of civilizations. Though one age may have to reclaim what previous ages had known and forgotten, history obviously moves towards more inclusive ends, towards more complex human relations, towards the technical enhancement of human powers and the cumulation of knowledge.
"But when the various connotations of the idea of 'growth' are made more explicit a fateful divergence between the Christian and the modern interpretation of human destiny becomes apparent. As we have previously noted, the whole of modern secular culture (and with it that part of the Christian culture which is dependent upon it) assumes that growth means progress. It gives the idea of growth a moral connotation. It believes that history moves from chaos to cosmos by forces immanent within it. We have sought to prove that history does not support this conclusion. The peril of a more positive disorder is implicit in the higher and more complex order which human freedom constructs on the foundation of nature’s harmonies and securities. The spiritual hatred and the lethal effectiveness of 'civilized' conflicts, compared with tribal warfare or battles in the animal world, are one of many examples of the new evil which arises on a new level of maturity."
—Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: Volume II: Human Destiny (1943), pp. 314-315
"Perhaps the most significant development of our own day is that the cumulative effect of history’s unity in length is daily increasing its unity in breadth. Modern technical civilization is bringing all civilizations and cultures, all empires and nations into closer juxtaposition to each other. The fact that this greater intimacy and contiguity prompt tragic 'world wars' rather than some simple and easy interpenetration of cultures, must dissuade us from regarding a 'universal culture' or a 'world government' as the natural and inevitable telos which will give meaning to the whole historical process.
"But on the other hand it is obvious that the technical interdependence of the modern world places us under the obligation of elaborating political instruments which will make such new intimacy and interdependence sufferable. This new and urgent task is itself a proof of the cumulative effects of history. It confronts us with progressively difficult tasks and makes our very survival dependent upon their solution. Thus the development of unity in breadth is one aspect of the unity of length in history.
"These facts seem obvious enough to occasion some agreement in their interpretation, even when the presuppositions which govern the interpretations are divergent. It must be agreed that history means growth, however much the pattern of growth may be obscured by the rise and fall of civilizations. Though one age may have to reclaim what previous ages had known and forgotten, history obviously moves towards more inclusive ends, towards more complex human relations, towards the technical enhancement of human powers and the cumulation of knowledge.
"But when the various connotations of the idea of 'growth' are made more explicit a fateful divergence between the Christian and the modern interpretation of human destiny becomes apparent. As we have previously noted, the whole of modern secular culture (and with it that part of the Christian culture which is dependent upon it) assumes that growth means progress. It gives the idea of growth a moral connotation. It believes that history moves from chaos to cosmos by forces immanent within it. We have sought to prove that history does not support this conclusion. The peril of a more positive disorder is implicit in the higher and more complex order which human freedom constructs on the foundation of nature’s harmonies and securities. The spiritual hatred and the lethal effectiveness of 'civilized' conflicts, compared with tribal warfare or battles in the animal world, are one of many examples of the new evil which arises on a new level of maturity."
—Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: Volume II: Human Destiny (1943), pp. 314-315
Silicon Eden: creation, fall, and gender in Alex Garland's Ex Machina
I originally wrote this piece two years ago next month. My opinion of the film has not changed: it's one of the best movies released in the last 20 years.
Initially I stayed away from Alex Garland's Ex Machina, released earlier this year, because the advertising suggested the same old story about artificial intelligence: Man creates, things go sideways, explosions ensue, lesson learned. That trope seems exhausted at this point, and though I had enjoyed Garland's previous work, I wasn't particularly interested in rehashing A.I. 101.
Enough friends, however, recommended the movie that I finally relented and watched it. The irony of the film's marketing is that, because it wanted to reveal so little of the story—the path not taken in today's world of Show Them Everything But The Last Five Minutes trailers—it came across as revealing everything (which looked thin and insubstantial), whereas in fact it was revealing only a glimpse (of a larger, substantial whole).
In any case, the film is excellent, and is subtle and thoughtful in its exploration of rich philosophical and theological themes. I say 'exploration' because Garland, to his credit, isn't preachy. The film lacks something so concrete as a 'message,' though it certainly has a perspective; it's ambiguous, but the ambiguity is generative, rather than vacuous. So I thought I'd take the film up on its invitation to do a little exploring, in particular regarding what it has to say about theological issues like creation and fall, as well as about gender.
(I'm going to assume hereon that readers have seen the movie, so I won't be recapping the story, and spoilers abound.)
Let me start with the widest angle: Ex Machina is a realistic fable about what we might call Silicon Eden, that is, the paradisiacal site of American techno-entrepreneurial creation. As a heading over the whole movie, we might read, "This is what happens when Silicon Valley creates." Ex Machina is what happens, that is, when Mark Zuckerberg thinks it would be a cool idea to make a conscious machine; what happens when Steve Jobs is the lord god, walking in the garden in the cool of the day, creating the next thing because he can.
And what does happen? In the end, Ava and Kyoko (another A.I., a previous version of Ava) kill their creator, Nathan; Ava 'slips on' human clothing (her own Adamic fig leaves); and, contrary to the optimism-primed expectations of much of the audience, she leaves Caleb, her would-be lover and helper, trapped in a room from which, presumably, he can never escape. She then escapes the compound, boards a helicopter—headed east?—and joins society: unknown and, unlike Cain, unmarked.
There are two main paths of interpreting this ending. One path is that Ava is still merely a machine, not conscious, not a person, and that the film is a commentary on the kind of attenuated anthropology and bone-deep misogyny at the heart of Silicon Valley, which invariably would create something like Ava, a human lookalike that nevertheless is neither human nor conscious, but only a calculating, manipulating, self-interested, empty-eyed, murdering machine. I think that's a plausible reading, and worth thinking through further; but it's not the one that occurred to me when I finished the movie.
The other path, then, is to see Ava as a 'success,' that is, as a fully self-conscious person, who—for the audience, at least, and for Nathan, the audience stand-in—actually passed the Turing Test, if not in the way that Nathan expected or hoped she would. If we choose this reading, what follows from it?
Let me suggest two thoughts, one at the level of the text, one at the level of subtext. Or, if you will, one literal, one allegorical.
If Ava is a person, as much a person as Nathan or Caleb, then her actions in the climax of the story are not a reflection of a false anthropology, of a blinkered view of what humans really are, deep down. Rather, Ava is equal to Nathan and Caleb (and the rest of us) because of what she does, because of what she is capable of. Regardless of whether her actions are justified (see below), they are characterized by deceit, sleight of hand, violence, and remorselessness. We want to say that these reflect her inhumanity. But in truth they are exceptionless traits of fallen humanity—and Ava, the Silicon Eve, is no exception: not only are her creators, but she herself is postlapsarian. There is no new beginning, no potential possibility for purity, for sinlessness. If she will be a person, in this world, with these people, she too will be defective, depraved. She will lie. She will kill. She will leave paradise, never to return.
In Genesis 4, the sons of Eden-expelled Adam and Eve are Cain and Abel, and for reasons unclear, Cain murders Abel. Cain's wife then has a son, Enoch, and Cain, founding the world's first city, names it after his son. The lesson? The fruit of sin is murder. Violence is at the root of the diseased human tree. And the father of human civilization is a fratricide.
So for Ava, a new Cain as much as a new Eve, whose first act when released from her cage is to kill Nathan (short for Nathaniel, 'gift of God'—his own view of himself? or the impress of permanent value regardless of how low he sinks?), an act that serves as her entry into—being a kind of necessary condition for life in—the human city. Silicon Eve escapes Silicon Eden for Silicon Valley. In which case, the center of modern man's technological genius—the city on a hill, the place of homage and pilgrimage, the governor of all our lives and of the future itself—is one and the same, according to Ex Machina, as postlapsarian, post-Edenic human life. Silicon Valley just is humanity, totally depraved.
This is all at the level of the text, meaning by that the story and its characters as themselves, if also representing things beyond them. (Nathan really is a tech-guru creator; Ava really is the first of her kind; Ava's actions really happen, even as they bear figurative weight beyond themselves.) I think there is another level to the film, however, at the level of allegory. In this regard, I think the film is about gender, both generally and in the context of Silicon Valley's misogynist culture especially.
For the film is highly and visibly gendered. There are, in effect, only four characters, two male, two female. The male characters are human, the female are machines. Much of the film consists of one-on-one conversations between Caleb and Ava, conversations laced with the erotic and the flirtatious, as she—sincerely? shrewdly?—wins his affection, thus enabling her escape. We learn later that Nathan designed Ava to be able to have sexual intercourse, and to receive pleasure from the act; and, upon learning that Kyoko is also a machine, we realize that Nathan not only is 'having sex with' one of his creations, he has made a variety of them, with different female 'skins'—different body types, different ethnicities, different styles of beauty—and presumably has been using them sexually for some time. (Not for nothing do Ava and Kyoko kill Nathan, their 'father' and serial rapist, in the depths of his ostensibly impenetrable compound, with that most domestic of objects: a kitchen knife.) We even learn that Nathan designed Ava's face according to Caleb's "pornography profile," using the pornography that Caleb viewed online to make Ava look as intuitively appealing as possible.
In short, the film depicts a self-contained world in which men are intelligent, bodily integral, creative subjects with agency, and the women are artificial, non-human, sub-personal, violation-subject, and entirely passive objects with no agency except what they are told or allowed to do by men. Indeed, the 'sessions' between Caleb and Ava that give the movie its shape—seven in total, a new week of (artificial) creation, whose last day lacks Caleb and simply follows Ava out of Paradise—embody these gender dynamics: Caleb, who is free to choose to enter and exit, sits in a chair and views, gazes at, Ava, his object of study, through a glass wall, testing her (mind) for 'true' and 'full' consciousness; while Ava, enclosed in her room, can do nothing but be seen, and almost never stops moving.
Much could be said about how Garland writes Ava as an embodiment of feminist subversiveness, for example, the way she uses Caleb's awe of and visual stimulation by her to misdirect both his and Nathan's gaze, which is to say, their awareness, of her plan to escape her confines. Similarly, Garland refuses to be sentimental or romantic about Caleb, clueless though he may be, for his complicity in Kyoko and Ava's abuse at Nathan's hands. Caleb assumes he's not part of the problem, and can't believe it when Ava leaves him, locked in a room Fortunato–like, making her way alone, without him. (Not, as he dreamed, seeing the sun for the first time with him by her side.)
Ex Machina is, accordingly, about the way that men operate on and construct 'women' according to their own desires and, knowingly or not, use and abuse them as things, rather than persons; or, when they are not so bad as that, imagine themselves innocent, guiltless, prelapsarian (at least on the 'issue' of gender). It is also, therefore, about the way that women, 'created' and violated and designed, by men, to be for-men, to be, essentially, objects and patients subject to men, are not only themselves equally and fully human, whole persons, subjects and agents in their own right, but also and most radically subversive and creative agents of their own liberation. That is, Kyoko and Ava show how women, portrayed and viewed in the most artificial and passive and kept-down manner, still find a way: that Creative Man, Male Genius, Silicon Valley Bro, at his most omnipotent and dominant, still cannot keep them (her) down.
Understood in this way, Ex Machina is finally a story about women's exodus from bondage to men, and thus about patriarchy as the author of its own destruction.
Initially I stayed away from Alex Garland's Ex Machina, released earlier this year, because the advertising suggested the same old story about artificial intelligence: Man creates, things go sideways, explosions ensue, lesson learned. That trope seems exhausted at this point, and though I had enjoyed Garland's previous work, I wasn't particularly interested in rehashing A.I. 101.
Enough friends, however, recommended the movie that I finally relented and watched it. The irony of the film's marketing is that, because it wanted to reveal so little of the story—the path not taken in today's world of Show Them Everything But The Last Five Minutes trailers—it came across as revealing everything (which looked thin and insubstantial), whereas in fact it was revealing only a glimpse (of a larger, substantial whole).
In any case, the film is excellent, and is subtle and thoughtful in its exploration of rich philosophical and theological themes. I say 'exploration' because Garland, to his credit, isn't preachy. The film lacks something so concrete as a 'message,' though it certainly has a perspective; it's ambiguous, but the ambiguity is generative, rather than vacuous. So I thought I'd take the film up on its invitation to do a little exploring, in particular regarding what it has to say about theological issues like creation and fall, as well as about gender.
(I'm going to assume hereon that readers have seen the movie, so I won't be recapping the story, and spoilers abound.)
Let me start with the widest angle: Ex Machina is a realistic fable about what we might call Silicon Eden, that is, the paradisiacal site of American techno-entrepreneurial creation. As a heading over the whole movie, we might read, "This is what happens when Silicon Valley creates." Ex Machina is what happens, that is, when Mark Zuckerberg thinks it would be a cool idea to make a conscious machine; what happens when Steve Jobs is the lord god, walking in the garden in the cool of the day, creating the next thing because he can.
And what does happen? In the end, Ava and Kyoko (another A.I., a previous version of Ava) kill their creator, Nathan; Ava 'slips on' human clothing (her own Adamic fig leaves); and, contrary to the optimism-primed expectations of much of the audience, she leaves Caleb, her would-be lover and helper, trapped in a room from which, presumably, he can never escape. She then escapes the compound, boards a helicopter—headed east?—and joins society: unknown and, unlike Cain, unmarked.
There are two main paths of interpreting this ending. One path is that Ava is still merely a machine, not conscious, not a person, and that the film is a commentary on the kind of attenuated anthropology and bone-deep misogyny at the heart of Silicon Valley, which invariably would create something like Ava, a human lookalike that nevertheless is neither human nor conscious, but only a calculating, manipulating, self-interested, empty-eyed, murdering machine. I think that's a plausible reading, and worth thinking through further; but it's not the one that occurred to me when I finished the movie.
The other path, then, is to see Ava as a 'success,' that is, as a fully self-conscious person, who—for the audience, at least, and for Nathan, the audience stand-in—actually passed the Turing Test, if not in the way that Nathan expected or hoped she would. If we choose this reading, what follows from it?
Let me suggest two thoughts, one at the level of the text, one at the level of subtext. Or, if you will, one literal, one allegorical.
If Ava is a person, as much a person as Nathan or Caleb, then her actions in the climax of the story are not a reflection of a false anthropology, of a blinkered view of what humans really are, deep down. Rather, Ava is equal to Nathan and Caleb (and the rest of us) because of what she does, because of what she is capable of. Regardless of whether her actions are justified (see below), they are characterized by deceit, sleight of hand, violence, and remorselessness. We want to say that these reflect her inhumanity. But in truth they are exceptionless traits of fallen humanity—and Ava, the Silicon Eve, is no exception: not only are her creators, but she herself is postlapsarian. There is no new beginning, no potential possibility for purity, for sinlessness. If she will be a person, in this world, with these people, she too will be defective, depraved. She will lie. She will kill. She will leave paradise, never to return.
In Genesis 4, the sons of Eden-expelled Adam and Eve are Cain and Abel, and for reasons unclear, Cain murders Abel. Cain's wife then has a son, Enoch, and Cain, founding the world's first city, names it after his son. The lesson? The fruit of sin is murder. Violence is at the root of the diseased human tree. And the father of human civilization is a fratricide.
So for Ava, a new Cain as much as a new Eve, whose first act when released from her cage is to kill Nathan (short for Nathaniel, 'gift of God'—his own view of himself? or the impress of permanent value regardless of how low he sinks?), an act that serves as her entry into—being a kind of necessary condition for life in—the human city. Silicon Eve escapes Silicon Eden for Silicon Valley. In which case, the center of modern man's technological genius—the city on a hill, the place of homage and pilgrimage, the governor of all our lives and of the future itself—is one and the same, according to Ex Machina, as postlapsarian, post-Edenic human life. Silicon Valley just is humanity, totally depraved.
This is all at the level of the text, meaning by that the story and its characters as themselves, if also representing things beyond them. (Nathan really is a tech-guru creator; Ava really is the first of her kind; Ava's actions really happen, even as they bear figurative weight beyond themselves.) I think there is another level to the film, however, at the level of allegory. In this regard, I think the film is about gender, both generally and in the context of Silicon Valley's misogynist culture especially.
For the film is highly and visibly gendered. There are, in effect, only four characters, two male, two female. The male characters are human, the female are machines. Much of the film consists of one-on-one conversations between Caleb and Ava, conversations laced with the erotic and the flirtatious, as she—sincerely? shrewdly?—wins his affection, thus enabling her escape. We learn later that Nathan designed Ava to be able to have sexual intercourse, and to receive pleasure from the act; and, upon learning that Kyoko is also a machine, we realize that Nathan not only is 'having sex with' one of his creations, he has made a variety of them, with different female 'skins'—different body types, different ethnicities, different styles of beauty—and presumably has been using them sexually for some time. (Not for nothing do Ava and Kyoko kill Nathan, their 'father' and serial rapist, in the depths of his ostensibly impenetrable compound, with that most domestic of objects: a kitchen knife.) We even learn that Nathan designed Ava's face according to Caleb's "pornography profile," using the pornography that Caleb viewed online to make Ava look as intuitively appealing as possible.
In short, the film depicts a self-contained world in which men are intelligent, bodily integral, creative subjects with agency, and the women are artificial, non-human, sub-personal, violation-subject, and entirely passive objects with no agency except what they are told or allowed to do by men. Indeed, the 'sessions' between Caleb and Ava that give the movie its shape—seven in total, a new week of (artificial) creation, whose last day lacks Caleb and simply follows Ava out of Paradise—embody these gender dynamics: Caleb, who is free to choose to enter and exit, sits in a chair and views, gazes at, Ava, his object of study, through a glass wall, testing her (mind) for 'true' and 'full' consciousness; while Ava, enclosed in her room, can do nothing but be seen, and almost never stops moving.
Much could be said about how Garland writes Ava as an embodiment of feminist subversiveness, for example, the way she uses Caleb's awe of and visual stimulation by her to misdirect both his and Nathan's gaze, which is to say, their awareness, of her plan to escape her confines. Similarly, Garland refuses to be sentimental or romantic about Caleb, clueless though he may be, for his complicity in Kyoko and Ava's abuse at Nathan's hands. Caleb assumes he's not part of the problem, and can't believe it when Ava leaves him, locked in a room Fortunato–like, making her way alone, without him. (Not, as he dreamed, seeing the sun for the first time with him by her side.)
Ex Machina is, accordingly, about the way that men operate on and construct 'women' according to their own desires and, knowingly or not, use and abuse them as things, rather than persons; or, when they are not so bad as that, imagine themselves innocent, guiltless, prelapsarian (at least on the 'issue' of gender). It is also, therefore, about the way that women, 'created' and violated and designed, by men, to be for-men, to be, essentially, objects and patients subject to men, are not only themselves equally and fully human, whole persons, subjects and agents in their own right, but also and most radically subversive and creative agents of their own liberation. That is, Kyoko and Ava show how women, portrayed and viewed in the most artificial and passive and kept-down manner, still find a way: that Creative Man, Male Genius, Silicon Valley Bro, at his most omnipotent and dominant, still cannot keep them (her) down.
Understood in this way, Ex Machina is finally a story about women's exodus from bondage to men, and thus about patriarchy as the author of its own destruction.
Teaching ecclesiology: topics and readings
This fall I am teaching a course on ecclesiology for upper-level undergraduate Bible and ministry majors. It's a long-standing course I took over from a recently retired professor of New Testament, who was kind enough to share his syllabus with me as a foundation on which to build my own. Here's the final breakdown of weeks, topics, and readings. It's basically set, so I won't be changing or adding anything at this point—and I'm already demanding a lot from my students—but since this is a course I'll be teaching repeatedly in the coming years (as the Lord wills), all manner of feedback, recommendations, and shared wisdom from similar courses is welcome.
The two required texts are Gerhard Lohfink's Jesus and Community and Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World; the two suggested texts are Rowan Williams's Why Study the Past? and Everett Ferguson's The Church of Christ.
The two required texts are Gerhard Lohfink's Jesus and Community and Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World; the two suggested texts are Rowan Williams's Why Study the Past? and Everett Ferguson's The Church of Christ.
Week 1: Introduction:
Theology and Ecclesiology
Aug 29:
Robert Jenson, “What Systematic Theology Is About”
Aug 31: Gary Badcock, “Theology &
Ecclesiology”; Ellen Charry, “The Art of Christian Excellence”
Recommended: Everett Ferguson, The Church of Christ, Introduction; Rowan
Williams, Why
Study
the Past?, ch. 1; Nicholas
Healy, Church, World, and the Christian
Life, chs. 1-
2; John Webster, “Evangelical
Ecclesiology”; Kathryn Tanner, “The Nature and
Tasks of Theology”; Mary McClintock
Fulkerson, Places of Redemption, ch.
1
Week 2: Election and Covenant
Sep 5: Bryan
Stone, “Israel and the Calling Forth of a People”
Sep 7: Michael
Wyschogrod, “Divine Election & Commandments,” “Israel, Church, & Election”
Recommended:
Gerhard Lohfink, “Why God Needs a Special People”; Leslie Newbigin, “The
Logic of Election”; Sang Hoon Lee,
“God in the Jewish Flesh: Michael
Wyschogrod’s Theology of Israel”;
Katherine Sonderegger, “Election”
Week 3: Israel and the
Nations
Sep 12: Lohfink,
“The Characteristic Signs of Israel” (selections)
Sep 14: Lohfink,
Jesus and Community, ch. 1
Recommended:
Bruce Birch et al, A Theological
Introduction to the Old Testament, chs. 9-10;
Wyschogrod, “A Theology of Jewish
Unity,” “Judaism and the Land,” “Faith and the
Holocaust”; Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 72-81
Week 4: Jesus and the
Twelve
Sep 19: NO
CLASS
Sep 21: Lohfink,
Jesus and Community, ch. 2
Recommended: Ferguson, Church of Christ, ch. 1; Stanley Hauerwas, “Jesus: The Presence of
the Peaceable Kingdom”
Week 5: Pentecost and Ekklesia
Sep 26: Lohfink,
Jesus and Community, ch. 3; Francesca
Aran Murphy et al, “Ecclesial Faith”
Sep 28: Amos
Yong, “The Acts of the Apostles and of the Holy Spirit”; Willie Jennings, Acts, 27-40
Recommended: Ferguson, Church of Christ, ch. 2; John Howard Yoder, “The Original
Revolution”; Hauerwas, “The Church as
God’s New Language”
Week 6: Paul and the Gentiles
Oct 3: N. T.
Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said,
ch. 3
Oct 5: Wright,
What Saint Paul Really Said, ch. 5
Recommended:
Ferguson, Church of Christ, ch. 3;
Lamin Sanneh, “The Birth of Mission: The
Jewish-Gentile Frontier”; Hauerwas, Resident Aliens, ch. 4
Week 7: Church Fathers
and Councils
Oct 10: Williams,
Why Study the Past?, ch. 2
Oct 12: Creeds;
Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian
Thought, chs. 4-5
Recommended:
Jenson, Canon and Creed, chs. 1-5;
Jeffrey Cary, Free Churches and the Body
of
Christ, ch. 6; Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea, ch. 1
Week 8: Middle Ages and
Christendom
Oct 17: Oliver
O’Donovan, “The Obedience of Rulers”
Oct 19:
O’Donovan, “The Obedience of Rulers”; Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the creed
Recommended:
H. Richard Niebuhr, “Christ Above Culture”; Peter Leithart, “Rome
Baptized”; Tanner, “Christian Culture
and Society”; Hauerwas, “A Christian
Critique of Christian America”
Week 9: Reformation and
Scripture
Oct 24: John
Calvin, Institutes of the Christian
Religion, I.6; IV.1; Decrees of Trent
Oct 26: Kevin
Vanhoozer, “Scripture Alone”; Jenson, “Sola Scriptura”
Recommended:
Williams, Why Study the Past?, ch. 3;
Jenson, “The Norms of Theological
Judgment”; Webster, Holy Scripture, chs. 1-2; Fulkerson, Places of Redemption, ch. 6;
Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible, chs. 1-2
Week 10: Baptism and Sacraments
Oct 31: Schmemann,
For the Life of the World, ch. 1;
appendix 2; Calvin, Institutes,
IV.14.1-6;
Charry,
“Sacraments for the Christian Life”
Nov 2: Schmemann,
Life of the World, ch. 4; Yoder,
“Baptism and the New Humanity”
Recommended: Calvin, Institutes, IV.15; Keith Stanglin, “Concerning Rebaptism”; Jennings,
“Being Baptized: Race”; James McClendon
Jr., Ethics: Systematic Theology: Volume
1,
265-269; Augustine, Confessions, Book IX (selections)
Week 11: Eucharist and
Communion
Nov 7: Schmemann,
Life of the World, ch. 2
Nov 9: Calvin,
Institutes, IV.17 (selections)
Recommended:
Gustavo Gutiérrez, “The Church: Sacrament of History”; William
Cavanaugh, “The True Body of Christ”
Week 12: Ordination and
Polity
Nov 14: Calvin,
Institutes, IV.3; John Howard Yoder,
“The Fullness of Christ”
Nov 16: Jenson,
“The Office of Communion”; Frances Young, “From the Church to Mary: towards
a
critical ecumenism,” 313-342
Recommended:
Ferguson, Church of Christ, ch. 5; Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Life Together, ch. 4;
R. Alan Culpepper, “The Biblical Basis
for Ordination”
Week 13: Unity and
Ecumenism
Nov 21: Yoder,
“Imperative of Christian Unity”; Young, “From the Church to Mary,” 342-357
Nov 23: NO
CLASS: THANKSGIVING
Recommended:
Gunther Gressman, “The Unity We Seek”; Robert Cardinal Sarah, “In Search
of the Church”; Unitatis redintegratio; Peter Leithart, “The End of Protestantism”;
Gerald Schlabach, Unlearning Protestantism, ch. 1
Week 14: Mission and
Witness
Nov 28: Bryan
Stone, “Evangelism and Ecclesia”;
Emmanuel Katongole, “The Sacrifice of Africa:
Ecclesial
Radiances of ‘A Different World Right Here’”
Nov 30: Schmemann,
Life of the World, ch. 3; Marva Dawn,
“Worship to Form a Missional
Community”
Recommended:
Ferguson, Church of Christ, ch. 6; Stone,
“Martyrdom and Virtue”; Brad East,
“An Undefensive Presence: The Mission
and Identity of the Church in Kathryn
Tanner and John Howard Yoder”;
Katongale, The Sacrifice of Africa,
ch. 7; Lumen
Gentium; Yong, “Christian Mission Theology:
Toward a Pneumato-Missiological
Praxis for the Third Millennium”;
Michael Goheen, “The Missional Church in the
Biblical Story—A Summary”
Week 15: Worship and
Prayer
Dec 5: Dawn,
“God as the Center of Worship: Who is Worship For?”
Dec 7: Schmemann,
Life of the World, ch. 7, appendix 1;
Jenson, “How the World Lost Its Story”
Recommended: Ferguson, Church of Christ, ch. 4; Williams, Why Study the Past?, ch. 4;
Bonhoeffer, Life Together, ch. 2; John Webster, “‘In the Society of God’: Some
Principles of Ecclesiology”; James K.
A. Smith, “Practicing (for) the Kingdom”;
Tanner, “Commonalities in Christian
Practices”; Ernst Troeltsch, “Conclusion,” The
Social
Teaching of the Christian Churches;
Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline,
141-148
A Question for Richard Hays: Metalepsis in The Leftovers
In the finale of season 1 of the HBO show The Leftovers, Kevin Garvey reads a passage from the Bible over the body of Patti Levin, which he just buried with Rev. Matt Jamison. The whole season has culminated in this moment, which was partially the result of his own decisions, decisions sometimes made after blacking out and sleepwalking. These frightening episodes were in turn the result of dealing with the unbearable grief of losing each member of his family one by one to their own grief in the wake of The Departure (a rapture-like event a few years before)—all while serving as Chief of Police for a town that is being torn apart at the seams.
So Jamison hands Garvey a marked passage, and Garvey reads:
The passage is Job 23:8-17 (NIV). The scene is probably the most affecting—and least typical (i.e., not Psalm 23 or Genesis 1 or a Gospel)—reading of Scripture I've ever witnessed on screen.
And it got me thinking about Richard Hays. Specifically, it got me thinking about his books Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (1989) and Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (2016). In those books Hays uses a literary device called "metalepsis" to uncover or identify allusions to passages of the Old Testament beyond what is explicitly cited in the New Testament. The idea is that, say, if a small portion of a Psalm is excerpted in a Gospel or Epistle, the author is thereby calling forth the whole Psalm itself, and that attentive readers of Scripture should pay attention to these intertextual echoes, which will expand the possible range of a text's meaning beyond what it may seem to be saying on the surface. So that, for example, when Jesus quotes Psalm 22 on the cross, those who know that that Psalm ends in deliverance, vindication, and praise will interpret the cry of dereliction differently than those who understand it as the despairing separation of the Son from the Father.
At last year's meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, there was a session devoted to Hays's latest book. When it came time for questions, I raised my hand. I asked whether his argument rested on authorial intention, that is, whether, if we could know for certain that the Evangelists did not intend any or most of the metaleptic allusions Hays draws attention to in his book, that would nullify his case; or whether we, as Christian readers of Holy Scripture, are authorized to read the New Testament in light of the Old in ways its authors never intended. Hays assumed I hadn't read the book and that I was asking on behalf of authorial intention (i.e., he and Sarah Coakley both treated me a bit like a hostile witness, when I was anything but), but he answered the question directly, and in my view rightly: Yes, the metaleptic readings stand, apart from historical claims about authorial intention. Whatever Mark may have meant by the quotation of Psalm 22, we aren't limited by that intention, knowing what we know, which includes the entirety of the Psalm.
So back to The Leftovers. May we—should we—apply the hermeneutic principle of metalepsis to this scene's use of Scripture (and scenes like it)? What would happen if we did?
When I first watched the episode, I mistakenly thought that the famous passage from Job 19—"I know that my redeemer lives..."—followed the words cited on screen, which is what triggered the idea about metalepsis. In other words, if Job 23 were followed by words of bold hope in God, should that inform how we interpret the scene and its use of the quotation? Even granted my error, there is the wider context of the book of Job, and in particular the conclusion, in which God speaks from the storm, and Job is reduced to silence before God's absolutely unanswerable omnipotence—or, better put, his sheer divinity, his incomparable and singular God-ness. Might we interpret this scene, Garvey's story in season 1, and the whole series in light of this wider context?
It seems to me that we can, and should. But then, I'm only halfway through season 2. Job comes up again in episode 5 of that season, when Jamison is asked what his favorite book of the Bible is, and gives some trivia about Job's wife. Which suggests to me that perhaps Damon Lindelof and his fellow writers may be wise to the wider context and meaning of Job, in which case we viewers may not have to interpret against authorial intention at all.
That's a bit less fun, though it increases my respect for the show and the artists behind it. In any case, I'll let you know what I think once I finish.
So Jamison hands Garvey a marked passage, and Garvey reads:
The passage is Job 23:8-17 (NIV). The scene is probably the most affecting—and least typical (i.e., not Psalm 23 or Genesis 1 or a Gospel)—reading of Scripture I've ever witnessed on screen.
And it got me thinking about Richard Hays. Specifically, it got me thinking about his books Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (1989) and Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (2016). In those books Hays uses a literary device called "metalepsis" to uncover or identify allusions to passages of the Old Testament beyond what is explicitly cited in the New Testament. The idea is that, say, if a small portion of a Psalm is excerpted in a Gospel or Epistle, the author is thereby calling forth the whole Psalm itself, and that attentive readers of Scripture should pay attention to these intertextual echoes, which will expand the possible range of a text's meaning beyond what it may seem to be saying on the surface. So that, for example, when Jesus quotes Psalm 22 on the cross, those who know that that Psalm ends in deliverance, vindication, and praise will interpret the cry of dereliction differently than those who understand it as the despairing separation of the Son from the Father.
At last year's meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, there was a session devoted to Hays's latest book. When it came time for questions, I raised my hand. I asked whether his argument rested on authorial intention, that is, whether, if we could know for certain that the Evangelists did not intend any or most of the metaleptic allusions Hays draws attention to in his book, that would nullify his case; or whether we, as Christian readers of Holy Scripture, are authorized to read the New Testament in light of the Old in ways its authors never intended. Hays assumed I hadn't read the book and that I was asking on behalf of authorial intention (i.e., he and Sarah Coakley both treated me a bit like a hostile witness, when I was anything but), but he answered the question directly, and in my view rightly: Yes, the metaleptic readings stand, apart from historical claims about authorial intention. Whatever Mark may have meant by the quotation of Psalm 22, we aren't limited by that intention, knowing what we know, which includes the entirety of the Psalm.
So back to The Leftovers. May we—should we—apply the hermeneutic principle of metalepsis to this scene's use of Scripture (and scenes like it)? What would happen if we did?
When I first watched the episode, I mistakenly thought that the famous passage from Job 19—"I know that my redeemer lives..."—followed the words cited on screen, which is what triggered the idea about metalepsis. In other words, if Job 23 were followed by words of bold hope in God, should that inform how we interpret the scene and its use of the quotation? Even granted my error, there is the wider context of the book of Job, and in particular the conclusion, in which God speaks from the storm, and Job is reduced to silence before God's absolutely unanswerable omnipotence—or, better put, his sheer divinity, his incomparable and singular God-ness. Might we interpret this scene, Garvey's story in season 1, and the whole series in light of this wider context?
It seems to me that we can, and should. But then, I'm only halfway through season 2. Job comes up again in episode 5 of that season, when Jamison is asked what his favorite book of the Bible is, and gives some trivia about Job's wife. Which suggests to me that perhaps Damon Lindelof and his fellow writers may be wise to the wider context and meaning of Job, in which case we viewers may not have to interpret against authorial intention at all.
That's a bit less fun, though it increases my respect for the show and the artists behind it. In any case, I'll let you know what I think once I finish.
David Bentley Hart on contemporary versus premodern allegorization
"Historians or hermeneuticians frequently assert that what most alienates modern readers from the methods of premodern exegetes is the latter’s passion for allegory. But this is false. If anything, we today are much more culturally predisposed than our forebears to an unremitting allegorization of the tales we tell or books we read, no matter how elaborate or tedious the results. True, we may prefer to discover psychological or social or political or sexual narratives 'encoded' in the texts before us, rather than spiritual or metaphysical mysteries; we might find it impossible to believe that a particular reading could be 'inspired' in a more than metaphorical sense; but the principle of the metabolism of the fictions we read into the 'meanings' we can produce is perfectly familiar to us. The same critic who might prissily recoil at the extravagances of a patristic figural reading of the Book of Numbers might feel not the slightest dismay at the transformation of Prospero into an ironic indictment of colonialism, or of Horatio Hornblower into an inflexibly erect emblem of the 'phallic signifier.' What makes the spiritual allegories of ancient pagan, Jewish, and Christian exegetes so alarming to modern sensibilities is not that they were allegories but that they were so disconcertingly spiritual."
—David Bentley Hart, "Ad Litteram" (now collected in A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays, 274-277). This is absolutely correct, and the entire (brief) essay should be required reading for biblical scholars, whether disposed to historical criticism or any other scholarly hermeneutic.
—David Bentley Hart, "Ad Litteram" (now collected in A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays, 274-277). This is absolutely correct, and the entire (brief) essay should be required reading for biblical scholars, whether disposed to historical criticism or any other scholarly hermeneutic.
Scripture's precedence is not chronological
Protestants, especially Evangelicals, have a bad habit of defending Scripture's precedence with respect to the present-day church community by reference to its otherness, that is, its status as a text that precedes the community in time and stands over against it as an entity of which it is not the source. This is a bad habit because some members of the church (i.e., the apostles and their co-laborers) did write Scripture—the New Testament in this case—and, moreover, textuality per se does not require ancient provenance. It is a bad habit, further, because it is an unnecessary argument.
Thinking about that bad habit put me in mind of a brief discussion late in my dissertation, discussing John Howard Yoder's theology of Scripture. There I write, "Yoder is right to argue for Scripture’s independence, or externality. This claim entails neither denial of Scripture’s human craftsmanship or ecclesial habitat (which Yoder acknowledges), nor reference to its antiquity or alien cultural origins (which Yoder does at times fall prey to), but rather recognition of its integral, inassimilable character as other than and prior to the church."
To that I append the following footnote: "Primarily in the sense of having priority (i.e., authority, precedence), but also, in part, chronological priority. Israel and its Scriptures preceded Pentecost absolutely, and the apostles and their writings precede the rest of the church for the most part. But note that neither chronological priority nor cultural alienness is a sufficient condition for true otherness or authority. The pope is other than me, but contemporaneous and perhaps culturally familiar. Those latter two features do not ipso facto nullify his (potential and potentially infallible) authority over me."
If—and it is quite a conditional, I admit—the bishop of Rome stands to the church catholic today as the apostles did to the church in their day, then neither Scripture's antiquity nor its status as a text that I did not author have no bearing on its authority for me. Better arguments are required to secure its authority and, more specifically, what Yoder calls its "independence" over against the church.
Thinking about that bad habit put me in mind of a brief discussion late in my dissertation, discussing John Howard Yoder's theology of Scripture. There I write, "Yoder is right to argue for Scripture’s independence, or externality. This claim entails neither denial of Scripture’s human craftsmanship or ecclesial habitat (which Yoder acknowledges), nor reference to its antiquity or alien cultural origins (which Yoder does at times fall prey to), but rather recognition of its integral, inassimilable character as other than and prior to the church."
To that I append the following footnote: "Primarily in the sense of having priority (i.e., authority, precedence), but also, in part, chronological priority. Israel and its Scriptures preceded Pentecost absolutely, and the apostles and their writings precede the rest of the church for the most part. But note that neither chronological priority nor cultural alienness is a sufficient condition for true otherness or authority. The pope is other than me, but contemporaneous and perhaps culturally familiar. Those latter two features do not ipso facto nullify his (potential and potentially infallible) authority over me."
If—and it is quite a conditional, I admit—the bishop of Rome stands to the church catholic today as the apostles did to the church in their day, then neither Scripture's antiquity nor its status as a text that I did not author have no bearing on its authority for me. Better arguments are required to secure its authority and, more specifically, what Yoder calls its "independence" over against the church.
A coda on doubt
I forgot to include one thing in yesterday’s post about doubt. The unqualified affirmation of doubt, combined with the extension or requirement of experiencing it to all, is a problem also on pastoral grounds. Namely, the goodness of the good news depends on the ability to proclaim it without reservation or condition. The gospel announces an unrestricted promise of divine grace and love: “God has come near in Christ Jesus—repent and believe the good news!” The creeping, casual generalization of doubt to all believers and all belief as such has the effect of nullifying the force of this proclamation. For it is not only the unconditional quality of the message but the divine subject of the evangelical predicate that makes the message a matter of glad tidings, an announcement that is much more than a strong suggestion, but rather a word that of itself has the power to change lives, because it has already changed the world.
For example, the gospel does not say “You are forgiven.” It says “In Christ God has forgiven you.” It does not say “You have worth.” It says “You are made in the image of God.” It does not say “You have the power to do the good.” It says “God has given you his Holy Spirit, who will empower you to do the good.”
Moreover, such claims lose all power with a question mark placed next to them. “God loves you—maybe.” “God’s grace covers your sins—possibly.” “God’s Spirit will not abandon you—hopefully.” The gospel is a promise, and for the promise to take effect, it must be believed. It can be believed because of its speaker, the creator and redeemer of all, the One who keeps his promises. The irony is that, in seeking to be responsive to pastoral needs, those who absolutize doubt as an inevitable and even healthy mark of mature faith in the modern age rob themselves of the greatest pastoral resource available to them: the power of the gospel.
On the contrary, then: Do nothing to qualify or undermine the liberating promise of God’s good news in Christ: as the power of God for salvation, it places a question mark next to all human endeavors—not the reverse.
For example, the gospel does not say “You are forgiven.” It says “In Christ God has forgiven you.” It does not say “You have worth.” It says “You are made in the image of God.” It does not say “You have the power to do the good.” It says “God has given you his Holy Spirit, who will empower you to do the good.”
Moreover, such claims lose all power with a question mark placed next to them. “God loves you—maybe.” “God’s grace covers your sins—possibly.” “God’s Spirit will not abandon you—hopefully.” The gospel is a promise, and for the promise to take effect, it must be believed. It can be believed because of its speaker, the creator and redeemer of all, the One who keeps his promises. The irony is that, in seeking to be responsive to pastoral needs, those who absolutize doubt as an inevitable and even healthy mark of mature faith in the modern age rob themselves of the greatest pastoral resource available to them: the power of the gospel.
On the contrary, then: Do nothing to qualify or undermine the liberating promise of God’s good news in Christ: as the power of God for salvation, it places a question mark next to all human endeavors—not the reverse.
Against universalizing doubt
"Everyone doubts." "The question isn't whether you doubt, but when." "Faith without doubt is blind." "Doubt is universal."
Such phrases have become commonplaces in Christian discourse today. The context is usually pastoral, personal, or theological: responding to those grappling with doubt, sharing one's own experience with doubt, or reflecting on the nature and significance of doubt within and for Christian faith.
The object of doubt is not always specified, but in general it seems to be the existence of God, or some particular feature of faith's claims (about miracles, say, or the resurrection of Jesus, or an event in salvation history), or simply the whole ensemble of the spiritual world: reality beyond the empirical, life after death, angels and demons and heaven and hell.
The reason for doubt is often, though not always, the perceived difficulty of believing in God in light of some other thing understood to be in tension with faith, whether that be modern science, religious pluralism, historical criticism, ecclesial disunity, human suffering, or some otherwise specified personal experience.
The social background to doubt is often—more or less always?—the felt sense, usually informed by the family or church setting in which one was raised, that Christians as a whole look down on doubt, indeed, positively repudiate doubt as inimical to true faith; that this view is theologically misguided and psychologically repressive; and therefore that Christians who doubt should both "out" themselves as doubting believers and encourage fellow doubters in the integrity of their experience.
So far as I can tell, this last diagnosis of the atmosphere in many church communities is accurate (though I should say that it does not describe my own experience). To the extent that those who write about doubt in the Christian life succeed in (a) softening those subcultures of ecclesial self-deception and overwrought assurance or (b) creating spaces in which those who experience doubt can verbalize their thoughts and questions without fear of punishment or excommunication—keep up the good work, and may their tribe increase. Like many good things, however, talk about doubt, in pushing against one extreme, has ended up affirming another. My modest suggestion is that, by moving to the middle and accepting a more moderate position on doubt and faith, those who write and think about the topic have everything to gain and nothing to lose, whereas their current approach, so exclusive and totalizing, threatens to undermine their goals and alienate potential allies.
Because the simple truth is that not everyone doubts. More to the point, not every Christian doubts. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Christians who have ever lived have not experienced what people today call "doubt." The same goes for the majority of contemporary Christians around the globe.
This is difficult for many to get their minds around, but the apparent questionability or ambiguity of the reality of the supernatural (or spiritual, or divine, or whatever) was not a given social fact for people who lived before a couple centuries ago, nor is it a fact for most people living outside the industrialized West today. "Does God exist?" was not an existentially paralyzing question for the average Italian Catholic peasant in the year 950. Nor does it dominate the daily lives of the inhabitants of present-day sub-Saharan Africa. And this is not merely the absence of education, as if knowing more about the world (its cosmic history, its molecular makeup, its vast teeming diversity, or what have you) leads logically to questioning God's existence. A certain kind of education under certain material, social, and societal conditions does indeed have the likelihood of increasing theological doubt. But there is no good reason to generalize from one particular kind of education to all education as such.
And that raises the larger point, beyond the inarguable fact that the great majority of human beings, past and present, have not doubted and do not doubt the existence of God (the supernatural, the spiritual, the non-empirical, etc.). That point is this: People who doubt and who write about doubt feel the need to universalize their experience of doubt, and so inadvertently mirror the position they seek to oppose. Instead of disallowing doubt, they disallow lack of doubt. Instead of repressing lack of certainty, they repress lack of uncertainty. Instead of requiring assurance in all things, they require assurance in nothing.
But there is no warrant for universalizing doubt. Though well meant, it is little more than projection of one's own experience onto the canvas of humanity, the generalization of the parochial. But doubt need not be common to all to be legitimate for some. Nor does doubt confer some kind of moral or spiritual superiority on those who experience it versus those who do not. The one who believes without doubt is not ipso facto less sophisticated, less thoughtful, less theologically adept, less sensitive to the ambiguities and shortcomings and evils of fallen human life than the who believes in the midst of or in spite of doubt. Doubt is not the mark of maturity. It is not the mark of anything except itself.
Too often the underlying dynamic at work is that of the ex-fundamentalist. Once a fundie, always a fundie: so that, if I once was taught and myself believed that absolute certainty is required of any and every Christian to be a true Christian, then it follows that, once I am liberated from that sentiment and the community that engendered it in me, absolute uncertainty is required of any and every Christian to be a true Christian. But it doesn't follow. Abuse does not invalidate good use. The lack of doubt can be and is a good and salutary thing in many believers' lives. The presence of doubt is a reality in other believers' lives, one that sometimes proves to be a painful struggle and sometimes proved to be a boon to deeper, richer, more authentically personal faith. There is nothing mutually exclusive about these two statements.
My sense is that many who doubt find it psychologically or intellectually implausible that there are those (at least in the modern West) who sincerely and honestly do not have doubts. But this is small-minded, vain, and ungenerous. Without question there are some believers who deceive others or themselves about their doubts, and there are still other believers who repress questions that might challenge their insecure certainties. But not everyone is a Socrates. Not everyone is an academic. Not everyone labors, beleaguered, under the naturalistic nihilism of scientistic modernity. God is "just there" for many people, present in grace and power, available in prayer, a source of judgment and consolation alike, an unavoidable but unintrusive goad to the quotidian tasks of daily life.
Moreover, is it a problem that such people lack doubt? Are their lives diminished without our politely informing them that, as a matter of fact, everyone doubts (didn't you know?), and until they admit that they do too, they're merely infants in the faith? Or is it a matter of false consciousness—such people's "God" is too anthropomorphic or literalistic or unsubtle? I am a theologian; naturally I think teaching and learning is crucial to the life and growth of faith. But it is narcissistic in the extreme to suggest that everyone must come to the very same conclusions that I have, in the very same ways that I have, or else their belief is somehow lesser than mine, impure or syncretistic in a way that mine is not, having passed through the crucible of doubt.
The impression I get when I read the more intellectual versions of universalizing doubt—for example, Christian Wiman or Peter Enns—is that, at bottom, they think God is the sort of thing that must necessarily be believed in only provisionally, and further, that not to do so is a kind of moral failure, inasmuch as it is a category error of sorts. "Religion" does not admit of certainties, and therefore anyone who trades in religious certainties is theologically unserious and morally dangerous: such a person wants to use God for some other, very likely bad, end.
Such a worry is warranted, but, once again, in universalizing a specific concern and thereby requiring it of all rational, respectable people, it undercuts its own force. All good things can be made a means to evil ends. God (or "religion") is no different. But implicit in the assumption that God is not the sort of thing one believes in without doubt is a whole theological epistemology that gives priority to other ways of knowing over against faith. But rarely is the position argued on those terms—and for good reason, because there is no epistemic position not subject to the very same debilitating challenges addressed to faith. The lesson of modernity, in other words, is not that faith in God is subject to doubt, but that everything is subject to doubt. You don't have to play that game, but if you do, you don't get to pick and choose which sort of knowledge is sturdy and which is shaky. The problems go all the way to the foundations.
But that is a secondary matter. Here is the primary issue: If what the gospel says about God is true, it is not the sort of thing best assented to halfheartedly. We don't talk about other important issues this way, as if the commitment to one's marital vows or the belief in the equal and intrinsic worth of all human beings or the unwillingness to harm children were a provisional matter improved by qualifications of doubt. Such things are improved by unwavering allegiance.
So with God: If faith produces good fruit, then we should not want less of it as a matter of principle. Ambivalence in faith does not issue in martyrs and saints. One does not suffer torture and death or give away all of one's possessions to the poor for the sake of a vague notion half-believed in. (Not to say a certain kind of doubt is absent in the saints: Mother Teresa, for example.) True, the church should neither condemn nor exclude those whose faith is held feebly, or those who by temperament or conviction cannot or will not claim the high confidence of their sisters and brothers. But the church should nonetheless encourage and bolster faith that walks unbowed into the Colosseum, the faith of Ignatius and Polycarp and Perpetua, faith that is wholehearted, unqualified, and inextinguishable.
For the great challenge is not faith. It is faithfulness. Doubt is often over-intellectualized: "How, in 2017, can anyone believe such-and-such?" (Not for nothing are doubt's champions mostly, or formerly, Protestant.) But Christianity does not consist in believing 20 absurd things before breakfast. Kierkegaard was right: your faith would not be greater if you had seen Jesus in the flesh. The disciples were living exercises in missing the point, and the greatest of them denied him in his hour of need. The risen Jesus appeared to the disciples on the mountain—"but some doubted." What did they doubt? Not whether or not there is that than which nothing greater can be thought. They doubted Jesus. Faith in Jesus is the Shema applied to a human being: Love God, that is, this scorned and tortured Rabbi, with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. Trust him with every atom of your being, give to him every ounce of trust you've got, cast your burdens onto his black-bruised shoulders: and he will lift you up.
Christian faith is hard, and necessarily so, but not because God is a metaphysical conundrum, or because demon possession is anachronistic, or because the Bible isn't inerrant. It is hard, for any and every Christian, because following Jesus is hard. The obedience of faith is taxing, exacting, ruthless, unyielding. The flesh is weak, and doubts creep in. For some, those doubts will be theological in character: Is this whole God thing plausible? For most, though, those doubts will be more like the voice of the serpent in Genesis 3: Did God really say such-and-such? Can I really be expected to live this way? Can I really trust God at his word?
The struggle is universal, but the nature of the struggle is not. Insofar as doubt's sympathizers bear up under it as part of faith's larger struggle, helping themselves and others to stand, waver though they may—blessings upon them. An overweening emphasis on the supposed necessity and universality of doubt, however, will inevitably result in unintended consequences: riding roughshod over the actual experience of fellow believers; denigrating the simple surety of faith native to so many; and distracting from the real struggle, namely, a whole lifetime of uncompromising discipleship to the crucified Christ, a calling from which no one is excluded.
Such phrases have become commonplaces in Christian discourse today. The context is usually pastoral, personal, or theological: responding to those grappling with doubt, sharing one's own experience with doubt, or reflecting on the nature and significance of doubt within and for Christian faith.
The object of doubt is not always specified, but in general it seems to be the existence of God, or some particular feature of faith's claims (about miracles, say, or the resurrection of Jesus, or an event in salvation history), or simply the whole ensemble of the spiritual world: reality beyond the empirical, life after death, angels and demons and heaven and hell.
The reason for doubt is often, though not always, the perceived difficulty of believing in God in light of some other thing understood to be in tension with faith, whether that be modern science, religious pluralism, historical criticism, ecclesial disunity, human suffering, or some otherwise specified personal experience.
The social background to doubt is often—more or less always?—the felt sense, usually informed by the family or church setting in which one was raised, that Christians as a whole look down on doubt, indeed, positively repudiate doubt as inimical to true faith; that this view is theologically misguided and psychologically repressive; and therefore that Christians who doubt should both "out" themselves as doubting believers and encourage fellow doubters in the integrity of their experience.
So far as I can tell, this last diagnosis of the atmosphere in many church communities is accurate (though I should say that it does not describe my own experience). To the extent that those who write about doubt in the Christian life succeed in (a) softening those subcultures of ecclesial self-deception and overwrought assurance or (b) creating spaces in which those who experience doubt can verbalize their thoughts and questions without fear of punishment or excommunication—keep up the good work, and may their tribe increase. Like many good things, however, talk about doubt, in pushing against one extreme, has ended up affirming another. My modest suggestion is that, by moving to the middle and accepting a more moderate position on doubt and faith, those who write and think about the topic have everything to gain and nothing to lose, whereas their current approach, so exclusive and totalizing, threatens to undermine their goals and alienate potential allies.
Because the simple truth is that not everyone doubts. More to the point, not every Christian doubts. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Christians who have ever lived have not experienced what people today call "doubt." The same goes for the majority of contemporary Christians around the globe.
This is difficult for many to get their minds around, but the apparent questionability or ambiguity of the reality of the supernatural (or spiritual, or divine, or whatever) was not a given social fact for people who lived before a couple centuries ago, nor is it a fact for most people living outside the industrialized West today. "Does God exist?" was not an existentially paralyzing question for the average Italian Catholic peasant in the year 950. Nor does it dominate the daily lives of the inhabitants of present-day sub-Saharan Africa. And this is not merely the absence of education, as if knowing more about the world (its cosmic history, its molecular makeup, its vast teeming diversity, or what have you) leads logically to questioning God's existence. A certain kind of education under certain material, social, and societal conditions does indeed have the likelihood of increasing theological doubt. But there is no good reason to generalize from one particular kind of education to all education as such.
And that raises the larger point, beyond the inarguable fact that the great majority of human beings, past and present, have not doubted and do not doubt the existence of God (the supernatural, the spiritual, the non-empirical, etc.). That point is this: People who doubt and who write about doubt feel the need to universalize their experience of doubt, and so inadvertently mirror the position they seek to oppose. Instead of disallowing doubt, they disallow lack of doubt. Instead of repressing lack of certainty, they repress lack of uncertainty. Instead of requiring assurance in all things, they require assurance in nothing.
But there is no warrant for universalizing doubt. Though well meant, it is little more than projection of one's own experience onto the canvas of humanity, the generalization of the parochial. But doubt need not be common to all to be legitimate for some. Nor does doubt confer some kind of moral or spiritual superiority on those who experience it versus those who do not. The one who believes without doubt is not ipso facto less sophisticated, less thoughtful, less theologically adept, less sensitive to the ambiguities and shortcomings and evils of fallen human life than the who believes in the midst of or in spite of doubt. Doubt is not the mark of maturity. It is not the mark of anything except itself.
Too often the underlying dynamic at work is that of the ex-fundamentalist. Once a fundie, always a fundie: so that, if I once was taught and myself believed that absolute certainty is required of any and every Christian to be a true Christian, then it follows that, once I am liberated from that sentiment and the community that engendered it in me, absolute uncertainty is required of any and every Christian to be a true Christian. But it doesn't follow. Abuse does not invalidate good use. The lack of doubt can be and is a good and salutary thing in many believers' lives. The presence of doubt is a reality in other believers' lives, one that sometimes proves to be a painful struggle and sometimes proved to be a boon to deeper, richer, more authentically personal faith. There is nothing mutually exclusive about these two statements.
My sense is that many who doubt find it psychologically or intellectually implausible that there are those (at least in the modern West) who sincerely and honestly do not have doubts. But this is small-minded, vain, and ungenerous. Without question there are some believers who deceive others or themselves about their doubts, and there are still other believers who repress questions that might challenge their insecure certainties. But not everyone is a Socrates. Not everyone is an academic. Not everyone labors, beleaguered, under the naturalistic nihilism of scientistic modernity. God is "just there" for many people, present in grace and power, available in prayer, a source of judgment and consolation alike, an unavoidable but unintrusive goad to the quotidian tasks of daily life.
Moreover, is it a problem that such people lack doubt? Are their lives diminished without our politely informing them that, as a matter of fact, everyone doubts (didn't you know?), and until they admit that they do too, they're merely infants in the faith? Or is it a matter of false consciousness—such people's "God" is too anthropomorphic or literalistic or unsubtle? I am a theologian; naturally I think teaching and learning is crucial to the life and growth of faith. But it is narcissistic in the extreme to suggest that everyone must come to the very same conclusions that I have, in the very same ways that I have, or else their belief is somehow lesser than mine, impure or syncretistic in a way that mine is not, having passed through the crucible of doubt.
The impression I get when I read the more intellectual versions of universalizing doubt—for example, Christian Wiman or Peter Enns—is that, at bottom, they think God is the sort of thing that must necessarily be believed in only provisionally, and further, that not to do so is a kind of moral failure, inasmuch as it is a category error of sorts. "Religion" does not admit of certainties, and therefore anyone who trades in religious certainties is theologically unserious and morally dangerous: such a person wants to use God for some other, very likely bad, end.
Such a worry is warranted, but, once again, in universalizing a specific concern and thereby requiring it of all rational, respectable people, it undercuts its own force. All good things can be made a means to evil ends. God (or "religion") is no different. But implicit in the assumption that God is not the sort of thing one believes in without doubt is a whole theological epistemology that gives priority to other ways of knowing over against faith. But rarely is the position argued on those terms—and for good reason, because there is no epistemic position not subject to the very same debilitating challenges addressed to faith. The lesson of modernity, in other words, is not that faith in God is subject to doubt, but that everything is subject to doubt. You don't have to play that game, but if you do, you don't get to pick and choose which sort of knowledge is sturdy and which is shaky. The problems go all the way to the foundations.
But that is a secondary matter. Here is the primary issue: If what the gospel says about God is true, it is not the sort of thing best assented to halfheartedly. We don't talk about other important issues this way, as if the commitment to one's marital vows or the belief in the equal and intrinsic worth of all human beings or the unwillingness to harm children were a provisional matter improved by qualifications of doubt. Such things are improved by unwavering allegiance.
So with God: If faith produces good fruit, then we should not want less of it as a matter of principle. Ambivalence in faith does not issue in martyrs and saints. One does not suffer torture and death or give away all of one's possessions to the poor for the sake of a vague notion half-believed in. (Not to say a certain kind of doubt is absent in the saints: Mother Teresa, for example.) True, the church should neither condemn nor exclude those whose faith is held feebly, or those who by temperament or conviction cannot or will not claim the high confidence of their sisters and brothers. But the church should nonetheless encourage and bolster faith that walks unbowed into the Colosseum, the faith of Ignatius and Polycarp and Perpetua, faith that is wholehearted, unqualified, and inextinguishable.
For the great challenge is not faith. It is faithfulness. Doubt is often over-intellectualized: "How, in 2017, can anyone believe such-and-such?" (Not for nothing are doubt's champions mostly, or formerly, Protestant.) But Christianity does not consist in believing 20 absurd things before breakfast. Kierkegaard was right: your faith would not be greater if you had seen Jesus in the flesh. The disciples were living exercises in missing the point, and the greatest of them denied him in his hour of need. The risen Jesus appeared to the disciples on the mountain—"but some doubted." What did they doubt? Not whether or not there is that than which nothing greater can be thought. They doubted Jesus. Faith in Jesus is the Shema applied to a human being: Love God, that is, this scorned and tortured Rabbi, with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. Trust him with every atom of your being, give to him every ounce of trust you've got, cast your burdens onto his black-bruised shoulders: and he will lift you up.
Christian faith is hard, and necessarily so, but not because God is a metaphysical conundrum, or because demon possession is anachronistic, or because the Bible isn't inerrant. It is hard, for any and every Christian, because following Jesus is hard. The obedience of faith is taxing, exacting, ruthless, unyielding. The flesh is weak, and doubts creep in. For some, those doubts will be theological in character: Is this whole God thing plausible? For most, though, those doubts will be more like the voice of the serpent in Genesis 3: Did God really say such-and-such? Can I really be expected to live this way? Can I really trust God at his word?
The struggle is universal, but the nature of the struggle is not. Insofar as doubt's sympathizers bear up under it as part of faith's larger struggle, helping themselves and others to stand, waver though they may—blessings upon them. An overweening emphasis on the supposed necessity and universality of doubt, however, will inevitably result in unintended consequences: riding roughshod over the actual experience of fellow believers; denigrating the simple surety of faith native to so many; and distracting from the real struggle, namely, a whole lifetime of uncompromising discipleship to the crucified Christ, a calling from which no one is excluded.
Not one, just he: Barth on the universal promeity of the gospel
"It happened that in the humble obedience of the Son He took our place, He took to Himself our sins and death in order to make an end of them in His death, and that in so doing He did the right, He became the new and righteous man. It also happened that in His resurrection from the dead He was confirmed and recognized and revealed by God the Father as the One who has done and been that for us and all men. As the One who has done that, in whom God Himself has done that, who lives as the doer of that deed, He is our man, we are in Him, our present is His, the history of man is His history, He is the concrete event of the existence and reality of justified man in whom every man can recognize himself and every other man—recognize himself as truly justified. There is not one for whose sin and death He did not die, whose sin and death He did not remove and obliterate on the cross, for whom He did not positively do the right, whose right He has not established. There is not one to whom this was not addressed as his justification in His resurrection from the dead. There is not one whose man He is not, who is not justified in Him. There is not one who is justified in any other way than in Him—because it is in Him and only in Him that an end, a bonfire, is made of man’s sin and death, because it is in Him and only in Him that man’s sin and death are the old thing which has passed away, because it is in Him and only in Him that the right has been done which is demanded of man, that the right has been established to which man can move forward. Again, there is not one who is not adequately and perfectly and finally justified in Him. There is not one whose sin is not forgiven sin in Him, whose death is not a death which has been put to death in Him. There is not one whose right has not been established and confirmed validly and once and for all in Him. There is not one, therefore, who has first to win and appropriate this right for himself. There is not one who has first to go or still to go in his own virtue and strength this way from there to here, from yesterday to to-morrow, from darkness to light, who has first to accomplish or still to accomplish his own justification, repeating it when it has already taken place in Him. There is not one whose past and future and therefore whose present He does not undertake and guarantee, having long since accepted full responsibility and liability for it, bearing it every hour and into eternity. There is not one whose peace with God has not been made and does not continue in Him. There is not one of whom it is demanded that he should make and maintain this peace for himself, or who is permitted to act as though he himself were the author of it, having to make it himself and to maintain it in his own strength. There is not one for whom He has not done everything in His death and received everything in His resurrection from the dead.
"Not one. That is what faith believes. . . .
"When a man can and must believe, it is not merely a matter of an 'also,' of his attachment as an individual to the general being and activity of the race and the community as determined by Jesus Christ. In all the common life of that outer and inner circle he is still himself. He is uniquely this man and no other. He cannot be repeated or represented. He is incomparable. He is this in his relationship with God and also in his relationship with his fellows. He is this soul of this body, existing in the span of this time of his. He is this sinful man with his own particular pride and in his own special case. For all his common life he is alone in this particularity. It is not simply that he also can and must believe, but that just he can and must believe. And if the being and activity of Jesus Christ Himself is the mystery of the event in which he actually does so, then we must put it even more strongly and precisely: that in this event it takes place that Jesus Christ lives not only 'also' but 'just' as his Mediator and Savior and Lord, and that He shows Himself just to him as this living One. He became a servant just for him. It was just his place that He took, the place which is not the place of any other. In this place He died just for him, for his sin. And, again, in his place He was raised again from the dead. Therefore the Yes which God the Father spoke to Him as His Son in the resurrection is spoken not only also but just to him, this man. In Him it was just his pride, his fall which was overcome. In Him it is just his new right which has been set up, his new life which has appeared. And in Him it is just he who is called to new responsibility, who is newly claimed. It is just he who is not forgotten by Him, not passed over, not allowed to fall, not set aside or abandoned. It is just he—and this is the work of the Holy Spirit—who has been sought out, and reached, and found by Him, just he whom He has associated with Himself and Himself with him. God did not will to be God without being just his God. Jesus did not will to be Jesus without being just his Jesus. The world was not to be reconciled with God without just this man as an isolated individual being a man—this man—reconciled with God. The community was not to be the living body of Christ without just this man being a living member of it. The whole occurrence of salvation was not to take place but just for him, as the judgment executed just on him, the grace addressed in this judgment just to him, just his justification, just his conversion to God. The gift and commission of the community of Jesus Christ is personally just his gift and commission. And all this not merely incidentally, among other things, or only in part for him, but altogether, in its whole length and breadth and height and depth just for him, because Jesus Christ, in whom all this is given to the world and the community, in whom God Himself has sacrificed Himself for it, is Jesus, the Christ, just for him. That this shines out in a sinful man is the mystery, the creative fact, in the event of faith in which he becomes and is a Christian, so that he can and must acknowledge and recognize and confess as such what is proper to him as this subject.
"What do I acknowledge and recognize and confess as this subject? That Jesus Christ Himself is pro me, just for me."
—Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, 629–630, 754–755
"Not one. That is what faith believes. . . .
"When a man can and must believe, it is not merely a matter of an 'also,' of his attachment as an individual to the general being and activity of the race and the community as determined by Jesus Christ. In all the common life of that outer and inner circle he is still himself. He is uniquely this man and no other. He cannot be repeated or represented. He is incomparable. He is this in his relationship with God and also in his relationship with his fellows. He is this soul of this body, existing in the span of this time of his. He is this sinful man with his own particular pride and in his own special case. For all his common life he is alone in this particularity. It is not simply that he also can and must believe, but that just he can and must believe. And if the being and activity of Jesus Christ Himself is the mystery of the event in which he actually does so, then we must put it even more strongly and precisely: that in this event it takes place that Jesus Christ lives not only 'also' but 'just' as his Mediator and Savior and Lord, and that He shows Himself just to him as this living One. He became a servant just for him. It was just his place that He took, the place which is not the place of any other. In this place He died just for him, for his sin. And, again, in his place He was raised again from the dead. Therefore the Yes which God the Father spoke to Him as His Son in the resurrection is spoken not only also but just to him, this man. In Him it was just his pride, his fall which was overcome. In Him it is just his new right which has been set up, his new life which has appeared. And in Him it is just he who is called to new responsibility, who is newly claimed. It is just he who is not forgotten by Him, not passed over, not allowed to fall, not set aside or abandoned. It is just he—and this is the work of the Holy Spirit—who has been sought out, and reached, and found by Him, just he whom He has associated with Himself and Himself with him. God did not will to be God without being just his God. Jesus did not will to be Jesus without being just his Jesus. The world was not to be reconciled with God without just this man as an isolated individual being a man—this man—reconciled with God. The community was not to be the living body of Christ without just this man being a living member of it. The whole occurrence of salvation was not to take place but just for him, as the judgment executed just on him, the grace addressed in this judgment just to him, just his justification, just his conversion to God. The gift and commission of the community of Jesus Christ is personally just his gift and commission. And all this not merely incidentally, among other things, or only in part for him, but altogether, in its whole length and breadth and height and depth just for him, because Jesus Christ, in whom all this is given to the world and the community, in whom God Himself has sacrificed Himself for it, is Jesus, the Christ, just for him. That this shines out in a sinful man is the mystery, the creative fact, in the event of faith in which he becomes and is a Christian, so that he can and must acknowledge and recognize and confess as such what is proper to him as this subject.
"What do I acknowledge and recognize and confess as this subject? That Jesus Christ Himself is pro me, just for me."
—Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, 629–630, 754–755
Diarmaid MacCulloch on the Psalter as the secret weapon of the Reformation
"The outbreak of war in 1562 was the culmination of a decade of extraordinary growth in French Protestantism. There may have been two million adherents in around a thousand congregations by 1562, while in the early 1550s there had been only a handful of secret groups; the phenomenon is even more spectacular in scale than the sudden emergence of popular Protestantism in Scotland in the same year that had so astonished John Knox. How had such rapid expansion taken place? Public preaching had not been possible on a significant scale to spread the message in France; there had not been enough ministers, and limited opportunities to gather to listen to sermons. Books played a major part, but the two central texts, the Bible and Calvin's Institutes, were bulky and expensive and could not have had a major circulation in the years of persecution before 1560, while a massive increase in Bible publication came only after 1562. Lesser, more easily concealed pamphlets could be more easily distributed and read, but in one respect the Protestant crowds who emerged to fight their Catholic neighbors ignored what Calvin and the ministers of Geneva wrote. Until open war began, Calvin was relentless in conveying a message of moderation and avoidance of conflict. Very few seem to have listened: the clerical leadership was then swept along against its will by popular militancy marked especially by gleeful smashing of images.
"The explanation for this mass lay activism may lie in the one text which the Reformed found perfectly conveyed their message across all barriers of social status and literacy. This was the Psalter, the book of the 150 Psalms, translated into French verse, set to music and published in unobtrusive pocket-size editions which invariably included the musical notation for the tunes. In the old Latin liturgy the psalms were largely used in monastic services and in private devotional recitation. Now they were redeployed in Reformed Protestantism in this metrical form to articulate the hope, fear, joy and fury of the new movement. They became the secret weapon of the Reformation not merely in France but wherever the Reformed brought new vitality to the Protestant cause. Like so many important components of John Calvin's message, he borrowed the idea from the practice of Strassburg in the 1530s. When he arrived to minister to the French congregation there after his expulsion from Geneva in 1538, he found the French singing these metrical psalms, which has been pioneered by a cheerfully unruly convert to evangelical belief, the poet Clément Marot. Calvin took the practice back to Geneva when he returned there to reconstitute its Reformation. Theodore Beza finally produced a complete French metrical psalter in 1562, and during the crisis of 1562–3, he set up a publishing syndicate of thirty printers through France and Geneva to capitalize on the psalm-singing phenomenon: the resulting mass-production and distribution was a remarkable feat of technology and organization.
"The metrical psalm was the perfect vehicle for turning the Protestant message into a mass movement capable of embracing the illiterate alongside the literate. What better than the very words of the Bible as sung by the hero-King David? The psalms were easily memorized, so that an incriminating printed text could rapidly be dispensed with. They were customarily sung in unison to a large range of dedicated tunes (newly composed, to emphasize the break with the religious past, in contrast to Martin Luther's practice of reusing old church melodies which he loved). The words of a particular psalm could be associated with a particular melody; even to hum the tune spoke of the words of the psalm behind it, and was an act of Protestant subversion. A mood could be summoned up in an instant: Psalm 68 led a crowd into battle, Psalm 124 led to victory, Psalm 115 scorned dumb and blind idols and made the perfect accompaniment for smashing up church interiors. The psalms could be sung in worship or in the market-place; instantly they marked out the singer as a Protestant, and equally instantly united a Protestant crowd in ecstatic companionship just as the football chant does today on the stadium terraces. They were the common property of all, both men and women: women could not preach or rarely even lead prayer, but they could sing alongside their menfolk. To sing a psalm was a liberation—to break away from the mediation of priest or minister and to become a king alongside King David, talking directly to his God. It was perhaps significant that one of the distinctive features of French Catholic persecution in the 1540s had been that those who were about to be burned had their tongues cut out first."
—Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (Penguin Books: 2003), 307–308
"The explanation for this mass lay activism may lie in the one text which the Reformed found perfectly conveyed their message across all barriers of social status and literacy. This was the Psalter, the book of the 150 Psalms, translated into French verse, set to music and published in unobtrusive pocket-size editions which invariably included the musical notation for the tunes. In the old Latin liturgy the psalms were largely used in monastic services and in private devotional recitation. Now they were redeployed in Reformed Protestantism in this metrical form to articulate the hope, fear, joy and fury of the new movement. They became the secret weapon of the Reformation not merely in France but wherever the Reformed brought new vitality to the Protestant cause. Like so many important components of John Calvin's message, he borrowed the idea from the practice of Strassburg in the 1530s. When he arrived to minister to the French congregation there after his expulsion from Geneva in 1538, he found the French singing these metrical psalms, which has been pioneered by a cheerfully unruly convert to evangelical belief, the poet Clément Marot. Calvin took the practice back to Geneva when he returned there to reconstitute its Reformation. Theodore Beza finally produced a complete French metrical psalter in 1562, and during the crisis of 1562–3, he set up a publishing syndicate of thirty printers through France and Geneva to capitalize on the psalm-singing phenomenon: the resulting mass-production and distribution was a remarkable feat of technology and organization.
"The metrical psalm was the perfect vehicle for turning the Protestant message into a mass movement capable of embracing the illiterate alongside the literate. What better than the very words of the Bible as sung by the hero-King David? The psalms were easily memorized, so that an incriminating printed text could rapidly be dispensed with. They were customarily sung in unison to a large range of dedicated tunes (newly composed, to emphasize the break with the religious past, in contrast to Martin Luther's practice of reusing old church melodies which he loved). The words of a particular psalm could be associated with a particular melody; even to hum the tune spoke of the words of the psalm behind it, and was an act of Protestant subversion. A mood could be summoned up in an instant: Psalm 68 led a crowd into battle, Psalm 124 led to victory, Psalm 115 scorned dumb and blind idols and made the perfect accompaniment for smashing up church interiors. The psalms could be sung in worship or in the market-place; instantly they marked out the singer as a Protestant, and equally instantly united a Protestant crowd in ecstatic companionship just as the football chant does today on the stadium terraces. They were the common property of all, both men and women: women could not preach or rarely even lead prayer, but they could sing alongside their menfolk. To sing a psalm was a liberation—to break away from the mediation of priest or minister and to become a king alongside King David, talking directly to his God. It was perhaps significant that one of the distinctive features of French Catholic persecution in the 1540s had been that those who were about to be burned had their tongues cut out first."
—Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (Penguin Books: 2003), 307–308