New article published: “The Church and the Spirit in Robert Jenson's Theology of Scripture" in Pro Ecclesia

I have an article in a two-part symposium in Pro Ecclesia commemorating the life and thought of Robert Jenson, and though the issues are not yet published, my article is available in an early, online-first capacity. Here's the abstract:

In the last two decades of Robert Jenson’s career, he turned his attention to the doctrine of Scripture and its theological interpretation. This article explores the dogmatic structure and reasoning that underlie Jenson’s thought on this topic. After summarizing his theology of Scripture as the great drama of the Trinity in saving relation to creation, the article unpacks the doctrinal loci that materially inform Jenson’s account of the Bible and its role in the church. Ecclesiology and pneumatology emerge as the dominant doctrines; these in turn raise questions regarding Jenson’s treatment of the church’s defectability: that is, whether and how, if at all, the church may fail in its teaching and thus in its reading of Scripture.

Check out the whole thing here.

Tolkien on the temptations of rule

“...our time is at hand: the world of Men, which we must rule. But we must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see. ...

"A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all. There is no hope left in Elves or dying Númenor. This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it. As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.”

—Saruman to Gandalf, in The Lord of the Rings, Book II, Chapter 2, "The Council of Elrond"

(I see now that many, many others online and elsewhere have seen in this quote the ongoing relevance it has to any number of important issues today; but since I'd yet to notice that, perhaps others haven't as well.)

Denise Levertov: “Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell"

Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell

By Denise Levertov

Down through the tomb's inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo
to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber:
the merciful dead, the prophets,
the innocents just His own age and those
unnumbered others waiting here
unaware, in an endless void He is ending
now, stooping to tug at their hands,
to pull them from their sarcophagi,
dazzled, almost unwilling. Didmas,
neighbor in death, Golgotha dust
still streaked on the dried sweat of his body
no one had washed and anointed, is here,
for sequence is not known in Limbo;
the promise, given from cross to cross
at noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn.
All these He will swiftly lead
to the Paradise road: they are safe.
That done, there must take place that struggle
no human presumes to picture:
living, dying, descending to rescue the just
from shadow, were lesser travails
than this: to break
through earth and stone of the faithless world
back to the cold sepulchre, tearstained
stifling shroud; to break from them
back into breath and heartbeat, and walk
the world again, closed into days and weeks again,
wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit
streaming through every cell of flesh
so that if mortal sight could bear
to perceive it, it would be seen
His mortal flesh was lit from within, now,
and aching for home. He must return,
first, in Divine patience, and know
hunger again, and give
to humble friends the joy
of giving Him food—fish and a honeycomb.

Denise Levertov: “On a Theme from Julian's Chapter XX"

On a Theme from Julian's Chapter XX

By Denise Levertov

Six hours outstretched in the sun, yes,
hot wood, the nails, blood trickling
into the eyes, yes—
but the thieves on their neighbor crosses
survived till after the soldiers
had come to fracture their legs, or longer.
Why single out the agony? What’s
a mere six hours?
Torture then, torture now,
the same, the pain’s the same,
immemorial branding iron,
electric prod.
Hasn’t a child
dazed in the hospital ward they reserve
for the most abused, known worse?
The air we’re breathing,
these very clouds, ephemeral billows
languid upon the sky’s
moody ocean, we share
with women and men who’ve held out
days and weeks on the rack—
and in the ancient dust of the world
what particles
of the long tormented,
what ashes.

But Julian’s lucid spirit leapt
to the difference:
perceived why no awe could measure
that brief day’s endless length,
why among all the tortured
One only is “King of Grief.”
The oneing, she saw, the oneing
with the Godhead opened Him utterly
to the pain of all minds, all bodies
—sands of the sea, of the desert—
from first beginning
to last day. The great wonder is
that the human cells of His flesh and bone
didn’t explode
when utmost Imagination rose
in that flood of knowledge. Unique
in agony, Infinite strength, Incarnate,
empowered Him to endure
inside of history,
through those hours when he took to Himself
the sum total of anguish and drank
even the lees of that cup:

within the mesh of the web, Himself
woven within it, yet seeing it,
seeing it whole. Every sorrow and desolation
He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.

The blurbs are in for The Triune Story

I couldn't be more pleased to share the following four blurbs for The Triune Story: Essays on Scripture, the volume of the late Robert Jenson's writings on the Bible that I am editing for Oxford University Press. Due later this summer, pre-order your copy today!

"Robert Jenson was undoubtedly one of the most influential and original English-speaking theologians of the last half century, eloquent, controversial, profoundly in love with the God of Jewish and Christian Scripture. This invaluable collection shows us the depth and quality of his engagement with the text of Scripture: we follow him in his close reading of various passages and his tracing of various themes, and emerge with a renewed appreciation of the scope of his doctrinal vision. He offers a model of committed, prayerful exegesis which is both a joy and a challenge to read." —Rowan Williams

"Robert Jenson never needed to be reminded that the most interesting thing about the Bible is God. For those frustrated by biblical scholars apparently willing to harangue us about anything but God, The Triune Story will come as a healing draught. With vigor, clarity, and learning, Jenson reminds us that the apostolic faith, ancient yet always future, is the only true key to the understanding and interpretation of Scripture." —Christopher Bryan, author of The Resurrection of the Messiah and Listening to the Bible

"The never ending task of helping students learn how to read scripture theologically just got a lot easier with this collection. Jenson had a lot to say about the theological interpretation of scripture—much of it important and worthy of offering to future generations as an able guide into the strange world of the bible. Jenson's work on scripture will also be studied by generations of historians and theologians who will want to see a theologian in full intellectual flight thinking about scripture and society and doing so with a seriousness almost unmatched in the latter half of the twenty century. This is a book both important and necessary." —Willie James Jennings, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies, Yale Divinity School

"In a cultural and theological milieu in the twentieth century that viewed the Bible as a book from the past, Robert Jenson put the biblical story as a living Word of God at the center of his thought. The essays in this rich collection are as fresh and stimulating today as they were when first published." —Robert Louis Wilken, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity, University of Virginia

Thoughts about Don Winslow's Cartel Trilogy

1. I initially called it his Border Trilogy, but then I remembered that name's already taken.

2. What Winslow has done in these books is impressive, in literary terms, and powerful, in terms of educating the reading public while also entertaining them. Little did he know when he began writing the first book nearly 20 years ago how relevant, and prescient, the topic of the drug war and its ever-widening social, moral, and political consequences would be.

3. Winslow is a gifted writer. His prose is propulsive, soaked in adrenaline and masculine energy, in all its creative and destructive forms. His control of tone, voice, character, cultural reference (popular and "high"), and biblical allusion is masterful. The complexity of his plots, the centripetal force drawing their far-flung lines of action to some center or centers of encounter and explosion (often literal), is enthralling. The man was born to do this.

4. The TV adaptation of the trilogy, on FX, is therefore going to be a blast to watch.

5. Having said all that... I found myself disappointed with The Border, and increasingly so as the book wore on. At over 700 pages, it brings the trilogy as a whole (following The Power of the Dog and The Cartel) to around 2,000 pages. In the end, the series makes for diminishing returns. I would recommend POTD to anyone, so long as they could stomach some intense, though realistic, violence and sex. The sequel was nearly as good, though the ending was a betrayal, in my view, and some of the flaws that would drag down the conclusion began to show up here. What are some of those flaws?

6. First, the sheer gratuity of the sex and violence becomes pornographic. It's superfluous, upsetting, and finally boring. Winslow, like so many genre artists, wants to have his cake and eat it too: to titillate readers then to indict them for it, given the who and the what and the how and the what-for of what's on the page. In other words, it's Truffaut's principle about war films applied to the drug war journo-novel: reveling in the glorious debauchery and hedonism of the money, power, fame, and pleasure that comes with the illegal drug trade only to reveal the nauseating rot that underwrites it all. There is (I believe) a way of showing the behavior and experiences of those who themselves revel in the extravagance made possible by drug trafficking without inviting readers to be voyeurs, to enjoy what they see, even if from afar. Call it the Goodfellas problem. However brilliant the third act, the first two acts of a story don't vanish into thin air once the bad guys get their comeuppance. Portray them as they feel in the moment (rather than as they are in lamentable fact), and you glorify The Life, whatever the consequences awaiting them down the line.

In short, I just got sick of it all. And I realized, whether it's Winslow or another genre author, I think I'm done with this sort of thing. It's just too much. Life's too short to have your nose rubbed in this wretchedness. Morally (and Winslow thinks his novels have a moral perspective), it's ugly; artistically, it's unnecessary and self-defeating.

7. The great temptation today is to make Relevant Art, where "relevant" means "speaking in terms that correspond directly and literally to the loudest and most public events on the American scene," and where "art" means "a vehicle for a thesis about said scene, didactically delivered, preferably reducible to a single statement about 'what it all means.'" Alas, Winslow has, with The Border, made Relevant Art.

8. How so? Well, Trump and his son-in-law and a Mueller stand-in all play central roles. You read that right. It's as bad as it sounds. Actually, it's worse.

Perhaps I shouldn't say "central." They aren't page-to-page speaking characters (though we do meet all of them face to face, as it were). But they're there on every page, whether as background, subtext, or pseudonym.

In fact, the climax of the narrative—I kid you not—has the protagonist of all three books, Art Keller, testifying before Congress (on and on and on he drones, with impressive, dizzying self-righteousness), the dramatic upshot of which concerns whether the Attorney General will appoint a Special Counsel. Winslow actually has his Trump stand-in, Dennison, fire Mueller-1, only for Keller's testimony to elicit a Mueller-2 to replace him. (Whoops: maybe should have delayed publication by a year or so...)

It dawned on me in the last 100 pages of the novel: I was reading Resistance Fan Fiction. A fever dream of anti-Trump Earth-2 wishful thinking. What an error in judgment.

9. Because Winslow views this Trilogy as educational entertainment, he also indulges himself with a C-plot that bears no relationship the rest of the story, except by the most indirect and least consequential reckoning, and even that in a terribly forced way. The plot tracks a 10-year old boy from the slums of Guatemala all the way north across the Texas border, through the immigration system once he's caught, into street crime in New York City, and finally in a wildly implausible intersection with three other (actual) characters. Why, you might ask, are we reading the tale of this boy, Nico? There's only one answer: to inform American readers What It's Like. What it's like, that is to say, to live in poverty in Latin America, to consider migrating to El Norte, to actually undertake the terribly dangerous journey, etc., etc., etc.

It's a Ripped From The Headlines Vox Explainer Piece, in novelized form. It does not work. It has no reason internal to the novel for its own existence. It exists because readers are wondering about such things, so Winslow will give it to them—even if it adds 150 pages to an already enormous book.

10. Last, Winslow already failed his lead character, Keller, in the finale of The Cartel, and The Border only extends the problem. I won't elaborate on the plot details, only to say that what makes the Trilogy work, when it does, is its willingness to let the tragic realities of the drug war bear, without sentimental qualification, on the lives and psyches of its fictional characters. But there's one, 2,000-page exception to this rule: the hero. He is insulated from it all, as if he has a force field protecting him—not just from bullets, but from any and all other consequences of his and others' actions. Divine providence (i.e., Don Winslow) just can't let Keller take a fall. Though he doesn't ride into the sunset, he does see one, looking across the border with his wife, on the final page of the book. They need a cane and a walker, respectively, to make it down the hill on their newly purchased land—but they're there, and it's theirs.

This is the same man who commits perjury before Congress and murders a man in cold blood, in addition to all the other extralegal and immoral and morally gray actions he commits across four decades for the simple reason (which Winslow has him earnestly report) that he's a "patriot." This is a man who makes a deal with the devil then, at the end of book 2, gets to shoot the devil twice in the face before walking out of the jungle, and taking a flight home to see his love.

The problem isn't that Keller "needs" to be "punished." It isn't that he lives. It's that the rules of the story that Winslow sets up from the beginning, and consistently lets play out in the lives of his characters up to the end, do not apply to the man at the center. It doesn't help that when Keller gets to speechifying in front of Congress, it reads like Winslow's (actual, not hypothetical) op-eds in favor of legalizing all drugs, ending mandatory minimums, so on and so forth. Fictional heroes usually embody their creators' aspirations for themselves, but in this case the self-projected myth-making goes so far as to undermine everything that made the story worth reading, and telling, in the first place.

Two thoughts on Adam Nayman on A Clockwork Orange

You should be reading the film criticism of Adam Nayman. Last week he wrote at The Ringer about Stanley Kubrick's adaption of A Clockwork Orange "in the age of cancellation," i.e., in a time when works of art deemed "problematic" are censored, edited, or banned. Or at least when such a fate is wished upon them by screaming hordes online.

I have two thoughts in response to his piece on ACO, which as usual is an excellent, thoughtful engagement with a difficult and culturally influential film.

First, toward the end of the essay he writes the following:

"It’s hard to say what’s more boring: The idea that a good movie is one made by a good person and/or contains content that could be considered progressive for its time and place, or the shouting-down of that position from those whose investment in rejecting it can seem condescending or creepy."

This is a genuinely strange dichotomy to pose, and there is only one plausible source for it: Twitter, or social media more generally. Surely Nayman knows there are—no joke—real-life, actual arguments, in print, in reputable journals and magazines, going back decades (and more), about the reception of art whose content or creator is morally questionable? Whereas the first item in his dichotomy is a culturally powerful, and growing, one, the second item he opposes to it is limited to a minuscule chorus of internet trolls who represent nothing and no one. Framing it in the way that he does, however, presents a faux false choice between two apparently equally bad options. Yet the falseness of the false choice is in the set-up, not in the actual positions available on the issue.

So either Nayman really thinks these are the options before us, or he is taking the easy way out and presenting a fake dilemma he knows is built on straw. Or, I suppose—what's best for him and worst for us—he, like so many who write about film and the arts today, spends too much online. Twitter distorts the mind, y'all. Get off it.

Second, he concludes the essay with the following paragraph:

"A Clockwork Orange is worth defending and decrying, although it’s not like coming down one way or the other is going to have much effect on a movie that’s already been elevated into the canon, and whose influence—from countless dorm rooms and laptop desktops adorned with posters and screenshots—is already massive. In truth, we don’t need another essay on A Clockwork Orange. But I do think we need the movie itself, not just because its problematic aspects are so bound up in its power, but because of what it says about the psychology of cancellation itself, and the unnaturalness of censorship and the comforting lie of 'bad apples,' which reassures us that it is other people who are rotten to the core. To paraphrase Kael, we become clockwork oranges if we reject difficult art without asking what’s inside us first. And it’s better to watch A Clockwork Orange than to be one."

This is a brilliant ending, and a point I largely endorse, since it's implicitly Augustinian: original sin means that, under fallen conditions, every artist and every work of art is implicated in evil—there's no way out. Which need not lead to either license or excuse or flattening of complicity in evil; but at a minimum it makes the correct diagnosis and eliminates the vacuous hope of "pure" art.

A minor addendum, however, from this unrecovered moralist: in point of fact, we don't "need" A Clockwork Orange, and for most of us, it would be better not to watch it at all. ACO and films like it—that is, works of visual art that depict or engage in gratuitous sex, violence, or vulgarity in such a way as to indict the viewer's own imlication or pleasure in them—fall prey to Truffaut's critique of anti-war films: the medium undermines the message. All anti-war films ultimately end up glorifying war; mutatis mutandis, the same goes for films that attempt to critique decadence by enacting it. Martin Scorsese is postmodernism's guilty auteur de jour here: Goodfellas, Casino, and The Wolf of Wall Street fail at exactly this point.

Which isn't to render a quick and easy No against these movies, or to argue that no one should see them, or to suggest that they don't have subtle things to say worth attending to in critical essays like the one Nayman's just written. Only to say that, all things being equal, A Clockwork Orange might do more harm than good, either in one's own life or in the broader culture; and that can be true at the same time that everything approbative Nayman says about the film is true, too.

Art's complicated. Cliché though it is, nevertheless it's one more reason, among many others, to resist cancellation culture, however "problematic" the work in question.

Pre-order The Triune Story today!

Good news: the book I am editing for Oxford University Press, The Triune Story: Essays on Scripture—a comprehensive collection of the late theologian Robert Jenson's writings on the Bible, with a foreword by Bruce Marshall—is available online at both OUP's website and Amazon.

Oxford says the book will be out mid-June; Amazon says mid-July. I'd go with Amazon on that one. I'm working on indexing the book right now, after which point, late this month, I'll get the proofs. So perhaps the revised proofs will be ready by May 1? I don't know how quickly the turnaround is on these kinds of books, but perhaps quicker than I imagined. We also need to get the blurbs, about which more soon.

But, anyway, I only just happened upon this bit of news, and I couldn't be more delighted. This volume is going to be a real resource going forward, for Jenson scholars as well as for theologians interested in Scripture more broadly. I can't wait for y'all to have it in your hands.

And speaking of which, pre-order today! And how could you not, gazing on that gorgeous cover (image by the great Chris Green):

Gentiles exiting the faith

It seems to me that most Christians today—in my context, I mean: college-educated or middle-class American Christians, especially those raised in the church—see their spiritual options as basically threefold. Either they maintain Christian faith of some kind; or they become spiritual but not religious; or they become officially agnostic, though functionally atheist. That is, there are basically two "exit" options from Christianity, both of which can be described as a form of nonbelief: faith in nothing at all, or faith in something-or-other left undefined.

In other words, such wayward believers aren't drawn to other religious traditions: the primary question is organized theism. Give up the former, you remain spiritual but not Christian; give up the latter, you're neither Christian nor spiritual. The temptation isn't ordinarily to become a Muslim or Sikh or Hindu. (Though the other day I did hear someone say, "If it weren't for X in Christianity, I'd be Muslim." But the exception proves the rule.)

Here's my question: Why don't Christians who cease to believe in Christ become Jews instead?

By which I mean: Why don't gentile worshipers of the God of Israel who cease to confess Jesus as the Messiah of Israel convert to Orthodox Judaism—precisely that religious community that worships the God of Israel without confessing Jesus as Messiah?

This is hardly an unknown trend in Christian history. It saturates the pages of the New Testament. Depending on how late you date some of the New Testament texts, it seems to have lasted well into the second century. Moreover, it's popular as late as St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom—the latter of whose sermons contain such strikingly anti-Jewish rhetoric exactly because his listeners find the synagogue so attractive.

There are social, political, and historical reasons that help to explain why so few American gentile Christians would ever, in the absence of faith in Jesus, even for a moment consider converting to Judaism, not least secularization's spiritual minimalism and liberalism's ethical individualism. Here's what I think the main factor is, though; it's theological and, in my view, the most damning one.

Most—or at least, far too many—gentile American Christians do not love the God of Israel.

Which is to say, the fact that the God and Father of Jesus Christ is the God of the Jews, and thus the God of the Law, the prophets, and the Psalms, is a stumbling block for Christians today. It may be a stumbling block they've overcome, or seek to overcome. But it's a part of the challenge of faith, not part of its appeal. They don't want the Father without the Son; they want the Son, and are stuck with the Father. Drop the New Testament, they're not left with the Old; they've only accepted the Old because of the New.

Now, obviously gentile believers the world over are believers because of the person and work of Jesus, through whom they have been grafted into the covenant people of God. I'm not suggesting for a moment that that is odd or out of sorts. What I'm saying, rather, is that, according to the gospel, Jesus is the mediator, not between generic humanity and generic divinity, but between gentile humanity and the God of Abraham. Jesus's introduction of the gentiles to the praise and glory of YHWH, Lord of Hosts, isn't meant to remain at the level of stiff formalities: gentiles are meant to grow in knowledge and affection for this One, precisely as their trusted Father and King.

And the truth is, converting to Judaism would sound to these Christians like a prison sentence. Why? Because of sermon after sermon, catechesis class after catechesis class, Bible study after Bible study preaching and teaching more or less explicit Marcionite doctrine.

They love Jesus. But not the One who sent him.

If I'm even close to right, this only furthers my resolve so to teach and preach that—counterfactually—if Jesus were not risen from the dead, his gentile disciples would nevertheless long with all their hearts to continue confessing the ancient prayer with Abraham's children: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one."

Incomplete theses on God's will, providence, and evil

Last week, in my upper-level majors course on systematic theology, the topic was providence. We read classical accounts of divine and human agency and discussed the nature of God's will. I wrote up some provisional, incomplete theses to help guide them through the thicket. I'm sharing them below, partly as an aid to others, partly as an invitation to be corrected by my betters—this area is simply not my specialty. St. Thomas, pray for this theologian's poor soul!

*                        *                         *

Affirmations

1. God, as the sole creator and author of creation ex nihilo, is solely responsible for the ongoing existence and well-being of the creation.
2. God is sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient, and good.
3. God is Lord of creation.
4. God upholds creation as a whole and in all its parts at all times, without ceasing.
5. God underlies, informs, and enables any and all activity in creation: nothing happens apart from God; no creature can act apart from God’s sovereign will.
6. God conducts creatures and creation as a whole toward their proximate and final ends, in this world and the next.
7. Nothing exists or happens outside the scope of God’s will.
8. Sin and evil are contrary to God’s will; sinful deeds and evil events occur.
9. God does not will sin, nor is God the author of evil.
10. When and where sin and evil are found in creation, God permits it.
11. God is able to bring good from evil and sin, including when they are intended by creatures to obstruct God’s purposes.
12. In the end, God will triumph over all sin and evil, and they will be no more in the new creation.

Implications

1. We do not know why God permits sin and evil.
2. On its face, a sinful deed or evil happening is a surd: meaningless in itself; neither sin nor evil is ever (really, deeply, ultimately) good.
3. The experience of suffering or loss is not itself necessarily sin or evil.
4. God may therefore actively will (rather than permit) our suffering in this world.
5. “Everything happens for a reason” is either true in an incomprehensible way (where that “reason” is Christ, who will reveal all to us only in glory) or false in a facile and pastorally disastrous way (where the starvation of children has a readily intelligible reason we can grasp in the moment).
6. The relationship between God’s will (as primary cause) and my will (as secondary cause) when I engage in sin (say, lying) is mysterious and inscrutable: somehow my willing as a free agent in bondage to sin possesses some deficiency (or, rather, lacks something necessary) that keeps it from fully performing righteous activity in full in accordance with God’s will and command.
7. So that: 
1. We may say that God wills in all my willing, but...
2. ...we may not say that God wills the sin I invariably will.

Talismanic invocations of scholarship

One of the silliest, and most annoying, trends in public Christian discourse is the use of academic scholarship. I've no doubt the trend I have in mind is present on all sides, but where I see it most is in newly liberated ex-evangelicals, whether pastors or laypeople, but certainly in popular writers.

Not only is "scholarship" used in the singular, as if two centuries' worth of study of the Bible in all its variety of contexts across dozens of countries in as many languages can be considered monolithic and unanimous. Even more, it's waved around as a kind of talisman, evidently with the expectation of an effect that can only be called apotropaic—which, we may infer, is the effect it had initially on the person so using it.

It's true that any number of stupid or damaging claims about the Bible and Christianity are a function or result of ignorance, and that education can remedy some of this. But the truth is that scholars disagree about very nearly anything and everything you can formulate a question about regarding the origins and interpretation of Christian figures, events, and teachings. About almost nothing can we say, "Scholars say..." and fill in the blank with a true, uncontested, non-banal claim. And even then, if such a claim did exist, I assure you that we could find someone 50 years ago or 50 years hence who did or will disagree with the would-be consensus.

Moreover, the "scholars say" line is typically used in an unsophisticated way. For example, if what Paul had in mind, or the anonymous final redactor of the fourth Gospel, was X, then that just settles the matter: it meant and means and will mean for all time this singular thing, X—protestations and counter-readings and reception history and reinterpretations and figural exegesis and the rest be damned.

Finally, the use of "scholars say" is often, at bottom, just an exercise in rhetorical trumping. It's a defeater in intra-communal arguments about God, the Bible, and history, wielded as a weapon. And naturally, there are always good reasons to discount the other side's scholars (falsely so called).

Having said that, I do think that many use the phrase in a sincere, almost obsequiously religious and deferential way: the experts have spoken, thus saith the Lord. There's always a magisterium, in other words. Just find yourself the right one. Which is to say, the one that supports your opinion.

My new email plan

I've written recently about my technology habits, and now I write with an update. Last week I took email off my phone, moving ever closer to the reduction of my iPhone to the basic features of a dumb phone, plus pictures/video, maps, weather, WhatsApp, and podcasts. That was why I purchased an iPhone in the first place, in the fall of 2015: to send and receive pictures and video of my children and nephews, and to get around easier when traveling. But Facebook and Twitter and Gmail and the rest colonized my phone and, in turn, my mind and, eventually, my daily habits; and this is part of my ongoing purgation of that colonization. Get thee behind me, Satan!

My iPhone's weekly Sunday morning report of usage told me my screen time declined by 30%, to an average of 49 minutes/day. I bet the next report will be even smaller. As I've said, my goal is an average of 45 minutes/day. But honestly, if I'm not texting much, and instead of reading Instapaper articles I'm reading physical books, magazines, and printed-out essays, I don't see why that number couldn't come down to 30 minutes (or fewer!). Which, for me, would be a glorious victory over Silicon Valley and all its pomp.

Decreasing phone usage would be to no avail, however, if it meant I was on my laptop that much more, precisely in order to compulsively check my inbox. So here's my new plan on that front.

I check email at four different times in the day, two brief checks bracketing two longer checks. The first brief check is in my house, early in the morning, before work (say ~6:30am): just in case there's a pressing matter or even an emergency (e.g., from a student). But my aim is a quick glance, not replying or cleaning out the inbox. The two longer checks come at ~11:30am and ~4:30pm: lunch and end-of-day. Ideally I spend 5-15 minutes at those times, responding as necessary, deleting trash, the usual mundane tasks. Then sometime in the evening before bed, say ~9:30pm, I'll do a similar check as the morning one, to make sure all is well and there aren't any fires needing to be put out before bed.

So that's four checks across 15 hours, adding up to half an hour of email time, preferably less. And in between those times, I use Freedom to block my laptop's access to Gmail—so I can't log in even if I wanted to. Finally, since sometimes replying might take longer than this daily allotment, Friday afternoons are my "catch up" day, where I'll spend whatever time is necessary taking care of unavoidable email business.

So far this plan has been extraordinarily freeing. I'm already reading and writing more, and my mind is less distracted internally. No email or laptop "breaks," since I can't get on Gmail or Twitter anyway. (I block Twitter along with Gmail during those five-hour stretches.) If I'm in my office, then I have a finite set of tasks in front of me: reading, writing, grading, or lesson prep. That's pretty much it. And the usual "filler" interstices of 5, 10, 20 minutes (or more) wasted on email are gone.

I'll report more as the weeks go by. But so far, life—professional and personal alike—with only the absolute minimum required email is just what you'd expect: wonderful.

On reading political writing from the 1990s

Recently I've been reading through Left Hooks, Right Crosses: A Decade of Political Writing, edited by Christopher Caldwell and the late Christopher Hitchens. It's a collection of 40 essays written during the 1990s, nearly all under the Clinton administration.

It's been a revelation. I was 7 years old when Clinton was elected the first time. I came of age politically and intellectually during the second Bush's two terms, and I didn't start consistently reading serious—or at least good—political writing from across the ideological spectrum until Obama's second term.

That means I'm basically a novice in these matters. I have a fairly good sense of the historical scope and shape of these arguments; I've read political philosophy, old and new; I'm conversant with what's going on at present. But I've little idea what it was like in the moment, in weekly and monthly political journalism, in each of the previous decades, even those I lived through.

So as a window into the debates, fights, and major moments and figures in the 1990s, this volume is indispensable. But more than that, it's been revelatory as a window on our own moment and the arguments and people involved. Because in one sense everything has changed, and in another, almost nothing.

Consider who's featured in the book: Thomas Frank and David Brooks, Adolph Reed Jr. and Andrew Sullivan, Mark Lilla and Tucker Carlson, Jonathan Rauch and David Rieff. These are only a few of the names of writers and thinkers "still in the mix." (Not to mention Caldwell, who is a major voice on the right today, and Hitchens, whose influence lingers still.)

And consider the topics: free speech and political correctness; gay rights and liberative intersectionality; postmodern fraud in the academy; military adventurism abroad; classical liberalism, contested and reclaimed; authoritarian populism; unchecked executive power, lies, and sexual abuse; so-called civility in public discourse; race and IQ; reactionary conservatism's left-friendly critique of globalization and American empire; the need for conservatism to evolve beyond Reaganism; the staying power of the socialist vision in liberal capitalist America; left-right shared contempt for Clintonist centrism; the ongoing and future demands of mass immigration to Europe and the U.S. from the global south; and more.

It isn't that we're simply replaying the culture wars and political battles of the 1990s, though in some respects we are—where the "we" in question is even, at times, the very same soldiers who fought on the front lines more than two decades ago. It's that the seeds of a generation ago have finally borne fruit, and in retrospect, you can see the organic growth from one era to another. And reversing the line of sight, some of that era's political thinkers actually did see 2019 coming: which suggests they might be worth listening to today, too.

One other effect worth mentioning: reading the consistently apocalyptic tone of political journalism under Clinton, especially as the turn of the millennium approached, has actually served to de-eschatologize the moment we are currently living through. Not to say it isn't bad, or in some respects genuinely new. But it isn't the End. We're not living in the Last Days. There's no Antichrist on the scene.

Sobriety clarifies. Sober analysis can describe in detail the extent to which things are bad, and why, and offer suggestions for what might make things better—all without pushing the rhetorical doomsday clock to midnight, or projecting onto the situation or the reader the exhaustion and fear besetting the writer's psyche. (Here I imagine Clinton's impeachment hearings plus Twitter. God save us all.)

For those reasons and more, I heartily recommend Left Hooks, Right Crosses. And if similar volumes for other American decades exist, drop me a line; I would love to get my hands on them.

“This Day" by Denise Levertov

This Day

By Denise Levertov

i

Dry wafer,
sour wine.

This day I see

God’s in the dust,
not sifted

out from confusion.

ii

Perhaps, I thought,
passing the duckpond,
perhaps—seeing the brilliantly somber water
deranged by lost feathers and bits of
drowning bread—perhaps
these imperfections (the ducklings
practised their diving,
stylized feet vigorously cycling among débris)
are part of perfection,
a pristine nuance? our eyes
our lives, too close to the canvas,
enmeshed within
the turning dance,
to see it?

iii

In so many Dutch 17th-century paintings
one perceives
a visible quietness, to which the concord
of lute and harpsichord contribute,
in which a smiling conversation
reposes;
‘calme, luxe,” and—in auburn or mercurial sheen
of vessels, autumnal wealth
of fur-soft table-carpets,
blue snow-gleam of Delft—
‘volupte’; but also the clutter
of fruit and herbs, pots, pans, poultry,
strewn on the floor: and isn’t
the quiet upon them too, in them and of them,
aren’t they wholly at one with the wonder?

iv

Dry wafer,
sour wine:

this day I see

the world, a word
intricately incarnate, offers—
ravelled, honeycombed, veined, stained—
what hunger craves,

a sorrel grass,
a crust,
water,
salt.

New essay published in Commonweal: “The Specter of Marcionism"

I've got a new essay published in the latest issue of Commonweal titled "The Specter of Marcionism." It uses the combined examples from last year of Andy Stanley's controversial teaching on the Old Testament and the First Things review relitigating the Mortara case to think about the different ways in which Protestants and Catholics struggle with the election of the Jews, Israel's scriptures, and supersessionism. Here's a taste:

"On this, all can agree. God and the Jews are a package deal. As 1 John 2:23 says of God and Christ—that one cannot have the Father without the Son, or the Son without the Father—so here: you cannot have Abraham’s God without Abraham’s children. Reject the latter and you lose the former. In its rejection of Marcionism, the church staked a claim to this principle: the only God with whom it would have to do was the Jewish God, the God of Moses, Hannah, Mary, and Jesus. But the church’s consistency in maintaining this principle was uneven at best. The specter of Marcion continued to haunt Europe. It even casts its long shadow over the Shoah. It is no accident that history’s greatest crime against the Jews came in the heart of Christendom. No longer did Israel’s menace wear the face of a Pharaoh or a Haman. Now it was the brothers of Jesus according to the Spirit who terrorized, or turned away, the brothers of Jesus according to the flesh."

Read the whole thing here.

Lewis's other virtue as a novelist

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

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

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

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

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

My technology habits

Developing good technology habits is one of the driving motivations of my daily life. Particularly since I surrendered and got a smart phone (only three years ago), combined with having children (the oldest is six) and getting a job (now in my second year), the possibility for the internet and screens to overtake my every waking moment has never been greater. A little less than two years ago I read Andy Crouch's The Tech-Wise Family, which galvanized and organized my approach to disciplining technology's role in my life. Here's where things stand at the moment.

Phone

I still have an iPhone, though an older and increasingly outdated model. When I read Crouch I realized I was spending more than 2 hours a day on my phone (adolescents average 3-6 hours—some of my students more than that!), and I followed his lead in downloading the Moment app to monitor my usage. Since then I've cut down my daily screen time on my phone to ~45 minutes: 10 or so minutes checking email, 10-20 or so minutes texting/WhatsApp, another 20-30 minutes reading articles I've saved to Instapaper.

I changed my screen settings to black and white, which diminishes the appeal of the phone's image (the eyes like color). My home screen consists of Gmail, Safari, Messages, WhatsApp, Calendar, Photos, Camera, Settings, Weather, Google Maps, and FaceTime. That's it. I have no social media apps. On the next screen I have, e.g., the OED, BibleGateway, Instapaper, Podcasts, Amazon, Fandango, and Freedom (which helps to manage and block access to certain websites or apps).

When we moved to Abilene in June 2016, we instituted a digital sabbath on Sundays: no TV (for kids or us), and minimal phone usage. Elaborating on the latter: I leave my phone in the car during church, and try to leave my phone plugged into the charger in the bedroom or away from living areas during the day. Not to say that we've been perfectly consistent with either of these practices, but for the most part, they've been life-giving and refreshing.

Oh, and our children do not have their own phones or tablets, and they do not use or play on ours, at home or in public. (Our oldest is just now experimenting with doing an educational app on our iPad instead of TV time. We'll see how that goes.)

Social Media

Currently the only social media that I am on and regularly use is Twitter. I was on Facebook for years, but last month I deactivated my account. I'm giving it a waiting period, but after Easter, or thereabouts, unless something has changed my mind, I am going to delete my account permanently. (Reading Jaron Lanier's most recent book had something to do with this decision.) I don't use, and I cannot imagine ever creating an account for, any other social media.

Why Twitter? Well, on the one hand, it has proved to be an extraordinarily helpful and beneficial means of networking, both personally and professionally. I've done my best to cultivate a level-headed, sane, honest, and friendly presence on it, and the results have so far wildly exceeded my expectations. Thus, on the other hand, I have yet to experience Twitter as the nightmare I know it is and can be for so many. Part of that is my approach to using it, but I know that the clock is ticking on my first truly negative experience—getting rolled or trolled or otherwise abused. What will I do then? My hope is that I will simply not read my mentions and avoid getting sucked into the Darkest Twitter Timeline whose vortex has claimed so many others. But if it starts affecting my actual psyche—if I start anxiously thinking about it throughout the day—if my writing or teaching starts anticipating, reactively, the negative responses Twitter is designed algorithmically to generate: then I will seriously consider deactivating or deleting my account.

How do I manage Twitter usage? First, since it's not on my phone, unless I'm in front of my own laptop, I can't access it, or at least not in a user friendly way. (Besides, I mostly use Twitter as I once did checking blogs: I go to individual accounts' home pages daily or every other day, rather than spend time scrolling or refreshing my timeline.) Second, I use Freedom to block Twitter on both my laptop and my phone for extended periods during the day (e.g., when writing or grading or returning emails), so I simply can't access it. Third, my aim is for two or three 5-10 minute "check-ins": once or twice at work, once in the evening. If I spend more than 20 or 30 minutes a day on Twitter, that day is a failure.

Laptop

I have four children, six and under, at home, so being on my laptop at home isn't exactly a realistic persistent temptation. They've got to be in bed, and unless I need to work, I'm not going to sit there scrolling around online indefinitely. I've got better things to do.

At work, my goal is to avoid being on my laptop as much as possible. Unless I need to be on it—in order to write, email, or prepare for class—I keep it closed. In fact, I have a few tricks for resisting the temptation to open it and get sucked in. I'll use Freedom to start a session blocking the internet for a few hours. Or I begin the day with reading (say, 8:00-11:00), then open the laptop to check stuff while eating an early lunch. Or I will physically put the laptop in an annoying place in my office: high on a shelf, or in a drawer. Human psychology's a fickle thing, but this sort of practice actually decreases the psychic desire to take a break from reading or other work by opening the laptop; and I know if I open it, Twitter or Feedly or Instapaper or the NYT or whatever will draw me in and take more time from me than I had planned or wanted.

[Insert: I neglected to mention that one way I try to read at least some of the innumerable excellent articles and essays published online is, first, to save them to Instapaper then, second, to print out the longest or most interesting ones (usually all together, once or twice a month). I print them front and back, two sides to a page, and put them in a folder to read in the evening or throughout the week. This can't work for everyone, but since I work in an office with a mega-printer that doesn't cost me anything, it's a nice way to "read online" without actually being online.]

One of my goals for the new year has been to get back into blogging—or as I've termed it, mezzo-blogging—which is really just an excuse to force myself to write for 15-30 minutes each day. That's proved to require even more hacks to keep me from going down rabbit holes online, since the laptop obviously has to be open to write a blog post. So I'll use Freedom to block "Distractions," i.e., websites I've designated as ones that distract me from productive work, like Twitter or Google.

I've yet to figure out a good approach with email, since I don't like replying to emails throughout the day, though sometimes my students do need a swifter answer than I'd prefer to give. Friday afternoons usually end up my catch-up day.

I should add that I am a binge writer (and editor): so if I have the time, and I have something to write, I'll go for three or six or even nine or more hours hammering away. But when I'm in the groove like that, the distractions are easy to avoid.

Oh, and as for work on the weekends: I typically limit myself to (at most) Saturday afternoon, while the younger kids nap and the older kids rest, and Sunday evening, after the kids go to bed. That way I take most or all of the weekend off, and even if I have work to do, I take 24+ hours off from work (Sat 5pm–Sun 7pm).

TV

In many ways my worst technology habits have to do with TV. Over many years my mind and body have been trained to think of work (teaching and reading and writing) as the sort of thing I do during the day, and rest from work after dinner (or the kids go to bed) means watching television. That can be nice, either as a respite from mentally challenging labor, or as a way to spend time with my wife. But it also implies a profoundly attenuated imagination: relaxation = vegging out. Most of the last three years have been a sustained, ongoing attempt at retraining my brain to resist its vegging-out desires once the last child falls asleep. Instead, to read a novel, to catch up with my wife, to clean up, to grab drinks with friends, to get to bed early—whatever.

If my goal is less than 1 hour per day on my phone, and only as much time on my laptop as is necessary (which could be as little as 30 minutes or as much as 4+ hours), my goal is six (or fewer) hours per week of TV time. That includes sports, which as a result has gone way down, and movies (whether with the kids or my wife). Reasonable exceptions allowed: our 5-month-old often has trouble getting down early or easily, and my wife and I will put on some mindless episode of comedy—current favorite: Brooklyn 99—while taking turns holding and bouncing her to sleep. But otherwise, my current #1 goal is as little TV as possible; and if it's on, something well worth watching.

Video games

I don't have video games, and haven't played them since high school. We'll see if this re-enters our life when our kids get older.

Pedagogy

I've written elsewhere about the principles that inform my so-called Luddite pedagogy. But truly, my goal in my classes is to banish technology from the classroom, and from in front of my students' faces, as much as is within my power. The only real uses I have for it is PowerPoint presentations (for larger lecture courses to freshmen) and YouTube clips (for a certain section of my January intensive course on Christianity and Culture). Otherwise, it's faces looking at faces, ears listening to spoken words, me at the table with the students or up scribbling on the white board. For 80 minutes at a time, I want my students to know what it's like not to constantly be scratching that itch.

Spiritual disciplines

All of this is useless without spiritual disciplines encompassing, governing, and replacing the time I'd otherwise be devoting to technology. I note that here as a placeholder, since that's not what this post is about; perhaps in another post I'll discuss my devotional regimen (which makes it sound far more rigorous than my floundering attempts in fact amount to).

I have been helped so much by learning what others do in order to curb and control their relationship to technology. I hope this might be helpful to others in a similar way.

The virtues of Lewis's Space Trilogy

I've been re-reading Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra this last month (I read That Hideous Strength for the first time last year), and the former especially brought to mind why I love Lewis so much. His novelistic shortcomings are more than apparent in these early works, so in the midst of noticing those, I asked myself: What is it about these books that makes them lovable? What are the virtues that Lewis the novelist brings to bear in them that raise them to more than pleasant diversions?

Here's a short list.

1. Lewis has a knack for making the metaphysical reality that Christians confess to be true inhabitable. He makes it seem like common sense—more, he makes it seem roomy. "This is the real world, refracted through fiction" is the refrain of all his writing, not least Ransom's adventures in space. Or: "It's probably not precisely this, but it's almost certainly very like this—only better and more wondrous."

2. Apart from the beautiful economy of his prose, perhaps Lewis's greatest strength across all the genres in which he wrote is the depth of his moral-spiritual psychology. He knows what makes us tick. Both at our most virtuous and our most vicious (more on the latter in a moment), his description of the motivations, intentions, pressures (petty and glorious), goals, indecisive failures, and temptations of the will is nonpareil. Better, it is utterly recognizable. And all too often it is deeply, shamefully convicting.

3. Lewis holds up a mirror to us—in this case, through the earnest observations of sinless alien species and their angelic rulers—and reveals our undeniable fallenness, both at the individual and at the civilizational level. (In this case, the theme of his fiction is "sin is real, it's inside of all of us, and you know it's true.") His extraterrestrial creatures are constantly dumbfounded by the everyday goings-on of earthlings, and that dumbfoundedness is a cue to the reader: why aren't you similarly bothered or surprised? Our fear of death, our denial of God, our fears of one another, our indefensible mistreatment of our neighbors, the quantity of time and energy we spend on worthless matters ... it is difficult to listen to Ransom's interlocutors without turning on yourself in the somber realization that you're implicated, indicted even, by their speech.

4. Continuing that theme, Lewis has no time for the insipid platitudes of technocratic modernity. The evil men whom Ransom battles are, in the end, hollowed out by the nihilism of cultural-scientific self-preservation, while lacking any guiding principles—not even the well-being of humanity as such—that might garner qualified praise as splendid vices. Knowledge for the sake of power for the sake of perpetuation of knowledge for the sake of power for the sake of ... until kingdom come. Lewis may be guilty of nostalgia at times, but he knows the problems of his day, not at the surface, but at the root; or rather, in the sickness of soul that drives soul-denying men to seek immortality at all costs. The narrative function of beauty in "the heavens" of "space" in the Trilogy drives this home: knowledge without wonder is finally the libido dominandi, now naked yet "clothed" in society's approbation. This is the enemy to be resisted to the end.

5. Lewis's Space Trilogy works also—as so many interplanetary stories do—as an allegory or metaphor for imperialism, and although Lewis was guilty of many of the biases and prejudices of his day, he knew that colonization and domination of other peoples and cultures was an offense against God and the fruit of original sin. Moreover, closer to his literary expertise, he knew the extent to which such domination is often an expression of ignorance and impotence, the exercise of force masking the insecurity of a fearful people. Culturally this expresses itself in a parochialism both of space and of time; Lewis termed the latter "chronological snobbery." Just as the European peoples thought themselves superior to peoples from other continents, so they (and others) thought (and think) themselves superior to people from the past. The two are related and inseparable: when Ransom listens to Oyarsa, part of his instruction consists of unlearning the modern prejudice against "difference," whether found across the sea or across the ages.

6. Finally, Lewis the theologian always emerges in dialogue between (say) his former self, Ransom, and his would-be present self, the unbent creatures of Malacandra or their eldila or Oyarsa himself. I long to read these stories with my children because those dialogues will themselves be occasions for them to hear ancient spiritual truths articulated in the clearest, freshest of ways. How odd: to hear the gospel lucidly spoken by being made strange on the lips of alien beings in a fictional novel. But when we find ourselves loving C. S. Lewis's novels, that's just one of the many reasons why we love them.

New review in the latest issue of Christian Century

I've got a critical review of Craig Carter's new book, Reading Scripture with the Great Tradition, in the latest issue of The Christian Century. Here's a taste:

"The spiritual sense that [premodern] saints sought—which is to say, prayed for, delighted in, and contemplated—was not a 'stable' 'layer' of meaning 'residing' in the text. It was the in principle infinite sacramental signification of human signs divinely authored and illumined. For the res of scripture, as a whole and in each of its parts, is Christ. Just how any one particular text of scripture signifies Christ, not to mention just what Christ might use such a text to say to the believing reader under the Spirit’s guidance, is limited neither by human authors’ intentions nor by ordinary rules of grammar and syntax, nor by the capacities, desires, or convictions of readers, believing or pagan. It is determinate, but only insofar as Christ is determinate. And Christ makes himself present and known in endless ways on countless occasions: in the determinate elements of the Eucharist, in the determinate bodies of the faithful, in the determinate words of the sermon, in the determinate sufferings of the least of these. Just so, we should expect countless, indeed endless, manifestations of Christ on the sacred page."

Read the whole thing here.

Blessed are the heretics

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

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

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

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

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

He continues:

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

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