Marilynne Robinson should know better

Like most seminary graduates and all theologians, I have long loved Marilynne Robinson. I read Gilead in the summer of 2005 and The Death of Adam shortly thereafter, and the deep affection created in those encounters has never left me. I have heard her speak on more than one occasion—at a church of Christ university and at Yale Divinity School, my two worlds colliding—and she was nothing but gracious, eloquent, and compelling in her anointed role as liberal Christian public intellectual. God give us more Marilynne Robinsons.

The beauty of her writing, her thought, and her public presence makes all the more painful the increasingly evident internal contradiction at the heart of her work. Others, with greater depth and insight than I am capable of offering here, have drawn attention to a related set of issues; see especially the reviews of her most recent volume of essays by Micah Meadowcroft, James K. A. Smith, B. D. McClay, Doug Sikkema, and Wesley Hill (alongside the earlier critique of Alan Jacobs, and the brief reflection yesterday by Bryan McGraw). The specific issue I am thinking of is not her inattention to original sin or total depravity, or the way in which such a lacuna is a serious misrepresentation of the Reformed tradition; or the way in which her politics is more or less a down-the-line box-checking of the Democratic National Committee, plus God and minus chronological snobbery; or how her public friendship with Barack Obama veers weirdly toward the obeisant—as if the former President did not order hundreds of drone strikes or deport millions of illegal immigrants or grant legal immunity to members of the CIA who engaged in torture under the previous administration or...

These and other matters are all worthy of interrogation and critique. What I'm interested in is her fundamental lack of charity or empathy toward people with whom she disagrees, namely red-state Christians, particularly those who voted for or continue to support Donald Trump.

Robinson is a novelist. The novelist's modus operandi is to create and embody the lives of human beings from the inside, human beings who are by definition not the author, whose beliefs and deeds are neither necessarily good nor necessarily defensible nor even necessarily consistent with one another. Moreover, Robinson has taken this deep attention to difference in the irreducible diversity of human affairs and applied it to history, recommending to others that they resist the thought-terminating prejudices of common cliche and instead offer to historically disreputable groups and personages the same benefit of doubt they would hope to be given themselves. Moses and Paul, Calvin and Cromwell, the Lollards and the Puritans: all are set within their original social and cultural context, judged by standards available at the time, compared to peers rather than progeny, permitted above all to be complex, conscientious, fallible, fallen, gloriously human members of one and the same species as the rest of us.

Comes the question: Why not use this same hermeneutic on the Repugnant Cultural Other that is the Trump-voting red-state would-be evangelical Christian? For, to use Alan Jacobs's term, that is what such a person is for Robinson. Doubtless such a person, and such a group, deserve robust criticism. They need not be treated with either paternalism or condescension. Say what you think, and give reasons why those with whom you disagree are wrong.

But Robinson does not take even one proverbial second to imagine the motivations or emotions or experiences of such people, or to consider how they might have been formed, or to what extent, if at all, they might be legitimate, whatever they popular expression in national politics or cable news. She does not step into their shoes. She does not even appear to imagine that they have shoes to step in. They are shoeless ciphers, a caricature without flesh and blood. And so she can, without irony, slander them in an essay on slander and Fox News; or question their Christian identity while challenging their recourse to drawing lines around orthodoxy; or treat them as a monolithic bloc in paeans to individualism; or castigate them as a group without showing knowledge of literate representation of their views, while wringing her hands about reading primary texts and avoiding capitulation to popular prejudice. Is there any popular prejudice more culturally acceptable in 2018 than dismissing all Republicans south of the Mason-Dixon line as bigoted dummies feigning faith as cover for benighted tribalism?

I am neither an evangelical nor a Republican nor a Trump voter. But I've lived in Texas, Georgia, and Connecticut, in major urban areas as well as "Trump country," with extended family spread out across the South and friends distributed along the Acela corridor. Robinson embodies the smug disdain common to all right-thinking people for folks I've counted and continue to count as neighbors, elders, family members, and fellow believers. More than anyone, Robinson should know that disagreement and critique, however fierce, are not obstacles to love—to the considerate love that generates attention, subtlety, and fellow feeling, without thereby obviating difference or conflict.

She should know better. She owes us more.

Defining fundamentalism

What makes a fundamentalist? It seems to me that there are only two workable definitions, one historical and one a sort of substantive shorthand. The first refers to actual self-identified fundamentalists from the early and mid-twentieth centuries, and to their (similarly defined) heirs today. The second refers to those Christian individuals or groups who, as it is often said, "lack a hermeneutic," that is, do not admit that hermeneutics is both unavoidable and necessary, and that therefore their interpretation of the Bible is not the only possible one for any rational literate person (or believer).

In my experience, both in print and in conversation, these definitions are very rarely operative. Colloquially, "fundamentalist" often means simply "bad," "conservative," or "to the right of me." I take it for granted that this usage is unjustified and to be avoided by any Christian, scholarly or otherwise; it is not only imprecise, it is little more than tribal slander. "I'm on the good team, and since she disagrees with me, she must be on the bad team."

Is there a workable definition beyond the options so far canvassed? In my judgment, it can't mean "someone who does not accept the deliverances of historical criticism," because those deliverances are by definition disputed; you can always find a non-fundamentalist who happens to affirm a stereotypically designated "fundamentalist" position. Postmodern hermeneutics cuts out the ground from the "sure deliverances" of historical criticism anyway.

Nor can the term, in my view, be applied usefully or consistently to specific doctrinal positions: the inerrancy of Scripture; male headship; traditional sexuality; young earth creationism; a denial of humanity's evolutionary origins; etc. On the one hand, "fundamentalist" isn't helpful because it carries so much historical and other baggage, while these positions can simply be named with terminological specificity. On the other hand, there are extraordinarily sophisticated historical, philosophical, and theological arguments for each and every one of these positions that belie the pejorative, "dummy know-nothing" evocations of "fundamentalism." That doesn't mean all or any of them are correct; it just means that branding them with the F-word is an exercise in both ad hominem and straw man tactics. The term itself has ceased to do work other than the functional task of marking who's in and who's out.

Finally, the term cannot mean "people or positions that use or allow the claims of revelation to trump other claims to knowledge." I fail to see how the epistemic primacy of revelation could ever be a mark of fundamentalism without thereby consigning all of Christian tradition and most of the contemporary global church to fundamentalist oblivion. And, again, it would come to mean so much that it would therefore mean very little indeed. If (nearly) everyone's a fundamentalist, then that doesn't tell us anything of value about the Christians so labeled.

So: Anyone got a useful definition to proffer? For myself, I'll limit myself in theory to the first two definitions listed, while in practice refraining from using the term altogether.

The thing about Phantom Thread

is that it's one of three things, none satisfactory. Either:

1. It's a profound meditation on the nature of love, on something intrinsic to love between men and women, a kind of unavoidable, even beautiful, crack in the surface of what is usually presented as seamless, without defect: in which case the film is false, self-deluded, and self-serious. Or:

2. It's a cheeky close-up, not on love in general, but on this particular couple's "love," doomed to dysfunction, an eternal power-play, in which the would-be submissive learns how to gain the upper hand, and the otherwise dominant, now dominated, accepts this kink in the relationship with a wry ardor: in which case the film is vile, an unserious exercise in sadomasochism either metaphorized or taken to an absurd extreme. Or:

3. It's nothing more than funny (and it is very funny), using the trappings of prestige film and high fashion and world-class acting and audience expectations as a Trojan horse for avant garde melodrama, gender-role hijinks, and an all-around send-up of the infinitely humorless genre of Very Serious Genius Men And Their Long-Suffering Muses: in which case the film is a rousing success, but ultimately quite shallow; and its central plot device is such a severe misdirect that the film's biggest fans have mistaken it for that which it is meant to parody: a meaningful commentary on love, genius, gender, art, power, etc.

These are also the stages of my own judgment about the film. I can make no sense of people who opt for either of the first two interpretations and acclaim the movie's greatness. And if, as I have come to believe, the third interpretation is best, then Anderson accomplished a task that wasn't worth the time or energy of his genuine genius. Or at least, it's not worth any more of my time, which otherwise might have been devoted to rewatching and continuing to reflect on such a film.

C. S. Lewis on the fumie

Meanwhile, in the Objective Room, something like a crisis had developed between Mark and Professor Frost. As soon as they arrived there Mark saw that the table had been drawn back. On the floor lay a large crucifix, almost life size, a work of art in the Spanish tradition, ghastly and realistic. “We have half an hour to pursue our exercises,” said Frost looking at his watch. Then he instructed Mark to trample on it and insult it in other ways.

Now whereas Jane had abandoned Christianity in early childhood, along with her belief in fairies and Santa Claus, Mark had never believed in it at all. At this moment, therefore, it crossed his mind for the very first time that there might conceivably be something in it. Frost who was watching him carefully knew perfectly well that this might be the result of the present experiment. He knew it for the very good reason that his own training by the Macrobes had, at one point, suggested the same odd idea to himself. But he had no choice. Whether he wished it or not this sort of thing was part of the initiation.

“But, look here," said Mark.

“What is it?" said Frost. “Pray be quick. We have only a limited time at our disposal.”

“This,” said Mark, pointing with an undefined reluctance to the horrible white figure on the cross. “This is all surely a pure superstition.”

“Well?”

“Well, if so, what is there objective about stamping on the face? Isn’t is just as subjective to spit on a thing like this as to worship it? I mean—damn it all—if it’s only a bit of wood, why do anything about it?”

“That is superficial. If you had been brought up in a non-Christian society, you would not be asked to do this. Of course, it is a superstition; but it is that particular superstition which has pressed upon our society for a great many centuries. It can be experimentally shown that is still forms a dominant system in the subconscious of many individuals whose conscious thought appears to be wholly liberated. An explicit action in the reverse direction is therefore a necessary step towards complete objectivity. It is not a question for a priori discussion. We find it in practice that it cannot be dispensed with.”

Mark himself was surprised at the emotions he was undergoing. He did not regard the image with anything at all like a religious feeling. Most emphatically it did not belong to that idea of the Straight or Normal or Wholesome which had, for the last few days, been his support against what he now knew of the innermost circle at Belbury. The horrible vigour of its realism was, indeed, in its own way as remote from that Idea as anything else in the room. That was one source of his reluctance. To insult even a carved image of such agony seemed an abominable act. But it was not the only source. With the introduction of this Christian symbol the whole situation had somehow altered. The thing was becoming incalculable. His simple antithesis of the Normal and the Diseased had obviously failed to take something into account. Why was the Crucifix there? Why were more than half of the poison-pictures religious? He had the sense of new parties to the conflict—potential allies and enemies which he had not suspected before. “If I take a step in any direction,” he thought, “I may step over a precipice.” A donkey like determination to plant hoofs and stay still at all costs arose in his mind.

“Pray make haste,” said Frost.

The quiet urgency of the voice, and the fact that he had so often obeyed it before, almost conquered him. He was on the verge of obeying, and getting the whole silly business over, when the defenselessness of the figure deterred him. the feeling was a very illogical one. Not because its hands were nailed and helpless, but because they were only made of wood and therefore even more helpless, because the thing, for all its realism, was inanimate and could not in any way hit back, he paused. The unretaliating face of a doll—one of Myrtle’s dolls—which he had pulled to pieces in boyhood had affected him in the same way and the memory, even now, was tender to the touch.

“What are you waiting for, Mr. Studdock?” said Frost.

Mark was well aware of the rising danger. Obviously, if he disobeyed, his last chance of getting out of Belbury alive might be gone. Even of getting out of this room. The smothering sensation once again attacked him. He was himself, he felt, as helpless as the wooden Christ. As he thought this, he found himself looking at the crucifix in a new way—neither as a piece of wood nor a monument of superstition but as a bit of history. Christianity was nonsense, but one did not doubt that the man had lived and had been executed thus by the Belbury of those days. And that, as he suddenly saw, explained why this image,though not itself an image of the Straight or Normal, was yet in opposition to the crooked Belbury. It was a picture of what happened when the Straight met the Crooked, a picture of what the Crooked did to the Straight—what it would do to him if he remained straight. It was, in a more emphatic sense than he had yet understood, a cross.

“Do you intend to go on with the training or not?” said Frost. His eye was on the time. . . .

“Do you not hear what I am saying?” he asked Mark again.

Mark made no reply. He was thinking, and thinking hard because he knew, that if he stopped even for a moment, mere terror of death would take the decision out of his hands. Christianity was a fable. It would be ridiculous to die for a religion one did not believe. This Man himself, on that very cross, had discovered it to be a fable, and had died complaining that the God in whom he trusted had forsaken him—had, in fact, found the universe a cheat. But this raised a question that Mark had never thought of before. Was that the moment at which to turn against the Man? If the universe was a cheat, was that a good reason for joining its side? Supposing the Straight was utterly powerless, always and everywhere certain to be mocked, tortured, and finally killed by the Crooked, what then? Why not go down with the ship? He began to be frightened by the very fact that his fears seemed to have momentarily vanished. They had been a safeguard . . . they had prevented him, all his life, from making mad decisions like that which he was now making as he turned to Frost and said,

“It’s all bloody nonsense, and I’m damned if I do any such thing.”

When he said this he had no idea what might happen next.

—C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, pp. 334-337

Just published: a review essay of Patrick Deneen and James K. A. Smith in the LA Review of Books

I've got a review essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books of Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed and James K. A. Smith's Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology. It's called "Holy Ambivalence." Go check it out.

Principles of Luddite pedagogy

My classes begin in this way: With phone in hand, I say, "Please put your phones and devices away," and thereupon put my own in my bag out of sight. I then say, "The Lord be with you." (And also with you.) "Let us pray." I then offer a prayer, usually the Collect for the day from the Book of Common Prayer. After the prayer, we get started. And for the next 80 minutes (or longer, if it is a grad seminar or intensive course), there is not a laptop, tablet, or smart phone in sight. If I catch a student on her phone, and Lord knows college students are not subtle, she is counted tardy for the day and docked points on her participation grade. Only after I dismiss class do the addicts—sorry, my students—satiate their gnawing hunger for a screen, and get their fix.

For larger lecture courses (40-60 students) with lots of information to communicate, I use PowerPoint slides. But for smaller numbers and especially for seminars, neither a computer nor the internet nor a screen of any kind is employed during class time. I further require my students to submit their papers (however short or long, however rarely or commonly due) in the form of a printed copy brought to class or dropped off at my office. And for weekly (or random) reading quizzes, students must come prepared with pencil and Scantron; we begin the quiz promptly at the beginning of class, with the questions coming sequentially in large print on the PowerPoint slides. I give them plenty of time for each question, but I do not go back to previous questions. If you arrive late and miss questions or the whole thing, so be it.

I rarely reply immediately to emails, and may not reply at all if the question's answer is specified in the syllabus. I will reply within 24 hours, but I will not reply (unless it is an emergency) after hours, while at home; some days I may not even check my work email between 5:00pm and 6:00am the following morning.

I have a strict attendance policy: I count both tardies and absences; three of the former count as one of the latter; and beginning with three unexcused absences (for a twice-weekly course), I deduct four percentage points from a student's final grade. So, e.g., a student with four unexcused absences and three tardies would go from a 91 to a 79. More than six unexcused absences means an automatic failing grade.

Students behave exactly as you suppose they would. They come to class, they show up on time, they do the reading, and they take hand-written notes. The only distraction they fight is drowsiness (I will not say whether I contribute to that perennial pedagogical opponent). And for two 80-minute blocks of time per week, these students who were in second grade when the first iPhone came out have neither a device in their hands nor a screen before their eyes nor buds in their ears.

It turns out I am a Luddite, at least pedagogically speaking. On the questions raised by this set of issues, my sense is that my colleagues, not just at my university but in the academy generally, are divided into three campus. There are those like me. There are those who find us and our pedagogy desirable, but for reasons intrinsic or extrinsic to themselves they cannot or will not join us and fashion their classrooms accordingly. And then there are those who, on principle, oppose Luddite pedagogy.

This last group, broadly speaking, views screens, phones, tablets, laptops, the internet, etc., as positive supplements or complements to the traditional teaching setting, and want as far as possible to incorporate student use of them in the classroom. This view extends beyond the classroom to, e.g., learning management systems and e-books, videos and podcasts, etc., etc. The scope of the classroom expands to include the digital architecture of LMS: a "space" online where discussion, assignments, interaction, learning, video, editing, grading feedback, and so on are consolidated and intertwined.

What rationale underwrites this perspective? Perhaps it is simply "where we are today," or "what we have to do" in the 21st century, working with digital-native millennials; or perhaps it is neither superior nor inferior to traditional classroom learning, but simply a different mode of teaching altogether, with its own strengths and weaknesses; or perhaps it is not sufficient but certainly necessary alongside the classroom, given its many ostensible benefits; or perhaps it is both necessary and sufficient, superior to because an improvement upon the now defunct pedagogical elements of old: a room, some desks, a teacher and students, some books, a board, paper and pencil.

I'm not going to make an argument against these folks. I think they're wrong, but that's for another day. Rather, I want to think about the basic principles underlying my own not-always-theorized pedagogical Ludditism—a stance I did not plan to take but found myself taking with ever greater commitment, confidence, and articulateness. What might those principles be?

Here's a first stab.

1. I want, insofar as possible, to interrupt and de-normalize the omnipresence of screens in my students' lives.

2. I want, insofar as possible, to get my students off the internet.

3. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to hold physical books in their hands, to turn pages, to read words off a page, to annotate what they read with pen or pencil.

4. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to put pen or pencil to paper, to write out their thoughts, reflections, answers, and arguments in longhand.

5. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to develop habits of silent, contemplative thought: the passive activity of the mind, lacking external stimulation, lost in a world known only to themselves—though by definition intrinsically communicable to others—chasing down stray thoughts and memories down back alleys in the brain.

6. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to practice talking out loud to their neighbors, friends, and strangers about matters of great import, sustained for minutes or even hours at a time, without the interposition or upward-facing promise of the smart phone's rectangle of light; to learn and develop habits of sustained discourse, even and especially to the point of disagreement, offering and asking for reasons that support one or another position or perspective, without recourse to some less demanding activity, much less to the reflexive conversation-stopper of personal offense.

7. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to see that the world to which they have grown accustomed, whose habits and assumptions they have imbibed and intuited without critique, consent, or forethought, is contingent: it is neither necessary nor necessarily good; that even in this world, resistance is possible; indeed, that the very intellectual habits on display in the classroom are themselves a form of and a pathway to a lifetime of such resistance.

8. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to experience, in their gut, as a kind of assault on their unspoken assumptions, that the life of the mind is at once more interesting than they imagined, more demanding than a simple passing grade (not to mention a swipe to the left or the right), and more rewarding than the endless mindless numbing pursuits of their screens.

9. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to realize that they are not the center of the universe, and certainly not my universe; that I am not waiting on them hand and foot, their digital butler, ready to reply to the most inconsequential of emails at a moment's notice; that such a way of living, with the notifications on red alert at all times of the day, even through the night, is categorically unhealthy, even insane.

In sum, I want the pedagogy that informs my classroom to be a sustained embodiment of Philip's response to Nathaniel's challenge in the Gospel of John. Can anything good come from a classroom without devices, from teaching and learning freed from technology's imperious determination?

Come and see.

Rowan Williams on Jewish identity and religious freedom in liberal modernity

"The [French] revolution wanted to save Jews from Judaism, turning them into rational citizens untroubled by strange ancestral superstitions. It ended up taking just as persecutory an approach as the Church and the Christian monarchy. The legacies of Christian bigotry and enlightened contempt are tightly woven together in the European psyche, it seems, and the nightmares of the 20th century are indebted to both strands.

"In some ways, this prompts the most significant question to emerge from the [history of Jews in modern Europe].  Judaism becomes a stark test case for what we mean by pluralism and religious liberty: if the condition for granting religious liberty is, in effect, conformity to secular public norms, what kind of liberty is this? More than even other mainstream religious communities, Jews take their stand on the fact that their identity is not an optional leisure activity or lifestyle choice. Their belief is that they are who they are for reasons inaccessible to the secular state, and they ask that this particularity be respected—granted that it will not interfere with their compliance with the law of the state.

"This question is currently a pressing one. Does liberal modernity mean the eradication of organic traditions and identities, communal belief and ritual, in the name of absolute public uniformity? Or does it involve the harder work of managing the reality that people have diverse religious and cultural identities as well as their papers of citizenship, and accepting that these identities will shape the way they interact?

"Yet again, we see how Jews can be caught in a mesh of skewed perception. The argumentative dice are loaded against them. As a distinctive cluster of communities held together by language, history and law—with the assumption for the orthodox believer that all of this is the gift of God—they pose a threat to triumphalist religious systems that look to universal hegemony and conversion.

"The Christian or Muslim zealot cannot readily accept the claim of an identity that is simply given and not to be argued away by the doctrines of newer faiths. But the dogmatic secularist finds this no easier. Liberation from confessional and religiously exclusive societies ought, they think, to mean the embrace of a uniform enlightened world-view—but the Jew continues to insist that particularity is not negotiable. So we see the grimly familiar picture emerging of Judaism as the target of both left and right.

"The importance of [this history] is that it forces the reader to think about how the long and shameful legacy of Christian hatred for Jews is reworked in 'enlightened' society. Jews are just as 'other' for a certain sort of progressive politics and ethics as they were for early and medieval Christianity. The offence is the sheer persistence of an identity that refuses to understand itself as just a minor variant of the universal human culture towards which history is meant to be working. And to understand how this impasse operated is to understand something of why Zionism gains traction long before the Holocaust."

—Rowan Williams, review of Simon Schama's Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492–1900

My dissertation acknowledgements

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

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

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

Acknowledgements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soli Deo Gloria.

On the speech of Christ in the Psalms

Tomorrow morning I am giving a lecture to some undergraduate students at Baylor University; the lecture's title is "Unlike Any Other Book: Theological Reflections on the Bible and its Faithful Interpretation." The lecture draws from four different writings: a dissertation chapter, a review essay for Marginalia, an article for Pro Ecclesia, and an article for International Journal of Systematic Theology.

As every writer knows, reading your own work can be painful. There's always more you can do to make it better. But sometimes you're happy with what you wrote. And I think the following quotation from the IJST piece, especially the final paragraph, is one of my pieces of writing I'm happiest about. It both makes a substantive point clearly and effectively, and does so with appropriate rhetorical force. Not many of you, surely, have read the original article; so here's a sample taste:

"[S]ince the triune God is the ecumenical confession of the church, it is entirely logical and defensible to read, say, the Psalms as the speech of Christ, or the Trinity as the creator in Genesis 1, or the ruach elohim as the very Holy Spirit breathed by the Father through the Son. Perhaps some Christian biblical scholars will respond that they do not protest the ostensible anachronism of such claims, but nonetheless hesitate at encouraging it out of concern for the humanity of these texts, that is, their human and historical specificity. In my judgment, this is a well-meant but misguided concern...

"[T]he motivations behind the concern for the humanity of Scripture are often themselves theological, but these are frequently underdeveloped. A chief example is the ubiquity in biblical scholarship of a kind of reflexive philosophical incompatibilism regarding human and divine agency, rarely articulated and never argued, such that if humans do something, then God does not, and vice versa. More specifically, on this view if Christ is the speaker of the Psalms, then the human voice of the Psalter is crowded out: apparently there’s only so much elbow room at Scripture’s authorial table. And thus, if it is shown—and who ever doubted it?—that the Psalms are products of their time and place and culture, then to read them christologically is to do violence to the text. At most, for some Christian scholars, to do so is, at times, allowable, especially if there is warrant from the New Testament; but it is still a hermeneutical device, in a manner superadded or overlaid onto a more determinate, definitive, historically rooted original.

"But the historic Christian understanding of Christ in the Psalms is much stronger than this qualified allowance, and the principal prejudice scholars must rid themselves of here is that, at bottom, ‘the real is the social-historical.’ On the contrary, the spiritual is no less real than the material, and the reality of God is so incomparably greater than either that it is their very condition of being. All of which bears two consequences for the Psalms. First, God’s speech in the Psalms in the person of the Son is not in competition with the manifold human voices of Israel that composed and sung and wrote and edited the Psalter. God is not an item in the metaphysical furniture of the universe; one and the same act may be freely willed and performed by God and by a human creature. This is very hard to grasp consistently, and it is not the only Christian view of human and divine action on offer. Nonetheless it is crucial for making sense of both the particulars and the whole of what Scripture is and how it works.

"Second and finally, to read the Psalms as at once the voice of Israel and the voice of Israel’s Messiah is therefore not to gloss an otherwise intact original with a spiritual meaning. Rather, it is to recognize, following Jason Byassee’s description of Augustine’s exegetical practice, the ‘christological plain sense.’ This accords with what is the case, namely, that ontologically equiprimordial with the human compositional history of the texts is the speech of the eternal divine Son anticipating and figuring, in advance, his own incarnate life and work in and as Jesus of Nazareth. When Jesus uses the Psalmists’ words in the Gospels, he is not appropriating something alien to himself for purposes distinct from their original sense; he is fulfilling, in his person and speech, what was and is his very own, now no longer shrouded in mystery but revealed for what they always were and pointed to. The figure of Israel sketched and excerpted in the Psalms, so faithful and true amid such trouble from God and scorn from enemies, is flesh and blood in the person of Jesus Christ, and not only retrospectively but, by God’s gracious foreknowledge, prospectively as well. It turns out that it was Christ all along."

An honest preface to contemporary academic interpretation of the New Testament

The figures and authors of the New Testament, especially Jesus and Paul, taught and wrote primarily during the middle half of the first century A.D. Their teachings and texts were not, alas, understood in the 2nd century, nor were they understood in the 3rd century, nor were they understood in the 4th century, nor were they understood in the 5th century, nor were they understood in the 6th century, nor were they understood in the 7th century, nor were they understood in the 8th century, nor were they understood in the 9th century, nor were they understood in the 10th century, nor were they understood in the 11th century, nor were they understood in the 12th century, nor were they understood in the 13th century, nor were they understood in the 14th century, nor were they understood in the 15th century, nor were they understood in the 16th century, nor were they understood in the 17th century, nor were they understood in the 18th century, nor were they understood in the 19th century, nor were they understood in the 20th century. Such periods, unfortunately, were not up to date on the latest scholarship.

I am.

What I wrote in 2017, and what's coming up

Last year was momentous for me, both personally and professionally. I submitted my dissertation; I earned my PhD from Yale; I got that rarest of things, a bona fide job—teaching at my alma mater no less; I moved my family to a place we love; and I taught my first semester as a professor of theology, a dream 14 years in the making. My wife and three small children are content and flourishing, and for the first time in any of our lives, we don't have an end date bearing down on us from the horizon.

My gratitude and joy know no bounds.

I also started a new blog! (This one, just like the old one.) And I wrote some stuff, here and elsewhere, scholarly and popular. A 2017 rundown...

Scholarly:

“Reading the Trinity in the Bible: Assumptions, Warrants, Ends,” Pro Ecclesia 25:4 (2016): 459-474. Technically published in 2016, but not actually available to read in print until 2017, so I'm counting it. This article does not, unfortunately, contain this footnote, which was originally meant to be included in it.

“The Hermeneutics of Theological Interpretation: Holy Scripture, Biblical Scholarship, and Historical Criticism,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 19:1 (2017): 30–52. I think this is the best piece of scholarly writing I have published, and the most programmatic at that. If you want to know what I think about theological interpretation of the Bible in relation to historical-critical scholarship, read this.

“John Webster, Theologian Proper,” Anglican Theological Review 99:2 (2017): 333–351. After Webster's abrupt passing in 2016, I was asked by ATR to write a commemorative review article of his many books, and it was a bittersweet experience. The last few pages of the piece engage in some friendly criticism of a couple features of Webster's theology, and I'm hopeful it contributes to the beginning of the reception of his thought.

“What is the Doctrine of the Trinity For? Practicality and Projection in Robert Jenson’s Theology,” Modern Theology 33:3 (2017). I wrote the first version of what eventually became this article nearly five years before its publication, which turned out to be only months before Jenson's death at 87 years old. My argument criticizes a specific feature of Jenson's trinitarian thought, namely its (ironically Feuerbachian) projection into the triune Godhead in order to secure practical payoff for human life. Though critical, the piece comes from a place of pure affection for Jenson's work (see below).

"Review: Gary Anderson, Christian Doctrine and the Old Testament: Theology in the Service of Exegesis," International Journal of Systematic Theology 19:4 (2017): 534–537. This is an excellent book that ought to begin paving the way forward for theologians and biblical scholars alike to read Scripture together, both theologically and historically.

Popular:

"Theologians Were Arguing About the Benedict Option 35 Years Ago," Mere Orthodoxy. This piece grew out of a Twitter thread reflecting on Hauerwas and the Yale School vis-à-vis Rod Dreher. In it I use James Davison Hunter's work in To Change the World to clarify why (a) people disagree so vociferously about Dreher's proposal and (b) how the very way in which the Benedict Option is a popular distillation of ideas from the 1970s and '80s demonstrates the force of Hunter's conception of cultural change and the need for something like the BenOp. My thanks to Derek Rishmawy for suggesting I write my thoughts up in essay form and send it to Jake Meador at MO.

"Systematic Theology and Biblical Criticism," Marginalia Review of Books. A review essay of Ephraim Radner's wild and woolly and uncategorizable (not to mention un-summarizable) 2016 book Time and the Word: Figural Reading of the Christian Scriptures. This piece didn't seem to get as much play as my previous piece for MROB on Katherine Sonderegger, but it was just as pleasurable to write.

"Public Theology in Retreat," Los Angeles Review of Books. 'Tis the season of David Bentley Hart! This piece, ostensibly a review essay of Hart's three latest collections of essays, offered an occasion to reflect, in conversation with Alan Jacobs, on the nature and status (and prospects) of theology on the American intellectual scene. The feedback on this piece, even from the DBH-agnostic, was overwhelmingly encouraging. Twitter remains unarguably demonic, but the kind words of strangers who shared this essay with others was a shaft of clear, angelic light to this junior prof scribbling in west Texas.

Blog:

On the use of "everyone" in pop culture talk. (June 4 & 7) From listening to too much (never enough!) of Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan on their podcast The Watch for The Ringer.

Figural christology in children's Bibles. (June 8) From reading my children Bible stories and noticing theological connections in the illustrations.

Four writing tips for seminarians. (June 9) From my time as a teaching assistant at Yale Divinity School.

The best American crime novelists of the last century, or: a way into the genre. (June 12) A fun diversion; who doesn't love a good list?

The liturgical/praying animal in Paradise Lost. (June 14) Riffing on Milton's anthropology in Book VII with Jamie Smith and Robert Jenson.

On the analogia entis contra Barth. (June 19 & 21) From finishing IV/1 last summer.

Teaching the Gospels starting with John. (June 30) Why not? Fie on the critics.

Figural christology in Paradise Lost. (July 10) One of my favorite things to write in 2017. Focused on the angel Michael's prophetic instructions to Adam in Book XI.

Against universalizing doubt, with a coda. (July 20 & 21) Top five favorite things I wrote in 2017. Would like to revise these together and publish in a magazine or some such thing.

Scripture's precedence is not chronological. (July 24) Expanding on a dissertation footnote on Yoder.

A question for Richard Hays: metalepsis in The Leftovers. (August 1) Having some fun while watching a great show.

Scruton, Eagleton, Scialabba, et al—why don't they convert? (August 11) A genuine question, to which a reader kindly offered a partial answer, at least for Scialabba, who once wrote briefly on the topic (in dialogue with C. S. Lewis, no less!).

What it is I'm privileged to do this fall. (August 22) Reflections on the extraordinary gift of teaching college students theology.

Rest in peace: Robert W. Jenson (1930–2017). (September 6) A bittersweet celebration of what Jenson meant to me, theologically and otherwise. This was by far the most-read piece on the blog this year, which goes to show how much this man of the church meant to so many others, too.

16 tips for how to read a passage from the Gospels. (September 14) Something I gave the freshmen in my fall course on the life and teachings of Jesus.

On John le Carré's new novel, A Legacy of Spies. (September 17) An enjoyable but ultimately disappointing trip back in time once more to the world of George Smiley.

On contemporary praise and worship music. (October 8) A fussy little missive, whose contents you can probably guess.

On Markan priority. (October 12) What would have to be the case for Mark not to be the first Gospel written? What implications would follow? How crazy is it to consider?

On the church's eternality and "church as mission." (October 20) Picking a friendly fight with the church-as-mission folks, with an assist from Thomas Aquinas.

The Holy One of Israel: a sermon on Leviticus 19. (October 25) This was a joy to write and deliver. Flexing some nearly-atrophied muscles in figural homiletics.

Notes on The Last Jedi, Godless, and Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri. (December 17) In which I share my critical reflections on all three, including a stirring, unanswerable defense of Rian Johnson's brilliant film. Also Three Billboards is bad.

Upcoming (as of January 2): 

“The Sermon Revisited: A Review of David P. Gushee and Glen H. Stassen’s Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context,” in Living Church. As you'll see when it's published, my evaluation of this book is quite negative.

"Review: Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Authority After Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity," in Interpretation. I did not love this book, but I respect its author and his goals; he simply fails to persuade here, nor is he helped by the oft-distracting rhetoric.

"Review: Hans Boersma, Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church," in Interpretation. This is a tiny little review of a lovely, fulsome work. My how I love the church fathers' biblical interpretation.

“Ambivalence After Liberalism,” in The Los Angeles Review of Books. This is a review essay of James K. A. Smith's Awaiting the Kingdom: Reforming Public Theology and Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed. I'm a ways into both books, so I hope to have a draft of the piece by the end of the month.

“Scripture as the Church’s Book in Robert Jenson’s Theology,” Pro Ecclesia. This will be out by the end of the year or in early 2019, as part of an issue dedicated to Jenson, who co-founded the journal. I'm going to adapt it from one of my dissertation chapters.

I have another scholarly article planned, which I will not write until the summer, on theological interpretation. I'll probably submit it to the Journal of Theological Interpretation.

And last but not least, I hope to complete my work as editor of Robert W. Jenson's The Triune Story: Essays on Scripture with Oxford University Press and have the book published by the end of 2018—perhaps even by the annual meeting of AAR/SBL in Denver the weekend before Thanksgiving. Lord willing!

Thanks for reading. It was a good year writing. Happy new year y'all.

Notes on The Last Jedi, Godless, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Though not in that order, because spoilers.



Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

–I did not like this film. I admired its craftsmanship, not least the acting, the unwieldy plot, the attempted control at something like permanent tonal dissonance (which is, I suppose, a backhanded way of saying I thought the tone was out of control), the thematic complex animating the film's every turn. I generally admire and enjoy the work of both the writer-director Martin McDonagh and his brother. But not this one.

–Eve Tushnet captures a great deal of what's wrong with the film here. These two paragraphs sum it up:

Or take the reason for Mildred Hayes’s furious grief. She feels guilty about her daughter’s horrifying death–of course she does, that’s how anyone would feel. But the film doesn’t trust us to accept that anybody would feel that way. The movie has her feel guilty because she literally, exactly in these words told her daughter to go walk in that field and get raped and murdered, and then she did!!!!!, and it’s just all so on-the-nose and unnecessary. It’s chintzy.

The huge, sad and sordid problem with the movie is that racism and black people are ciphers in an alphabet used to talk solely about the sins and redemptions of white people. Racism is a theme the movie insists on grappling with but it just cannot do it well, because the black characters aren’t people. They are plot furniture who might as well blink out of existence as soon as they’ve performed their role in the moral drama of the white folk.

The film simply does not trust its audience, nor does it trust the would-be ordinary griefs and grievances the film is ostensibly about. Everything is turned up to eleven: Mildred doesn't just set up outlandish billboards, she throws Molotov cocktails at the police station; the dumb racist violent cop isn't just dumb and racist and violent, he marches into an office building, walks up to the second floor, beats up a man, and throws him out of a window (all filmed in one take, thus doubling down on the scene's histrionics with fussy cinematic virtuosity); and so on.

–Tushnet also touches on the wild tonal swings that, while perhaps not doomed to failure, certainly fail here. One moment Mildred's talking to her ex-husband, busting balls; the next he's throwing the kitchen table against the wall and grabbing her by the throat, their son holding a knife to his own father's throat—only for the ex-husband's dim-witted half-his-age girlfriend to walk in the doorway and drain the tension because she has to pee. It's as if a Judd Apatow comedy interrupted a Scorsese film.

–The first act is mostly good, but everything falls to pieces the moment Woody Harrelson's cancer-stricken sheriff kills himself. Not only are his final words to his wife (in his suicide note) execrably romanticized, but all of a sudden the jolly, ever-recognizable voice of Beloved Actor Woody Harrelson becomes the Ghost of Christmas Future for the characters left behind. Mildred and said dumb racist violent cop receive posthumous letters from the sheriff-turned-seer, poring into their souls and speaking, as only Beloved Actor Woody Harrelson's voice could, their future best selves into being, guiding them from beyond the grave. Having lovingly, generously, self-sacrificially "saved" his wife and daughters untold grief at "having to watch him" suffer and die, and thus be "left" with "that lasting image" of him—instead of the "one final perfect day" they do have—he now transforms himself into a truly selfless saint. Light a votive candle while you're at it, Mildred.



Godless

–Scott Frank is one of the best living writers in Hollywood, and anything that gives him work is cause for celebration. Doubly so when it's a long-gestating limited series Western for Netflix.

–In an interview on Fresh Air, Frank said he didn't want to avoid the classic tropes of the great Westerns; he wanted to include every single one, and then some. Amen. As with all genre, the way to go is either radically revisionary (a la Tarantino) or pure specimen with a twist. Anything in between usually falters; and more to the point, you have to show you can master (or have mastered) the genre's necessary features in order to succeed at all, and few directors are so accomplished as to be able to go the Tarantino route. Frank chose wisely.

–The series centers on a town of women, widows who one and all lost their husbands in a single tragic mining accident. A stranger comes to town, adopted son and deserter of a viciously violent leader of a criminal gang. As the vengeful Bad seeks vengeance, we learn about the stranger, the woman who took him in, the town's inhabitants, and its supposedly cowardly sheriff.

–The series is gorgeously shot, lush with all the Western geography you could ask for, and shots of men riding horses with such skill and beauty you convince yourself God made one for the other, and both to be captured in moving pictures. The actors are uniformly superb, particularly Michelle Dockery (of Downton Abbey fame), Scoot McNairy (from Halt and Catch Fire, among other things), and Jeff Daniels (simply reveling in a truly wicked part without ever crossing the line into Hamville). Frank takes his time with the characters and with the moments that make them who they are, or who they become. The details and the dialogue are lived-in and witty without ever calling attention to themselves.

–Two problems keep the series from making good on its promise. The first is pacing: stretched across seven episodes of varying length, one can easily imagine the two and a half hour movie version of this story. At least two episodes (five and six) are pure filler, and other side plots could be scratched without loss. Such a problem is permissible if everything else works. Unfortunately...

–The finale simply does not deliver. The climactic shootout does deliver, as a piece of sheer filmmaking. But as climax to the narrative, it's a flop. Minus two minor characters who meet their doom quickly and without fanfare (one halfway through the series), no major character loses his or her life. Perhaps acceptable, if not for a serious issue at the script level: namely, the slaughter of Blackdom. You see, outside La Belle (the town of all women) there is an all-black settlement, founded by buffalo soldiers and their families. In the series finale, these characters—mostly a detour from the main plot lines—confer with one another about whether or not to help the all-white town. This is the first the camera has visited these characters without a white character standing in for the audience. Only moments later, however, Jeff Daniels comes a-knocking, and three minutes later every man, woman, and child in Blackdom is dead.

If Frank had committed to this kind of atrocity culminating his story—just one more feature of the impartial, unconquerable godlessness of the Western frontier—this decision could have been justified. Instead, more or less every white character gets to live on, kept safe (by Frank or by God?) from the hateful, meaningless death and destruction meted out just one town over. It is a profound misstep that undoes whatever good will the series has built up to this point, and undermines whatever Frank was hoping to say. Happy endings for the (white) leads, an unmarked grave for the rest.



The Last Jedi

–I am fascinated by what appears to be a wide divide in reactions to Rian Johnson's film. A number of critics as well as SW fans downright love it, hailing it as one of the best SW films ever, rivaling the 1977 original and Empire in quality, depth, and craft. Those who disagree aren't merely in the middle, however; they actively dislike the movie and think it largely fails. What's going on here?

–First, my own take: I think TLJ is a rousing success, marred only by a minor side plot (the trip to Canto Bight), which ends with a silly CGI scene and makes the pacing of the film's second act sag unnecessarily. A few other nits to pick, sure, but otherwise, the film is great. Everything with Rey, Kylo Ren, and Luke is A+. (Agreeing, as more than one person has, then commenting that everything else is a problem is a bit like saying Lord of the Rings is a failure except for all the scenes with Gandalf, Aragorn, and Frodo. Because, um, aren't they in most of them?) And there are at least three moments that took my breath away: the throne room, the lightspeed kamikaze, and the showdown between Luke and Ren. More on the good anon.

–Here's my take on the divide I'm seeing so far. Those praising the film up and down and those disappointed by it appear to be talking about different things. That is, nobody's arguing opposing sides of the same topic; it's all about what one was looking for, what one was struck by, and thus what one holds up for emphasis, as emblematic of the film's quality. Those who love TLJ are talking about Rey, Ren, and Luke; about Johnson's direction; about composition and color; about the film's core themes; about the departures from previous SW entries; about off-loading detritus from Abrams; about upending (even taunting) fanboys' expectations; about where the film leaves the story and its characters. Those left dissatisfied by TLJ aren't talking about any of that. They're talking about the silliness of Canto Bight; about the narrative dead-end of DJ and the covert mission of Finn and Rose; about the odd fit of Laura Dern's character and the half-baked nature of Poe's mutiny; about Leia's Force moment in space; about the premature deaths of Snoke and Phasma; about the further echoes and rhyming repetitions of past SW films; about Luke never leaving his Jedi island of loneliness, never unleashing some serious Force destruction on the First Order.

Note well: The lovers' love has a great deal to do with formal qualities and decisions, combined with the main characters' arcs. The haters' hate concerns specific matters of content, especially plot, especially relative to The Force Awakens. So I suppose this rift is going to continue. The haters aren't going to come around (they already grant the goodness of the Rey-Ren-Luke stuff), and the lovers just aren't worried about some of those plot matters, or think focusing on them is disproportionate to what the film does well.

–Another way to look at it: I think TLJ is a three-star film with two or three bona fide four-star moments and one or two two-star moments, whereas TFA is a three-star film that basically never rises above or sinks below that quality (minus the overall fact that Starkiller Base is an indefensible redux of IV and VI). And it's true that TLJ never quite has an extended sequence like the first act of TFA, which not only never stops moving, but may be the most well-paced, flawless 45 minutes in all nine SW movies. And there's no through-line like Harrison Ford's farewell Han Solo performance or Ridley and Boyega's banter (though the connection between Ridley and Driver in TLJ runs deeper, and is more interesting).

All that to say: I can understand having a preference for TFA over TLJ (leaving aside the original trilogy!); but that's simply comparing different movies with different agendas, different sensibilities, different stories, and different goals.

–So why am I, a TLJ defender, unconcerned about the haters' criticisms? Here's a preliminary response. The running of the CGI alien-bulls on Canto Bight is prequel-worthy nonsense, even cringe-worthy. Granted. But the trip itself is an interesting idea on a number of fronts, so the mere presence of a dumb 5-minute chase scene doesn't torpedo a 150-minute movie. First, the initial reason to go to the planet is to find a way to disable the First Order's ability to track the Resistance's fleet. Second, it provides something the SW series rarely offers: a fleeting glimpse into how the various machinations of the super-spaceships and military maneuvers and Jedi duels actually relate to ordinary planets and their inhabitants—or rather, how ordinary places and people perceive and are affected by this apparently unending galactic civil war. That's a narrative idea worth chasing. Third, the fact that the casino trip fails to result in what Finn, Rose, and Poe dream up for it does not make the whole thing a waste of time; that failure is one in a whole string of failures that mark the film from start to finish. Johnson has constructed TLJ as a kind of Dunkirk in Space: even star wars are less about heroism and triumph than sheer survival, against all odds. Live to fight another day, because maybe that day will be the day you don't get smashed to pieces by the bad guys.

So while Johnson should have rewritten what happens on Canto Bight—make it a heist, make it sleek and fun, make it devoid of all CGI—the trip itself, before and after, is perfectly warranted, and integral to the film's plot and themes.

–Otherwise, I'm basically unperturbed by TLJ's other flaws, real or perceived. Committing to Luke's near despair and total withdrawal (from the war, from those he loves, from responsibility, from the Force) is a brave narrative choice, and it succeeds. The same goes for leaving ambiguous just what happened between Luke and Ren that night when Ren tore down the temple. Relegating Maz to a cameo, making Hux a pitiable joke, and killing off Phasma is altogether shrewd storytelling revisionism, extended canonical universe and fanboys' imaginations be damned. The centerpiece of the film—the throne room scene—is pitch perfect, and killing Snoke before we learned anything about him is the point. He was just another Palpatine (and did we, in 1983, know anything about him, either?), and in shocking the audience through both killing him before IX and uniting Ren and Rey in battle, however briefly, Johnson unwrote Abrams's overweening nostalgia and freed him to finally tell a genuinely new story in the conclusion to this third trilogy. Whatever we might have "learned" about Snoke—whatever time we spent with him—would have been underwhelming and, ultimately, boring; leaving the First Order in (now) Supreme Leader Kylo Ren's hands is brilliant, bold, and wide open, narratively speaking. So much so that I can't believe Kathleen Kennedy let Johnson get away with it.

The rest is noise. And it's in Abrams's hands now, anyway. That's either very good news or very concerning. We'll see in 2019. Until then.

Coda:

 –One thing this experience, and the rift in TLJ's reception, has taught me is how difficult it is to assess a film this highly anticipated and this culturally significant based on a single viewing. I often have trouble with this: the first time I saw—to limit myself to big serial blockbusters—Skyfall, The Force Awakens, Rogue One, The Dark Knight Rises, and others, all I could register was the problems, real or imagined, with each film's script. It was only on a second or third viewing that I was actually capable of taking the film in, as a film. I'm already eager to go back and have this experience with TLJ.

–I see that there are some who feel like TLJ is basically a combination of Empire and ROTJ. I suppose this is true in a way; but I wonder how such folks feel about TFA, which at times is like a note-for-note remake of IV. In a sense, Johnson played the hand that was dealt him: if what Abrams wanted was to retell the original trilogy with new characters, Johnson sped up the process, so at least IX could be freed from all such expectations. I also happen to think TLJ is neither redundant nor predictable, but your mileage may vary.

–As for whether or not TLJ lets themes and messaging overtake the priority of story—so that, e.g., the film's gender politics become flashing neon lights instead of plot-integrated subtext—I'll just say that (first-time viewing syndrome again) I didn't even catch on to the fact that so many scenes played out between an individual man and woman, the former stubborn with pride, the latter drawing (or arguing, or fighting) said man into the good, the right, the undespairing future. I'll have to see how it plays in the second viewing. But precisely because I didn't see those flashing lights the first time, and since I don't recall a moment when the movie turns preachy, I doubt I'm going to think this is a problem, either.

Jenson on being stuck with the Bible's language

"[In my work] I have used Luther's insights [about the hiddenness of God] therapeutically, to ward off a bowdlerized apophaticism which has recently been popular. That God is unknowable must not be construed to mean that he is but vaguely glimpsed through clouds of metaphysical distance, so that we are compelled—and at liberty—to devise namings and metaphors guided by our religious needs. It means on the contrary that we are stuck with the names and descriptions the biblical narrative contingently enforces, which seem designed always to offend somebody; it means that their syntax is hidden from us, so that we cannot identify synonyms or make translations. It means that we have no standpoint from which to relativize them and project more soothing visions."

—Robert Jenson, "The Hidden and Triune God," in Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation, 69-77, at 70-71

An unpublished footnote on Longenecker on Hays on apostolic exegesis

About a year ago Pro Ecclesia published my article, "Reading the Trinity in the Bible: Assumptions, Warrants, Ends" (25:4, 459-474). On page 466 I briefly reference Richard Longenecker's position on the (non-)exemplarity of apostolic exegesis, and in turn cite Richard Hays's counter to Longenecker. Unfortunately, in the version of the article I sent to the editors, I somehow neglected to include the lengthy footnote I had written in a previous version, summarizing Longenecker's position and responding critically to it. I wish it were in print—and perhaps someday it will be—but I thought I'd publish it here, for what it's worth.

In the “Preface to the Second Edition” (Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975, 1999), xiii-xli), Longenecker responds to criticisms like mine above and those of Hays and Leithart, and engages directly with Hays (xxxiv-xxxix). He takes Hays to be missing his point, which concerns “the distinctiveness of the particular exegetical procedures and practices that Paul uses in spelling out . . . his theological approach” (xxxvi). It is these—along with, e.g., methods such as “dreams and visions, ecstatic prophecies, the fleece of a sheep, necromancy” as well as casting lots—which Longenecker deems “culturally conditioned and not normative for believers today.” He thus wants to distinguish “between (1) normative theological and ethical principles and (2) culturally conditioned methods and practices used in the support and expression of those principles,” a distinction he takes to be commonly accepted by Christian churches that are not restorationist or primitivist in bent (xxxvii). In this way, he agrees with Hays about the normativity of the New Testament’s interpretations of Scripture, but disagrees with him about their interpretive methods, judging these to be “culturally conditioned” (xxxviii). On the contrary, it is not “my business to try to reproduce the exegetical procedures and practices of the New Testament writers, particularly when they engage in . . . ‘midrash,’ ‘pesher,’ or ‘allegorical’ exegesis,” which practices “often represent a culturally specific method or reflect a revelational stance, or both.” (He does not specify what “a revelational stance” is.) Finally, Longenecker does not share Hays’s conviction about Christian hermeneutical boldness, which would seek to follow Paul’s example; similar attempts have been made in the church’s history, but “usually with disastrous results.” The proper contemporary task, for ordinary believers and Christian scholars alike, is to recontextualize the content of the apostolic proclamation today, seeking “appropriate ways and means in our day for declaring and working out the same message of good news in Christ that they proclaimed” (xxxix).

There are a number of problems here. First, regarding imitation of apostolic exegesis, it would be helpful to make a distinction between formal, material, and methodological. Longenecker is right to say that we may not need or want to imitate the apostles in the specific methods of their exegesis (though, even here, the emphasis is on “may not”). But this does not answer the larger question. Hays’s proposal is at both the formal and the material level: formally, we should read the Old Testament (with the apostles) in the light of the events (and texts) of the New; materially, we should read the Old Testament (with the apostles) as in fact prefiguring, mysteriously, the gospel of the crucified and risen Messiah and of his body, the church. In doing so, Hays suggests, we will have read well, and will be well served in our exegetical judgments.

Second, Longenecker uses the modifier “culturally conditioned” regarding apostolic practice as if it is doing a good deal more work than it is. As he allows, our own methods are equally culturally conditioned. Well, then we need reasons—good reasons—why our own exegesis definitely should not conform, or even loosely imitate, that of the apostles. Longenecker seems to think that we are a long ways away from apostolic practice. But we stand at the end of a tradition that reaches back to the New Testament, and a good deal of Christian interpretation since then has taken its lead from apostolic example; moreover, scholarly practice is not a useful indicator for the breadth of Christian exegetical habits. On the ground, churches around the world inculcate and encourage habits of reading that follow the New Testament’s example quite closely. If Longenecker’s only criterion is cultural conditionedness, does he have any objection to this? How could he?

Relatedly, third, beyond the unobjectionable fact that apostolic practice can be and has been adopted, does Longenecker have good reasons to object to Hays suggesting that apostolic practice ought to be adopted? It is not as if we are locked into the cage of our cultural context, unable to make decisions about what we should or should not do. Hays proposes we look to Paul and, in our own time and place, follow his practice in his time and place. What arguments does Longenecker have to offer against this, other than the (universally admitted and materially irrelevant) observation that the practice in question is culturally conditioned?

Fourth and finally, Longenecker veers too close to positing something like “timeless truths” in the New Testament texts, while simultaneously (and oddly) undercutting the possibility of making cross-cultural judgments about common corporate practices like reading. On the one hand, he thinks the apostles deliver to us the true and reliable gospel message, albeit arrived at by methods that are culturally conditioned and, for that reason, not to be imitated by us. On the other hand, his picture presents the methods of “then and there” as if they reside across a great unbridgeable chasm, beyond recovery or the desire for recovery; whereas the methods of “here and now” are similarly cordoned off from criticism coming, as it were, in the reverse direction—that is, criticism by the standards of the Bible’s own exegetical practices. This picture is problematic both at a historical and a theological level. Surely different eras and cultures can comment on and evaluate others, provided they do so with respect and charity. In short: Can Christians really envisage the church’s history in such a way that whole epochs are sealed off from interrogation and/or imitation, by virtue of no other fact than that they are another time and place than our own?

Patrick Leigh Fermor on prayer in the monastic life

"After the first postulate of belief, without which the life of a monk would be farcical and intolerable, the dominating fact of monastic existence is a belief in the necessity and the efficacy of prayer; and it is only by attempting to grasp the importance of this principle—a principle so utterly remote from every tendency of modern secular thought—to the monks who practise it, that one can hope to understand the basis of monasticism. This is especially true of the contemplative orders, like the Benedictines, Carthusians, Carmelites, Cistercians, Camaldulese and Sylvestrines; for the others, like the Franciscans, Dominicans or the Jesuits—are brotherhoods organised for action. They travel, teach, preach, convert, organise, plan, heal and nurse; and the material results they achieve make them, if not automatically admirable, at least comprehensible to the Time-Spirit. They get results; they deliver the goods. But what (the Time-Spirit asks) what good do the rest do, immured in monasteries far from contact with the world?

"The answer is—if the truth of the Christian religion and the efficacy of prayer are both dismissed as baseless—no more than any other human beings who lead a good life, make (for they support themselves) no economic demands on the community, harm no one and respect their neighbours. But, should the two principles be admitted—particularly, for the purposes of this particular theme, the latter—their power for good is incalculable. Belief in this power, and in the necessity of worshipping God daily and hourly, is the mainspring of Benedictine life. It was this belief that, in the sixth century, drove St. Benedict into the solitude of a cave in the Sabine gorges and, after three years of private ascesis, prompted him to found the first Benedictine communities. His book, The Rule of St. Benedict—seventy-three short and sagacious chapters explaining the theory and codifying the practice of the cenobitic life—is aimed simply at securing for his monks protection against the world, so that nothing should interfere with the utmost exploitation of this enormous force. The vows embracing poverty, chastity and obedience were destined to smite from these men all fetters that chained them to the world, to free them for action, for the worship of God and the practice of prayer; for the pursuit, in short, of sanctity. Worship found its main expression, of course, in the Mass; but the offices of the seven canonical hours that follow the Night Office of Matins—Lauds, Prime, Tierce, Sext, Nones, Vespers and Compline, a cycle that begins in the small hours of the night and finishes after sunset—kept, and keep the monks on parade, as it were, with an almost military rigour. Their programme for the day involves three-and-a-half or four hours in church. But other periods, quite separate from the time devoted to study, are set aside for the reading of the martyrology in the chapter-house, for self-examination, private prayer and meditation.

"One has only to glance at the mass of devotional and mystical works which have appeared throughout the Christian era to get an idea of the difficulty, the complexity, the pitfalls and the rewards of this form of spiritual exercise. However strange these values may appear to the homme moyen sensuel, such are the pursuits that absorb much of a monk’s life. They range from a repetition of the simpler prayers, sometimes tallied by the movement of beads through the fingers, to an advanced intellectual skill in devotion and meditation; and occasionally rise to those hazardous mystical journeys of the soul which culminate, at the end of the purgative and illuminative periods, in blinding moments of union with the Godhead; experiences which the poverty of language compels the mystics who experience them to describe in the terminology of profane love: a kind of personal, face-to-face intimacy, the very inkling of which, since Donne, Quarles, Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne wrote their poems, has drained away from life in England.

"With this daily, unflagging stream of worship, a volume of prayer ascends, of which, if it is efficacious, we are all the beneficiaries. Between people pledged to those spiritual allegiances, 'Pray for me' and 'Give me your blessing' are no polite formulæ, but requests for definite, effective acts. And it is easy to imagine the value and fame, before the growth of scepticism, of men whose lives were spent hammering out in silent factories these imponderable but priceless benefits. They are the anonymous well-wishers who reduce the moral overdraft of mankind, les paratonnerres (as Huysmans says) de la société. Life, for a monk, is shorter than the flutter of an eyelid in comparison to eternity, and this fragment of time flits past in the worship of God, the salvation of his soul, and in humble intercession for the souls of his fellow exiles from felicity."

—Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence (1957), 26-29 (paragraph breaks mine)

Happy news: I'm editing a collection of Jenson's writings on Scripture

I am delighted to announce that I have signed a contract with Oxford University Press to edit a collection of the late Robert Jenson's writings. Tentatively titled The Triune Story: Essays on Scripture, it will gather together more than three dozen of Jenson's theological essays on the Bible, spanning more than four decades of his career.

My thanks to Cynthia Read and to the editorial team at Oxford for supporting this book. Before his passing earlier this fall, Jens gave the project his blessing, and I hope it is a testament to the beauty and abiding value of his work both for the church and for the theological academy.

My hope is to have the book published by the end of next year, though that obviously depends on many forces outside my control. Perhaps even in time for a session at AAR/SBL...?

In any case, this has been an idea in the back of my mind for a few years now, and it's a joy to see it become a (proleptic) reality. Now y'all just be sure to buy it when it comes out.

The Holy One of Israel: A Sermon on Leviticus 19

A reading from the book of Leviticus, chapter 19, verses 1-4, 9-18.

“The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. You shall revere your mother and father, and you shall keep my sabbaths: I am the Lord your God. Do not turn to idols or make cast images for yourselves: I am the Lord your God….

“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.

“You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the Lord.

“You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.

“You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the Lord.

“You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”

The word of the Lord:
Thanks be to God.

May the words of my mouth
And the meditation of my heart
Be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, our rock and our redeemer: Amen.

_______________

Some years ago I was listening to a round-table of ethicists discussing a series of moral and political questions centered on human dignity and worth. A token theologian was included in the round-table for good measure. At some point one of the ethicists referred off-hand to how every human being is holy. It wasn’t a major point; it appeared to be a kind of throwaway comment, a premise assumed to be shared by everyone at the table, not least the theologian. But the theologian broke in and brusquely asserted the following:

“Human beings are not holy. Only God is holy.”

The bare, unqualified nature of the flat denial and exclusive affirmation stopped me cold. Surely the ethicist was simply saying in a roundabout way something unobjectionable: that human beings have value, that human life—as many of us are wont to say—is “sacred.” Is it, strictly speaking, true that human beings are not holy? Is it necessary to say so in such extreme terms?

The answer, I have come to see, is yes. The theologian was right—as we occasionally are. God alone is holy. Human beings are not holy. But that is not all there is to say. Because there is an intimate, unbreakable connection between these two statements; for there is an intimate, unbreakable relationship between the two characters or subjects spoken of in them, that is, a relationship between the One who alone is holy and those who are not holy, but may and will and shall be. A relationship of transformation, the name for which is sanctification.

If the Bible is anything, it is a book about sanctification: about the one and only Holy God’s undying and infallible will (1 Thess 4:5) to make holy what is not holy, to sanctify a people, to hallow the whole creation. Indeed, the gospel is the good news of holiness. How so?

Start—as every entertaining sermon does—with Leviticus. Here we are, in the middle of the Torah, listening in as God commands Moses to command the people of Israel how they are to live. And the fundamental umbrella command, beneath which all the other commands take their place and from which they derive their meaning, is the drumbeat of the book as a whole: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev 19:2; cf. 1 Pet 1:14). So holiness is a command, but a command to a particular people, Israel, rooted in the nature of a particular God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Lord of Hosts and creator of the world.

So at the outset, holiness is twofold.

On the one hand: Holiness is a principal attribute of the only true and living God, the God of Israel. Holiness means: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Holiness means: The idols of the nations are lifeless, they neither hear nor speak nor save. Holiness means: There is no court of appeal, no judge or Lord or sovereign or power, in heaven or on earth or under the earth, which one might petition, to which one might flee for refuge, apart from this God, the imageless and absolutely transcendent One, enthroned between the cherubim. Holiness means: Indivisible, inescapable, unquenchable life, without source or loss, beginning or end—a burning jealousy as unyielding as the grave.

On the other hand: Holiness is unlike other divine attributes, known technically as “non-communicable” attributes because God does not, because God could not, communicate them to creatures. Such attributes include omniscience, omnipotence—the omni’s in general. Whether or not we should understand humanity as originally created holy (I’m ambivalent about that), in a world ruled by the powers of sin and death, human beings are not and have never been holy, much less holy as God is holy. Yet here, right in the heart of the Torah, almost literally at its centerpoint, we hear God command Israel to be holy. So holiness is somehow a possibility, or at least an expectation, for human beings; or, if not for humanity as a whole, at least for Abraham’s children.

What does holiness entail for Israel? It appears to be a sort of image of the divine holiness, a creaturely counterpart to the uncreated holiness of the Lord. Just as God is utterly and unmistakably distinct both from the world and from the gods of the nations, so Israel is to be visibly and clearly distinct in and from the world, set apart from and among the nations. Israel is to be different.

And this difference is to go all the way down, to be inscribed on the body of Israel. Food, sex, hair, land, crops, money, family, parents and children, husbands and wives, rulers and ruled, priests and otherwise, rich and poor, landed and homeless, native and alien—holiness touches everything and everyone, it is comprehensive and all-consuming, its details are exhaustive (not to say exhausting), and it knows no such thing as the separation of religious from political from moral from liturgical from family from individual from communal from economic from…(fill in the blank). Holiness encompasses everything, because holiness concerns God, and God is at once the maker of human life and the author of the covenant. There is nothing that is not the business of Israel’s God.

It doesn’t take, however. Or rather, it takes, but it doesn’t do the job. The commands do indeed set Israel apart from the nations, but the living, burning holiness of the Lord God—the jealous fire that cuts to the heart—it fails to take exclusive, permanent hold; it does spadework against injustice and idolatry, but it does not cut them out, root and branch. They keep sprouting up, in the heart and in the land. What must be done to ignite the consuming fire of God in the midst of the people of God without setting them ablaze—without burning them up, leaving nothing but a valley of dead, dry bones?

Before he dies, Moses tells us. Through Moses, God promises Israel that, following its waywardness and disobedience, following its failure to love God and to keep God’s commandments, following its punishment and exile and re-gathering in the land—after all that, then God will perform a mighty deed: “the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, in order that you may live” (Deut 30:6).

None other than God will do so, because none other than God can do so. The mark of the covenant on the body of Israel will cut to the heart. God will make it so, because God is able, and God’s grace to Israel is everlasting. Likewise, the command to be holy is transformed from an imperative to a promise: No longer, “Be holy,” but, “You shall be holy, for I myself will make you holy.” Indeed, circumcision of the heart just is what it means to be holy to the Lord. God will give Israel a holiness proper to human beings, but a holiness from beyond their means or ken: God’s own holiness.

For the Holy One was made flesh and tabernacled among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace, the grace of holiness. The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus, the Messiah and Holy One of Israel (John 1:14-17).

Holiness is incarnate in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Holiness touches the body, the flesh and blood of a human being, this one Jew. Holiness cuts to the heart of this one. He is absolutely set apart; he is one of us, but he is not us. He is different. His life is a single sustained offering to the God of Israel, every minute and every action dedicated to the will and glory of the Lord. He loves the Lord, his God and Father, with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength. He is ablaze with the fire of God’s Holy Spirit, but he is not consumed; his flesh, like the leaves of the bush at Horeb, is not burnt up (Exod 3:1-2). He, Jesus, is holy, as God is holy.

And when God makes the life of Jesus, the Lord’s servant, an offering for sin (Isa 53:10), God does not abandon him to the grave, will not let his Holy One see decay (Ps 16:10; Acts 2:27). God raises him from the dead with power through the Spirit of holiness (Rom 1:4): The Holy One is alive; the fire is not quenched. And by the will of God, we have been made holy through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (Heb 10:10). The righteous one has made many righteous; the Holy One has made many holy (Isa 53:11). For the holiness of Christ is a hallowing holiness, a sanctifying sanctity. As the Father hallows his name (Matt 6:9), so the Son sanctifies himself for our sakes, that we might be sanctified in the truth of God’s love (John 17:18-19); and God’s love, the flaming tongues of God’s holy word (Acts 2:3), has been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given us (Rom 5:5).

And through the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead (Rom 8:11), we are a temple of God’s Holy Spirit (1 Cor 3:16), holy bodies bearing the Holy One in our midst, saints circumcised in the heart through baptism into his death. We ourselves are the one body of Christ, set apart from and for the world, ministers of and witnesses to his holiness. He commands us to be holy; he has made us holy; he shall make us holy at the last. For the one who began the work of sanctification among us will bring it to completion on the day of Jesus Christ (Phil 1:6).

We bear the holiness of God to one another, this unmerited and unpossessable gift of the thrice-holy triune God of Israel. The holy Father, the holy Son, the Holy Spirit: This God, the one God, our God, is with us. We stand in the presence of the living God, at the foot of the sacred mountain (Heb 12:18-24), as God’s holy people—and we are not burnt up.

On the church's eternality and "church as mission"

"The Church is Catholic, that is, universal. First, it is universal in place, because it is worldwide. This is contrary to the error of the Donatists. For the Church is a congregation of the faithful; and since the faithful are in every part of the world, so also is the Church: 'Your faith is spoken of in the whole world' [Rm 1:8]. And also: 'Go into the whole world and preach the gospel to every creature' [Mk 16:15]. Long ago, indeed, God was known only in Judea; now, however, He is known throughout the entire world. The Church has three parts: one is on earth, one is in heaven, and one is in purgatory.

"Second, the Church is universal in regard to all the conditions of mankind; for no exceptions are made, neither master nor servant, neither man nor woman: 'Neither bond nor free; there is neither male nor female' [Gal 3:28].

"Third, it is universal in time. Some have said that the Church will exist only up to a certain time. But this is false, for the Church began to exist in the time of Abel and will endure up to the end of the world: 'Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world' [Mt 28:20]. Moreover, even after the end of the world, it will continue to exist in heaven [Sed post consummationem saeculi remanebit in caelo]."

This is Thomas Aquinas's all too brief discussion of the church's catholicity in his exposition of the Apostles' Creed. Yesterday on Twitter I quoted the last section, on the eternality or temporal catholicity of the church, with some comments following it. Specifically, I wrote, "This text is ground zero for returning to the Bible to counter the argument that the church—God's people— is constituted by mission."

I got a lot of helpful replies, mostly pushing back or challenging my challenge to the claim that the church is constituted by mission. As I said later, the tweets weren't intended primarily to be polemical; I was preparing to teach Thomas's text in class, and so I jotted some thoughts down on Twitter before heading off. And though John Flett's The Witness of God is on my shelf, I've yet to read it, so I can't speak substantively to where our disagreements might lie, if anywhere.

But let me float a few questions to the church-as-mission folks, for greater clarity of understanding, at least on my side of things.

First, what motivates the claim that mission constitutes the church? Or, put differently, what are the stakes? One reply requested a less polarizing approach to this question. My response was and is this: I'm trying to lower the volume in our ecclesiological rhetoric. My sense is that, in recent decades and perhaps the last century, talk about mission has become over-inflated relative to its material importance to the doctrine of the church as such. What I'd like to say, simply, is: Mission is a crucial feature of the church, though it neither defines nor constitutes it. Or perhaps: Mission constitutes the church militant, but not the church triumphant. My question is: What would be lost if we say "the mission is consummated with the kingdom's coming in full, yet the church endures in the new creation as God's elect and holy people," etc., etc.?

Second, is there biblical support for the church's "sending" being something other than or beyond what is spelled out in Matthew 28:19-20 and Acts 1:8? That is, is God's people "sent" prior to Christ's sending of the apostles (and the apostolic church) or following his second advent? Where in the Bible suggests that?

Third, all the counter-proposals I saw (on Twitter: again, Flett excepted) very quickly became metaphorical in the extreme and/or reductive to the point of emptying the concept. That is, "sending" is interpreted in terms of Gregory of Nyssa's epektasis, the never-ending journey into the infinite life of the triune God's eternal, inexhaustible fellowship. (My friend Myles Werntz posed this idea.) Well, okay ... but what work is "sending" doing there that epektasis isn't already doing? Why hold on to "sending" when we have another term or concept that is perfectly adequate to the job? Others suggested something like the church's never-ending task in the eschaton of worshiping God or testifying to one another about God's grace and love. Sure, those are traditionally (and biblically) the description of what it is we'll be doing in the kingdom; but what conceptual connection exists between those activities and "being sent"? All kinds of descriptions of life in resurrected glory exist in the church's tradition, and few to none include or require language of "sending." (Cf. Dante's Paradiso.) So what, again, does "sending" add materially to the description? "Sending" cannot and should be reduced to "asked/called to do stuff"/"tasked with actions from and for God." Why not advert, say, to cultic language, in which we will all be priests, ministering in the one temple of the one new world of God? You don't need "sending" language for that.

So on and so forth. But my fourth and last query gets to the heart of the matter, I think, which is this: My push-back on church-as-mission is meant, theologically, to de-center ecclesiology that (a) makes Israel secondary or subordinate to the missionary church and/or (b) conceives of election and peoplehood as essentially instrumental, coordinated as a means to some greater end. My counter—and this will be the article, God willing, I write sometime in the next few years—is that divine election to peoplehood is in part an end in itself. Israel is called to be holy, set apart from the nations, to witness to the divine glory and grace, and to be a divine blessing to the nations: yes and amen. But Israel is also called by God simply out of God's inexplicable, unpredictable love for Israel, and therefore out of God's bottomless desire to bless the children of Abraham, the friend of God. Pentecost and ekklesia open up the people of God to the gentiles through faith in Israel's Messiah, and indeed, that was always God's intention for the world; hence the mission to the nations, Christ's sending of the apostles to every corner of the earth as his witnesses. But when the mission is completed—when the gospel has been proclaimed to every nation and people under the sun, when "the full number of the gentiles has come in" (Rom 11:25)—then all Israel will be saved, and will live as God's people under God's reign in God's new creation, no longer sent, but gathered in the city of God where God dwells with them, they as his people, he as their God. But "peoplehood" will not be defunct as a concept in the same way as "mission," for the saints in glory will not be a mere aggregate of individuals, but the corporate bride of Christ, the holy Israel of YHWH, from everlasting to everlasting.

Those are the stakes as I see them. But what say y'all?

On Markan priority

This semester I'm teaching two sections of a course for freshmen of all majors on the Gospels. It's the professor's discretion to pick one of the Gospels to focus on for the majority of the semester, and while I flirted with the Gospel of John (before I learned that it had to be a Synoptic), I eventually chose Mark. I've now been teaching it, ever so slowly, for the last five weeks—and we're only through the beginning of chapter 9, having discussed the transfiguration today. (We've skipped ahead to a couple teachings, such as on marriage, but otherwise we're going chapter by chapter.) Next week we follow Jesus into Jerusalem for his triumphal entry and prophetic demonstration in the temple.

Reading and re-reading and teaching Mark has raised anew for me the question of Markan priority. I teach, following the overwhelming majority of New Testament scholars, that Mark was most likely the first Gospel written, and that both Matthew and Luke used Mark as a primary source. If I had to bet, that's still by far the choice I would go with.

Having said that...

Spend some time with Mark, and you'll notice just how expertly crafted it is; just how richly artistic and intentional its literary, structural, thematic, and theological features are. My sense is that at least part of the case made for Matthew and Luke's dependence on Mark is their "cleaning up" of Mark's roughness. Except that there is no reason in principle to take Mark's roughness as an accidental aspect of the Gospel, that is, to take it as a function of a hurried or rushed composition, unrelated to the purpose and stylistic substance of the work.

Because Mark's no-frills style is part and parcel of the subtle, sophisticated portrait of Jesus the Gospel offers to its readers. (One student compared the opening two dozen verses of the Gospel to a movie trailer: action, CUT, action, CUT, action, CUT—new scenes piling on top of one another with neither commentary nor context.) And the literary intentionality is undeniable: doubled episodes, intercalation, the messianic mystery, the triple repetition of Jesus's prediction of suffering in Jerusalem, the drum-beat refrain of the disciples' (most of all Peter's) absolute failure to understand Jesus, the allusions (centrally in the opening handful of verses) to Isaiah 40–55, the circumspect but exhaustive affirmation of Jesus's divine power and authority, the elusive and unsettling account of the resurrection, the irony of who it is that recognizes Jesus and who does not, the would-be angel's exhortation to the women (and so to the disciples, and so to the reader) to "return to Galilee" and to discover the living Jesus there—i.e., in the pages of the very same Gospel—etc., etc.

So what would have to be the case for Mark not to have been the first Gospel written? Matthew would probably have to be first instead, using his own materials (and perhaps something like "Q"), composed just before or after the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D.; and Mark, receiving Matthew's Gospel—let's say in Rome, only months or 1-2 years after Matthew's composition—gives us not just the cliff notes, but a much less explicit, a much less didactic, a much less prolix and embroidered Gospel, one emphasizing mystery, secrecy, failure, shame, suffering, and irony—perhaps under the influence of Paul or one of his coworkers, perhaps under the heightened pressures of persecution in the imperial capital, perhaps aiming for something both more concretely close to the ground of Palestine yet accessible to gentile Christians in south-central Europe unfamiliar with Jewish groups, conventions, and language in and around Galilee and Jerusalem, perhaps even a hear-it-in-a-single-sitting biography-Gospel for Pauline-like churches that lacked something so rich in narrative detail but for whom Matthew's Gospel would be too invested in intra-Jewish polemic and interpretive dispute over Torah to be existentially and spiritually significant.

Perhaps. It's a long shot. It's unlikely. I know I'm not the first one to suggest it. But it's a thought.

From "Sent Mail": on contemporary praise and worship music

I am exactly one step away from entering full-on Amos prophetic mode with contemporary praise and worship songs. It's not that it's bad. Church music has, parish to parish, congregation to congregation, been bad since time immemorial. It's something else entirely.

The content is so spectacularly, even impressively, vacuous that it it nigh un-Christian. The words are so consistently monosyllabic that one would think the phrases are meant to be understood by kindergartners. The only characters in the songs are the otherwise unnamed pronouns "You" and "I." "You" is, so far as I can tell, generally benign, and makes "I" feel good, but I've yet to figure anything else about him/her/it, or even about "I," except that "I" thinks about "I" a whole lot, especially "I's" emotional well-being.

I am persuaded that the songwriters have together signed a blood-pact never, on principle, to use language that is from, or could be taken by a seeker to be from, the Bible—which is the only possible explanation for the lack of any scriptural terminology, stories, echoes, allusions, personal names, or titles for God. Protestants used to think the pope had a special meeting place in the Vatican for consultations with Satan; I'm convinced some similar bargain has been reached by the lords of CCM. Nothing else except a diabolical conspiracy can make sense of it.