Resident Theologian
About the Blog
An atonement typology
This post grew out of a brief handout I drew up quickly for a class I was teaching on the atonement, which I then shared on Twitter. I thought I would expand it here with some initial definition and reflections.
Let me note two things at the outset. First, I took initial inspiration from Ben Myers' lovely patristic-flavored post on atonement theories from a few years back. Second, it seems to me that atonement is a particularly resonant English word that is very nearly interchangeable with salvation. To ask what atonement consists in, it seems to me, is to ask how Jesus saves. Or at least so I have assumed in what follows. Third, atonement is not one of my pet doctrines; I haven't read widely and deeply in it the way some of my friends and colleagues have. I'm sure that, somewhere below, I have left something out or inexpertly explained this or that theory. Pardons in advance.
Without further ado, my sixfold (really, 6 x 5) typology of the atonement.
I. Royal Conquest
1. Ransom
Through the death of Jesus, the Messiah, God "ransoms" or buys back his elect people from their slavery to sin and death; this is the new and final Exodus, in which the Lord once and for all delivers his people from the Pharaoh-like Satan.
2. Christus victor
Jesus submits to death, the wages of sinful humanity, and in doing so puts death to death and triumphs over it in his resurrection from the dead, now eternally free from death in the life of God, never to die again.
3. Harrowing of hell
Jesus the King descends to the realm of the dead and claims what is his own: all the saints of old, awaiting the proclamation of good news to those who died in hope of his coming. The gates of hell tremble at the sound of his feet, and crack open as he takes his own with him into everlasting life: he, the Living One, in whose hands are now the keys to Death and Hades (Rev 1:18).
4. Exaltation
Jesus Christ is risen from the dead: and not only risen, but raised to glory eternal, the glory he had with the Father before the ages. Only now, it is in and as the human nature he assumed in Mary's womb that he is raised, glorified, ascended, enthroned at the right hand of the Father in the power of the Spirit, whence he rules and judges the affairs of earth until he returns again.
5. Citizenship
Having inaugurated his reign over creation, Christ extends the gift of heavenly citizenship to all who accept his rule. To live subject to the wise, just, and merciful kingship of Christ in between his two advents means to anticipate, even now, the glories of the kingdom of heaven that will be made manifest at his appearing, though they remain hidden as the church sojourns in the world.
II. Holy Justice
1. Suffering
This one little word, "suffered," serves in the New Testament as a euphemism or précis for the whole work of Christ. Why is that? "Christ also suffered for sins once for all" (1 Pet 3:18); "Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood" (Heb 13:12): we could multiply examples. There is a mystery here. First, Jesus shares in the human condition, under the weight of sin, evil, and death. His solidarity is complete. "For because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted" (Heb 2:18). Moreover, his suffering is salvific: the victim bleeds, the substitute is scourged, the one pronounced guilty is mocked and spat upon. We see, we feel, we intuit the depths of the mystery here—even if we cannot finds words adequate to it—that the eternal and impassible One has willed to undergo this passion simply because "he loved me" (Gal 2:20). It was necessary that the Lord's servant suffer rejection at the hands of both those under and those outside the Law: this very thing happened in our midst, for us and for our salvation.
2. Sacrifice
God is holy, and wills that his people be holy likewise. In old Israel, God graciously provided for the people to be cleansed of their sins through the shedding of blood, that is, through ritual sacrifices that sanctified them, in love, so that they might worship the Lord in his presence with a pure body and a clean conscience. Jesus Christ is the final sacrifice, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, that to which all prior sacrifices pointed and in which they participated (and, mutatis mutandis, so ever since, whether in praise, in illness, in martyrdom, or in the Eucharist). Jesus, the spotless victim, without blemish, offered himself upon the cross, a perfect and pleasing sacrifice to the God of Israel, thus cleansing, purifying, and sanctifying his beloved people, and effecting, once and for all, the forgiveness of sins.
3. Justification
God is righteous and just, the only good and wise Judge. Human righteousness consists in obedience to his commands, which is to live in accordance with the divine will. Humans, though, individually and collectively, are law-breakers, transgressors, guilty before the court of divine justice. We deserve condemnation, and indeed, guilty of sin and subject to death, we stand condemned, dead in our trespasses. But God in his mercy justifies the ungodly, offering pardon in the name of Christ to all who cast themselves in faith on him, the Crucified. He, the righteous one, stands in the dock, and our sentence becomes his—do not Pilate and the people sentence Jesus to a death reserved for the guilty?—while his status—do not Pilate and the Centurion recognize Jesus's just innocence?—becomes ours. Barabbas figures the believer who, through no merit of his own, is released, while Jesus does not resist taking his place. In short, the triune God delivers the final verdict, and though we have broken God's law, we are absolved, pardoned, pronounced innocent for the sake of Christ. Now therefore there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom 8:1).
4. Substitution
Jesus Christ, the one true and fully human man, takes our place. He lives and dies for us, on our behalf, for our sake. He is utterly and without reservation pro nobis, and he stands in our stead, so that we might stand in his. What was due us, comes to him; what is due him, comes to us. What is ours becomes his, and what is his becomes ours. All that he does, he does with us in mind, for our benefit. Whatever justice demands, he, the God-man, both exacts and accepts it. In him, we see our fate overturned, not by a miscarriage of justice, but by the mercy of the Just One offering himself in our place.
5. Satisfaction
What does humanity owe God our creator? Everything, as it turns out. It is a debt we owe simply in virtue of being the creatures we are, made from nothing and sustained in existence for no good reason other than the divine good pleasure. But we do not give God what is his due. We do not render obedience. We do not love him with our whole hearts; we do not love our neighbor as ourselves (as he commands). We do not live in constant, grateful dependence upon him. If we are to be restored to fellowship with the God who alone is just, good, and right, how are we to rectify the relationship we have broken (from our side)? Not by our own efforts, themselves already corrupt and corrupting. Only the offering of a fully human life perfect from start to finish could be thus acceptable. Thus does Jesus, the God-man, offer his own life to make satisfaction for all humanity, to "pay the debt we could not pay." By his death, he gives infinitely beyond what we ever could, and in rising from the dead and pouring out his Spirit, he gives with abandon what he does not need and what was always already his by nature, not only making restitution but gratuitously sharing gifts both beyond nature and beyond measure.
III. Israel's Fulfillment
1. Abraham's seed
The promise of the Lord to Abraham was that his seed would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, and that in his seed all the nations would be blessed (Gen 12:1-3; 22:17). Thus the New Testament begins by telling us that Jesus is the son of Abraham (Matt 1:1), and Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians that the seed (singular, not plural) of which the Lord spoke was Christ himself (3:16)—through him the nations have come to the Lord for blessing, by the selfsame faith with which Abraham believed the Lord's promise (Rom 4:23-25).
2. Torah's telos
The Law of Moses was a gracious provision for God's people Israel, to set them apart from the nations, to sanctify them as his treasured possession, to render them fit to be his servant, the light to the nations. It was, in this sense, a means to an end. And as Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, "Christ is the end of the law" (10:4), which is to say, the telos of the Torah is the Messiah. Moses had a target, an aim, a goal, and it is fulfilled in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Both the work he accomplishes—sanctifying Israel, effecting forgiveness of sins, bringing near the reign of God—and the perfect obedience he offers—obedience to the Torah's literal commands but also to its heart, which is the revealed heart of the Lord God—bring to glorious fulfillment the purpose and meaning of Moses's Law: the law of love, the law of Christ.
3. Shekinah embodied
Jesus is Immanuel, God with us—but the Lord's presence in, with, among, and to Israel is not a novelty. Israel's scriptures are nothing but one long story of the Lord's passionate will to be present to and for his people: wrestling with Jacob, the fire by night and cloud by day, the tabernacle, the ark, the temple. The God of Israel is an indwelling God, a particular God (not deity in general) of a particular land and people (Abraham's children) who can be found, in Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod's memorable phrase, at One Temple Avenue, Jerusalem. But these are the foretaste and promise, not the reality or fulfillment. That came in the person of Mary's son, who took on flesh in her womb and was born and lived a man, that is, a fully human life lived by YHWH. He, Yeshua bar-Yehosef, is the Shekinah enfleshed, the fullness of the Godhead dwelling bodily amidst his people. And so he will dwell, forever, when heaven comes to earth on the last day.
4. Priesthood
The work of the priest is to stand between God and the people, mediating in both directions: representing God to the people, and representing the people to God. In love, the Lord established the priesthood in Israel through Aaron's line and the tribe of Levi. The principal work of the priest was to offer sacrifices before the Lord. Jesus was not a Levite, but he was a priest (according to the book of Hebrews) in the order of Melchizedek. Not only a priest, he is "a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God" (2:17), who offered once and for all his own life as a sacrifice for all the people—a perfect offering, because he, a priest without sin, offered not for himself but for others what they, not he, needed. And so this eternal priest makes offering in the heavenly sanctuary not made with human hands, Jesus the mediator between God and man, interceding for us before God the Father, an advocate and aid to all who seek the help of heaven.
5. Ingrafting
The seed of Abraham is the chosen people of God, and as Paul writes, the root of the tree of Israel is irreducibly and immutably Jewish (Rom 11:16-18). But the miraculous and unexpected work of the Messiah is so to accomplish salvation "apart from law"—"although the law and the prophets bear witness to it" (3:21)—that it applies not only to Jews, branches of Israel's tree by nature, but also to gentiles, a wild olive shoot ("contrary to nature" [11:24]). So that, through baptism and faith in the Messiah, both the natural and the wild branches belong to one and the same tree, the latter grafted in through the gracious hands of the Lord, who is God not only of the Jews but also of the gentiles (3:29).
IV. Natural Restoration
1. Knowledge
Humanity was created to know God, and in disobeying the command of God by seeking after forbidden knowledge, humanity fell away from the knowledge of God. Through Christ, however, the knowledge of God is restored, both in his own person, as a fully human being, and in those united to him by faith through baptism. As Colossians 3:9-10 states, believers have put off the old, fallen nature and been clothed in the new, regenerate nature—redeemed and remade in Christ—"which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator." Moreover, Christ came teaching, and in the Spirit and through Scripture, he remains our teacher, drawing us into true and saving knowledge of the Father.
2. Image
Humanity was and is created in the image of God, but through the Fall that image is tarnished, damaged, neither whole nor expressive, as it ought to be, of who human beings are and what they were made to be within the wider created order. Christ, though, as God from God and Light from Light, is neither made nor "in" the image of God: he is the image itself, from everlasting to everlasting. And so, in becoming human, he restores the imago Dei in human nature; all those in him share in that restored image, which will be theirs in full upon his return in glory—at which point they will finally take up their calling as image-bearing creatures among and for the sake of all other creatures.
3. Second Adam
Adam, the first man, fell; and in him all humanity fell, too. That is to say, all human beings share in the condition of our first parents: we are all "in Adam." But Jesus Christ is the new man, the Second Adam, and to be "in" Christ is to be incorporated into the life and body of this sinless one triumphant over death. Our sin died with him on the cross, and in his resurrection, he lives to God the super-abundant life of the Spirit, whom, in pouring him out on the church, he makes available to all those who draw near to him in faith. And in the End, when God is all in all, this Adam will not, can never fall; and the same is true of those he brings with him.
4. Healing
Fallenness means sickness, sickness of the soul and of the body. Christ is our healer, the great physician. He came healing, and those who asked him to be made whole had their petitions granted: "If you will... I will" (Mark 1:40-41). He also sent his disciples out with the same charge, and they healed in his name both before and after his crucifixion and resurrection. Never has a generation passed since then when some number of those who have asked him or his servants for healing have not borne witness to the Lord's healing in their mortal bodies. But no healing lasts in this life; the final healing will come with his second coming, when no disease or sickness will outlast his cleansing presence.
5. Life-giver
To be a creature is to be given existence, and to be created human is to be given the unsurpassably beautiful gift of life: the breath of life in our lungs, breathed in us by God himself (Gen 2:7). Death is the final enemy to be defeated (1 Cor 15:26), and as the wages of sin, death is bound up with opposition to God's good will for living creatures. By contrast, Christ is "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6); indeed, he is "the resurrection and the life" (11:25). He comes to bring us death-bound creatures life abundant (10:10), and from his heart rivers of life spring forth to nourish us (7:38). Even now, through his Spirit, we have a taste of "the eternal life which was with the Father" (1 John 1:2), the fullness of which will arrive at his appearing.
V. Perfected Relationship
1. Slavery
The Lord Jesus is the great deliverer, liberating his people from the chains of slavery: first from Egypt and the power of Pharaoh, finally from sin, death, and the power of Satan. Thus he assumed our nature that "through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage" (Heb 2:14-15). But as both Exodus and Romans testify, those once enslaved are not set free "for" anything at all; they are set free to be servants and worshipers of God. There is, in this sense, a transfer of masters, not a denial of life under lordship: though, in this case, a transfer not in degree but in kind—from the cruelty of unjust fellow creatures to the blessing of the only just and sovereign Master. And so, in this sense, what Jesus accomplishes in his life, death, and resurrection is the liberation of all peoples from servitude and subjection to any and all worldly masters, making us instead "slaves of righteousness" (Rom 6:8), that is to say, "slaves of Christ" (1 Cor 7:22).
2. Friendship
Having said that, we turn to 1 John: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love" (4:18). Indeed, as Jesus says in his final words to the disciples in the Gospel of John, "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You are my friends if you do what I command you" (15:15, 14). Thus, although it is proper to say that we are slaves of Christ, at least here below, this claim is subordinate and secondary to the theologically primary claim, that in the incarnation God befriends us, elevating us to friendship with himself. The work of Christ, simply put, is to make us his friends. And so he has, because his word and his life are true and efficacious. Nothing is so beautiful to imagine as beatitude experienced as everlasting friendship with the Holy Trinity.
3. Covenant Membership
There is no relationship with the God of Israel outside of covenant; YHWH is the God of covenant. Covenant is the gracious means by which the Lord establishes relations—saving, loving, lasting—with human women and men. It is, furthermore, the means by which he establishes them as more than isolated individuals or tribal clans or nations at odds, but as a community, a single people defined by relationship with God, the creator of all. Thus, Jesus saves not individuals but a people, the covenant people of God. But in doing so he fulfills the old covenant by creating a new covenant in his blood, sealed on the cross. To be redeemed, to be touched by the atoning love of Christ, is nothing other than to be included in this covenant, to be made a member of God's covenant family. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus: indeed, for outside the church there is no covenant, and to belong to the covenant is to belong to Christ himself, our savior, redeemer, and friend.
4. Feast
God saves by feeding; his salvation is a feast. The Passover meal, the manna and quail in the wilderness, the feasts and festivals at the temple: bread and meat to eat and wine and water to drink are the telltale signs of the Lord at work to deliver from bondage and atone for sin. So in the ministry of Jesus, whose first sign changes water to wine at a wedding feast (John 2:1-11) and whose reputation for partying was so renowned that he was slandered as a glutton and a drunkard (Matt 11:19)! No surprise, then, that the central practice of the church instituted by Jesus himself is a meal of bread and wine—elements that signify and mediate the bodily presence of the risen and ascended Lord himself—which meal itself figures the final marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:7-10). The heavenly banquet is prepared, and Christ invites us now, even as he did on earth, to partake of this saving food and drink, that is, his own body and blood (John 6:53-58).
5. Marriage
As Israel is the bride of YHWH, so the church is the bride of the Messiah. "'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church" (Eph 5:31-21). This is true at the communal as well as the individual level, since Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that, just as a united to a woman become one flesh with her, so a person "united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him" (6:16-17). In the end, when God creates new heavens and new earth, the marriage of the Lord and his covenant people will be consummated, and God and Abraham's children will be eternally one, for God is one, and he will be all in all (15:28).
VI. Supernatural Elevation
1. Forerunner
Christ not only takes our place and lives a truly human life on our behalf. He blazes the trail of salvation, in whose wake we have but to follow. He charts the path to God, a path from conception and birth through growth and life to death, descent, resurrection, and ascension. Our lives are but imitations of his, the journey of the One who went before, the forerunner, the archegos (Heb 12:2). Where our nature has gone with him, so we will and may go—including into heaven (Eph 2:5-6), before the presence of God almighty. And along the way, all of Christ's action is our instruction (an axiom of St. Thomas Aquinas). We are followers in the Way and learners in his school, until we see him face to face.
2. Adoption
Jesus Christ is the eternal, unique, only-begotten Son of God, incarnate in and as a human being. But precisely in his becoming flesh and blood, existing in every way like us apart from sin, he extends his Sonship to us through baptism in his Spirit, the Spirit of Sonship, which is to say, the Spirit of adoption (Rom 8:15, 23). We thus become the sisters and brothers of Christ, and therefore, one and all, the children of God by adoption. Just as gentiles are adopted through Abraham's seed to be, by faith, the children of Abraham, so both Jews and gentiles are adopted through God's only Son to be, through the gift of the Spirit in baptism, the sons and daughters of God.
3. Spirit-sender
The external operations of the Holy Trinity are indivisible, both in creation and in salvation. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are alike and equally Creator and Savior. Thus the Spirit is present and active at every moment of the incarnation and career and saving work of the Son. Jesus is conceived by the Spirit, filled with the Spirit, empowered by the Spirit, drawn by the Spirit, nourished by the Spirit, raised in the power of the Spirit—and when he ascends to heaven, Jesus pours our the Spirit he bore in his earthly life upon the apostles and, through them, all the baptized henceforth and forevermore. In sending the Spirit he sent the church, not alone, but filled by his presence, that is, the Spirit who makes him present in power, love, and peace. The Spirit gives life, and Jesus breathes the Spirit on us with unstinting grace (John 20:22).
4. Great exchange
Jesus not only substitutes himself as a man in our place; in his very being, in the hypostatic union that constitutes the eternal Son to be a man—perfect in divinity, perfect in humanity—he enacts the great, the beautiful, the happy exchange: he takes on our nature that he might gives us his. He assumes finitude, creatureliness, mortality; we receive the fullness of what it means to be the Spirit-filled Son of God the Father. The realities and shortcomings of humanity are his; the benefits and blessings of divinity are ours. The exchange happens in his own person, in the communication of properties between his two natures; and what happens there, in that one man, redounds to all women and men who share his human nature.
5. Theosis
Truly, in Christ, we "become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Pet 1:4). In the words of St. Athanasius, he became human that we might become divine. Or in C. S. Lewis's phrasing, the final end of the work of Christ is to make little Christs of all of us. And if Christ is God, then we are gods. Not, that is, that our nature is changed from human to divine. We remain human, as Christ remains human. Rather, our humanity is divinized, saturated with the divine glory and presence and consequently elevated to fellowship in the eternal communion of love that is the inexhaustible life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Spirit inserts us through the human nature of the glorified Son, Jesus, into this perfect circle of giving, sharing, and endless, enraptured happiness. We will see God, in the last, and to see God is to be conformed to himself, that is, to his image. And so we are, and so we will be. Soli Deo gloria.
Let me note two things at the outset. First, I took initial inspiration from Ben Myers' lovely patristic-flavored post on atonement theories from a few years back. Second, it seems to me that atonement is a particularly resonant English word that is very nearly interchangeable with salvation. To ask what atonement consists in, it seems to me, is to ask how Jesus saves. Or at least so I have assumed in what follows. Third, atonement is not one of my pet doctrines; I haven't read widely and deeply in it the way some of my friends and colleagues have. I'm sure that, somewhere below, I have left something out or inexpertly explained this or that theory. Pardons in advance.
Without further ado, my sixfold (really, 6 x 5) typology of the atonement.
_________________________________
I. Royal Conquest
1. Ransom
Through the death of Jesus, the Messiah, God "ransoms" or buys back his elect people from their slavery to sin and death; this is the new and final Exodus, in which the Lord once and for all delivers his people from the Pharaoh-like Satan.
2. Christus victor
Jesus submits to death, the wages of sinful humanity, and in doing so puts death to death and triumphs over it in his resurrection from the dead, now eternally free from death in the life of God, never to die again.
3. Harrowing of hell
Jesus the King descends to the realm of the dead and claims what is his own: all the saints of old, awaiting the proclamation of good news to those who died in hope of his coming. The gates of hell tremble at the sound of his feet, and crack open as he takes his own with him into everlasting life: he, the Living One, in whose hands are now the keys to Death and Hades (Rev 1:18).
4. Exaltation
Jesus Christ is risen from the dead: and not only risen, but raised to glory eternal, the glory he had with the Father before the ages. Only now, it is in and as the human nature he assumed in Mary's womb that he is raised, glorified, ascended, enthroned at the right hand of the Father in the power of the Spirit, whence he rules and judges the affairs of earth until he returns again.
5. Citizenship
Having inaugurated his reign over creation, Christ extends the gift of heavenly citizenship to all who accept his rule. To live subject to the wise, just, and merciful kingship of Christ in between his two advents means to anticipate, even now, the glories of the kingdom of heaven that will be made manifest at his appearing, though they remain hidden as the church sojourns in the world.
II. Holy Justice
1. Suffering
This one little word, "suffered," serves in the New Testament as a euphemism or précis for the whole work of Christ. Why is that? "Christ also suffered for sins once for all" (1 Pet 3:18); "Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood" (Heb 13:12): we could multiply examples. There is a mystery here. First, Jesus shares in the human condition, under the weight of sin, evil, and death. His solidarity is complete. "For because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted" (Heb 2:18). Moreover, his suffering is salvific: the victim bleeds, the substitute is scourged, the one pronounced guilty is mocked and spat upon. We see, we feel, we intuit the depths of the mystery here—even if we cannot finds words adequate to it—that the eternal and impassible One has willed to undergo this passion simply because "he loved me" (Gal 2:20). It was necessary that the Lord's servant suffer rejection at the hands of both those under and those outside the Law: this very thing happened in our midst, for us and for our salvation.
2. Sacrifice
God is holy, and wills that his people be holy likewise. In old Israel, God graciously provided for the people to be cleansed of their sins through the shedding of blood, that is, through ritual sacrifices that sanctified them, in love, so that they might worship the Lord in his presence with a pure body and a clean conscience. Jesus Christ is the final sacrifice, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, that to which all prior sacrifices pointed and in which they participated (and, mutatis mutandis, so ever since, whether in praise, in illness, in martyrdom, or in the Eucharist). Jesus, the spotless victim, without blemish, offered himself upon the cross, a perfect and pleasing sacrifice to the God of Israel, thus cleansing, purifying, and sanctifying his beloved people, and effecting, once and for all, the forgiveness of sins.
3. Justification
God is righteous and just, the only good and wise Judge. Human righteousness consists in obedience to his commands, which is to live in accordance with the divine will. Humans, though, individually and collectively, are law-breakers, transgressors, guilty before the court of divine justice. We deserve condemnation, and indeed, guilty of sin and subject to death, we stand condemned, dead in our trespasses. But God in his mercy justifies the ungodly, offering pardon in the name of Christ to all who cast themselves in faith on him, the Crucified. He, the righteous one, stands in the dock, and our sentence becomes his—do not Pilate and the people sentence Jesus to a death reserved for the guilty?—while his status—do not Pilate and the Centurion recognize Jesus's just innocence?—becomes ours. Barabbas figures the believer who, through no merit of his own, is released, while Jesus does not resist taking his place. In short, the triune God delivers the final verdict, and though we have broken God's law, we are absolved, pardoned, pronounced innocent for the sake of Christ. Now therefore there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom 8:1).
4. Substitution
Jesus Christ, the one true and fully human man, takes our place. He lives and dies for us, on our behalf, for our sake. He is utterly and without reservation pro nobis, and he stands in our stead, so that we might stand in his. What was due us, comes to him; what is due him, comes to us. What is ours becomes his, and what is his becomes ours. All that he does, he does with us in mind, for our benefit. Whatever justice demands, he, the God-man, both exacts and accepts it. In him, we see our fate overturned, not by a miscarriage of justice, but by the mercy of the Just One offering himself in our place.
5. Satisfaction
What does humanity owe God our creator? Everything, as it turns out. It is a debt we owe simply in virtue of being the creatures we are, made from nothing and sustained in existence for no good reason other than the divine good pleasure. But we do not give God what is his due. We do not render obedience. We do not love him with our whole hearts; we do not love our neighbor as ourselves (as he commands). We do not live in constant, grateful dependence upon him. If we are to be restored to fellowship with the God who alone is just, good, and right, how are we to rectify the relationship we have broken (from our side)? Not by our own efforts, themselves already corrupt and corrupting. Only the offering of a fully human life perfect from start to finish could be thus acceptable. Thus does Jesus, the God-man, offer his own life to make satisfaction for all humanity, to "pay the debt we could not pay." By his death, he gives infinitely beyond what we ever could, and in rising from the dead and pouring out his Spirit, he gives with abandon what he does not need and what was always already his by nature, not only making restitution but gratuitously sharing gifts both beyond nature and beyond measure.
III. Israel's Fulfillment
1. Abraham's seed
The promise of the Lord to Abraham was that his seed would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, and that in his seed all the nations would be blessed (Gen 12:1-3; 22:17). Thus the New Testament begins by telling us that Jesus is the son of Abraham (Matt 1:1), and Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians that the seed (singular, not plural) of which the Lord spoke was Christ himself (3:16)—through him the nations have come to the Lord for blessing, by the selfsame faith with which Abraham believed the Lord's promise (Rom 4:23-25).
2. Torah's telos
The Law of Moses was a gracious provision for God's people Israel, to set them apart from the nations, to sanctify them as his treasured possession, to render them fit to be his servant, the light to the nations. It was, in this sense, a means to an end. And as Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, "Christ is the end of the law" (10:4), which is to say, the telos of the Torah is the Messiah. Moses had a target, an aim, a goal, and it is fulfilled in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Both the work he accomplishes—sanctifying Israel, effecting forgiveness of sins, bringing near the reign of God—and the perfect obedience he offers—obedience to the Torah's literal commands but also to its heart, which is the revealed heart of the Lord God—bring to glorious fulfillment the purpose and meaning of Moses's Law: the law of love, the law of Christ.
3. Shekinah embodied
Jesus is Immanuel, God with us—but the Lord's presence in, with, among, and to Israel is not a novelty. Israel's scriptures are nothing but one long story of the Lord's passionate will to be present to and for his people: wrestling with Jacob, the fire by night and cloud by day, the tabernacle, the ark, the temple. The God of Israel is an indwelling God, a particular God (not deity in general) of a particular land and people (Abraham's children) who can be found, in Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod's memorable phrase, at One Temple Avenue, Jerusalem. But these are the foretaste and promise, not the reality or fulfillment. That came in the person of Mary's son, who took on flesh in her womb and was born and lived a man, that is, a fully human life lived by YHWH. He, Yeshua bar-Yehosef, is the Shekinah enfleshed, the fullness of the Godhead dwelling bodily amidst his people. And so he will dwell, forever, when heaven comes to earth on the last day.
4. Priesthood
The work of the priest is to stand between God and the people, mediating in both directions: representing God to the people, and representing the people to God. In love, the Lord established the priesthood in Israel through Aaron's line and the tribe of Levi. The principal work of the priest was to offer sacrifices before the Lord. Jesus was not a Levite, but he was a priest (according to the book of Hebrews) in the order of Melchizedek. Not only a priest, he is "a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God" (2:17), who offered once and for all his own life as a sacrifice for all the people—a perfect offering, because he, a priest without sin, offered not for himself but for others what they, not he, needed. And so this eternal priest makes offering in the heavenly sanctuary not made with human hands, Jesus the mediator between God and man, interceding for us before God the Father, an advocate and aid to all who seek the help of heaven.
5. Ingrafting
The seed of Abraham is the chosen people of God, and as Paul writes, the root of the tree of Israel is irreducibly and immutably Jewish (Rom 11:16-18). But the miraculous and unexpected work of the Messiah is so to accomplish salvation "apart from law"—"although the law and the prophets bear witness to it" (3:21)—that it applies not only to Jews, branches of Israel's tree by nature, but also to gentiles, a wild olive shoot ("contrary to nature" [11:24]). So that, through baptism and faith in the Messiah, both the natural and the wild branches belong to one and the same tree, the latter grafted in through the gracious hands of the Lord, who is God not only of the Jews but also of the gentiles (3:29).
IV. Natural Restoration
1. Knowledge
Humanity was created to know God, and in disobeying the command of God by seeking after forbidden knowledge, humanity fell away from the knowledge of God. Through Christ, however, the knowledge of God is restored, both in his own person, as a fully human being, and in those united to him by faith through baptism. As Colossians 3:9-10 states, believers have put off the old, fallen nature and been clothed in the new, regenerate nature—redeemed and remade in Christ—"which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator." Moreover, Christ came teaching, and in the Spirit and through Scripture, he remains our teacher, drawing us into true and saving knowledge of the Father.
2. Image
Humanity was and is created in the image of God, but through the Fall that image is tarnished, damaged, neither whole nor expressive, as it ought to be, of who human beings are and what they were made to be within the wider created order. Christ, though, as God from God and Light from Light, is neither made nor "in" the image of God: he is the image itself, from everlasting to everlasting. And so, in becoming human, he restores the imago Dei in human nature; all those in him share in that restored image, which will be theirs in full upon his return in glory—at which point they will finally take up their calling as image-bearing creatures among and for the sake of all other creatures.
3. Second Adam
Adam, the first man, fell; and in him all humanity fell, too. That is to say, all human beings share in the condition of our first parents: we are all "in Adam." But Jesus Christ is the new man, the Second Adam, and to be "in" Christ is to be incorporated into the life and body of this sinless one triumphant over death. Our sin died with him on the cross, and in his resurrection, he lives to God the super-abundant life of the Spirit, whom, in pouring him out on the church, he makes available to all those who draw near to him in faith. And in the End, when God is all in all, this Adam will not, can never fall; and the same is true of those he brings with him.
4. Healing
Fallenness means sickness, sickness of the soul and of the body. Christ is our healer, the great physician. He came healing, and those who asked him to be made whole had their petitions granted: "If you will... I will" (Mark 1:40-41). He also sent his disciples out with the same charge, and they healed in his name both before and after his crucifixion and resurrection. Never has a generation passed since then when some number of those who have asked him or his servants for healing have not borne witness to the Lord's healing in their mortal bodies. But no healing lasts in this life; the final healing will come with his second coming, when no disease or sickness will outlast his cleansing presence.
5. Life-giver
To be a creature is to be given existence, and to be created human is to be given the unsurpassably beautiful gift of life: the breath of life in our lungs, breathed in us by God himself (Gen 2:7). Death is the final enemy to be defeated (1 Cor 15:26), and as the wages of sin, death is bound up with opposition to God's good will for living creatures. By contrast, Christ is "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6); indeed, he is "the resurrection and the life" (11:25). He comes to bring us death-bound creatures life abundant (10:10), and from his heart rivers of life spring forth to nourish us (7:38). Even now, through his Spirit, we have a taste of "the eternal life which was with the Father" (1 John 1:2), the fullness of which will arrive at his appearing.
V. Perfected Relationship
1. Slavery
The Lord Jesus is the great deliverer, liberating his people from the chains of slavery: first from Egypt and the power of Pharaoh, finally from sin, death, and the power of Satan. Thus he assumed our nature that "through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage" (Heb 2:14-15). But as both Exodus and Romans testify, those once enslaved are not set free "for" anything at all; they are set free to be servants and worshipers of God. There is, in this sense, a transfer of masters, not a denial of life under lordship: though, in this case, a transfer not in degree but in kind—from the cruelty of unjust fellow creatures to the blessing of the only just and sovereign Master. And so, in this sense, what Jesus accomplishes in his life, death, and resurrection is the liberation of all peoples from servitude and subjection to any and all worldly masters, making us instead "slaves of righteousness" (Rom 6:8), that is to say, "slaves of Christ" (1 Cor 7:22).
2. Friendship
Having said that, we turn to 1 John: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love" (4:18). Indeed, as Jesus says in his final words to the disciples in the Gospel of John, "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You are my friends if you do what I command you" (15:15, 14). Thus, although it is proper to say that we are slaves of Christ, at least here below, this claim is subordinate and secondary to the theologically primary claim, that in the incarnation God befriends us, elevating us to friendship with himself. The work of Christ, simply put, is to make us his friends. And so he has, because his word and his life are true and efficacious. Nothing is so beautiful to imagine as beatitude experienced as everlasting friendship with the Holy Trinity.
3. Covenant Membership
There is no relationship with the God of Israel outside of covenant; YHWH is the God of covenant. Covenant is the gracious means by which the Lord establishes relations—saving, loving, lasting—with human women and men. It is, furthermore, the means by which he establishes them as more than isolated individuals or tribal clans or nations at odds, but as a community, a single people defined by relationship with God, the creator of all. Thus, Jesus saves not individuals but a people, the covenant people of God. But in doing so he fulfills the old covenant by creating a new covenant in his blood, sealed on the cross. To be redeemed, to be touched by the atoning love of Christ, is nothing other than to be included in this covenant, to be made a member of God's covenant family. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus: indeed, for outside the church there is no covenant, and to belong to the covenant is to belong to Christ himself, our savior, redeemer, and friend.
4. Feast
God saves by feeding; his salvation is a feast. The Passover meal, the manna and quail in the wilderness, the feasts and festivals at the temple: bread and meat to eat and wine and water to drink are the telltale signs of the Lord at work to deliver from bondage and atone for sin. So in the ministry of Jesus, whose first sign changes water to wine at a wedding feast (John 2:1-11) and whose reputation for partying was so renowned that he was slandered as a glutton and a drunkard (Matt 11:19)! No surprise, then, that the central practice of the church instituted by Jesus himself is a meal of bread and wine—elements that signify and mediate the bodily presence of the risen and ascended Lord himself—which meal itself figures the final marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:7-10). The heavenly banquet is prepared, and Christ invites us now, even as he did on earth, to partake of this saving food and drink, that is, his own body and blood (John 6:53-58).
5. Marriage
As Israel is the bride of YHWH, so the church is the bride of the Messiah. "'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church" (Eph 5:31-21). This is true at the communal as well as the individual level, since Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that, just as a united to a woman become one flesh with her, so a person "united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him" (6:16-17). In the end, when God creates new heavens and new earth, the marriage of the Lord and his covenant people will be consummated, and God and Abraham's children will be eternally one, for God is one, and he will be all in all (15:28).
VI. Supernatural Elevation
1. Forerunner
Christ not only takes our place and lives a truly human life on our behalf. He blazes the trail of salvation, in whose wake we have but to follow. He charts the path to God, a path from conception and birth through growth and life to death, descent, resurrection, and ascension. Our lives are but imitations of his, the journey of the One who went before, the forerunner, the archegos (Heb 12:2). Where our nature has gone with him, so we will and may go—including into heaven (Eph 2:5-6), before the presence of God almighty. And along the way, all of Christ's action is our instruction (an axiom of St. Thomas Aquinas). We are followers in the Way and learners in his school, until we see him face to face.
2. Adoption
Jesus Christ is the eternal, unique, only-begotten Son of God, incarnate in and as a human being. But precisely in his becoming flesh and blood, existing in every way like us apart from sin, he extends his Sonship to us through baptism in his Spirit, the Spirit of Sonship, which is to say, the Spirit of adoption (Rom 8:15, 23). We thus become the sisters and brothers of Christ, and therefore, one and all, the children of God by adoption. Just as gentiles are adopted through Abraham's seed to be, by faith, the children of Abraham, so both Jews and gentiles are adopted through God's only Son to be, through the gift of the Spirit in baptism, the sons and daughters of God.
3. Spirit-sender
The external operations of the Holy Trinity are indivisible, both in creation and in salvation. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are alike and equally Creator and Savior. Thus the Spirit is present and active at every moment of the incarnation and career and saving work of the Son. Jesus is conceived by the Spirit, filled with the Spirit, empowered by the Spirit, drawn by the Spirit, nourished by the Spirit, raised in the power of the Spirit—and when he ascends to heaven, Jesus pours our the Spirit he bore in his earthly life upon the apostles and, through them, all the baptized henceforth and forevermore. In sending the Spirit he sent the church, not alone, but filled by his presence, that is, the Spirit who makes him present in power, love, and peace. The Spirit gives life, and Jesus breathes the Spirit on us with unstinting grace (John 20:22).
4. Great exchange
Jesus not only substitutes himself as a man in our place; in his very being, in the hypostatic union that constitutes the eternal Son to be a man—perfect in divinity, perfect in humanity—he enacts the great, the beautiful, the happy exchange: he takes on our nature that he might gives us his. He assumes finitude, creatureliness, mortality; we receive the fullness of what it means to be the Spirit-filled Son of God the Father. The realities and shortcomings of humanity are his; the benefits and blessings of divinity are ours. The exchange happens in his own person, in the communication of properties between his two natures; and what happens there, in that one man, redounds to all women and men who share his human nature.
5. Theosis
Truly, in Christ, we "become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Pet 1:4). In the words of St. Athanasius, he became human that we might become divine. Or in C. S. Lewis's phrasing, the final end of the work of Christ is to make little Christs of all of us. And if Christ is God, then we are gods. Not, that is, that our nature is changed from human to divine. We remain human, as Christ remains human. Rather, our humanity is divinized, saturated with the divine glory and presence and consequently elevated to fellowship in the eternal communion of love that is the inexhaustible life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Spirit inserts us through the human nature of the glorified Son, Jesus, into this perfect circle of giving, sharing, and endless, enraptured happiness. We will see God, in the last, and to see God is to be conformed to himself, that is, to his image. And so we are, and so we will be. Soli Deo gloria.
What does holiness look like?
The Protestant account of vocation smooths out the hierarchies of office (the priesthood of all believers) and of holy living (monastic life is no "better" than life working a farm). From one point of view, this is a good thing: no special religious caste; it flattens out "quality" of life: God calls each to his or her own station in life; holiness is democratized. From another point of view, this is a problem: it treats everything and everyone "the same," thus losing all differentiation; it lacks honesty, since in fact church ministry or serving the poor are, and will be treated as, more important than, say, working as a notary or drilling for oil; and worst of all, it loses the eschatological dimension of Christ's call, draining it of radical disorientation through the cross and resurrection and replacing it with the simple pleasures of local, family, and/or bourgeois life.
One way to frame the disjunction is to ask the question: Is the good life—that is, the faithful life of discipleship to Christ—taught by and embodied in a particular church tradition best exemplified by (1) the philosophy of Aristotle, (2) the Book of Proverbs, or (3) the Sermon on the Mount?
It seems to me that there is a problem if the answer, more or less full-stop, is (2).
My older, more Anabaptist self thought the answer, more or less full-stop, should be (3). And that's still true, in one sense.
But I find myself increasingly drawn to the long-standing catholic answer, which I would formulate this way: In terms of what we may reasonably expect and ordinarily teach, the common good ought to be ordered to (1); the average believer ought to be ordered (at a minimum) to (2); while the church as such, particularly in the form of its saints and martyrs (past), ordained and religious (present), ought to be ordered to (3). So that, even if those grouped in (2) never move from natural sapience to supernatural Chokmah—from the way of things to the Way of Wisdom Incarnate—the latter is held before their eyes as their eventual destination, not only the Way but the End, where all roads lead: to Christ, crucified, risen, glorified, and his Kingdom of little Christs. And in the process, perhaps those of us lesser saints, baptized as we are, will in fact move beyond our bourgeois comforts to the higher paths of harder, but better, living.
I'm mostly thinking out loud. And thinking in the midst of having my mind changed, or realizing it has changed. What I am convinced about is that, e.g., the moral vision of Wendell Berry is both good and beautiful and not sufficiently converted to the gospel. And if some forms of Christian political theology don't recognize that, then so much the worse for them.
One way to frame the disjunction is to ask the question: Is the good life—that is, the faithful life of discipleship to Christ—taught by and embodied in a particular church tradition best exemplified by (1) the philosophy of Aristotle, (2) the Book of Proverbs, or (3) the Sermon on the Mount?
It seems to me that there is a problem if the answer, more or less full-stop, is (2).
My older, more Anabaptist self thought the answer, more or less full-stop, should be (3). And that's still true, in one sense.
But I find myself increasingly drawn to the long-standing catholic answer, which I would formulate this way: In terms of what we may reasonably expect and ordinarily teach, the common good ought to be ordered to (1); the average believer ought to be ordered (at a minimum) to (2); while the church as such, particularly in the form of its saints and martyrs (past), ordained and religious (present), ought to be ordered to (3). So that, even if those grouped in (2) never move from natural sapience to supernatural Chokmah—from the way of things to the Way of Wisdom Incarnate—the latter is held before their eyes as their eventual destination, not only the Way but the End, where all roads lead: to Christ, crucified, risen, glorified, and his Kingdom of little Christs. And in the process, perhaps those of us lesser saints, baptized as we are, will in fact move beyond our bourgeois comforts to the higher paths of harder, but better, living.
I'm mostly thinking out loud. And thinking in the midst of having my mind changed, or realizing it has changed. What I am convinced about is that, e.g., the moral vision of Wendell Berry is both good and beautiful and not sufficiently converted to the gospel. And if some forms of Christian political theology don't recognize that, then so much the worse for them.
On Episode IX and J.J. Abrams
In 16 weeks, Episode IX—the conclusion to the final trilogy in the trilogy of trilogies that the Star Wars saga has become, not to mention the other stand-alone films and the new live-action TV show—will be released. The new teaser made available earlier this week generated a lot of discussion and speculation about plot lines and, above all, the direction the script will take and, ultimately, how it will wrap up the story.
Up till now I've tried to be realistic but hopeful about the possibility that J. J. Abrams might actually stick the landing, if not perfectly, than satisfactorily. What he did in VII was a combination of good and bad, but Rian Johnson took the hand he'd been dealt and did something masterful with it in VIII. Could Abrams have something equally excellent up his sleeve? Could he surprise us all by finally overcoming his worst tendencies and producing truly original, brilliant work?
The truth is that we have no reason to think so.
Consider the other films Abrams has written and/or directed in the last 15 years: Mission: Impossible III, Star Trek, Super 8, Star Trek Into Darkness, and The Force Awakens. The Rise of Skywalker is only the sixth film he has directed—and, if you begin in 1998 when he began to "be" J.J. Abrams (i.e., with the release of Armageddon and the premiere of Felicity), he's also only written six films.
Of those he has directed, only one was an original property, and only two, strictly speaking, were not a sequel. Three were expansions of TV shows. And as for each considered individually:
–M:I:3 is a polished 2-hour TV movie that is clearly a "first film."
–Star Trek is a retelling of the original Star Wars in Gene Roddenberry's universe, with an altered timeline and some yadda-yadda-ing of plot to get the Right Characters in the Right Place sooner rather than later.
–Super 8 is E.T. for millennials, with CGI.
–Star Trek Into Darkness is—as you know—a semi-remake of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The less said about this one the better.
–And then there's Episode VII, which simultaneously re-launched Star Wars for a new generation and, in the structure of the whole film but especially in the final act, came close to being a beat-for-beat remake of Episode IV. A reboot that's also a sequel, somehow.
And now we come to Episode IX, which features the return of Lando Calrissian and, inexplicably, Emperor Palpatine. What could go wrong?
* * *
Now, I'm underselling Abrams' talents in the way I've presented his work. He has real strengths. He may be second only to Spielberg in his ability to cast, both knowns and unknowns. His direction of actors draws out the best of them. He can write and direct both dialogue and rapport with the best of them. And his films move: for all the flaws of the rest of the film, the opening 45 minutes of The Force Awakens is blockbuster filmmaking nonpareil. Oh, and his actual technique, in terms of frame and composition and color and so on, is underrated. Each of his films has improved substantially in that respect.
But Abrams' chief vice, his fatal shortcoming, undermines each and every one of these virtues: namely, his affinity for nostalgia, for telling and re-telling the stories he grew up with and whose essential beats, he knows, his audience yearns to see in only slightly dressed-up form.
Had he made only one or two different decisions in VII—say, having Starkiller Base fail in its attempt to destroy the New Republic, or having the Resistance's attempt to disable and destroy the Base fail, thus resulting in a lack of catharsis and non-replay of IV—things could have gone differently there, because it's clear that Abrams was trying to comment on his own, which is to say his generation's, inability to move beyond the past, to play dress-up in Boomer Glory even as a decadent empire falls apart. Kylo Ren is, in that respect, a perfect pop culture creation.
But he didn't have the courage or the imagination or the awareness or the studio support to go fully revisionary in his Star Wars entry, and thus here we are.
* * *
So: Might Episode IX be good?
In fact, that's not the right question, because it will without a doubt be good, because Abrams doesn't make bad movies. The problem, rather, is that he may only make Good Movies.
Rephrasing, then: Will Episode IX be more than good? Will Abrams upset our expectations beyond the mystery box and a couple "shocking" surprises?
The answer, unfortunately, is no. Every sign points to it. There will be funny rapport and lovely images and stirring character beats and some fantastic action. But Abrams won't be able to resist the siren song of nostalgia. The nods and winks to the prequels and original trilogy, the recycling of old themes and narrative devices and literal resurrected characters: they're all going to be there, in full, without apology. And that'll be the end of that. Best to accept it now rather than manufacture unfounded expectations for a writer-director who has been nothing if not consistent for two decades of TV and film work.
That'll be the end of the Skywalker saga, and if we're lucky, the end of Abrams' involvement with Star Wars, too—for good.
Up till now I've tried to be realistic but hopeful about the possibility that J. J. Abrams might actually stick the landing, if not perfectly, than satisfactorily. What he did in VII was a combination of good and bad, but Rian Johnson took the hand he'd been dealt and did something masterful with it in VIII. Could Abrams have something equally excellent up his sleeve? Could he surprise us all by finally overcoming his worst tendencies and producing truly original, brilliant work?
The truth is that we have no reason to think so.
Consider the other films Abrams has written and/or directed in the last 15 years: Mission: Impossible III, Star Trek, Super 8, Star Trek Into Darkness, and The Force Awakens. The Rise of Skywalker is only the sixth film he has directed—and, if you begin in 1998 when he began to "be" J.J. Abrams (i.e., with the release of Armageddon and the premiere of Felicity), he's also only written six films.
Of those he has directed, only one was an original property, and only two, strictly speaking, were not a sequel. Three were expansions of TV shows. And as for each considered individually:
–M:I:3 is a polished 2-hour TV movie that is clearly a "first film."
–Star Trek is a retelling of the original Star Wars in Gene Roddenberry's universe, with an altered timeline and some yadda-yadda-ing of plot to get the Right Characters in the Right Place sooner rather than later.
–Super 8 is E.T. for millennials, with CGI.
–Star Trek Into Darkness is—as you know—a semi-remake of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The less said about this one the better.
–And then there's Episode VII, which simultaneously re-launched Star Wars for a new generation and, in the structure of the whole film but especially in the final act, came close to being a beat-for-beat remake of Episode IV. A reboot that's also a sequel, somehow.
And now we come to Episode IX, which features the return of Lando Calrissian and, inexplicably, Emperor Palpatine. What could go wrong?
* * *
Now, I'm underselling Abrams' talents in the way I've presented his work. He has real strengths. He may be second only to Spielberg in his ability to cast, both knowns and unknowns. His direction of actors draws out the best of them. He can write and direct both dialogue and rapport with the best of them. And his films move: for all the flaws of the rest of the film, the opening 45 minutes of The Force Awakens is blockbuster filmmaking nonpareil. Oh, and his actual technique, in terms of frame and composition and color and so on, is underrated. Each of his films has improved substantially in that respect.
But Abrams' chief vice, his fatal shortcoming, undermines each and every one of these virtues: namely, his affinity for nostalgia, for telling and re-telling the stories he grew up with and whose essential beats, he knows, his audience yearns to see in only slightly dressed-up form.
Had he made only one or two different decisions in VII—say, having Starkiller Base fail in its attempt to destroy the New Republic, or having the Resistance's attempt to disable and destroy the Base fail, thus resulting in a lack of catharsis and non-replay of IV—things could have gone differently there, because it's clear that Abrams was trying to comment on his own, which is to say his generation's, inability to move beyond the past, to play dress-up in Boomer Glory even as a decadent empire falls apart. Kylo Ren is, in that respect, a perfect pop culture creation.
But he didn't have the courage or the imagination or the awareness or the studio support to go fully revisionary in his Star Wars entry, and thus here we are.
* * *
So: Might Episode IX be good?
In fact, that's not the right question, because it will without a doubt be good, because Abrams doesn't make bad movies. The problem, rather, is that he may only make Good Movies.
Rephrasing, then: Will Episode IX be more than good? Will Abrams upset our expectations beyond the mystery box and a couple "shocking" surprises?
The answer, unfortunately, is no. Every sign points to it. There will be funny rapport and lovely images and stirring character beats and some fantastic action. But Abrams won't be able to resist the siren song of nostalgia. The nods and winks to the prequels and original trilogy, the recycling of old themes and narrative devices and literal resurrected characters: they're all going to be there, in full, without apology. And that'll be the end of that. Best to accept it now rather than manufacture unfounded expectations for a writer-director who has been nothing if not consistent for two decades of TV and film work.
That'll be the end of the Skywalker saga, and if we're lucky, the end of Abrams' involvement with Star Wars, too—for good.
Anonymous Americans
Perhaps someone else has made this connection before, but it seems to me that there is a secularized form of Rahner's so-called "anonymous Christians" at work in American political discourse. It has right and left variations, but the theme is the same: In principle, the world is always already America; persons from other places, citizens of other nations, are Americans in embryo: the potential merely needs to be made actual. In this way non-Americans are in fact anonymous Americans, Americans without knowing it, Americans of the heart: related to and defined by America simply in virtue of who they are and how they live. And though they may lack this knowledge, we Americans, we explicit, public Americans—we know it on their behalf.
On the right, this takes the form of speaking as if other countries are good places to live just to the extent that they approximate the American way of life; so that any person or family beyond America's borders would, if given the chance to become American (without cost, risk, etc.), take the opportunity in a heartbeat. The American polity lies at the end of history, toward which horizon all the nations stream to receive instruction and pay homage.
On the left, this takes the form of speaking as if people from other countries are, in an almost metaphysical sense, already American, and thus owed, indeed entitled, to all the civic, social, legal, and other rights and privileges bestowed upon "official" Americans. If segments of the right envision open borders for the sake of freer movement of ideas and capital, segments of the left imagine open borders nominally as the elimination of the divisions enacted in the nation-state system, but effectively as the Americanization of the world: all are Americans, proleptically speaking; it just so happens that only a small portion of them have formal documentation to prove it at the moment.
No wonder that Americanists right and left so often unite in foreign adventurism, whether of the imperial or the humanitarian variety. Anonymous Americans around the world are living under conditions of great deprivation, definitionally speaking: they are expats of an ontological variety, exiled in advance of the great homecoming. No wonder, too, that the adventurism takes on the veneer of the Great Commission. Not only evangelization but eschatological in-gathering is the driving vision, the basis and the motivation for actions abroad rooted in faith, that is, the substance of things hoped for, the knowledge of things unseen.
On the last day, the great sorting will occur. But instead of Matthew 25, more often it is Isaiah 2, Micah 4, and Revelation 22 that fill out the picture of the End. The dazzling light of final freedom will disclose the hearts of the people, and the people's hearts will be, to a person, American. Even if—especially if—they never had a clue.
On the right, this takes the form of speaking as if other countries are good places to live just to the extent that they approximate the American way of life; so that any person or family beyond America's borders would, if given the chance to become American (without cost, risk, etc.), take the opportunity in a heartbeat. The American polity lies at the end of history, toward which horizon all the nations stream to receive instruction and pay homage.
On the left, this takes the form of speaking as if people from other countries are, in an almost metaphysical sense, already American, and thus owed, indeed entitled, to all the civic, social, legal, and other rights and privileges bestowed upon "official" Americans. If segments of the right envision open borders for the sake of freer movement of ideas and capital, segments of the left imagine open borders nominally as the elimination of the divisions enacted in the nation-state system, but effectively as the Americanization of the world: all are Americans, proleptically speaking; it just so happens that only a small portion of them have formal documentation to prove it at the moment.
No wonder that Americanists right and left so often unite in foreign adventurism, whether of the imperial or the humanitarian variety. Anonymous Americans around the world are living under conditions of great deprivation, definitionally speaking: they are expats of an ontological variety, exiled in advance of the great homecoming. No wonder, too, that the adventurism takes on the veneer of the Great Commission. Not only evangelization but eschatological in-gathering is the driving vision, the basis and the motivation for actions abroad rooted in faith, that is, the substance of things hoped for, the knowledge of things unseen.
On the last day, the great sorting will occur. But instead of Matthew 25, more often it is Isaiah 2, Micah 4, and Revelation 22 that fill out the picture of the End. The dazzling light of final freedom will disclose the hearts of the people, and the people's hearts will be, to a person, American. Even if—especially if—they never had a clue.
Political spectrums
I live deep in the heart of red state Texas, which means I regularly find myself trying to expand the political imaginations of my students. Not, that is, to switch their allegiances from one color to another, but to redraw the map they've inherited; to place a question mark next to its self-evident obviousness, which they treat as if it were the periodic table of elements (with only two to choose from!).
So I've come up with a heuristic that is meant to help students in my context. Mostly I want them to see the array of combinations, both of political first principles and concrete policy convictions, beyond lining up the GOP's national platform versus the DNC's. So, e.g., I want them to be introduced to (the concept of) Catholic Communists and Pro-Life Progressives and Democratic Socialists and Communitarian Conservatives and so on.
What follows is the set of spectrums, eight in all, that I've conjured up in order to help them in this process. I would be very interested in learning about other examples of this sort of thing, either in print or in the classroom. Here's mine, with brief of explanations for each, mostly in the form of questions.
1. Secular———————Religious
The question here is not whether one is individually religious. It is whether and to what extent one believes the governing authorities ought to be religious in character. The extremes here would be laïcité versus integralism; less extreme: separation of church and state versus established religion. Appeal to common faith or to Scripture as public norms, or practices like prayer in public schools, are litmus tests for where one stands on this spectrum.
2. Individualist—————Communitarian
Is the fundamental unit of society the individual, the family, the extended kin network, the neighborhood, the town, the city, or other? What is privileged in law and social mores? Is it plausible to treat groups as units irreducible to the individual—or no? Why or why not? Can such units be neither familial nor racial but, e.g., religious? This spectrum helps to answer such questions.
3. Democratic—————Aristocratic
How should the policies that govern and order society be decided and enacted? Who has authority to say so and power to make it so? Should any and all laws be put up to a direct vote by "the people"? Should adults be legally required to vote? Should one's vote ever be taken away? Should any processes of policy deliberation and creation be delegated to representatives? If so, ought those representatives to do what they deem the wisest course, or ought they to do whatever (the majority of) their voters say they want? Does society inevitably have a "ruling class" of "elites"? If it does, should this tendency be curtailed, indeed resisted, or should it be cultivated toward the common good? How "mixed" should government be, and what norms or laws, if any, militate against 50.1% majoritarian rule?
4. Liberal———————Illiberal*
What is "freedom," and how should it be protected or encouraged by the governing authorities? Does freedom pertain to individuals or communities? Is it purely negative (i.e., freedom from interference) or also positive (i.e., freedom to do, be, or say X or Y)? What may or must society "enforce" in the lives of its citizens? Are there moral or legal norms beyond the harm principle? How may they be adjudicated? Are the liberties properly sought or secured in society a creation of said society, or do they antedate their own formal recognition? What is their metaphysical status, in other words? Are they necessarily connected with "rights," or are "rights" as a concept unnecessary in a free polity? Are there "freedoms" or "rights" it is better not to permit, legally or otherwise, given the consequences for the common good? What are they, how can they be identified, and by what measure are they judged good or bad for society?
(*Initially I had "authoritarian" here, which would appear to load the deck. If someone has a nice neutral alternative term here, I'm all ears.)
5. Socialist———————Libertarian
What is the ideal, most practicable, or most preferable political economy? One in which private property is abolished or protected? Should workers own the means of production? Is the accumulation of enormous quantities of capital permissible? If permissible, is it encouraged or discouraged? Should the governing authorities have the authority to bestow or remove money or property to or from individuals or communities? If so, under what circumstances and for what reasons may it do so? To what extent should markets predominate in society, and to what extent, if any, should the governing authorities be able and willing to intervene in or to regulate those markets? Is political economy a matter of first principles, universal in scope and applicable to all contexts, or is it a pragmatic or prudential matter, local in scope and differentiated in application? What level of inequity is tolerable in society—if any at all?
6. Progressive——————Conservative
What is the proper stance toward the past? Should it be received as a gift to treasure and pass on to the next generation? Or is it primarily a legacy of oppression and suffering to reject and/or transform in the present, for the sake of a more just future? Where do the dangers lie—in an undue pessimism about our ability to improve our lot and the lot of our neighbors, or in an overly optimistic confidence in our capacity for radical change for the better? What is the status of moral and social mores and traditions? Are they wise, hard-earned advice handed on by the democracy of the dead? Or are they stultifying, lifeless customs holding us in the grip of a past from which we need liberation? Must social practices by "rationally" justified in order to approve of them or incentivize them in others? What is the weight of convention? What authority, if any, do parents, families, neighbors, pastors, civic leaders possess, and to what extent, if any, should deference be paid to them?
7. Internationalist————Nationalist
To what or to whom are one's loyalties properly due? Is patriotism a virtue? Is it a moral obligation? Are "nations" the fundamental macro-corporate political unit? Should they be? (What of supra-national entities? What of empires?) To what extent, if any, does one owe one's fellow citizens of a nation affection, affinity, or service beyond what one owes to persons from other nations? Does one owe "allegiance" to one's nation? Is allegiance different than love, and if so, how? Would the world be improved if nations were dissolved, or at least, if national identities were softened substantially? Is one's national identity an essential part of oneself? Should it be?
8. Globalist———————Localist
Though similar to the previous spectrum, this one asks a different kind of question: What is the proper scope or extent of the polity to which one belongs and to which one owes service? Hypothetically one could be an internationalist localist: caring little for the nation as such, but finding life beyond the "local"—defined, let us say, as the concentric circles of household, neighborhood, and town, populated at the outer limit in the tens of thousands, but smaller than a full-blown city—too large for thick membership. The localist knows the names of her neighbors, streets, rivers, trees, native fauna, seasonal weather, and so on. The "globe" is an abstraction, and "global citizen" a contradiction in terms. Whereas the globalist thinks the localist backwards, parochial, nostalgic, or doomed for extinction in the near future. Politics is top-down, and while local town councils might seem to get stuff down, the forces that determine life in the 21st century, even the lives of farming and ranching communities in rural contexts, are as macro-global as can be. Best to recognize the fact and live accordingly rather than head for the bunker, hoping for the clock to turn back a few centuries.
/ / / / / / /
So much, anyway, for the heuristic I've come up with. For my students, as I say, what I want them to see beyond is both the GOP/DNC binary and the Right/Left master-filter. There are illiberal conservative socialists, and progressive nationalists, and secular aristocrats, and libertarian democrats, and communitarian liberals, and religious globalists, and on and on. (We'll leave aside the anarcho-syndicalists for the moment.)
Hopefully my students are enabled to reflect on the complexity of their own political commitments as well as learn a less reductive lens for interpreting the commitments of others. At the very least, my hope is to engender a more productive conversation in the classroom.
So I've come up with a heuristic that is meant to help students in my context. Mostly I want them to see the array of combinations, both of political first principles and concrete policy convictions, beyond lining up the GOP's national platform versus the DNC's. So, e.g., I want them to be introduced to (the concept of) Catholic Communists and Pro-Life Progressives and Democratic Socialists and Communitarian Conservatives and so on.
What follows is the set of spectrums, eight in all, that I've conjured up in order to help them in this process. I would be very interested in learning about other examples of this sort of thing, either in print or in the classroom. Here's mine, with brief of explanations for each, mostly in the form of questions.
1. Secular———————Religious
The question here is not whether one is individually religious. It is whether and to what extent one believes the governing authorities ought to be religious in character. The extremes here would be laïcité versus integralism; less extreme: separation of church and state versus established religion. Appeal to common faith or to Scripture as public norms, or practices like prayer in public schools, are litmus tests for where one stands on this spectrum.
2. Individualist—————Communitarian
Is the fundamental unit of society the individual, the family, the extended kin network, the neighborhood, the town, the city, or other? What is privileged in law and social mores? Is it plausible to treat groups as units irreducible to the individual—or no? Why or why not? Can such units be neither familial nor racial but, e.g., religious? This spectrum helps to answer such questions.
3. Democratic—————Aristocratic
How should the policies that govern and order society be decided and enacted? Who has authority to say so and power to make it so? Should any and all laws be put up to a direct vote by "the people"? Should adults be legally required to vote? Should one's vote ever be taken away? Should any processes of policy deliberation and creation be delegated to representatives? If so, ought those representatives to do what they deem the wisest course, or ought they to do whatever (the majority of) their voters say they want? Does society inevitably have a "ruling class" of "elites"? If it does, should this tendency be curtailed, indeed resisted, or should it be cultivated toward the common good? How "mixed" should government be, and what norms or laws, if any, militate against 50.1% majoritarian rule?
4. Liberal———————Illiberal*
What is "freedom," and how should it be protected or encouraged by the governing authorities? Does freedom pertain to individuals or communities? Is it purely negative (i.e., freedom from interference) or also positive (i.e., freedom to do, be, or say X or Y)? What may or must society "enforce" in the lives of its citizens? Are there moral or legal norms beyond the harm principle? How may they be adjudicated? Are the liberties properly sought or secured in society a creation of said society, or do they antedate their own formal recognition? What is their metaphysical status, in other words? Are they necessarily connected with "rights," or are "rights" as a concept unnecessary in a free polity? Are there "freedoms" or "rights" it is better not to permit, legally or otherwise, given the consequences for the common good? What are they, how can they be identified, and by what measure are they judged good or bad for society?
(*Initially I had "authoritarian" here, which would appear to load the deck. If someone has a nice neutral alternative term here, I'm all ears.)
5. Socialist———————Libertarian
What is the ideal, most practicable, or most preferable political economy? One in which private property is abolished or protected? Should workers own the means of production? Is the accumulation of enormous quantities of capital permissible? If permissible, is it encouraged or discouraged? Should the governing authorities have the authority to bestow or remove money or property to or from individuals or communities? If so, under what circumstances and for what reasons may it do so? To what extent should markets predominate in society, and to what extent, if any, should the governing authorities be able and willing to intervene in or to regulate those markets? Is political economy a matter of first principles, universal in scope and applicable to all contexts, or is it a pragmatic or prudential matter, local in scope and differentiated in application? What level of inequity is tolerable in society—if any at all?
6. Progressive——————Conservative
What is the proper stance toward the past? Should it be received as a gift to treasure and pass on to the next generation? Or is it primarily a legacy of oppression and suffering to reject and/or transform in the present, for the sake of a more just future? Where do the dangers lie—in an undue pessimism about our ability to improve our lot and the lot of our neighbors, or in an overly optimistic confidence in our capacity for radical change for the better? What is the status of moral and social mores and traditions? Are they wise, hard-earned advice handed on by the democracy of the dead? Or are they stultifying, lifeless customs holding us in the grip of a past from which we need liberation? Must social practices by "rationally" justified in order to approve of them or incentivize them in others? What is the weight of convention? What authority, if any, do parents, families, neighbors, pastors, civic leaders possess, and to what extent, if any, should deference be paid to them?
7. Internationalist————Nationalist
To what or to whom are one's loyalties properly due? Is patriotism a virtue? Is it a moral obligation? Are "nations" the fundamental macro-corporate political unit? Should they be? (What of supra-national entities? What of empires?) To what extent, if any, does one owe one's fellow citizens of a nation affection, affinity, or service beyond what one owes to persons from other nations? Does one owe "allegiance" to one's nation? Is allegiance different than love, and if so, how? Would the world be improved if nations were dissolved, or at least, if national identities were softened substantially? Is one's national identity an essential part of oneself? Should it be?
8. Globalist———————Localist
Though similar to the previous spectrum, this one asks a different kind of question: What is the proper scope or extent of the polity to which one belongs and to which one owes service? Hypothetically one could be an internationalist localist: caring little for the nation as such, but finding life beyond the "local"—defined, let us say, as the concentric circles of household, neighborhood, and town, populated at the outer limit in the tens of thousands, but smaller than a full-blown city—too large for thick membership. The localist knows the names of her neighbors, streets, rivers, trees, native fauna, seasonal weather, and so on. The "globe" is an abstraction, and "global citizen" a contradiction in terms. Whereas the globalist thinks the localist backwards, parochial, nostalgic, or doomed for extinction in the near future. Politics is top-down, and while local town councils might seem to get stuff down, the forces that determine life in the 21st century, even the lives of farming and ranching communities in rural contexts, are as macro-global as can be. Best to recognize the fact and live accordingly rather than head for the bunker, hoping for the clock to turn back a few centuries.
/ / / / / / /
So much, anyway, for the heuristic I've come up with. For my students, as I say, what I want them to see beyond is both the GOP/DNC binary and the Right/Left master-filter. There are illiberal conservative socialists, and progressive nationalists, and secular aristocrats, and libertarian democrats, and communitarian liberals, and religious globalists, and on and on. (We'll leave aside the anarcho-syndicalists for the moment.)
Hopefully my students are enabled to reflect on the complexity of their own political commitments as well as learn a less reductive lens for interpreting the commitments of others. At the very least, my hope is to engender a more productive conversation in the classroom.
Curriculum Vitae
Brad East
Assistant Professor of Theology
Abilene Christian University,
College of Biblical Studies
1850 Teague Boulevard, ACU Box
29420, Abilene, TX 79699
(325) 674-3736 || brad.east@acu.edu
EDUCATION
2017 Yale University
Ph.D. (M.A., M.Phil) in Religious
Studies (Theology)
Dissertation: The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in
Ecclesial Context in the Work
of
John Howard Yoder, Robert Jenson, and John Webster
Committee: Kathryn Tanner
(advisor), David Kelsey, Miroslav Volf, Stephen Fowl
2011 Emory University, Candler School
of Theology
M.Div. summa cum laude (Theology and Ethics)
2007 Abilene Christian University
B.A. summa cum laude in Biblical Text
HONORS, AWARDS, AND SCHOLARSHIPS
2015–2017 Graduate Fellowship Award, Christian
Scholarship Foundation
2015 Louise and Richard Goodwin Prize
for Excellence in Theological Writing
2014–2016 Doctoral Fellowship, Louisville Institute
2014–2015 Graduate Research Lecturer, Heritage
Christian University
2011 Award for Academic Excellence,
Candler School of Theology
2010 Award for Excellence in Biblical
Scholarship, Candler School of Theology
2008–2011 Honor Scholarship, Candler School of
Theology
2007 University Scholar Award,
Abilene Christian University
2004–2007 Presidential Scholarship, Abilene Christian
University
BOOKS
The
Church: A Guide to the People of God
(Christian Essentials; Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2023).
The
Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022).
The
Doctrine of Scripture
(Cascade Companions; Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2021).
EDITED BOOKS
Robert
W. Jenson, The Triune Story: Collected Essays
on Scripture (New York: Oxford University
Press,
2019).
JOURNAL ARTICLES
“The
Church and the Spirit in Robert Jenson’s Theology of Scripture,” Pro Ecclesia 28:3 (2019):
278–300.
“What
is the Doctrine of the Trinity For? Practicality and Projection in Robert
Jenson’s Theology,”
Modern Theology 33:3 (2017): 414–433.
“John
Webster, Theologian Proper,” Anglican
Theological Review 99:2 (2017): 333–351.
“The
Hermeneutics of Theological Interpretation: Holy Scripture, Biblical
Scholarship, and
Historical
Criticism,” International Journal of
Systematic Theology 19:1 (2017): 30–52.
“Reading
the Trinity in the Bible: Assumptions, Warrants, Ends,” Pro Ecclesia 25:4 (2016): 459–
474.
“An
Undefensive Presence: The Mission and Identity of the Church in Kathryn Tanner and
John
Howard
Yoder,” Scottish Journal of Theology
68:3 (2015): 327–344.
“Hooking
In, Sitting Loose: A Call for Theology in the Churches of Christ,” Restoration Quarterly
54:4
(2012): 219–228.
“Though
the Earth Give Way: Haiti, Suffering, and the Crucified God,” The Other Journal 16:5
(2010).
BOOK CHAPTERS
“Preaching
Peace in Violent Times: Faithful Approaches for Pacifist Pastors to Speak the
Truth in
Love,”
Preaching and the Theological Imagination,
ed. Zachary Guiliano and Cameron
Partridge
(New York: Peter Lang, 2015), 231–250.
“A
Response to Jon Coutts on Barth and the Coen Brothers,” Karl Barth in Conversation, ed. David
Congdon
and W. Travis McMaken (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2014), 247–
254.
BOOK REVIEWS
Steven
J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian
Theology, in
International
Journal of Systematic Theology
(forthcoming).
Joseph
K. Gordon, Divine Scripture in Human
Understanding: A Systematic Theology of the Christian
Bible, in Anglican Theological Review (forthcoming).
Keith D.
Stanglin, The Letter and Spirit of
Biblical Interpretation: From the Early Church to Modern
Practice, in Interpretation (forthcoming).
Hans
Boersma, Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental
Exegesis in the Early Church, in Interpretation
73:1
(2019): 91–92.
Kevin
J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Authority After
Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant
Christianity, in Interpretation 73:1 (2019): 90–91.
Gary
Anderson, Christian Doctrine and the Old
Testament: Theology in the Service of Exegesis, in
International Journal of
Systematic Theology
19:4 (2017): 534-537.
John
Howard Yoder, ed. Gayle Gerber Koontz and Andy Alexis-Baker, Theology of Mission: A
Believers Church Perspective, in Scottish Journal of Theology 69:3 (2016): 370–371.
Nicholas
M. Healy, Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical
Introduction, in International
Journal of Systematic
Theology 18:2 (2016): 236–239.
Scott
R. Swain, The God of the Gospel: Robert
Jenson’s Trinitarian Theology, in Pro
Ecclesia 23:4
(2014):
471–474.
Kevin
Giles, The Eternal Generation of the Son:
Maintaining Orthodoxy in Trinitarian Theology, in
Restoration Quarterly 56:3 (2014): 188–189.
Duane
Olson, Issues in Contemporary Christian
Thought: A Fortress Introduction, in Restoration
Quarterly 55:4 (2013): 255–256.
Lee
Camp, Who Is My Enemy?: Questions
American Christians Must Face About Islam—and
Themselves, in Restoration Quarterly 55:2 (2013): 124–126.
PAPERS AND PRESENTATIONS
“A
Third Way for Churches of Christ,” Summit Lectureship, Abilene, TX, September 18,
2019.
“Untidy
Scripture, Systematic Theology: Some Friendly Questions for Joe Gordon,” Christian
Scholars’ Conference, Lubbock, TX, June
7, 2019.
“How to
Think, or: How to Resist the Social Media-fication of Relationships,” Summer
Seminar,
Abilene,
TX, August 3, 2018.
“Theology
of Scripture: Ecclesiological Reflections,” Christian Scholars’ Conference, Nashville,
TN,
June
6, 2018.
“Theological
Reflections on Movies as Prayers,” Christian Scholars’ Conference, Nashville,
TN,
June
6, 2018.
“Unlike
Any Other Book: Theological Reflections on the Bible and its Faithful
Interpretation,”
Baylor
University, Waco, TX, February 10, 2018.
“How
Should We Read John Howard Yoder in Light of His Abuse of Women?” Ethics Colloquium,
Yale
University, New Haven, CT, November 18, 2015.
“Undefensive
Ecclesiology and Engaging the Wider Tradition”; “10 Commitments of Theological
Interpretation,”
Heritage Christian University, Florence, AL, April 1, 2015.
“Some
Nonnegotiables in Theological Interpretation Done Well, or: On Keeping the
Fight Alive
with
Biblical Scholarship,” Christian Scholars’ Conference, Nashville, TN, June 5,
2014.
“Patiently
Awaiting the Death and Resurrection of the Universe: Eschatological Memory and
Ecological
Ethics in 2 Peter 3:1–13,” Christian Scholars’ Conference, Nashville, TN, June
7,
2013.
“An
Undefensive Presence: The Mission and Identity of the Church in Kathryn Tanner
and John
Howard
Yoder,” annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Chicago, IL,
November
19, 2012.
“Hooking
In, Sitting Loose: A Call for Theology in the Churches of Christ,” Christian
Scholars’
Conference,
Nashville, TN, June 7, 2012.
“Disciples
of a State Criminal: How the Mission of the Church Relates to the U.S.
Imprisonment
Crisis,”
Stone-Campbell Journal Conference, Lincoln Christian University, Lincoln, IL,
April
14, 2012.
POPULAR, ONLINE, AND OTHER PUBLICATIONS
“Birth
on a Cross,” in The Christian Century
136:18 (August 28, 2019): 10–11.
“A
Better Country: On Michael Brendan Dougherty’s My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s
Search for Home,” in Plough (August 7, 2019).
“Briefly
Noted: Chris E. W. Green’s The End is Music:
A Companion to Robert W. Jenson’s Theology,”
in
First Things 295 (August/September
2019): 60–61.
“Enter
Paul: On Paula Fredriksen’s Paul: The
Pagans’ Apostle and When Christians Were
Jews: The
First Generation,” in The Los Angeles Review of Books (June 23, 2019).
“Five
Theses on Preaching,” in Mere Orthodoxy (June 7, 2019).
“The
Specter of Marcion,” in Commonweal 146:4
(February 22, 2019): 12–13.
“An Anti-Enlightenment
Ax to Grind: A Review of Craig A. Carter’s Interpreting
Scripture with the
Great Tradition: Recovering the
Genius of Premodern Exegesis,”
in The Christian Century 136:4
(February
13, 2019): 45–49.
“The
Church and the Common Good,” in Comment
(January 17, 2019).
“First
Things and Last Things in Christian Theology: On Ian McFarland’s From Nothing: A
Theology of Creation and Paul Griffiths’ Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures,”
in The
Marginalia Review of Books (October 26, 2018).
“God
and All Things in God: The Theology of John Webster,” in Mere Orthodoxy (August 20,
2018).
“A
Brief Introduction to John Webster,” in Anglican
Theological Review 100:3 (2018): 561–562.
“In
Captivity to the Zeitgeist: A Review of David P. Gushee and Glen H. Stassen’s Kingdom Ethics:
Following Jesus in Contemporary
Context,” in Living Church (March 11, 2018): 31–32.
“Holy
Ambivalence: On Patrick Deneen’s Why
Liberalism Failed and James K. A. Smith’s Awaiting
the Kingdom: Reforming Public
Theology,” in The Los Angeles Review of Books (March
1,
2018).
“Public
Theology in Retreat: On Three New Essay Collections by David Bentley Hart,” in The Los
Angeles Review of Books (September 20, 2017).
“Systematic
Theology and Biblical Criticism: On Ephraim Radner’s Time and the Word: Figural
Reading of the Christian
Scriptures,” in
The Marginalia Review of Books (June
22, 2017).
“Theologians
Were Arguing about the Benedict Option 35 Years Ago,” in Mere Orthodoxy (March
13,
2017).
“Renewing
the Heart of Systematic Theology: On Katherine Sonderegger’s Systematic Theology:
Volume 1, The Doctrine of God,” in The Marginalia Review of Books (August 2, 2016).
“Discerning
the (Holiday) Spirits: On Prophecy in the Negative Mode Only,” in Tokens Blog
(December
19, 2013).
“Interview
with Miroslav Volf,” in Missio Dei
4:2 (August 2013).
“Turn,
Turn, Turn, Turning No More: An Eschatological Reflection on Ecclesiastes
3:1–11,” in
The Princeton Theological Review
44 (Fall 2011):
69–73.
“Why
Theology Matters,” in New Wineskins (July
21, 2010).
“Battlestar Galactica: Frakking Feminist—So
Say We All!” in Slant Magazine’s The House Next Door
(March
20, 2009).
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Teaching Experience
Abilene Christian University:
Fall 2019 Theology; Ecclesiology; Christianity and
Culture
Sum 2019 Christianity and Culture (online)
Spr
2019 Theology; Acts to Revelation
Jan
2019 Christianity and Culture
Fall 2018 Survey of the Gospels; Ecclesiology;
Christianity and Culture; Freshman Seminar
Sum 2018 Christianity and Culture (online)
Spr
2018 Ethics; Acts to Revelation
Jan
2018 Christianity and Culture
Fall
2017 Survey of the Gospels; Ecclesiology;
Freshman Seminar
Sum
2017 Christianity and Culture
(online)
Jan
2017 Christianity and Culture
Yale Divinity School:
Spr
2016 Christian Social Ethics
(Adam Eitel)
Fall
2015 Theology and the New Testament
(Dale Martin and Kathryn Tanner)
Spr
2015 Medieval Theology (Denys
Turner)
Fall
2014 Patristic Theology
(Christopher Beeley)
Editorial Work
2017– Theology Book Review Editor, The Marginalia Review of Books
Conference Organization
Convener,
“Major Book Review: Joseph Gordon, Divine
Scripture in Human Understanding: A
Systematic Theology of the
Christian Bible,”
Christian Scholars’ Conference, Nashville, TN,
June
7, 2019.
Convener,
“Major Book Review: Keith
Stanglin, The Letter and Spirit of
Biblical Interpretation:
From the Early Church to Modern
Practice,” Christian
Scholars’ Conference, Nashville, TN,
June
6, 2019.
Convener,
“Negotiating Scripture and Culture,” Christian Scholars’ Conference, Abilene,
TX, June
4,
2015.
Convener
and moderator, “Reading the Old Testament as Scripture: A Conversation Between
Ellen
Davis
and Walter Brueggemann on Biblical Interpretation, Theology, and the
Relationship
Between
Church and Academy,” Christian Scholars’ Conference, Nashville, TN, June 6,
2014.
Convener
and moderator, “Faith in Public: A Conversation Between John Hare and Charles
Mathewes
on Religious Commitment, Christian Ethics, and Political Engagement,”
Christian
Scholars’ Conference, Nashville, TN, June 7, 2013.
LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY
Koine
Greek; German
PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS
American
Academy of Religion; Society of Biblical Literature
New essay published in Plough: “A Better Country"
In Plough this morning I have a review essay of Michael Brendan Dougherty's My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son's Search for Home. It's a beautiful book that I loved reading, some of whose ideas and proposals call for theological interrogation. I also compare his work to that of Ta-Nehisi Coates, the hyphenated identity of e.g. the Irish in America to African-Americans. It was a pleasure to write; I hope it holds together. Here's a taste:
"Dougherty is Roman Catholic, a faith recovered, like so much else in his life, in adulthood. Where he foregrounds father and fatherland, though, God remains mostly in the background. The resulting imbalance leaves certain questions unanswered. For example, Dougherty is right to insist on the heart’s reasons beyond wonk positivism. But sometimes the heart’s reasons are not enough. The Rising should not be protected by a moat of romance and high speech. Christians do indeed celebrate at the altar the ultimate sacrifice, an unbloody remembering of a bloodied and disfigured man lynched, unjustly, by occupying authorities. But that man didn’t resist, didn’t take up arms. He disarmed his disciples, in fact, and they died – have died ever since – as he did: without resistance. Martyrdom is the lived meaning of the sacrifice of Christ."
Read the rest here.
Questions for Jake Meador after reading his lovely new book
Jake Meador is one of my favorite writers to read today on the intersection of faith, politics, and culture. (Am I contractually obligated to call him a "young" writer? What are the rules here when you're not sure whether you're older than the young writer in question?) We've yet to meet, but he's been gracious to me over the past few years, posting and soliciting essays I've written for Mere Orthodoxy, which he edits.
I was eager to read his new book, In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World, and I wasn't disappointed. The book will be a boon to a variety of folks, especially pastors, churches, and college students. Indeed, I'm assigning it to one of my classes this fall. Given Meador's politics—a social conservative against racism, an agrarian against abortion, a Christian against the GOP, an evangelical against Trump, a Calvinist against capitalism—his writing makes for nice inroads to conversations with ordinary believers that bypass the partisan binary.
But while I wasn't disappointed, I was surprised by the book. I've been chewing on the reasons for that surprise for the last month. So let me try to boil down my surprise into the form of questions Meador left me with—questions I hope his ongoing work, at Mere O and especially in future books, will continue to grapple with.
1. For whom is this book written? Who is its primary audience? Meador's writing is always clear but it is often pitched "higher," to those who've read the primary sources and know the state of the conversation, and who have the desire or the power to do something about it. The book seems pitched "lower" (not in a pejorative sense), to those who haven't done the reading and aren't familiar with the driving conversations of the day. If so, perhaps the book is meant as a kind of translation or popularization for ordinary Christians, as I suggested above. In that, I think it succeeds; but it was not what I was prepared for.
2. Substantively, what surprised me most was the relative lack of direness in Meador's account of the current civic crisis. Partly a matter of tone, it's more than that too: one doesn't get the sense from the book that American society is an free fall. Sure, things are worse than they could be, but also, things are looking up, or at least, signs of (this-worldly) hope are on the horizon. But this doesn't match what I read in Meador's more regular writing. So just how bad are things? Are we in the midst of a kind of crisis? Or is it less dire than that?
3. Related is the state of the church in the U.S. I had thought, again based on Meador's other writing, that we are currently in a stage of ecclesial emergency. The church's numbers have been declining rapidly and continue to do so; those churches that have changed with the times have apostatized, and those churches that have ostensibly remained orthodox are beset by trials and scandals of a political and sexual nature. But a strikingly sanguine tone characterizes much (not all) of the book's talk of church: the simplicities and ordinary kindnesses of congregational life, etc. Is this just a non-alarmism about an objective emergency situation? Or have I misread Meador? How bad is it, and how bad are our future prospects?
4. Combining the previous two points, perhaps the biggest conceptual gap in the book for me was the relationship between the church and politics. If the church is declining in numbers and the wider culture is secularizing, indeed moving toward a post-Christian hostility to the church, then why continue to presume the ongoing power and influence of the church to effect much of anything in (at least national) politics going forward? There is a sort of running "if...then" momentum in the book, such that "if" X or Y happens within the church or on the part of Christians, "then" A or B may or should or will happen within the culture or the government. But I had thought we'd moved beyond that thinking. What if the church—the faithful, those who worship in parishes and congregations and actively follow Christ (say, 15-20% of the population)—were to be perfectly faithful across the next generation, and American culture and politics simply ignored us? What then? Or am I misunderstanding the nature of the book's vision?
5. By book's end, Meador's cheerful optimism—in one sense an antidote to the hysteria on all sides of cultural commentary today—left me with a vision of non-political politics: witness without agonistes. I had no sense of either the fight I ought to join or the battle from which I ought to retreat; the book describes not so much a field of conflict as a state of affairs in which the good has been leached out of our common life, and those of us who recognize that fact ought to do our best to pour it back in. But is Meador really so optimistic? Does he lack a sense for the conflicts facing our society and Christians therein? I don't think so. So what am I missing?
6. What I want to know (what I was left wondering) is: What is possible, and how do we get there? Does Meador think the "Trump effect" is not so much the ratcheting up of polarization, demonization, racism, reaction, etc., but instead the detonation of past paradigms so that we can imagine, more or less, whatever future we want? The Overton window not only expanded but smashed to smithereens? I doubt he'd put it in quite such extreme terms, but if it's something like that, then what does he (what should we) want at the end of our political and cultural labors? Beyond relative peace, stability, freedom, prosperity, depth of faith, intact families, and the rest. In other words, are we meant to close the book and imagine a radically transformed post-liberal America? Or a small but faithful remnant of Christ's church in the ruins of a decadent, hostile empire? That difference of visions is the ambiguity I felt from start to finish.
7. Put differently once again: Which saint, which option, ought we to choose? Should we opt for Dreher's Benedict Option, strategically withdrawing energy, emotion, time, and resources from political activism in order to shore up the wealth of the tradition and catechize our children for the dark ages? Should we instead follow Jamie Smith's Augustine Option, approaching culture and politics with a holy ambivalence that discriminates between good and evil case by case, refusing alarmist fears for engagement and resistance as the situation requires, without spurning the need for compromise? Or should we choose the Daniel Option, the proposal of Alissa Wilkinson and Robert Joustra, who don't deny the ills of modernity but basically see our time and culture as a benign one, full of signs of progress and opportunity for good, thus requiring our support for and participation in the liberal regime? (We could go on, with saints and options; perhaps Solomon standing for integralism?) I have always thought of Meador as BenOp-adjacent, not quite there but quite close, minus the tenor of Dreher's terror. But In Search of the Common Good, had I never read the author before, would have had me assuming he was somewhere between Smith and Wilkinson.
8. Speaking of saints, let me also mention martyrdom. The lack of an agonistic vision of politics combined with the cultural optimism resulted, in my reading, in a denial of tragedy, an account of political engagement without suffering or loss. I was left wondering what it might mean—not least coming from a person who has written tirelessly about putting principle over winning, means before ends—for the church to follow Meador's vision for Christian sociopolitical witness and still to "lose" or "fail" on the world's terms. What if being faithful means "death," however metaphorical? I'm confident of Meador's response: "Then so be it." But I was surprised by the implicit suggestion in the book that, in general, things will work out. What if things don't work out? What if, in 75 years, the church in America dwindles to one-tenth of the citizenry, despised but ignored, even as a third or more of the population claims the mantle of "Christian" while denying everything Christianity stands for? (Wait, that already sounds too familiar.) Note well, I'm not predicting this future. I'm saying: Christians have grown so used to this country being "theirs," so used to "running the show," to having influence and wielding it, that it is close to impossible for them (for us) to imagine a future in which that is no longer the case. Hence the very real fears of losing that power—fears we have seen manifested in spectacularly wicked ways these last few years (and not only then). What happens once we move beyond those fears to living in that future? Or is that so hypothetical as to be irrelevant to the present time—the spasms of dysfunction visible today signs of nothing seismic or epochal, just the usual bad actors and bad apples? (Answers here bears on answers to numbers two and three above. Just how bad is it?)
9. Shifting gears a bit here, and by way of closing, I sense a disjunction between two modes of thought in Meador. One is the natural, the other the supernatural; let's make their representatives Wendell Berry and St. Augustine. Meador envisions the good life as one in accord with creation, in harmony with the natural world. Hence his emphasis on farming, local community, conservation, the natural family, children, kinship, caring for the elderly, knowing one's neighbors, staying rooted in one place, and so on. This is the moral vision of Port William. Moreover, the natural good life is available, epistemically and otherwise, to all people, not just Christians. Whereas the Augustinian vision, while certainly affirming natural goods and the good of the created order, differs in important respects. The world is fallen, corrupted by sin, and women and men are depraved in their wills, their minds, their hearts, their desires. Driven by disordered love, sinful people neither know nor live in accordance with the highest good or the proper hierarchy of goods under God. They serve idols of every kind. What people need, then, is grace: to cleanse their conscience, heal their hearts, reorder their wills, and guide their lives. Apart from grace they cannot live as their ought nor know how they ought to live. Grace is a necessary condition of the good life, in and after Christ. (Recall too that, for Augustine, as for the catholic tradition after him, not to have children, not to be married, not to serve in civic life is actually the higher form of life in Christ, even if that ideal is not meant for all.) So the question arises: Where does Meador fall between Berry and Augustine here? What exactly is he recommending, and for whom is he recommending it, and on what (epistemic, moral, theological, political) basis? At what point do the theological virtues enter into the natural good life, and when and where and to what extent do they challenge, subvert, or deny aspects of it? And what of our neighbors? Is our concern for their good limited to the natural, or does it extend to the supernatural? If the latter, what social and political shape should that concern take?
That's enough for now. I've presumed too much of your patience, dear reader, as I have Jake's (if he reads this). Lest my questions be misinterpreted, let me be clear that I intend them in a spirit of friendship and of affinity for the book they query, and for the project that book advances. I'm thankful for the book, and I'm eager to see the fruit it bears in the coming years.
I was eager to read his new book, In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World, and I wasn't disappointed. The book will be a boon to a variety of folks, especially pastors, churches, and college students. Indeed, I'm assigning it to one of my classes this fall. Given Meador's politics—a social conservative against racism, an agrarian against abortion, a Christian against the GOP, an evangelical against Trump, a Calvinist against capitalism—his writing makes for nice inroads to conversations with ordinary believers that bypass the partisan binary.
But while I wasn't disappointed, I was surprised by the book. I've been chewing on the reasons for that surprise for the last month. So let me try to boil down my surprise into the form of questions Meador left me with—questions I hope his ongoing work, at Mere O and especially in future books, will continue to grapple with.
1. For whom is this book written? Who is its primary audience? Meador's writing is always clear but it is often pitched "higher," to those who've read the primary sources and know the state of the conversation, and who have the desire or the power to do something about it. The book seems pitched "lower" (not in a pejorative sense), to those who haven't done the reading and aren't familiar with the driving conversations of the day. If so, perhaps the book is meant as a kind of translation or popularization for ordinary Christians, as I suggested above. In that, I think it succeeds; but it was not what I was prepared for.2. Substantively, what surprised me most was the relative lack of direness in Meador's account of the current civic crisis. Partly a matter of tone, it's more than that too: one doesn't get the sense from the book that American society is an free fall. Sure, things are worse than they could be, but also, things are looking up, or at least, signs of (this-worldly) hope are on the horizon. But this doesn't match what I read in Meador's more regular writing. So just how bad are things? Are we in the midst of a kind of crisis? Or is it less dire than that?
3. Related is the state of the church in the U.S. I had thought, again based on Meador's other writing, that we are currently in a stage of ecclesial emergency. The church's numbers have been declining rapidly and continue to do so; those churches that have changed with the times have apostatized, and those churches that have ostensibly remained orthodox are beset by trials and scandals of a political and sexual nature. But a strikingly sanguine tone characterizes much (not all) of the book's talk of church: the simplicities and ordinary kindnesses of congregational life, etc. Is this just a non-alarmism about an objective emergency situation? Or have I misread Meador? How bad is it, and how bad are our future prospects?
4. Combining the previous two points, perhaps the biggest conceptual gap in the book for me was the relationship between the church and politics. If the church is declining in numbers and the wider culture is secularizing, indeed moving toward a post-Christian hostility to the church, then why continue to presume the ongoing power and influence of the church to effect much of anything in (at least national) politics going forward? There is a sort of running "if...then" momentum in the book, such that "if" X or Y happens within the church or on the part of Christians, "then" A or B may or should or will happen within the culture or the government. But I had thought we'd moved beyond that thinking. What if the church—the faithful, those who worship in parishes and congregations and actively follow Christ (say, 15-20% of the population)—were to be perfectly faithful across the next generation, and American culture and politics simply ignored us? What then? Or am I misunderstanding the nature of the book's vision?
5. By book's end, Meador's cheerful optimism—in one sense an antidote to the hysteria on all sides of cultural commentary today—left me with a vision of non-political politics: witness without agonistes. I had no sense of either the fight I ought to join or the battle from which I ought to retreat; the book describes not so much a field of conflict as a state of affairs in which the good has been leached out of our common life, and those of us who recognize that fact ought to do our best to pour it back in. But is Meador really so optimistic? Does he lack a sense for the conflicts facing our society and Christians therein? I don't think so. So what am I missing?
6. What I want to know (what I was left wondering) is: What is possible, and how do we get there? Does Meador think the "Trump effect" is not so much the ratcheting up of polarization, demonization, racism, reaction, etc., but instead the detonation of past paradigms so that we can imagine, more or less, whatever future we want? The Overton window not only expanded but smashed to smithereens? I doubt he'd put it in quite such extreme terms, but if it's something like that, then what does he (what should we) want at the end of our political and cultural labors? Beyond relative peace, stability, freedom, prosperity, depth of faith, intact families, and the rest. In other words, are we meant to close the book and imagine a radically transformed post-liberal America? Or a small but faithful remnant of Christ's church in the ruins of a decadent, hostile empire? That difference of visions is the ambiguity I felt from start to finish.
7. Put differently once again: Which saint, which option, ought we to choose? Should we opt for Dreher's Benedict Option, strategically withdrawing energy, emotion, time, and resources from political activism in order to shore up the wealth of the tradition and catechize our children for the dark ages? Should we instead follow Jamie Smith's Augustine Option, approaching culture and politics with a holy ambivalence that discriminates between good and evil case by case, refusing alarmist fears for engagement and resistance as the situation requires, without spurning the need for compromise? Or should we choose the Daniel Option, the proposal of Alissa Wilkinson and Robert Joustra, who don't deny the ills of modernity but basically see our time and culture as a benign one, full of signs of progress and opportunity for good, thus requiring our support for and participation in the liberal regime? (We could go on, with saints and options; perhaps Solomon standing for integralism?) I have always thought of Meador as BenOp-adjacent, not quite there but quite close, minus the tenor of Dreher's terror. But In Search of the Common Good, had I never read the author before, would have had me assuming he was somewhere between Smith and Wilkinson.
8. Speaking of saints, let me also mention martyrdom. The lack of an agonistic vision of politics combined with the cultural optimism resulted, in my reading, in a denial of tragedy, an account of political engagement without suffering or loss. I was left wondering what it might mean—not least coming from a person who has written tirelessly about putting principle over winning, means before ends—for the church to follow Meador's vision for Christian sociopolitical witness and still to "lose" or "fail" on the world's terms. What if being faithful means "death," however metaphorical? I'm confident of Meador's response: "Then so be it." But I was surprised by the implicit suggestion in the book that, in general, things will work out. What if things don't work out? What if, in 75 years, the church in America dwindles to one-tenth of the citizenry, despised but ignored, even as a third or more of the population claims the mantle of "Christian" while denying everything Christianity stands for? (Wait, that already sounds too familiar.) Note well, I'm not predicting this future. I'm saying: Christians have grown so used to this country being "theirs," so used to "running the show," to having influence and wielding it, that it is close to impossible for them (for us) to imagine a future in which that is no longer the case. Hence the very real fears of losing that power—fears we have seen manifested in spectacularly wicked ways these last few years (and not only then). What happens once we move beyond those fears to living in that future? Or is that so hypothetical as to be irrelevant to the present time—the spasms of dysfunction visible today signs of nothing seismic or epochal, just the usual bad actors and bad apples? (Answers here bears on answers to numbers two and three above. Just how bad is it?)
9. Shifting gears a bit here, and by way of closing, I sense a disjunction between two modes of thought in Meador. One is the natural, the other the supernatural; let's make their representatives Wendell Berry and St. Augustine. Meador envisions the good life as one in accord with creation, in harmony with the natural world. Hence his emphasis on farming, local community, conservation, the natural family, children, kinship, caring for the elderly, knowing one's neighbors, staying rooted in one place, and so on. This is the moral vision of Port William. Moreover, the natural good life is available, epistemically and otherwise, to all people, not just Christians. Whereas the Augustinian vision, while certainly affirming natural goods and the good of the created order, differs in important respects. The world is fallen, corrupted by sin, and women and men are depraved in their wills, their minds, their hearts, their desires. Driven by disordered love, sinful people neither know nor live in accordance with the highest good or the proper hierarchy of goods under God. They serve idols of every kind. What people need, then, is grace: to cleanse their conscience, heal their hearts, reorder their wills, and guide their lives. Apart from grace they cannot live as their ought nor know how they ought to live. Grace is a necessary condition of the good life, in and after Christ. (Recall too that, for Augustine, as for the catholic tradition after him, not to have children, not to be married, not to serve in civic life is actually the higher form of life in Christ, even if that ideal is not meant for all.) So the question arises: Where does Meador fall between Berry and Augustine here? What exactly is he recommending, and for whom is he recommending it, and on what (epistemic, moral, theological, political) basis? At what point do the theological virtues enter into the natural good life, and when and where and to what extent do they challenge, subvert, or deny aspects of it? And what of our neighbors? Is our concern for their good limited to the natural, or does it extend to the supernatural? If the latter, what social and political shape should that concern take?
That's enough for now. I've presumed too much of your patience, dear reader, as I have Jake's (if he reads this). Lest my questions be misinterpreted, let me be clear that I intend them in a spirit of friendship and of affinity for the book they query, and for the project that book advances. I'm thankful for the book, and I'm eager to see the fruit it bears in the coming years.
A confusing error by John Gray
Early in John Gray's Seven Types of Atheism, he writes the following:
"The[] Jewish and Greek views of the world are not just divergent but irreconcilably opposed. Yet from its beginnings Christianity has been an attempt to join Athens with Jerusalem. Augustine's Christian Platonism was only the first of many such attempts. Without knowing what they are doing, secular thinkers have continued this vain effort" (29).
From an otherwise admirably lucid and fair-minded thinker, I find this a bizarre claim in a number of ways.
First, Augustine was far from the first to "join" Platonist philosophy with Christian faith. His most prominent predecessor being (I can barely resist saying of course in all caps) Origen of Alexandria, whose influence spread far and wide, east and west.
Second, Gray's presentation suggests that Hellenization and Platonization commenced after Christianity's advent, after its creation as a post-Jewish phenomenon—indeed, apparently only after Constantine. But Ben Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon and Philo and the apostle Paul and the book of Hebrews all predate both Augustine and Origen; most of them predate the establishment of mainstream Christianity by the end of the first century. Judaism and therefore messianic Nazarene Judaism were thoroughly Hellenized and, at the very least, exposed to Platonist thinking for centuries prior to Augustine, indeed were such at the very source, in the age of Tiberius and Claudius and Nero.
Third, there is no such thing as "the" Jewish or "the" Greek "view of the world." Nor, even if there were, would either be a hermetically sealed whole, in relation to which ideas and practices extrinsic to itself must necessarily be alien intrusions. True, Israel's scriptures are not Platonist. So what? Who is to say what is and what is not complementary between them? Who is to say what modifications or amendments or additions would or would not count as corruption?—as if there ever were a stable essence to one or the other in the first place. It is not as if Origen or Augustine took on Platonism wholesale; they clearly and directly and explicitly reject certain philosophical ideas as inimical and contrary to the catholic faith. That's not syncretism or vain eclecticism. It's Christian theology, well and faithfully done. It might be untrue or imperfectly practiced, but it's not invalid or impossible on principle. How Gray could have come to such a conclusion I haven't the faintest clue.
"The[] Jewish and Greek views of the world are not just divergent but irreconcilably opposed. Yet from its beginnings Christianity has been an attempt to join Athens with Jerusalem. Augustine's Christian Platonism was only the first of many such attempts. Without knowing what they are doing, secular thinkers have continued this vain effort" (29).
From an otherwise admirably lucid and fair-minded thinker, I find this a bizarre claim in a number of ways.
First, Augustine was far from the first to "join" Platonist philosophy with Christian faith. His most prominent predecessor being (I can barely resist saying of course in all caps) Origen of Alexandria, whose influence spread far and wide, east and west.
Second, Gray's presentation suggests that Hellenization and Platonization commenced after Christianity's advent, after its creation as a post-Jewish phenomenon—indeed, apparently only after Constantine. But Ben Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon and Philo and the apostle Paul and the book of Hebrews all predate both Augustine and Origen; most of them predate the establishment of mainstream Christianity by the end of the first century. Judaism and therefore messianic Nazarene Judaism were thoroughly Hellenized and, at the very least, exposed to Platonist thinking for centuries prior to Augustine, indeed were such at the very source, in the age of Tiberius and Claudius and Nero.
Third, there is no such thing as "the" Jewish or "the" Greek "view of the world." Nor, even if there were, would either be a hermetically sealed whole, in relation to which ideas and practices extrinsic to itself must necessarily be alien intrusions. True, Israel's scriptures are not Platonist. So what? Who is to say what is and what is not complementary between them? Who is to say what modifications or amendments or additions would or would not count as corruption?—as if there ever were a stable essence to one or the other in the first place. It is not as if Origen or Augustine took on Platonism wholesale; they clearly and directly and explicitly reject certain philosophical ideas as inimical and contrary to the catholic faith. That's not syncretism or vain eclecticism. It's Christian theology, well and faithfully done. It might be untrue or imperfectly practiced, but it's not invalid or impossible on principle. How Gray could have come to such a conclusion I haven't the faintest clue.
Genre criticism
I'm in a book club with some buddies in town, and as it happens I'm the only one who liked the latest book, a work of fantasy. Two issues with the book have come to the surface, and I've been thinking about their status for fiction more generally.
First, I've realized that I don't believe in "pace." Or rather, a book's having a slow or fast pace is at best a neutral statement that requires content to be filled in: was the slow pace done well, or was the fast pace rushed? More often, I think pacing is a cipher for other matters: whether the reader finds the characters, interactions, descriptions, and events engaging—or not. In that sense a reader might well say, "I found the pacing slow," to which the author could reply, "Yes, exactly, that's the idea," at which point the reader then must supply further reasons as to why the slow pacing was a problem. There may be good reasons to make such an assertion, but they involve reference to other features of the narrative, not the pace as such.
Second, all fiction, all storytelling, is responsive to other instances of the same art, indeed every other art form, and thus every novel is derivative in one way or another. So that tropes—particularly when speaking of genre fiction, given the more identifiable and delimited features of that sub-form—are always everywhere present; there is no storytelling, there has never been a novel, without tropes. Nor is a novel or story's success directly proportional to the minimization of tropes: the very worst fiction in the world might be the most original. What we mean by originality, at least when using it as a criterion in the right way, is that the author's handling of the story's tropes was deft, subtle, unexpected, masterful, funny, gripping, complex, pleasing, or otherwise well done. In which case, as with pacing, reference to tropes in critique of a novel is the beginning rather than the end of the conversation, since the proper response to such a reference is, "Indeed—go on..." At which point further reasons enter in to clarify the quality of the use of tropes, granted their inevitability.
First, I've realized that I don't believe in "pace." Or rather, a book's having a slow or fast pace is at best a neutral statement that requires content to be filled in: was the slow pace done well, or was the fast pace rushed? More often, I think pacing is a cipher for other matters: whether the reader finds the characters, interactions, descriptions, and events engaging—or not. In that sense a reader might well say, "I found the pacing slow," to which the author could reply, "Yes, exactly, that's the idea," at which point the reader then must supply further reasons as to why the slow pacing was a problem. There may be good reasons to make such an assertion, but they involve reference to other features of the narrative, not the pace as such.
Second, all fiction, all storytelling, is responsive to other instances of the same art, indeed every other art form, and thus every novel is derivative in one way or another. So that tropes—particularly when speaking of genre fiction, given the more identifiable and delimited features of that sub-form—are always everywhere present; there is no storytelling, there has never been a novel, without tropes. Nor is a novel or story's success directly proportional to the minimization of tropes: the very worst fiction in the world might be the most original. What we mean by originality, at least when using it as a criterion in the right way, is that the author's handling of the story's tropes was deft, subtle, unexpected, masterful, funny, gripping, complex, pleasing, or otherwise well done. In which case, as with pacing, reference to tropes in critique of a novel is the beginning rather than the end of the conversation, since the proper response to such a reference is, "Indeed—go on..." At which point further reasons enter in to clarify the quality of the use of tropes, granted their inevitability.
Where Else to Find Me Online
Here is my ACU faculty page.
Here is my Academia.edu page.
Here is where you can find me on Twitter (@eastbrad).
Here is my old blog, Resident Theology.
Here is a December 2015 interview with me at Theological Horizons.
And here are some links to selected online publications (most recent first):
"Advent I: The Face of God," Mere Orthodoxy.
"Can the Humanities Find a Home in the Academy?" The Liberating Arts.
"Befriending Books," Mere Orthodoxy.
"The Jesus of History and the Gods of Natural Theology," Los Angeles Review of Books.
"Why the Church Needs Christian Colleges," The Liberating Arts.
"Be Fearful as Christ Was Fearful," Mere Orthodoxy.
"Sacraments, Technology, and Streaming Worship in a Pandemic," Mere Orthodoxy.
"Interview with Matthew Emerson on Christ's Descent to the Dead," Christianity Today.
"Are We Idol Worshipers?" The Christian Century.
"Birth on a Cross," The Christian Century.
"A Better Country," Plough.
"Briefly Noted," First Things.
"Against Pop Culture," Mere Orthodoxy.
"Enter Paul," Los Angeles Review of Books.
"Five Theses on Preaching," Mere Orthodoxy.
"The Specter of Marcion," Commonweal.
"An Anti-Enlightenment Ax to Grind," The Christian Century.
"The Church and the Common Good," Comment.
"First Things and Last Things in Christian Theology," Marginalia Review of Books.
"God and All Things in God: The Theology of John Webster," Mere Orthodoxy.
"Holy Ambivalence," Los Angeles Review of Books.
"Public Theology in Retreat," Los Angeles Review of Books.
"Systematic Theology and Biblical Criticism," Marginalia Review of Books.
"Theologians Were Arguing About the Benedict Option 35 Years Ago," Mere Orthodoxy.
"Renewing the Heart of Systematic Theology," Marginalia Review of Books.
"An Interview with Miroslav Volf," Missio Dei.
"Though the Earth Give Way: Haiti, Suffering, and the Crucified God," The Other Journal.
"Why Theology Matters," New Wineskins.
Pop culture, for and against
Jake Meador has kindly cross-posted my original blog post "Against pop culture" over at Mere Orthodoxy, and it's gotten a second round of (much larger) attention. Mostly the responses have been appreciative or generously critical, but let me address some of the criticisms as well as clear up some misunderstandings.
1. The piece is meant to be provocative, as both the title and tone suggest, so part of this is doubtless my own fault; but the overall point I'm trying to make is not that pop culture as such, or Netflix, is Bad, or that Christians should not ever "engage" it. The primary argument, instead, is that Christians (with an audience) who believe or write that Christians (in general) ought to "engage" popular culture as an imperative are wrong. That is, even if pop culture is neutral (which it is not), there is no good argument that Christians (again, in the aggregate) should, as a prescriptive norm, make it a priority to watch more Hulu, see more Netflix originals, listen to more Spotify, spend more time on YouTube, etc. My argument, then, is wholly negative, countering the opposing (positive) argument regarding Christians' behavior and posture toward pop culture. Though I gesture in this direction, I do not in fact make the mirror-image (positive) argument that Christians, normatively, should not, ever, under any circumstances, "engage" pop culture. What I do suggest is that there are worthwhile alternatives to such activity—an observation I would assume we can all agree on, though perhaps I am wrong.
2. I am therefore not "against" pop culture in the strong sense. This is true in multiple ways. Personally, I am—albeit ambivalently—an avid consumer of and participant in popular culture. Peruse my blog or CV and you'll see evidence aplenty. I have published academic work on, e.g., the Coen brothers. I write regularly about film and TV: on A Clockwork Orange; on Ex Machina; on The Leftovers; on the supposed monoculture; on ParaNorman; on Phantom Thread; on Godless, Three Billboards, and The Last Jedi; on Rachel Getting Married; and much more. My reading online is probably evenly split between political commentary and movie/TV criticism. I could name my top 10 favorite film critics off the top of my head. I teach a class called "Christianity and Culture" that includes a film critique assignment; moreover, when I teach it as a one-week intensive, we spend an hour every afternoon viewing "cultural artifacts" together via YouTube. I was that kid in high school thumbing through my (subscription) Entertainment Weekly while methodically crossing off entries on AFI's Top 100 Movies list. I still have individual Word documents for each year going back two decades that include my own personal "Best Of" lists for both film and TV. I can neither confirm nor deny that I continue to update them.
3. So I've got pop culture bona fides (Lord forgive me). And I do not think Christians must flee to the hills and keep their children safe from the mark of the beast, i.e., Hollywood. (This isn't a "keep Christian culture pure" take.) I'm not even arguing, as Matt Anderson does, that Christians should delete their Netflix accounts. I have Netflix, and I'll be enjoying season 3 of Stranger Things later this week. There is indeed plenty of good in various artifacts and products of our artistic culture today, and that includes popular culture—this isn't, to address another criticism, a high versus low argument. Though I am constantly trying to expand my cultural and aesthetic palate, I am a very poor reader of, say, 19th century novels. One day I'll be able to offer thoughtful reflections on Austen and Melville and Trollope, but this is not that day. So, no, I'm not pitting two options against each other—Schitt's Creek versus Crime and Punishment—stacking the deck in favor of one, and judging the poor plebs who opt against Great And High Culture.
4. So what am I doing? Well, to repeat, I'm rejecting the case made by far too many Christian writers, academics, and pastors that their fellow Christians should be engaging pop culture. As I wrote, that is silly, and its silliness should be dazzlingly apparent to all of us. It's a way of rationalizing our habits or elevating what is usually quite shallow entertainment—an undemanding way to pass the time, alone or with others—to the venerable status of Meaningful. In a way, I'd rather folks admit the truth, that sometimes, perhaps more often than they'd like to admit, Netflix (et al) is a way to shut off their brains and veg out at the end of a long day. I still think (as I'll say below) that there are reasons to resist that route, but most of us have done it, it's not the worst thing in the world, and it's far more honest than high-minded justifications as to why House of Cards is deep art. (Which it is not: absent a few directorial flourishes from Fincher in the opening episodes, that wretched show is a self-serious daytime soap about evil people doing wicked things with absolutely nothing interesting to say about human nature, politics, or power. It's as bad for your soul as it was for mine when I watched it.)
5. So why the digression in the original post about how Netflix (serving as a shorthand for all digital and streaming content) is bad for you? And about how there are dozens of other activities that would be better for you? Well, because more than one thing can be true at the same time. It is true both (a) that there are quality films and shows on Netflix that would not be a waste of your time and (b) that, in general, spending time on Netflix is the worst option among a host of otherwise life-giving, body-restoring, mind-expanding, soul-rejuvenating activities available to you on any given evening. And thus, I want to suggest, it is worth considering the time one gives to streaming apps and other screens and social media, compared with how one could be using that time differently. What if, instead of 2+ hours of Netflix per night, you had 3-5 Netflix-free nights per week, and limited yourself to a movie one night and a (single episode of a) show another night? Here is the counter-prescriptive argument for the rah-rah Christian pop culture folks: I am confident that all the activities I listed in my piece—gardening, reading, cooking, serving, crafting, writing, etc.—are superior, 99 times out of 100, to spending time on Netflix. Does that mean, as I said there, that one therefore ought never to watch Netflix? No! We don't always do The Very Best Thing For Ourselves at all times. Otherwise we'd be praying 90-minute Vespers after the kids went to bed every night, or learning a new language every 18 months, or what have you. But the fact that we don't always do The Very Best Thing, and even that we needn't feel like there is a standing imperative Always So To Do, doesn't change the fact that Netflix is on the very bottom of the list of activities that are good and restorative and healthy for us; activities, that is, that are an excellent use of the (very limited) time allotted to us. We don't need to lie about that to make ourselves feel better about it.
6. I had at least two audiences in mind with my original piece. One was the group criticized directly: those who believe, and write, that Christians ought to "engage" pop culture. And the reaction of at least some folks proved, to me at least, the point: there is a kind of nervous insecurity on the part of folks who "love" pop culture and who therefore need it to Be Meaningful. (An insult to it is an insult to us all.) But why? Would the lives of Christians be worse in any way if they decreased the time they give to streaming TV and movies by 80%? Answer: No! Would they be worse neighbors as a result? By no means! If your concept of neighborliness, of Christian neighbor-love, is necessarily wedded to knowledge of pop culture, then it is your concept that needs to change, not the people who fail to live up to it. Now, does the fact that most Christians would be well served by decreasing their Netflix (and Hulu, and Spotify, and HBO, and Instagram, and Facebook, and Twitter, and...) usage mean, as a consequence, that a minority of Christians who are lovers and critics, professional or amateur, of visual art forms must—like St. Anthony hearing the Gospel read in church and Jesus's words spoken directly to him—give up their streaming services, abandon cinema, and forever devote themselves to Faust and Beethoven instead? What an exaggerated and convoluted question you've asked. You know my answer by now.
7. My other audience was, basically, my students. Or, more broadly, my own generation (I'm technically a Millennial) and the generation coming up behind us (Gen Z). It is impossible to overstate how bad their technological habits are. From sunrise to sundown (through many hours of sundown) they fill their minutes and hours with brain-stunting screen-candy, whether social media, music, streaming video, or all of the above. They wake up to it and, quite literally, fall asleep to it. They can't imagine going without it for even brief stretches, and they can't imagine sitting in a room, without a device, without artificial noise of some kind, and reading a book for 25 minutes straight. (They can't imagine it because they've never done it or, all too often, seen it done.) This is another, larger conversation, granted, but it is related to the present topic, because the principal thing for Christian teachers, pastors, professors, and writers to say to these kids is not Thou Shalt Engage Pop Culture EVEN MOAR. The thing to do is to model, instruct, and shape them so as (a) to unlearn their screen-addled habits and (b) to present an alternative. True, this generation isn't going to go Full Butlerian Jihad—though I wish to God they, and we, would—and so it is indeed a wise and worthwhile thing to train them in healthy, thoughtful, critical habits of engagement with culture of every kind. And inasmuch as that is what the pro–pop culture folks are in actuality up to, I have no beef with them. But in order to motivate that project, we don't have to shore up the depth or quality or worthiness of pop culture as such; we don't have to pretend. We just have to accept it as a part of our common life, bad as much of it is, then think through how Christians ought to relate to it (in a complex balance of resistance, ascesis, discipline, engagement, celebration, and critique).
8. A coda on sports, then a postscript on myself. A number of folks asked either why I didn't mention sports or whether sports falls under my critique. Those are good questions. Sports, even more than pop culture (understood as concrete artifacts produced for mass entertainment purposes—and even here I realize sports is becoming less and less distant from such a definition), can become an idol from which Christians should flee. But since what I had in mind was Christians with an audience arguing that fellow Christians have a kind of spiritual or cultural or missional duty to "engage" popular culture, sports seemed a separate issue. I've not encountered that kind of rhetoric regarding sports, partly because basically no one, including Christians, needs to be convinced to play or watch sports; partly because sports has a different kind of importance in our lives—different, that is, than art and its aura of significance. But I have no doubt much of what I wrote and what I've written here applies, mutatis mutandis, to sports and the adoration, even fanaticism, that surrounds it.
9. My original piece had a third audience above all: myself. Outside of the most important aspects of my life (God, family, church, vocation), I probably spend the largest chunk of my time, day to day and week to week, thinking about how to change my relationship to technology. I've written about that a number of times on this blog. My relationship to technology includes my phone (cut down to ~45 min/day!), social media (no Facebook! Minimal Twitter!), my household (no kids have devices! No TV on Sundays!). But it also includes my viewing habits. And those have always been the hardest for me to curb. I grew up watching a lot of TV, and then in my late teens I got into film in a big way. In college and grad school I developed what I take to be quite bad habits—not morally bad, in terms of what I viewed, but psychically bad, in terms of shaping my brain and body's expectations for what it means to fill free time, to rest. If I didn't have school work to do in the evenings, my singular instinct was (and to some extent still remains) to turn on the TV (where "TV" means some film- or show-streaming screen). From 2000 to 2010, film-wise, and from 2006 to 2016, TV-wise, if you've heard of it, I've probably seen it. Having four kids in six years both helped and hurt. Helped, because my movie habits were forced to change whether I liked it or not. Hurt, because while I was staying home part time as a doctoral student, I simply couldn't find the energy to do intellectually demanding work when my kids napped, so I actually increased my TV viewing. In the last 3+ years, I have made it a dominating goal of my life to decrease this time spent in front of a screen, watching a show (however good the show might be—and sometimes they're quite good). And I've succeeded, to an extent. My aim is not—pace Matt Anderson—to rid my life of TV or streaming art. It's to unlearn the itch, that is, the psychological and almost physiological reflex to fill "blank" time with a screen filled with moving images. I treat this itch like a disease, though I am self-aware enough to know that my almost maniacal posture toward the itch is itself a sign of how far I've come. But so far as I can see, it really is a disease, a social disease, present in Kindergartners, freshmen in college, thirtysomething parents, empty-nesters, and retired grandparents. When dinner's done, or the dishes are washed, or the kids are in bed, or the house is clean—when there's a chunk of time to be filled—we all do we what we've always done since the 1950s: turn on the TV. Only now, the name of that all-powerful gravitational pull is no longer TV but Netflix. It's a cultural tick, a habitual default, an emotional itch, a psychological addiction. And speaking only for myself, I want to be free of it.
1. The piece is meant to be provocative, as both the title and tone suggest, so part of this is doubtless my own fault; but the overall point I'm trying to make is not that pop culture as such, or Netflix, is Bad, or that Christians should not ever "engage" it. The primary argument, instead, is that Christians (with an audience) who believe or write that Christians (in general) ought to "engage" popular culture as an imperative are wrong. That is, even if pop culture is neutral (which it is not), there is no good argument that Christians (again, in the aggregate) should, as a prescriptive norm, make it a priority to watch more Hulu, see more Netflix originals, listen to more Spotify, spend more time on YouTube, etc. My argument, then, is wholly negative, countering the opposing (positive) argument regarding Christians' behavior and posture toward pop culture. Though I gesture in this direction, I do not in fact make the mirror-image (positive) argument that Christians, normatively, should not, ever, under any circumstances, "engage" pop culture. What I do suggest is that there are worthwhile alternatives to such activity—an observation I would assume we can all agree on, though perhaps I am wrong.
2. I am therefore not "against" pop culture in the strong sense. This is true in multiple ways. Personally, I am—albeit ambivalently—an avid consumer of and participant in popular culture. Peruse my blog or CV and you'll see evidence aplenty. I have published academic work on, e.g., the Coen brothers. I write regularly about film and TV: on A Clockwork Orange; on Ex Machina; on The Leftovers; on the supposed monoculture; on ParaNorman; on Phantom Thread; on Godless, Three Billboards, and The Last Jedi; on Rachel Getting Married; and much more. My reading online is probably evenly split between political commentary and movie/TV criticism. I could name my top 10 favorite film critics off the top of my head. I teach a class called "Christianity and Culture" that includes a film critique assignment; moreover, when I teach it as a one-week intensive, we spend an hour every afternoon viewing "cultural artifacts" together via YouTube. I was that kid in high school thumbing through my (subscription) Entertainment Weekly while methodically crossing off entries on AFI's Top 100 Movies list. I still have individual Word documents for each year going back two decades that include my own personal "Best Of" lists for both film and TV. I can neither confirm nor deny that I continue to update them.
3. So I've got pop culture bona fides (Lord forgive me). And I do not think Christians must flee to the hills and keep their children safe from the mark of the beast, i.e., Hollywood. (This isn't a "keep Christian culture pure" take.) I'm not even arguing, as Matt Anderson does, that Christians should delete their Netflix accounts. I have Netflix, and I'll be enjoying season 3 of Stranger Things later this week. There is indeed plenty of good in various artifacts and products of our artistic culture today, and that includes popular culture—this isn't, to address another criticism, a high versus low argument. Though I am constantly trying to expand my cultural and aesthetic palate, I am a very poor reader of, say, 19th century novels. One day I'll be able to offer thoughtful reflections on Austen and Melville and Trollope, but this is not that day. So, no, I'm not pitting two options against each other—Schitt's Creek versus Crime and Punishment—stacking the deck in favor of one, and judging the poor plebs who opt against Great And High Culture.
4. So what am I doing? Well, to repeat, I'm rejecting the case made by far too many Christian writers, academics, and pastors that their fellow Christians should be engaging pop culture. As I wrote, that is silly, and its silliness should be dazzlingly apparent to all of us. It's a way of rationalizing our habits or elevating what is usually quite shallow entertainment—an undemanding way to pass the time, alone or with others—to the venerable status of Meaningful. In a way, I'd rather folks admit the truth, that sometimes, perhaps more often than they'd like to admit, Netflix (et al) is a way to shut off their brains and veg out at the end of a long day. I still think (as I'll say below) that there are reasons to resist that route, but most of us have done it, it's not the worst thing in the world, and it's far more honest than high-minded justifications as to why House of Cards is deep art. (Which it is not: absent a few directorial flourishes from Fincher in the opening episodes, that wretched show is a self-serious daytime soap about evil people doing wicked things with absolutely nothing interesting to say about human nature, politics, or power. It's as bad for your soul as it was for mine when I watched it.)
5. So why the digression in the original post about how Netflix (serving as a shorthand for all digital and streaming content) is bad for you? And about how there are dozens of other activities that would be better for you? Well, because more than one thing can be true at the same time. It is true both (a) that there are quality films and shows on Netflix that would not be a waste of your time and (b) that, in general, spending time on Netflix is the worst option among a host of otherwise life-giving, body-restoring, mind-expanding, soul-rejuvenating activities available to you on any given evening. And thus, I want to suggest, it is worth considering the time one gives to streaming apps and other screens and social media, compared with how one could be using that time differently. What if, instead of 2+ hours of Netflix per night, you had 3-5 Netflix-free nights per week, and limited yourself to a movie one night and a (single episode of a) show another night? Here is the counter-prescriptive argument for the rah-rah Christian pop culture folks: I am confident that all the activities I listed in my piece—gardening, reading, cooking, serving, crafting, writing, etc.—are superior, 99 times out of 100, to spending time on Netflix. Does that mean, as I said there, that one therefore ought never to watch Netflix? No! We don't always do The Very Best Thing For Ourselves at all times. Otherwise we'd be praying 90-minute Vespers after the kids went to bed every night, or learning a new language every 18 months, or what have you. But the fact that we don't always do The Very Best Thing, and even that we needn't feel like there is a standing imperative Always So To Do, doesn't change the fact that Netflix is on the very bottom of the list of activities that are good and restorative and healthy for us; activities, that is, that are an excellent use of the (very limited) time allotted to us. We don't need to lie about that to make ourselves feel better about it.
6. I had at least two audiences in mind with my original piece. One was the group criticized directly: those who believe, and write, that Christians ought to "engage" pop culture. And the reaction of at least some folks proved, to me at least, the point: there is a kind of nervous insecurity on the part of folks who "love" pop culture and who therefore need it to Be Meaningful. (An insult to it is an insult to us all.) But why? Would the lives of Christians be worse in any way if they decreased the time they give to streaming TV and movies by 80%? Answer: No! Would they be worse neighbors as a result? By no means! If your concept of neighborliness, of Christian neighbor-love, is necessarily wedded to knowledge of pop culture, then it is your concept that needs to change, not the people who fail to live up to it. Now, does the fact that most Christians would be well served by decreasing their Netflix (and Hulu, and Spotify, and HBO, and Instagram, and Facebook, and Twitter, and...) usage mean, as a consequence, that a minority of Christians who are lovers and critics, professional or amateur, of visual art forms must—like St. Anthony hearing the Gospel read in church and Jesus's words spoken directly to him—give up their streaming services, abandon cinema, and forever devote themselves to Faust and Beethoven instead? What an exaggerated and convoluted question you've asked. You know my answer by now.
7. My other audience was, basically, my students. Or, more broadly, my own generation (I'm technically a Millennial) and the generation coming up behind us (Gen Z). It is impossible to overstate how bad their technological habits are. From sunrise to sundown (through many hours of sundown) they fill their minutes and hours with brain-stunting screen-candy, whether social media, music, streaming video, or all of the above. They wake up to it and, quite literally, fall asleep to it. They can't imagine going without it for even brief stretches, and they can't imagine sitting in a room, without a device, without artificial noise of some kind, and reading a book for 25 minutes straight. (They can't imagine it because they've never done it or, all too often, seen it done.) This is another, larger conversation, granted, but it is related to the present topic, because the principal thing for Christian teachers, pastors, professors, and writers to say to these kids is not Thou Shalt Engage Pop Culture EVEN MOAR. The thing to do is to model, instruct, and shape them so as (a) to unlearn their screen-addled habits and (b) to present an alternative. True, this generation isn't going to go Full Butlerian Jihad—though I wish to God they, and we, would—and so it is indeed a wise and worthwhile thing to train them in healthy, thoughtful, critical habits of engagement with culture of every kind. And inasmuch as that is what the pro–pop culture folks are in actuality up to, I have no beef with them. But in order to motivate that project, we don't have to shore up the depth or quality or worthiness of pop culture as such; we don't have to pretend. We just have to accept it as a part of our common life, bad as much of it is, then think through how Christians ought to relate to it (in a complex balance of resistance, ascesis, discipline, engagement, celebration, and critique).
8. A coda on sports, then a postscript on myself. A number of folks asked either why I didn't mention sports or whether sports falls under my critique. Those are good questions. Sports, even more than pop culture (understood as concrete artifacts produced for mass entertainment purposes—and even here I realize sports is becoming less and less distant from such a definition), can become an idol from which Christians should flee. But since what I had in mind was Christians with an audience arguing that fellow Christians have a kind of spiritual or cultural or missional duty to "engage" popular culture, sports seemed a separate issue. I've not encountered that kind of rhetoric regarding sports, partly because basically no one, including Christians, needs to be convinced to play or watch sports; partly because sports has a different kind of importance in our lives—different, that is, than art and its aura of significance. But I have no doubt much of what I wrote and what I've written here applies, mutatis mutandis, to sports and the adoration, even fanaticism, that surrounds it.
9. My original piece had a third audience above all: myself. Outside of the most important aspects of my life (God, family, church, vocation), I probably spend the largest chunk of my time, day to day and week to week, thinking about how to change my relationship to technology. I've written about that a number of times on this blog. My relationship to technology includes my phone (cut down to ~45 min/day!), social media (no Facebook! Minimal Twitter!), my household (no kids have devices! No TV on Sundays!). But it also includes my viewing habits. And those have always been the hardest for me to curb. I grew up watching a lot of TV, and then in my late teens I got into film in a big way. In college and grad school I developed what I take to be quite bad habits—not morally bad, in terms of what I viewed, but psychically bad, in terms of shaping my brain and body's expectations for what it means to fill free time, to rest. If I didn't have school work to do in the evenings, my singular instinct was (and to some extent still remains) to turn on the TV (where "TV" means some film- or show-streaming screen). From 2000 to 2010, film-wise, and from 2006 to 2016, TV-wise, if you've heard of it, I've probably seen it. Having four kids in six years both helped and hurt. Helped, because my movie habits were forced to change whether I liked it or not. Hurt, because while I was staying home part time as a doctoral student, I simply couldn't find the energy to do intellectually demanding work when my kids napped, so I actually increased my TV viewing. In the last 3+ years, I have made it a dominating goal of my life to decrease this time spent in front of a screen, watching a show (however good the show might be—and sometimes they're quite good). And I've succeeded, to an extent. My aim is not—pace Matt Anderson—to rid my life of TV or streaming art. It's to unlearn the itch, that is, the psychological and almost physiological reflex to fill "blank" time with a screen filled with moving images. I treat this itch like a disease, though I am self-aware enough to know that my almost maniacal posture toward the itch is itself a sign of how far I've come. But so far as I can see, it really is a disease, a social disease, present in Kindergartners, freshmen in college, thirtysomething parents, empty-nesters, and retired grandparents. When dinner's done, or the dishes are washed, or the kids are in bed, or the house is clean—when there's a chunk of time to be filled—we all do we what we've always done since the 1950s: turn on the TV. Only now, the name of that all-powerful gravitational pull is no longer TV but Netflix. It's a cultural tick, a habitual default, an emotional itch, a psychological addiction. And speaking only for myself, I want to be free of it.
On climate change and the church
Yesterday Freddie de Boer posted a brief reflection on climate change, which he opens in this way:
"This is one of those things where I feel like everybody quietly knows it but we have this sort of tacit agreement not to say it openly in order to preserve some sort of illusion about what our society is and who we are. But, I mean, come on – we’re not fixing climate change. Nobody thinks we are, not really. Everyone’s putting on a brave face, everyone’s maintaining the pretense on behalf of the kids of whatever. But come on. Let us be adults here. We are not, as a species, going to do the things necessary to arrest or meaningfully slow the heating of the planet and thus will be exposed to all of the ruinous consequences of failing to do so."
This is neither, for him, denialism nor despair, just the hard facts. Action is still called for:
"I’m not telling people to give up, and I’m not telling people to despair. Of course we have to fight this thing, just like you fight to save your life even when it’s impossible. This is not in any sense denialism; it’s real, it’s coming, and the changes are utterly devastating. And though I recognize it would be easy to think this, I say this without a shred of glee, smugness, or superiority. I just feel like everyone privately knows that this is a fight we’re going to lose. Turn off every emotional part of your brain and do the pure, brutal actuarial calculus and find out what you really believe."
Let me share a few brief thoughts and questions in response to this.
1. It seems to me that, bracketing sincere deniers and those who simply never think about the topic—and we should allow that, at least in the U.S., that covers a sizeable slice of the population—this analysis is basically correct. If, on the continuum of predictions, the worst is true, paired with what it would be necessary to do to prevent such a future from happening, who can plausibly believe a fractious and divided globe of 7 billion people will unite in order to change their own lives and the lives of everyone else, the very structure and habitus of civilization, in the blink of an eye, without dissent, peaceably, and voluntarily?
2. Is Freddie correct that this is not a counsel of despair? At least, for people who broadly share Freddie's moral and political convictions? People fight to save their lives out of the natural instinct of self-preservation. But would it, strictly speaking, be rational for, say, an atheist who knew she would die in 3 hours to fight—with all her might, with great suffering, and to no avail—with the certain knowledge that, at most, she would die in 6 hours instead? Why should people who lack faith in God (and the concomitant beliefs, commitments, and practices of faith in God) not despair for themselves and their progeny, assuming the prediction of doom is correct?
3. What do Christians have to say about this? What should Christian theology say about it? So much of the oxygen of this conversation has for so long been sucked up by dispute over the existence and severity of climate change, and even then, in the register of politics. But let's just stipulate the fact: not only of climate change but also of its most disastrous potential consequences. Does the church, do theologians, have something unique—something substantive, or prophetic, or evangelical, or apostolic, or penitential, or whatever—to say about such a matter? Has such commentary been offered, and I have missed it? Are there Europeans or Africans or other church authorities or theologians that have offered a richly Christian word on the topic? I don't mean, again, recognition of the problem and vague generalities about meeting the challenge of the day. I mean the possibility (here, the stipulated fact) of widespread ecological ruin, terror and suffering and destruction of human life and culture on a vast, perhaps unparalleled scale, social instability and generational loss, the near-total transformation of conditions of human existence on planet earth. Has serious theological attention been paid to that? Even as only a potential or stipulated future? What would the gospel speak into such a situation? What would the call of God be upon the church, both today and in such a future?
I'm left wondering.
"This is one of those things where I feel like everybody quietly knows it but we have this sort of tacit agreement not to say it openly in order to preserve some sort of illusion about what our society is and who we are. But, I mean, come on – we’re not fixing climate change. Nobody thinks we are, not really. Everyone’s putting on a brave face, everyone’s maintaining the pretense on behalf of the kids of whatever. But come on. Let us be adults here. We are not, as a species, going to do the things necessary to arrest or meaningfully slow the heating of the planet and thus will be exposed to all of the ruinous consequences of failing to do so."
This is neither, for him, denialism nor despair, just the hard facts. Action is still called for:
"I’m not telling people to give up, and I’m not telling people to despair. Of course we have to fight this thing, just like you fight to save your life even when it’s impossible. This is not in any sense denialism; it’s real, it’s coming, and the changes are utterly devastating. And though I recognize it would be easy to think this, I say this without a shred of glee, smugness, or superiority. I just feel like everyone privately knows that this is a fight we’re going to lose. Turn off every emotional part of your brain and do the pure, brutal actuarial calculus and find out what you really believe."
Let me share a few brief thoughts and questions in response to this.
1. It seems to me that, bracketing sincere deniers and those who simply never think about the topic—and we should allow that, at least in the U.S., that covers a sizeable slice of the population—this analysis is basically correct. If, on the continuum of predictions, the worst is true, paired with what it would be necessary to do to prevent such a future from happening, who can plausibly believe a fractious and divided globe of 7 billion people will unite in order to change their own lives and the lives of everyone else, the very structure and habitus of civilization, in the blink of an eye, without dissent, peaceably, and voluntarily?
2. Is Freddie correct that this is not a counsel of despair? At least, for people who broadly share Freddie's moral and political convictions? People fight to save their lives out of the natural instinct of self-preservation. But would it, strictly speaking, be rational for, say, an atheist who knew she would die in 3 hours to fight—with all her might, with great suffering, and to no avail—with the certain knowledge that, at most, she would die in 6 hours instead? Why should people who lack faith in God (and the concomitant beliefs, commitments, and practices of faith in God) not despair for themselves and their progeny, assuming the prediction of doom is correct?
3. What do Christians have to say about this? What should Christian theology say about it? So much of the oxygen of this conversation has for so long been sucked up by dispute over the existence and severity of climate change, and even then, in the register of politics. But let's just stipulate the fact: not only of climate change but also of its most disastrous potential consequences. Does the church, do theologians, have something unique—something substantive, or prophetic, or evangelical, or apostolic, or penitential, or whatever—to say about such a matter? Has such commentary been offered, and I have missed it? Are there Europeans or Africans or other church authorities or theologians that have offered a richly Christian word on the topic? I don't mean, again, recognition of the problem and vague generalities about meeting the challenge of the day. I mean the possibility (here, the stipulated fact) of widespread ecological ruin, terror and suffering and destruction of human life and culture on a vast, perhaps unparalleled scale, social instability and generational loss, the near-total transformation of conditions of human existence on planet earth. Has serious theological attention been paid to that? Even as only a potential or stipulated future? What would the gospel speak into such a situation? What would the call of God be upon the church, both today and in such a future?
I'm left wondering.
Against pop culture
Christians love pop culture these days. But the subset of Christians who love pop culture the most is pastors, writers, and academics. Pop culture as a mode of "engagement"; pop culture as a means of "reaching" this or that group; pop culture as a way of "relating" to students: all these and more are celebrated and commended and practiced in churches, classrooms, and websites every day. "Finding the gospel in [pop culture artifact X]" is a ubiquitous and representative genre. Christians love pop culture, and Christians with an audience want fellow Christians to love pop culture.
Why is that? Why should Christians like, love, or "engage with" pop culture?
I don't think there are very many, or perhaps any, good answers to that question.
Now, sociologically and empirically, we can surely posit some reasons for the lovefest. Christians, especially conservative Christians, especially conservative evangelical Christians, have tended to be socially and culturally disreputable, either isolated or self-exiled from dominant norms, media, and elite artistic production. When that has taken the form of anxious parents "protecting" their children from, say, Disney or Hollywood, it could assume unhealthy forms. Moreover, once such children grow up—or, perhaps, move up in terms of class—they may discover that, as it happens, The Lion King and Return of the Jedi and even some R-rated movies aren't so bad after all.
More broadly, knowledge of pop culture is the lingua franca of upwardly mobile bourgeois-aspirational twenty- and thirty-somethings working white collar jobs in big cities (not to mention college, the gateway to such a destination). I remember a long car ride I once took with three academic colleagues, one of whom had not seen a single "relevant" or popular film or TV show from the previous decade. The result? He basically sat out the conversation for hours at a stretch. What did he have to contribute, after all? And what else was there to talk about?
But such explanations are just that, explanations, not reasons for why Christians (or anyone) ought to be enthusiastic consumers of pop culture, much less evangelists for it. And rather than flail around for half-baked arguments in support of that view, let me just posit the contrary: there are no good reasons. The boring fact is that Christians like pop culture for the same reasons everyone else does—it's convenient, undemanding, diverting, entertaining, and socially rewarded—and Christians with an audience either (1) rationalize that fact with high-minded justifications, (2) invest that activity with meaning it lacks (but "must" have to warrant the time Christians give to it), or (3) instrumentalize it toward other, non-trivial ends.
Options 1 and 2 are dead ends. Option 3 is well-intended but, nine times out of ten, also a dead end.
The truth is that, for every hour that you do not spend watching Netflix, your life will be improved, and you will have the opportunity to do something better with that time. (I'm generalizing: if, instead of watching Netflix, you break one of the 10 commandments, then you will have done something worse with your time.) Reading, cooking, gardening, playing a board game, building something with your hands, chatting with a neighbor, grabbing coffee with a friend, serving in a food pantry, learning a language, cleaning, sleeping, journaling, praying, sitting on your porch, resting, catching up with your spouse or housemate: every one of these things would be a qualitative improvement on streaming a show or movie (much less scrolling infinitely on Instagram or Twitter). There is no argument for spending time online or "engaging" pop culture as a better activity for Christians with time on their hands than these or other activities. Netflix is always worse for your soul—and your mind, and your heart, and your body—than the alternative.
Now, does that mean you should never, ever stream a show? No, although this is usually too quick an escape route for those who would evade the force of the claim. ("Jesus, I know you said turn the other cheek, but could you, quickly though in detail, provide conditions for my justifiably harming or even taking the life of another human being?") My argument here is not against the liceity of ever streaming a show or otherwise engaging pop culture; it is against the ostensibly positive reasons in favor its being a good thing Christians ought to do, indeed, ought to care about doing, with eagerness and energy. Because that is a silly thing to believe, and the silliness should be obvious.
I had been meaning to write something like this the last year or two, but a recent exchange between Matthew Lee Anderson, in his newsletter, and his readers, including Brett McCracken, prompted me to finally get these thoughts down. The short version is that Matt suggests people delete their Netflix accounts, and people think that goes too far. (To be clear: Whenever anyone anywhere at any time suggests that people delete their [anything digital/online/social media], I agree reflexively.) The present post isn't meant as an intervention in that conversation so much as a parallel, complementary reflection. Any and all libertarian (in the sense of a philosophy of the will's freedom) Christian accounts of pop culture, Netflix, social media, etc., fail at just this point, because they view individuals as choosers who operate neutrally with options arrayed before them, one of which in our day happens to be flipping Netflix on (or not) and "deciding" to watch a meaty, substantive Film instead of binging bite-size candy-bar TV. But that is not an accurate depiction of the situation. Netflix—and here again I'm using Netflix as a stand-in for all digital and social media today—is a principality and a power, as is the enormous flat-screen television set, situated like a beloved household god in every living room in every home across the country. It calls for attention. It demands your love. It wants you. And its desire for you elicits desire in you for it. It is, therefore, a power to be resisted, at least for Christians. Such resistance requires ascesis. And ascesis means discipline, denial, and sometimes extreme measures. It might mean you suffer boredom and lethargy on a given evening. It might mean you have to read a book, or use your hands. It might even mean you won't catch the quippy allusions in a shallow conversation at work. So be it.
A final word, or postscript, speaking as a teacher. I have too many colleagues (across the university and in other institutions) who have effectively admitted defeat in the long war between 20-year olds' habits and the habits of the classroom, and who thus not only employ various forms of visual media in class (assuming students cannot learn without them) but actively encourage and solicit students' use of and engagement with social and digital media and streaming entertainment in assignments outside class. Granting that there are appropriate forms of this (for example, in a course on Christianity and culture, one of my assignments is a film critique), I am thinking of more extreme versions of this defeatism. What I mean is the notion that "this generation" simply cannot be expected to read a book cover to cover, or that the book must be pitched at a 9th-grade level, or that assignments "ought" to "engage" other forms of digital media, because "this is the world we live in." Education must be entertaining, lest the students not be educated at all. But as Neil Postman has taught us, when education is made to be entertaining, students do not learn while also happening to be entertained. They learn that learning itself must always be fun. And when it isn't, that must be a failure of some kind.
Our students do not need us to encourage their Netflix and Twitter and other digital habits. They need us to help them unlearn them, so far as is possible within the limits afforded us. Acceptance is not realism, in the classroom any more than in our own lives. Acceptance is acquiescence and retreat. For Christians, at least, that is not an option.
Why is that? Why should Christians like, love, or "engage with" pop culture?
I don't think there are very many, or perhaps any, good answers to that question.
Now, sociologically and empirically, we can surely posit some reasons for the lovefest. Christians, especially conservative Christians, especially conservative evangelical Christians, have tended to be socially and culturally disreputable, either isolated or self-exiled from dominant norms, media, and elite artistic production. When that has taken the form of anxious parents "protecting" their children from, say, Disney or Hollywood, it could assume unhealthy forms. Moreover, once such children grow up—or, perhaps, move up in terms of class—they may discover that, as it happens, The Lion King and Return of the Jedi and even some R-rated movies aren't so bad after all.
More broadly, knowledge of pop culture is the lingua franca of upwardly mobile bourgeois-aspirational twenty- and thirty-somethings working white collar jobs in big cities (not to mention college, the gateway to such a destination). I remember a long car ride I once took with three academic colleagues, one of whom had not seen a single "relevant" or popular film or TV show from the previous decade. The result? He basically sat out the conversation for hours at a stretch. What did he have to contribute, after all? And what else was there to talk about?
But such explanations are just that, explanations, not reasons for why Christians (or anyone) ought to be enthusiastic consumers of pop culture, much less evangelists for it. And rather than flail around for half-baked arguments in support of that view, let me just posit the contrary: there are no good reasons. The boring fact is that Christians like pop culture for the same reasons everyone else does—it's convenient, undemanding, diverting, entertaining, and socially rewarded—and Christians with an audience either (1) rationalize that fact with high-minded justifications, (2) invest that activity with meaning it lacks (but "must" have to warrant the time Christians give to it), or (3) instrumentalize it toward other, non-trivial ends.
Options 1 and 2 are dead ends. Option 3 is well-intended but, nine times out of ten, also a dead end.
The truth is that, for every hour that you do not spend watching Netflix, your life will be improved, and you will have the opportunity to do something better with that time. (I'm generalizing: if, instead of watching Netflix, you break one of the 10 commandments, then you will have done something worse with your time.) Reading, cooking, gardening, playing a board game, building something with your hands, chatting with a neighbor, grabbing coffee with a friend, serving in a food pantry, learning a language, cleaning, sleeping, journaling, praying, sitting on your porch, resting, catching up with your spouse or housemate: every one of these things would be a qualitative improvement on streaming a show or movie (much less scrolling infinitely on Instagram or Twitter). There is no argument for spending time online or "engaging" pop culture as a better activity for Christians with time on their hands than these or other activities. Netflix is always worse for your soul—and your mind, and your heart, and your body—than the alternative.
Now, does that mean you should never, ever stream a show? No, although this is usually too quick an escape route for those who would evade the force of the claim. ("Jesus, I know you said turn the other cheek, but could you, quickly though in detail, provide conditions for my justifiably harming or even taking the life of another human being?") My argument here is not against the liceity of ever streaming a show or otherwise engaging pop culture; it is against the ostensibly positive reasons in favor its being a good thing Christians ought to do, indeed, ought to care about doing, with eagerness and energy. Because that is a silly thing to believe, and the silliness should be obvious.
I had been meaning to write something like this the last year or two, but a recent exchange between Matthew Lee Anderson, in his newsletter, and his readers, including Brett McCracken, prompted me to finally get these thoughts down. The short version is that Matt suggests people delete their Netflix accounts, and people think that goes too far. (To be clear: Whenever anyone anywhere at any time suggests that people delete their [anything digital/online/social media], I agree reflexively.) The present post isn't meant as an intervention in that conversation so much as a parallel, complementary reflection. Any and all libertarian (in the sense of a philosophy of the will's freedom) Christian accounts of pop culture, Netflix, social media, etc., fail at just this point, because they view individuals as choosers who operate neutrally with options arrayed before them, one of which in our day happens to be flipping Netflix on (or not) and "deciding" to watch a meaty, substantive Film instead of binging bite-size candy-bar TV. But that is not an accurate depiction of the situation. Netflix—and here again I'm using Netflix as a stand-in for all digital and social media today—is a principality and a power, as is the enormous flat-screen television set, situated like a beloved household god in every living room in every home across the country. It calls for attention. It demands your love. It wants you. And its desire for you elicits desire in you for it. It is, therefore, a power to be resisted, at least for Christians. Such resistance requires ascesis. And ascesis means discipline, denial, and sometimes extreme measures. It might mean you suffer boredom and lethargy on a given evening. It might mean you have to read a book, or use your hands. It might even mean you won't catch the quippy allusions in a shallow conversation at work. So be it.
A final word, or postscript, speaking as a teacher. I have too many colleagues (across the university and in other institutions) who have effectively admitted defeat in the long war between 20-year olds' habits and the habits of the classroom, and who thus not only employ various forms of visual media in class (assuming students cannot learn without them) but actively encourage and solicit students' use of and engagement with social and digital media and streaming entertainment in assignments outside class. Granting that there are appropriate forms of this (for example, in a course on Christianity and culture, one of my assignments is a film critique), I am thinking of more extreme versions of this defeatism. What I mean is the notion that "this generation" simply cannot be expected to read a book cover to cover, or that the book must be pitched at a 9th-grade level, or that assignments "ought" to "engage" other forms of digital media, because "this is the world we live in." Education must be entertaining, lest the students not be educated at all. But as Neil Postman has taught us, when education is made to be entertaining, students do not learn while also happening to be entertained. They learn that learning itself must always be fun. And when it isn't, that must be a failure of some kind.
Our students do not need us to encourage their Netflix and Twitter and other digital habits. They need us to help them unlearn them, so far as is possible within the limits afforded us. Acceptance is not realism, in the classroom any more than in our own lives. Acceptance is acquiescence and retreat. For Christians, at least, that is not an option.
New essay published in The Los Angeles Review of Books: "Enter Paul"
I have a new essay published this morning over in The Los Angeles Review of Books, titled "Enter Paul," on Paula Fredriksen's two latest books, Paul: The Pagans' Apostle and When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (both from Yale University Press). Here's a sample:
"Put it this way: an itinerant rabbi from the Galilee — the backwaters of Palestine — leads a popular movement among the Jews, one that comes to an ignominious end when he is executed for sedition by the Roman authorities. Some of his followers form a small community in Jerusalem, proclaiming that not only was this rabbi and prophet the longed-for Messiah of Israel, but he is alive, in glory with God, vested with impregnable power and heavenly authority. These messianic Jews share goods in common and worship daily at the temple, praying and waiting eagerly for Jesus’s imminent return, when he will drive out the pagan occupiers and restore his people’s fortunes.
"Pause the frame there. Nothing about this picture offers even a hint that this same community — one defined by exclusive loyalty to Jesus, Israel’s Messiah and Lord — will, centuries hence, find itself filling the Roman Empire, legalized and endorsed by that same empire, dominated by gentiles, not Jews, and led by men like Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis.
"How did this happen? Why did it happen? To answer, we need to leave Augustine behind and follow Fredriksen into the world of the eastern Mediterranean in the first century of the common era, specifically Jewish life under the thumb of the Roman Empire."
Read the rest.
"Put it this way: an itinerant rabbi from the Galilee — the backwaters of Palestine — leads a popular movement among the Jews, one that comes to an ignominious end when he is executed for sedition by the Roman authorities. Some of his followers form a small community in Jerusalem, proclaiming that not only was this rabbi and prophet the longed-for Messiah of Israel, but he is alive, in glory with God, vested with impregnable power and heavenly authority. These messianic Jews share goods in common and worship daily at the temple, praying and waiting eagerly for Jesus’s imminent return, when he will drive out the pagan occupiers and restore his people’s fortunes.
"Pause the frame there. Nothing about this picture offers even a hint that this same community — one defined by exclusive loyalty to Jesus, Israel’s Messiah and Lord — will, centuries hence, find itself filling the Roman Empire, legalized and endorsed by that same empire, dominated by gentiles, not Jews, and led by men like Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis.
"How did this happen? Why did it happen? To answer, we need to leave Augustine behind and follow Fredriksen into the world of the eastern Mediterranean in the first century of the common era, specifically Jewish life under the thumb of the Roman Empire."
Read the rest.
“We can't really be that fallen": a question for Christian socialists
Recently Nathan Robinson, editor-in-chief at Current Affairs, a socialist magazine, responded to National Review's issue "Against Socialism." He considers, successively, thirteen different writers' contributions in the issue. The tone of the piece is cheeky while wanting genuinely to respond in kind to substantive critiques of socialism.
One passage stood out to me. First, here is a paragraph that Robinson quotes from Theodore Dalrymple's essay in the NR issue:
"Socialism is not only, or even principally, an economic doctrine: It is a revolt against human nature. It refuses to believe that man is a fallen creature and seeks to improve him by making all equal one to another. It is not surprising that the development of the New Man was the ultimate goal of Communist tyrannies, the older version of man being so imperfect and even despicable. But such futile and reprehensible dreams, notwithstanding the disastrous results when they were taken seriously by ruthless men in power, are far from alien to current generations of intellectuals. Man, knowing himself to be imperfect, will continue to dream of, and believe in, schemes not merely of improvement here and there but of perfection, of a life so perfectly organized that everyone will be happy, kind, decent, and selfless without any effort at all. Illusion springs eternal, especially among intellectuals."
Here is what Robinson writes in response:
"Now, this part has a bit of truth to it. Socialism is not principally an economic doctrine, and I’ve suggested that the best way to understand it is as the set of principles that arise from feelings of solidarity. But it is not a 'revolt against human nature.' We simply have a difference of opinion on what 'human nature' means and what it allows to be possible. We believe human beings can be a cooperative species and do not see our fellow creatures as helplessly 'fallen' (or rather, if they’ve fallen, it’s our job to extend a hand and get them back up.) It’s true, we like to daydream about everyone being happy, kind, and decent, perhaps because we know so many people who fit the description and we find it easy to imagine the ethos spreading further. But we’re also realistic: we are not focused on mashing our fellow people into a vision of the New Human Being, but on achieving concrete goals that will materially improve people’s lives. I’m a utopian by twilight, but during the day I’m a practical sort, and so are the other lefties I know. Their goals are actually so modest that it’s remarkable they’re so controversial: a good standard of living for all, freedom from exploitation and abuse, democracy in the workplace, a culture of mutual aid and compassion. Can we not manage these things? We can’t really be that fallen."
It's unclear to me whether Robinson is having some rhetorical fun here, or whether he doesn't know the Christian theological language of "fallenness" on which Dalrymple is drawing. For what fallenness names is the condition of human (and indeed all created) life under sin, a condition that, according to Christian faith, will not change, much less be resolved, so long as this world endures. To the claim, "We can't really be that fallen," the broadly catholic, or Augustinian, tradition replies, at least in principle, "Indeed we are that fallen—and it is far worse than you imagine."
Now, that doesn't per se answer the concrete political, economic, or policy goals that Robinson sets out (though I do think there is a bit of a sleight of hand at work between the "modesty" of the proposals and the normative anthropological vision of flourishing he admits underwrites them). And non-religious or non-Christian socialists may be perfectly coherent, and even justified, in rejecting the theological account of human being that the church confesses, following revelation, to be true.
But the Dalrymple/Robinson pairing of perspectives makes for a nice contrast, and one, moreover, that touches on a question I have had percolating in the back of my mind for a while now. The question is for Christians who claim the socialist vision—and here I mean socialism in the strongest of terms, not as a cipher for left-of-centrism or left-of-the-DNC or even social democracy as such.
Here's the question, put a few different ways. What is the relationship between the Christian doctrine of original sin and Christian support for a socialist economy? What role does ineradicable human fallenness play in such an account of socialism's operation and success? Is "human nature" and/or the limits and/or sinfulness of all human beings without exception a determining factor in the Christian support for, or version of, socialism? Does affirmation of human fallenness in some way modify, alter, color, qualify, mitigate, or otherwise affect specifically Christian socialism as opposed to secular or atheistic socialism? Does original sin put a "brake" on the envisageable "perfectibility" (however analogically defined) of human character, action, will, and life together? What role, if any, do fallenness and tragedy play in theoretical accounts of, and policy proposals regarding, ideal economic arrangements in human society?
You get the idea. It's a real set of questions. I know or read just enough Christian socialists to suspect there are answers; I know or read just few enough to lack the awareness of which resources to consult on these questions. I welcome direction—or answers!
Theses on preaching
1. The principal subject matter for preaching, always and everywhere, is the triune God of Israel attested and revealed in the good news about Jesus, the Lord and Messiah of Israel. If a sermon could not plausibly be said to have been about that, it was not a sermon.
1.1. This is primarily a substantive point, that is, regarding what a sermon is "about," which doesn't mean that counting the number of times the words "God," "Lord," "Jesus," "Spirit," "Trinity," etc., are mentioned in a sermon is going to do the job. Throwing around those words isn't good enough; indeed, imagine an expertly crafted sermon on the book of Esther that somehow avoided such terms, just like the text in question, while nevertheless rendering God's providential, saving hand throughout.
1.2. Having said that, the point is secondarily grammatical. That is, months and months of sermons unpopulated by liberal use of the sentence structure, "God [verb]," would be deeply suspect. In most sermons God ought to be the grammatical subject as much as he is the subject matter. God is not passive—in Scripture, in the world, in the church, or in the sermon—and he shouldn't be implied to be by the rhetoric of preachers.
2. A sermon is the proclamation of the gospel by an authorized member of the church out of a specific text from Holy Scripture in the setting of public worship among, to, and for the sake of the gathered local assembly of the baptized.
2.1. Proclamation means announcement, attestation, verbal testimony, public witness, a herald's message from the royal throne. A sermon, therefore, is not a lesson. It is not (primarily) teaching, or didactic in tone or content. It is not a pep talk, an inspirational message, or personal sharing. It is not a comedy routine. It is not a TED Talk. It is solemn, joyful, awesome declaration of the gospel of the incarnate Lord.
2.2. The gospel is the good news about Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God become human, crucified, risen, and ascended. Jesus is Immanuel, God with us; the autobasileia, the kingdom himself in person; the God-man who takes away the sins of the world. He is the promised one of Israel, the grace of God enfleshed, the King and Ruler of the cosmos. His name means love, forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption. A sermon is not a sermon that does not point, like the outstretched finger of John the Baptist, to this Christ, and to life in him, the life he makes possible.
2.2.1. That the sermon announces the gospel, and the gospel is the good news of friendship with God through the grace of Christ, does not mean that every sermon must be about or mention the name of Jesus. Most should, no doubt, and no sermon should fear mentioning Christ lest he be "imported" into or "imposed" on, say, a text that does not mention him by name. A Christian sermon should not fear to be a Christian sermon. But it is certainly possible to preach a faithful Christian sermon out of an Old Testament text without mentioning Jesus. Why? Because the good news about Jesus is the gospel of Israel's God, whose covenant with Abraham is the very covenant renewed in Christ and extended to the gentiles. God's grace, in other words, and God's identity and attributes, are one and the same across the covenants. To preach the one God just is to preach the gospel.
2.2.2. Having said that, reticence about preaching Jesus from Israel's scriptures is an inherited prejudice worth unlearning in most cases. Moses and David and Isaiah foretold Jesus, as Jesus himself taught. We should take him at his word, and God's people deserve to hear of it.
2.3. A sermon is and ought to be rooted in and an explication of some particular passage of the Christian Bible. This should go without saying. A sermon, however thematic, is not on a topic or theme first of all. The topic or theme arises from the text. A sermon series that does not follow the lectionary and is organized thematically should be very careful so as to commit itself to concrete texts each week.
2.3.1. Expository preaching may be done faithfully, but not all preaching need be expository. The danger of so-called non-expository preaching is that it become unmoored from the text. The alternative danger, however, is mistaking the sermon for a class lesson. But a sermon is not a lecture; the pulpit is not a lectern. A lecture's aim is understanding. A sermon's aim is faith. One can proclaim the gospel out of a text without parsing its every verb and explaining its every historical nuance. But one can do the latter without accomplishing the former. That's the error to avoid.
2.3.2. A sermon is not a book tour. It is not a personal testimony. It isn't time for church business (or, God forbid, budget talk). A sermon isn't practical advice, or suggestions for living your best life now, or ideas about how to parent. It is not electioneering and it is not political advocacy. If you hear attempted preachments that, for example, do not have a biblical text as their source or the living God as their subject or the gospel as the matter of their announcement: then you have not heard a sermon.
2.3.3. Texts preached on should be diverse in every way: narrative, epistle, Torah, psalms, wisdom, paraenesis, apocalypse, etc. For both lectionary and non-lectionary traditions, the harder texts should not be avoided (purity laws, money, war, nonviolence, gender, miracles, politics, justice—whatever challenges you or your audience's preconceptions or sacred cows).
2.4. Preaching is an item of Christian worship. It is an element of the liturgy, the word proclaimed in speech and sacrament. Preaching is not secular. It is not a species of human speech in general. It is the word of God communicated through human words. The preacher is an instrument of divine speech, a sanctified mediator of Christ's saving gospel. The Holy Spirit sanctifies the words of the sermon to be, in all their unworthiness, the medium of the eternal Word that slays and makes alive again.
2.4.1. Preachers and Christian hearers ought to approach the word proclaimed mindful of what is happening. Which is not to make the occasion a somber or rarefied event: a sermon's environment is and ought to be the lively reality of human community, which means nursing babies and fussing kids and coughs and tears and inarticulate moans (offered by, for example, profoundly intellectually disabled persons, who are welcomed by Christ himself to hear him speak). The sermon, in short, is not cordoned off from real life; the assembly need not resemble the silence of a monastery before God can begin to work. But precisely in the midst of and through all such common features of human life together, the Spirit of Christ is making his presence known in the speaking of his holy word.
2.4.2. The long-standing catholic practice of the church is for the proclaimed word to precede the celebration of the Eucharist, which is the climax of the liturgy. Churches descended from the Reformation tend to reverse the order, so that the service culminates in the sermon (sometimes tending, regrettably, to eliminate the meal altogether). The catholic sequence seems right to me, but in either case, there are dangers to be avoided.
2.4.3. Protestants must resist the temptation to make worship talky, so word-centered that it really does become like one long classroom experience, peppered with prayers and a bit of music. The word, moreover, must not swamp the sacrament. Far too many sermon-centered churches, even if they celebrate communion, downgrade its importance through a minimum of ritual, time, and emphasis. The sermon becomes the reason the people are gathered; and if the sermon, then the preacher; and if the preacher, then a mere minister has displaced Christ as the locus of the church's assembly. The gravest theological danger is that the sacramental principle of ex opere operato ceases to apply, practically, to the sermon, because its centrality highlights the need for technical quality, and preachers are no longer trusted to successfully proclaim God's gospel apart from their own worthiness or talents, for those very things become exactly the measure of their faithfulness, and thus their appeal.
2.4.4. Catholics (East and West) must resist the temptation to make the sermon, or homily, a mere prelude, preferably brief, to the Main Event. The gospel is proclaimed in word and sacrament; that need not imply equality in every respect, but it certainly requires a kind of parity, a recognition that each has its proper work to do, under God, for God's people. Ritual is good and liturgy is good, but proclamation of the gospel has the converting power of Christ himself through the Spirit (a sword in the hand of the servant of God, to mortify the flesh and vivify the soul), power to convict of sin, awaken faith, to work signs and miracles, to raise the dead. The centrality of the Eucharist does not logically entail, and must not become an excuse to enact, the liturgical devaluation of the proclaimed word.
2.5. A sermon is an ecclesial event; it exists by, in, and for the church of Christ. Preaching is a practice proper to the baptized. The proper context and principal audience for the word of God is the people of God. In this the sermon is no different than the Eucharist, whose natural home is the gathered community of faith.
2.5.1. The twofold telos of the sermon is the awakening of faith and the edification of the faithful. The sermon, then, is preached primarily to and for baptized believers, not to nonbelievers, visitors, seekers, or pagans. The sermon is not first of all evangelistic or apologetic. Doubtless there have been and are contexts in which sermons ought to be oriented to nonbelievers, but that is not ordinarily, not normatively, what the sermon is or is for. The word proclaimed is for the upbuilding of the saints in via, the (audible) manna alongside the (visible) manna that the Lord provides for the journey through the wilderness to the promised land.
2.5.2. Simplifying sermons so as to be intelligible, week in and week out, to people who know nothing about the Christian gospel or Holy Scripture is unwise and, though it may provide short-term results, in the long-term it is impracticable, ineffective, and damaging. The Lord's people require feeding. Refusing, on principle, never to move beyond milk for infants will leave the people famished and arrested in their spiritual maturity.
3. Preaching in a digital age presents challenges the church hasn't had to face in nearly its entire life. It's a genuinely new world, and the changes are still fresh, historically speaking. Microphones, video, images, projected text, recording, podcasts, broadcasting to multiple sites at once—I don't envy pastors who have to make decisions about such things in real time. But there are principles worth keeping in mind while navigating the new landscape.
3.1. Technology should serve the sermon and the sermon's ends, not the other way around. It should serve, in fact, every one of the theses above. If it does not—if it distracts, if it draws attention to itself, if it becomes an end in itself, if it is superficial, if it is flashy, if it is ugly, if it abets rather than subverts the hyper-technologizing tendencies already gnawing and corrupting the minds and souls of the faithful—then it should be resisted and rejected out of hand.
3.2. Preaching is an oral event. Considered as a natural occurrence, it is essentially a verbal communication spoken by one human being to the hearkening ears of a gathering of other human beings. Technology can aid this occurrence: by amplifying sound, for example, for the large size of an assembly; or, say, for the hard of hearing. It can even transmit the sermon to those unable, for medical or travel or other reasons, to attend the convocation of God's people in person. These are clear ways in which technology serves the orality of gospel proclamation.
3.2.1. Technology can also mitigate the spoken nature of the sermon. Such technology includes videos, extensive use of screen text, involved graphics and images and slide shows, and so on. The question is not whether these are absolutely forbidden in any and all cases. The question is whether they are subjected to rigorous theological inquiry as to their suitability to the essential form of churchly proclamation, rather than their merely instrumental capacities with respect to desired secondary ends (e.g., lack of boredom, capturing youths' attention, entertainment, laughs, viral videos). The medium is not neutral, not an instance of adiaphora; the medium is, literally, the message: the word of God for the people of God. If it isn't a word, if it isn't God's word, then it isn't the preaching of the gospel. And that's the whole ballgame.
3.3. Churches and preachers should be wary rather than eager to use new technologies. Technology takes on a life of its own. It masters its domain. Nor is it neutral: a social media app cannot reinforce good habits of sustained attention, for example, because by its very nature a social media app is meant to colonize your attention and destroy your ability to concentrate for sustained periods of time without interruption. Nor is technology master-less; it serves gods, rabid and hungry and insatiable. Those gods are the market and Silicon Valley. Technology doesn't descend ready-made from heaven. It comes from somewhere, and is made by human beings. Those human beings make what they sell and sell what they make for one reason: money. Letting what they make and sell into the church is a dangerous game to play, even if well-considered and well-intentioned. A pastor ought always to be suspicious rather than sanguine about the power of technology in the life of the church—and such suspicion should bear on its use in preaching.
4. Technique is, hands down, the least important thing about preaching. If a pastor has spent the week dwelling in the biblical text for that Sunday's sermon and, from the pulpit, strives, while petitioning for help from God's grace, to preach from Scripture the good news of God's grace in Jesus on behalf of and for the sake of the upbuilding of Christ's body—then the job is done. In a real sense that is the only criterion for any sermon: was that thing accomplished (even, was its accomplishment sought)? If so, then questions of delivery, eloquence, clarity, form, etc., are all secondary, and of little import. If not, if a truly Christian sermon was not even attempted, then all the good humor, articulateness, pathos, personal anecdotes, intelligence, powers of rhetoric, and the rest don't mean a damn thing.
4.1. Method is a matter of prudence, native talent, gifts of the Spirit, audience, context, training, and many more largely uncontrollable variables. A faithful sermon can be 20, 40, or 60 minutes long (or more); it can be done from memory, with a basic outline, or with a manuscript; it can involve gestures and movements and animation or minimal intonation and emotion; it can encompass the whole spectrum of human passions and virtues; there is no platonic ideal of Faithful Proclamation. (Nor, by the way, is there The Biblical Model of it.) Method depends; don't be a slave to method; don't be a disciple of methodologists.
4.2. Preaching should wear its study lightly while depending on it as the sermon's lifeblood. You can spot a preacher who doesn't study from a mile away. A preacher who doesn't read except for what is strictly necessary. A preacher who doesn't read widely, who doesn't read for pleasure, who doesn't read anything but commentaries (though, please, read the commentaries!). A preacher whose primary—or, God forbid, exclusive—allusions and references are to pop culture. A good preacher doesn't flaunt sources and drop names. But the research that informs a sermon should be discernible in the rich substance of it; should be there to be offered to anyone with further questions following the sermon. "Oh, you had a question about that line? Here are half a dozen books I'd recommend on the topic if you want to go deeper on it..."
4.2.1. Speaking of pop culture: steer clear of it. Nine times out of ten an explicit and/or drawn-out reference to pop culture is a distraction and undermines the aim of the reference. Lovers of pop culture vastly overestimate the universality of their pop culture darlings. Harry Potter may have millions of fans, but here's the truth: half of your church hasn't read the books or seen the films. Moreover, pop culture almost always skews young, and playing for the youth is a capitulation to market pressures. A sermon is catholic: it is meant for the one holy church of God—not some upwardly mobile demographic slice of it. Finally, pop culture references usually denigrate rather than elevate the material. What hath Hollywood to do with Jerusalem? Children's movies and science fiction are silly and insubstantial compared with the holy ever-living Trinity and the sacrifice of Jesus upon a Roman gallows. "When Jesus calls a man he bids him come and die—oh and that reminds me of this funny little anecdote from Finding Nemo..." The juxtaposition is absurd, and though congregants might chuckle or wink, in their hearts they know something great and weighty is being set alongside something weak and shallow. Don't do it.
4.2.2. The pop culture rule is a species of the greater genus of illustrations. (Another species is anecdotes.) Illustrations are certainly useful and have their place. But at least two dangers are worth addressing. One is the tendency for illustrations to swamp the text. Instead of the preacher's experience at the DMV illuminating the real matter at hand, which is the text from Scripture, the opposite happens: God's word becomes a bit player in the larger drama of the preacher's life. The other danger is related: illustrations, consistently used, can come to shape the people's minds in the following way. Instead of Scripture being the relevant, formative, immediate influence on their souls—their hearts, minds, morals, imaginations—Scripture is instead pictured as distant, alien, strange, ancient, foreign, irrelevant. And what illustrations do is bridge that gap, translate that language, assimilate that culture into ours, our time and context and culture and language being the dominant factors. Illustrations and stories and anecdotes and allusions need, rather, to serve the relevance and power and relatability and authority of the scriptural text, not reverse the terms and increase the alienation people (perhaps already) feel about the Bible.
5. All that the preacher does, all that the many facets of the sermon strive to achieve, must be in service of the one thing necessary: to speak human words, rooted in God's written word, that may, by the Spirit's grace, become a conduit for the living and eternal Word, Christ risen and reigning from heaven, to speak himself in person, in his saving presence, to his beloved people, that he might justify and sanctify, equip and encourage them in faith, hope, and love; and that they might, when the words are finished, give glory to God—and say Amen.
1.1. This is primarily a substantive point, that is, regarding what a sermon is "about," which doesn't mean that counting the number of times the words "God," "Lord," "Jesus," "Spirit," "Trinity," etc., are mentioned in a sermon is going to do the job. Throwing around those words isn't good enough; indeed, imagine an expertly crafted sermon on the book of Esther that somehow avoided such terms, just like the text in question, while nevertheless rendering God's providential, saving hand throughout.
1.2. Having said that, the point is secondarily grammatical. That is, months and months of sermons unpopulated by liberal use of the sentence structure, "God [verb]," would be deeply suspect. In most sermons God ought to be the grammatical subject as much as he is the subject matter. God is not passive—in Scripture, in the world, in the church, or in the sermon—and he shouldn't be implied to be by the rhetoric of preachers.
2. A sermon is the proclamation of the gospel by an authorized member of the church out of a specific text from Holy Scripture in the setting of public worship among, to, and for the sake of the gathered local assembly of the baptized.
2.1. Proclamation means announcement, attestation, verbal testimony, public witness, a herald's message from the royal throne. A sermon, therefore, is not a lesson. It is not (primarily) teaching, or didactic in tone or content. It is not a pep talk, an inspirational message, or personal sharing. It is not a comedy routine. It is not a TED Talk. It is solemn, joyful, awesome declaration of the gospel of the incarnate Lord.
2.2. The gospel is the good news about Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God become human, crucified, risen, and ascended. Jesus is Immanuel, God with us; the autobasileia, the kingdom himself in person; the God-man who takes away the sins of the world. He is the promised one of Israel, the grace of God enfleshed, the King and Ruler of the cosmos. His name means love, forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption. A sermon is not a sermon that does not point, like the outstretched finger of John the Baptist, to this Christ, and to life in him, the life he makes possible.
2.2.1. That the sermon announces the gospel, and the gospel is the good news of friendship with God through the grace of Christ, does not mean that every sermon must be about or mention the name of Jesus. Most should, no doubt, and no sermon should fear mentioning Christ lest he be "imported" into or "imposed" on, say, a text that does not mention him by name. A Christian sermon should not fear to be a Christian sermon. But it is certainly possible to preach a faithful Christian sermon out of an Old Testament text without mentioning Jesus. Why? Because the good news about Jesus is the gospel of Israel's God, whose covenant with Abraham is the very covenant renewed in Christ and extended to the gentiles. God's grace, in other words, and God's identity and attributes, are one and the same across the covenants. To preach the one God just is to preach the gospel.
2.2.2. Having said that, reticence about preaching Jesus from Israel's scriptures is an inherited prejudice worth unlearning in most cases. Moses and David and Isaiah foretold Jesus, as Jesus himself taught. We should take him at his word, and God's people deserve to hear of it.
2.3. A sermon is and ought to be rooted in and an explication of some particular passage of the Christian Bible. This should go without saying. A sermon, however thematic, is not on a topic or theme first of all. The topic or theme arises from the text. A sermon series that does not follow the lectionary and is organized thematically should be very careful so as to commit itself to concrete texts each week.
2.3.1. Expository preaching may be done faithfully, but not all preaching need be expository. The danger of so-called non-expository preaching is that it become unmoored from the text. The alternative danger, however, is mistaking the sermon for a class lesson. But a sermon is not a lecture; the pulpit is not a lectern. A lecture's aim is understanding. A sermon's aim is faith. One can proclaim the gospel out of a text without parsing its every verb and explaining its every historical nuance. But one can do the latter without accomplishing the former. That's the error to avoid.
2.3.2. A sermon is not a book tour. It is not a personal testimony. It isn't time for church business (or, God forbid, budget talk). A sermon isn't practical advice, or suggestions for living your best life now, or ideas about how to parent. It is not electioneering and it is not political advocacy. If you hear attempted preachments that, for example, do not have a biblical text as their source or the living God as their subject or the gospel as the matter of their announcement: then you have not heard a sermon.
2.3.3. Texts preached on should be diverse in every way: narrative, epistle, Torah, psalms, wisdom, paraenesis, apocalypse, etc. For both lectionary and non-lectionary traditions, the harder texts should not be avoided (purity laws, money, war, nonviolence, gender, miracles, politics, justice—whatever challenges you or your audience's preconceptions or sacred cows).
2.4. Preaching is an item of Christian worship. It is an element of the liturgy, the word proclaimed in speech and sacrament. Preaching is not secular. It is not a species of human speech in general. It is the word of God communicated through human words. The preacher is an instrument of divine speech, a sanctified mediator of Christ's saving gospel. The Holy Spirit sanctifies the words of the sermon to be, in all their unworthiness, the medium of the eternal Word that slays and makes alive again.
2.4.1. Preachers and Christian hearers ought to approach the word proclaimed mindful of what is happening. Which is not to make the occasion a somber or rarefied event: a sermon's environment is and ought to be the lively reality of human community, which means nursing babies and fussing kids and coughs and tears and inarticulate moans (offered by, for example, profoundly intellectually disabled persons, who are welcomed by Christ himself to hear him speak). The sermon, in short, is not cordoned off from real life; the assembly need not resemble the silence of a monastery before God can begin to work. But precisely in the midst of and through all such common features of human life together, the Spirit of Christ is making his presence known in the speaking of his holy word.
2.4.2. The long-standing catholic practice of the church is for the proclaimed word to precede the celebration of the Eucharist, which is the climax of the liturgy. Churches descended from the Reformation tend to reverse the order, so that the service culminates in the sermon (sometimes tending, regrettably, to eliminate the meal altogether). The catholic sequence seems right to me, but in either case, there are dangers to be avoided.
2.4.3. Protestants must resist the temptation to make worship talky, so word-centered that it really does become like one long classroom experience, peppered with prayers and a bit of music. The word, moreover, must not swamp the sacrament. Far too many sermon-centered churches, even if they celebrate communion, downgrade its importance through a minimum of ritual, time, and emphasis. The sermon becomes the reason the people are gathered; and if the sermon, then the preacher; and if the preacher, then a mere minister has displaced Christ as the locus of the church's assembly. The gravest theological danger is that the sacramental principle of ex opere operato ceases to apply, practically, to the sermon, because its centrality highlights the need for technical quality, and preachers are no longer trusted to successfully proclaim God's gospel apart from their own worthiness or talents, for those very things become exactly the measure of their faithfulness, and thus their appeal.
2.4.4. Catholics (East and West) must resist the temptation to make the sermon, or homily, a mere prelude, preferably brief, to the Main Event. The gospel is proclaimed in word and sacrament; that need not imply equality in every respect, but it certainly requires a kind of parity, a recognition that each has its proper work to do, under God, for God's people. Ritual is good and liturgy is good, but proclamation of the gospel has the converting power of Christ himself through the Spirit (a sword in the hand of the servant of God, to mortify the flesh and vivify the soul), power to convict of sin, awaken faith, to work signs and miracles, to raise the dead. The centrality of the Eucharist does not logically entail, and must not become an excuse to enact, the liturgical devaluation of the proclaimed word.
2.5. A sermon is an ecclesial event; it exists by, in, and for the church of Christ. Preaching is a practice proper to the baptized. The proper context and principal audience for the word of God is the people of God. In this the sermon is no different than the Eucharist, whose natural home is the gathered community of faith.
2.5.1. The twofold telos of the sermon is the awakening of faith and the edification of the faithful. The sermon, then, is preached primarily to and for baptized believers, not to nonbelievers, visitors, seekers, or pagans. The sermon is not first of all evangelistic or apologetic. Doubtless there have been and are contexts in which sermons ought to be oriented to nonbelievers, but that is not ordinarily, not normatively, what the sermon is or is for. The word proclaimed is for the upbuilding of the saints in via, the (audible) manna alongside the (visible) manna that the Lord provides for the journey through the wilderness to the promised land.
2.5.2. Simplifying sermons so as to be intelligible, week in and week out, to people who know nothing about the Christian gospel or Holy Scripture is unwise and, though it may provide short-term results, in the long-term it is impracticable, ineffective, and damaging. The Lord's people require feeding. Refusing, on principle, never to move beyond milk for infants will leave the people famished and arrested in their spiritual maturity.
3. Preaching in a digital age presents challenges the church hasn't had to face in nearly its entire life. It's a genuinely new world, and the changes are still fresh, historically speaking. Microphones, video, images, projected text, recording, podcasts, broadcasting to multiple sites at once—I don't envy pastors who have to make decisions about such things in real time. But there are principles worth keeping in mind while navigating the new landscape.
3.1. Technology should serve the sermon and the sermon's ends, not the other way around. It should serve, in fact, every one of the theses above. If it does not—if it distracts, if it draws attention to itself, if it becomes an end in itself, if it is superficial, if it is flashy, if it is ugly, if it abets rather than subverts the hyper-technologizing tendencies already gnawing and corrupting the minds and souls of the faithful—then it should be resisted and rejected out of hand.
3.2. Preaching is an oral event. Considered as a natural occurrence, it is essentially a verbal communication spoken by one human being to the hearkening ears of a gathering of other human beings. Technology can aid this occurrence: by amplifying sound, for example, for the large size of an assembly; or, say, for the hard of hearing. It can even transmit the sermon to those unable, for medical or travel or other reasons, to attend the convocation of God's people in person. These are clear ways in which technology serves the orality of gospel proclamation.
3.2.1. Technology can also mitigate the spoken nature of the sermon. Such technology includes videos, extensive use of screen text, involved graphics and images and slide shows, and so on. The question is not whether these are absolutely forbidden in any and all cases. The question is whether they are subjected to rigorous theological inquiry as to their suitability to the essential form of churchly proclamation, rather than their merely instrumental capacities with respect to desired secondary ends (e.g., lack of boredom, capturing youths' attention, entertainment, laughs, viral videos). The medium is not neutral, not an instance of adiaphora; the medium is, literally, the message: the word of God for the people of God. If it isn't a word, if it isn't God's word, then it isn't the preaching of the gospel. And that's the whole ballgame.
3.3. Churches and preachers should be wary rather than eager to use new technologies. Technology takes on a life of its own. It masters its domain. Nor is it neutral: a social media app cannot reinforce good habits of sustained attention, for example, because by its very nature a social media app is meant to colonize your attention and destroy your ability to concentrate for sustained periods of time without interruption. Nor is technology master-less; it serves gods, rabid and hungry and insatiable. Those gods are the market and Silicon Valley. Technology doesn't descend ready-made from heaven. It comes from somewhere, and is made by human beings. Those human beings make what they sell and sell what they make for one reason: money. Letting what they make and sell into the church is a dangerous game to play, even if well-considered and well-intentioned. A pastor ought always to be suspicious rather than sanguine about the power of technology in the life of the church—and such suspicion should bear on its use in preaching.
4. Technique is, hands down, the least important thing about preaching. If a pastor has spent the week dwelling in the biblical text for that Sunday's sermon and, from the pulpit, strives, while petitioning for help from God's grace, to preach from Scripture the good news of God's grace in Jesus on behalf of and for the sake of the upbuilding of Christ's body—then the job is done. In a real sense that is the only criterion for any sermon: was that thing accomplished (even, was its accomplishment sought)? If so, then questions of delivery, eloquence, clarity, form, etc., are all secondary, and of little import. If not, if a truly Christian sermon was not even attempted, then all the good humor, articulateness, pathos, personal anecdotes, intelligence, powers of rhetoric, and the rest don't mean a damn thing.
4.1. Method is a matter of prudence, native talent, gifts of the Spirit, audience, context, training, and many more largely uncontrollable variables. A faithful sermon can be 20, 40, or 60 minutes long (or more); it can be done from memory, with a basic outline, or with a manuscript; it can involve gestures and movements and animation or minimal intonation and emotion; it can encompass the whole spectrum of human passions and virtues; there is no platonic ideal of Faithful Proclamation. (Nor, by the way, is there The Biblical Model of it.) Method depends; don't be a slave to method; don't be a disciple of methodologists.
4.2. Preaching should wear its study lightly while depending on it as the sermon's lifeblood. You can spot a preacher who doesn't study from a mile away. A preacher who doesn't read except for what is strictly necessary. A preacher who doesn't read widely, who doesn't read for pleasure, who doesn't read anything but commentaries (though, please, read the commentaries!). A preacher whose primary—or, God forbid, exclusive—allusions and references are to pop culture. A good preacher doesn't flaunt sources and drop names. But the research that informs a sermon should be discernible in the rich substance of it; should be there to be offered to anyone with further questions following the sermon. "Oh, you had a question about that line? Here are half a dozen books I'd recommend on the topic if you want to go deeper on it..."
4.2.1. Speaking of pop culture: steer clear of it. Nine times out of ten an explicit and/or drawn-out reference to pop culture is a distraction and undermines the aim of the reference. Lovers of pop culture vastly overestimate the universality of their pop culture darlings. Harry Potter may have millions of fans, but here's the truth: half of your church hasn't read the books or seen the films. Moreover, pop culture almost always skews young, and playing for the youth is a capitulation to market pressures. A sermon is catholic: it is meant for the one holy church of God—not some upwardly mobile demographic slice of it. Finally, pop culture references usually denigrate rather than elevate the material. What hath Hollywood to do with Jerusalem? Children's movies and science fiction are silly and insubstantial compared with the holy ever-living Trinity and the sacrifice of Jesus upon a Roman gallows. "When Jesus calls a man he bids him come and die—oh and that reminds me of this funny little anecdote from Finding Nemo..." The juxtaposition is absurd, and though congregants might chuckle or wink, in their hearts they know something great and weighty is being set alongside something weak and shallow. Don't do it.
4.2.2. The pop culture rule is a species of the greater genus of illustrations. (Another species is anecdotes.) Illustrations are certainly useful and have their place. But at least two dangers are worth addressing. One is the tendency for illustrations to swamp the text. Instead of the preacher's experience at the DMV illuminating the real matter at hand, which is the text from Scripture, the opposite happens: God's word becomes a bit player in the larger drama of the preacher's life. The other danger is related: illustrations, consistently used, can come to shape the people's minds in the following way. Instead of Scripture being the relevant, formative, immediate influence on their souls—their hearts, minds, morals, imaginations—Scripture is instead pictured as distant, alien, strange, ancient, foreign, irrelevant. And what illustrations do is bridge that gap, translate that language, assimilate that culture into ours, our time and context and culture and language being the dominant factors. Illustrations and stories and anecdotes and allusions need, rather, to serve the relevance and power and relatability and authority of the scriptural text, not reverse the terms and increase the alienation people (perhaps already) feel about the Bible.
5. All that the preacher does, all that the many facets of the sermon strive to achieve, must be in service of the one thing necessary: to speak human words, rooted in God's written word, that may, by the Spirit's grace, become a conduit for the living and eternal Word, Christ risen and reigning from heaven, to speak himself in person, in his saving presence, to his beloved people, that he might justify and sanctify, equip and encourage them in faith, hope, and love; and that they might, when the words are finished, give glory to God—and say Amen.
Politics on the pattern of the martyrs
In my Comment essay earlier this year titled "The Church and the Common Good," I wrote the following, describing and recommending Paul Griffiths' idiosyncratic spin on quietism as the proper form of Christian political action:
"At bottom it is a radical call for epistemic, moral, and theological humility. For we cannot know either the actual or the unintended consequences of the policies for which we advocate; nor can we know those of the policies we oppose. We must assume our opponents act in good faith, even as we admit we act from mixed motives ourselves. If we fail, we may trust that providence has allowed it, for reasons opaque to us; if we prevail, we are in an even more precarious position, for we will be responsible for what results, and we will be tempted to pride. In any case, what good comes, we receive with gratitude. What evil comes, we suffer with patience.
"Quietism, in short, is politics on the pattern of the martyrs, who, like Christ, did not consider victory 'a thing to be grasped, but emptied' themselves, entrusting themselves in faith to 'the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being the things that are not.' Christ forsook the sword as a means of establishing justice in Israel; the kingdom came instead at the cross.
"Banished is every utopia, including the confident Christian rhetoric of justice in our time. As St. Augustine teaches us, the only true justice is found in the city of God, whose founding sacrifice constitutes the only true worship of God. The celebration of this sacrifice is the eucharistic liturgy. Approximations of this justice in politics are difficult to assess in the moment, not to mention predict in advance. The church therefore cannot be codependent with politics. Its hope lies in a future not of its making."
I then ask the inevitable question: "How, you may ask, is this not secession from politics, a status quo–baptizing desertion of the common good?" I go on:
"Answer: Because Christians remain as engaged as ever, even to the point of laying down their lives, only without the vices that attend a realized eschatology (activism absent resurrection): the desperate need to win, the entitled expectation of success, the assumption of God’s approval, the forgetfulness of sin, the recourse to evil means for good ends. Domine, quo vadis? Christian political witness is figured by St. Peter—the rock on which the church is built, surely an ecclesial sine qua non—following the Lord back into Rome, certain that his end is near, but equally certain that all his noble plans and good deeds are not worth resisting the call. For the End is not in his or any human hands, and depends not one iota on our efforts."
All that is by way of preamble, to make a single and simple point. This week has seen the conservative intellectual world roiled by an explosive intramural spat, sparked initially and mostly carried on by Christians, concerning their proper political witness and their prospects, and strategies, for victory.
Here is my question. Of what relevance, if any, is the witness and example of the martyrs for the way that Christians conduct themselves politically? Is "politics on the pattern of the martyrs" exemplary in some way, and thus possible, and thus a goal to strive to approximate? If so, what difference does that make for Christian theory and practice of public engagement? If not ... well, I would like to read someone make the case either that martyrdom is irrelevant to sociopolitical matters (women and men put to death by state authorities regarding their convictions or deeds) or that, though relevant, the stakes are too high to pay them heed in this matter, today, in our context.
Put differently: The martyrs teach us, at a minimum, that sometimes letting go is more faithful than fighting, dying more faithful than continuing to live. The first three centuries of the church's life attest to the vitality of this witness precisely in the arena of politics, as does the church's experience across the globe at present and in recent centuries.
The martyrs were not doormats, and martyrdom is not despair or acquiescence before evil or persecution. It is the power of the cross made manifest in the world. Surely that power has a word to speak to our moment, and to the dispute alluded to above. If we listened, what might it say?
"At bottom it is a radical call for epistemic, moral, and theological humility. For we cannot know either the actual or the unintended consequences of the policies for which we advocate; nor can we know those of the policies we oppose. We must assume our opponents act in good faith, even as we admit we act from mixed motives ourselves. If we fail, we may trust that providence has allowed it, for reasons opaque to us; if we prevail, we are in an even more precarious position, for we will be responsible for what results, and we will be tempted to pride. In any case, what good comes, we receive with gratitude. What evil comes, we suffer with patience.
"Quietism, in short, is politics on the pattern of the martyrs, who, like Christ, did not consider victory 'a thing to be grasped, but emptied' themselves, entrusting themselves in faith to 'the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being the things that are not.' Christ forsook the sword as a means of establishing justice in Israel; the kingdom came instead at the cross.
"Banished is every utopia, including the confident Christian rhetoric of justice in our time. As St. Augustine teaches us, the only true justice is found in the city of God, whose founding sacrifice constitutes the only true worship of God. The celebration of this sacrifice is the eucharistic liturgy. Approximations of this justice in politics are difficult to assess in the moment, not to mention predict in advance. The church therefore cannot be codependent with politics. Its hope lies in a future not of its making."
I then ask the inevitable question: "How, you may ask, is this not secession from politics, a status quo–baptizing desertion of the common good?" I go on:
"Answer: Because Christians remain as engaged as ever, even to the point of laying down their lives, only without the vices that attend a realized eschatology (activism absent resurrection): the desperate need to win, the entitled expectation of success, the assumption of God’s approval, the forgetfulness of sin, the recourse to evil means for good ends. Domine, quo vadis? Christian political witness is figured by St. Peter—the rock on which the church is built, surely an ecclesial sine qua non—following the Lord back into Rome, certain that his end is near, but equally certain that all his noble plans and good deeds are not worth resisting the call. For the End is not in his or any human hands, and depends not one iota on our efforts."
All that is by way of preamble, to make a single and simple point. This week has seen the conservative intellectual world roiled by an explosive intramural spat, sparked initially and mostly carried on by Christians, concerning their proper political witness and their prospects, and strategies, for victory.
Here is my question. Of what relevance, if any, is the witness and example of the martyrs for the way that Christians conduct themselves politically? Is "politics on the pattern of the martyrs" exemplary in some way, and thus possible, and thus a goal to strive to approximate? If so, what difference does that make for Christian theory and practice of public engagement? If not ... well, I would like to read someone make the case either that martyrdom is irrelevant to sociopolitical matters (women and men put to death by state authorities regarding their convictions or deeds) or that, though relevant, the stakes are too high to pay them heed in this matter, today, in our context.
Put differently: The martyrs teach us, at a minimum, that sometimes letting go is more faithful than fighting, dying more faithful than continuing to live. The first three centuries of the church's life attest to the vitality of this witness precisely in the arena of politics, as does the church's experience across the globe at present and in recent centuries.
The martyrs were not doormats, and martyrdom is not despair or acquiescence before evil or persecution. It is the power of the cross made manifest in the world. Surely that power has a word to speak to our moment, and to the dispute alluded to above. If we listened, what might it say?
Are there good reasons to stay on Twitter?
Earlier this week Nolan Lawson wrote a brief post extolling people to get off Twitter. He opens it by saying, "Stop complaining about Twitter on Twitter. Deny them your attention, your time, and your data. Get off of Twitter. The more time you spend on Twitter, the more money you make for Twitter. Get off of Twitter."
Alan Jacobs picked up on this post and wrote in support: "The decision to be on Twitter (or Facebook, etc.) is not simply a personal choice. It has run-on effects for you but also for others. When you use the big social media platforms you contribute to their power and influence, and you deplete the energy and value of the open web. You make things worse for everyone. I truly believe that. Which is why I’m so obnoxiously repetitive on this point."
I've written extensively about my own habits of technology and internet discipline. I deleted my Facebook account. I don't have any social media apps on my iPhone; nor do I even have access to email on there. I use it for calls, texts, podcasts, pictures of my kids (no iCloud!), directions, the weather, and Instapaper. I use Freedom to eliminate my access to the internet, on either my phone or my laptop, for 3-4 hours at a time, two to three times a day. I don't read articles or reply to emails until lunch time, then hold off until end of (work) day or end of (actual) day—i.e., after the kids go to bed. I'm not on Instagram or Snapchat or any of the new social media start-ups.
So why am I still on Twitter? I'm primed to agree with Lawson and Jacobs, after all. And I certainly do agree, to a large extent: Twitter is a fetid swamp of nightmarish human interaction; a digital slot machine with little upside and all downside. I have no doubt that 90% of people on Twitter need to get off entirely, and 100% of people on Twitter should use it 90% less than they do. Twitter warps the mind (journalism's degradation owes a great deal to @Jack); it is unhealthy for the brain and damaging for the soul. No one who deleted their Twitter account would become a less well-rounded, mentally and emotionally and spiritually fulfilled person.
So, again: Why am I still on Twitter? Are there any good reasons to stay?
For me, the answer is yes. The truth is that for the last 3 years (the main years of my really using it) my time on Twitter has been almost uniformly positive, and there have been numerous concrete benefits. At least for now, it's still worth it to me.
How has that happened? Partly I'm sure by dumb luck. Partly by already having instituted fairly rigorous habits of discipline (it's hard to fall into the infinite scroll if the scroll is inaccessible from your handheld device! And the same goes for instant posting, or posting pictures directly from my phone, which I can't do, or for getting into flame wars, or for getting notifications on my home screen, which I don't—since, again, it's not on my phone, and my phone is always (always!) on Do Not Disturb and Silent and, if I'm in the office, on Airplane Mode; you get it now: the goal is to be uninterrupted and generally unreachable).
Partly it's my intended mode of presence on Twitter: Be myself; don't argue about serious things with strangers; only argue at all if the other person is game, the topic is interesting, and the conversation is pleasant or edifying or fun; always think, "Would my wife or dad or best friend or pastor or dean or the Lord Jesus himself approve of this tweet?" (that does away with a lot of stupidity, meanness, and self-aggrandizement fast). As a rule, I would like for people who "meet" me on Twitter to meet me in person and find the two wholly consonant. Further, I try hard never to "dunk" on anyone. Twitter wants us to be cruel to one another: why give in?
I limit my follows fairly severely: only people I know personally, or read often, or admire, or learn something from, or take joy in following. For as long as I'm on Twitter I would like to keep my follows between 400 and 500 (kept low through annual culling). The moment someone who follows me acts cruelly or becomes a distraction, to myself or others, I immediately mute them (blocks are reserved, for now, for obvious bots). I don't feel compelled to respond to every reply. And I tend to "interface" with Twitter not through THE SCROLL but through about a dozen bookmarked profiles of people, usually writers or fellow academics, who always have interesting things to say or post links worth saving for later. All in all, I try to limit my daily time on Twitter to 10-30 minutes, less on Saturdays and (ordinarily, or aspirationally) zero on Sundays—at least so long as the kids are awake.
So much for my rules. What benefits have resulted from being on Twitter?
First, it appears that I have what can only be called a readership. Even if said readership comprises "only" a few hundred folks (I have just over a thousand followers), that number is greater than zero, which until very recently was the number of my readers not related to me by blood. And until such time (which will be no time) that I have thousands upon tens of thousands of readers—nay, in the millions!—it is rewarding and meaningful to interact with people who take the time to read, support, share, and comment on my work.
(That raises the question: Should the time actually come, and I'm sure that it will, when I am bombarded by trolls and the rank wickedness that erupts from the bowels of Twitter Hell for so many people? I will take one of two courses of action. I will adopt the policy of not reading my replies, as wise Public People do. But if that's not good enough, that will be the day, the very day, that I quit Twitter for good. And perhaps Lawson and Jacobs both arrived at that point long ago, which launched them off the platform. If so, good for them.)
Additionally, I have made contacts with a host of people across the country (and the world) with whom I share some common interest, not least within the theological academy. Some of these have become, or are fast becoming, genuine friendships. And because we theologians find reasons to gather together each year (AAR/SBL, SCE, CSC, etc.), budding online friendships actually generate in-person meetings and hangouts. Real life facilitated by the internet! Who would've thought?
I have also received multiple writing opportunities simply in virtue of being on Twitter. Those opportunities came directly or indirectly from embedding myself, even if (to my mind) invisibly, in networks of writers, editors, publishers, and the like. (I literally signed a book contract last week based on an email from an editor who found me on Twitter based on some writing and tweeting I'd done.) As I've always said, academic epistemology is grounded in gossip, and gossip (of the non-pejorative kind) depends entirely on who you know. The same goes for the world of publishing. And since writers and editors love Twitter—doubtless to their detriment—Twitter's the place to be to "hang around" and "hear" stuff, and eventually be noticed by one or two fine folks, and be welcomed into the conversation. That's happened to me already, in mostly small ways; but they add up.
So that's it, give or take. On a given week, I average 60-90 minutes on Twitter spread across 5-6 days, mostly during lunch or early evening hours, on my laptop, never on my phone, typically checking just a handful of folks' profiles, sending off a tweet or two myself, never battling, never feeding the trolls, saving my time and energy for real life (home, kids, church, friends) and for periods of sustained, undistracted attention at work, whether reading or writing.
Having said that, if I were a betting man, I would hazard a guess that I'll be off Twitter within five years, or that the site will no longer exist in anything like its current form. My time on Twitter is unrepresentative, and probably can't last. But so long as it does, and the benefits remain, I'll "be" there, and I think the reasons I've offered are sufficient to justify the decision.
Alan Jacobs picked up on this post and wrote in support: "The decision to be on Twitter (or Facebook, etc.) is not simply a personal choice. It has run-on effects for you but also for others. When you use the big social media platforms you contribute to their power and influence, and you deplete the energy and value of the open web. You make things worse for everyone. I truly believe that. Which is why I’m so obnoxiously repetitive on this point."
I've written extensively about my own habits of technology and internet discipline. I deleted my Facebook account. I don't have any social media apps on my iPhone; nor do I even have access to email on there. I use it for calls, texts, podcasts, pictures of my kids (no iCloud!), directions, the weather, and Instapaper. I use Freedom to eliminate my access to the internet, on either my phone or my laptop, for 3-4 hours at a time, two to three times a day. I don't read articles or reply to emails until lunch time, then hold off until end of (work) day or end of (actual) day—i.e., after the kids go to bed. I'm not on Instagram or Snapchat or any of the new social media start-ups.
So why am I still on Twitter? I'm primed to agree with Lawson and Jacobs, after all. And I certainly do agree, to a large extent: Twitter is a fetid swamp of nightmarish human interaction; a digital slot machine with little upside and all downside. I have no doubt that 90% of people on Twitter need to get off entirely, and 100% of people on Twitter should use it 90% less than they do. Twitter warps the mind (journalism's degradation owes a great deal to @Jack); it is unhealthy for the brain and damaging for the soul. No one who deleted their Twitter account would become a less well-rounded, mentally and emotionally and spiritually fulfilled person.
So, again: Why am I still on Twitter? Are there any good reasons to stay?
For me, the answer is yes. The truth is that for the last 3 years (the main years of my really using it) my time on Twitter has been almost uniformly positive, and there have been numerous concrete benefits. At least for now, it's still worth it to me.
How has that happened? Partly I'm sure by dumb luck. Partly by already having instituted fairly rigorous habits of discipline (it's hard to fall into the infinite scroll if the scroll is inaccessible from your handheld device! And the same goes for instant posting, or posting pictures directly from my phone, which I can't do, or for getting into flame wars, or for getting notifications on my home screen, which I don't—since, again, it's not on my phone, and my phone is always (always!) on Do Not Disturb and Silent and, if I'm in the office, on Airplane Mode; you get it now: the goal is to be uninterrupted and generally unreachable).
Partly it's my intended mode of presence on Twitter: Be myself; don't argue about serious things with strangers; only argue at all if the other person is game, the topic is interesting, and the conversation is pleasant or edifying or fun; always think, "Would my wife or dad or best friend or pastor or dean or the Lord Jesus himself approve of this tweet?" (that does away with a lot of stupidity, meanness, and self-aggrandizement fast). As a rule, I would like for people who "meet" me on Twitter to meet me in person and find the two wholly consonant. Further, I try hard never to "dunk" on anyone. Twitter wants us to be cruel to one another: why give in?
I limit my follows fairly severely: only people I know personally, or read often, or admire, or learn something from, or take joy in following. For as long as I'm on Twitter I would like to keep my follows between 400 and 500 (kept low through annual culling). The moment someone who follows me acts cruelly or becomes a distraction, to myself or others, I immediately mute them (blocks are reserved, for now, for obvious bots). I don't feel compelled to respond to every reply. And I tend to "interface" with Twitter not through THE SCROLL but through about a dozen bookmarked profiles of people, usually writers or fellow academics, who always have interesting things to say or post links worth saving for later. All in all, I try to limit my daily time on Twitter to 10-30 minutes, less on Saturdays and (ordinarily, or aspirationally) zero on Sundays—at least so long as the kids are awake.
So much for my rules. What benefits have resulted from being on Twitter?
First, it appears that I have what can only be called a readership. Even if said readership comprises "only" a few hundred folks (I have just over a thousand followers), that number is greater than zero, which until very recently was the number of my readers not related to me by blood. And until such time (which will be no time) that I have thousands upon tens of thousands of readers—nay, in the millions!—it is rewarding and meaningful to interact with people who take the time to read, support, share, and comment on my work.
(That raises the question: Should the time actually come, and I'm sure that it will, when I am bombarded by trolls and the rank wickedness that erupts from the bowels of Twitter Hell for so many people? I will take one of two courses of action. I will adopt the policy of not reading my replies, as wise Public People do. But if that's not good enough, that will be the day, the very day, that I quit Twitter for good. And perhaps Lawson and Jacobs both arrived at that point long ago, which launched them off the platform. If so, good for them.)
Additionally, I have made contacts with a host of people across the country (and the world) with whom I share some common interest, not least within the theological academy. Some of these have become, or are fast becoming, genuine friendships. And because we theologians find reasons to gather together each year (AAR/SBL, SCE, CSC, etc.), budding online friendships actually generate in-person meetings and hangouts. Real life facilitated by the internet! Who would've thought?
I have also received multiple writing opportunities simply in virtue of being on Twitter. Those opportunities came directly or indirectly from embedding myself, even if (to my mind) invisibly, in networks of writers, editors, publishers, and the like. (I literally signed a book contract last week based on an email from an editor who found me on Twitter based on some writing and tweeting I'd done.) As I've always said, academic epistemology is grounded in gossip, and gossip (of the non-pejorative kind) depends entirely on who you know. The same goes for the world of publishing. And since writers and editors love Twitter—doubtless to their detriment—Twitter's the place to be to "hang around" and "hear" stuff, and eventually be noticed by one or two fine folks, and be welcomed into the conversation. That's happened to me already, in mostly small ways; but they add up.
So that's it, give or take. On a given week, I average 60-90 minutes on Twitter spread across 5-6 days, mostly during lunch or early evening hours, on my laptop, never on my phone, typically checking just a handful of folks' profiles, sending off a tweet or two myself, never battling, never feeding the trolls, saving my time and energy for real life (home, kids, church, friends) and for periods of sustained, undistracted attention at work, whether reading or writing.
Having said that, if I were a betting man, I would hazard a guess that I'll be off Twitter within five years, or that the site will no longer exist in anything like its current form. My time on Twitter is unrepresentative, and probably can't last. But so long as it does, and the benefits remain, I'll "be" there, and I think the reasons I've offered are sufficient to justify the decision.
DIY Christianity
What is the greatest threat to the church in America today? You could list a lot of candidates.
My answer is DIY Christianity.
That's the term I use with my students to communicate the notion—which they readily recognize—of the Christian faith as recreated anew in, by, and for each generation, or even perhaps each local body of believers. This is Christianity without history, without tradition, without authority, without saints or martyrs or anything mediate, that is, anything intervening (thus obtruding, thus obstructing) between the individual and Jesus. DIY Christianity is "founding" a local church the way entrepreneurs found a start-up, with Big Ideas and Enough With The Old and Radical Innovation. (DIY Christianity thinks "innovation," like "curiosity," is a virtue rather than a vice.)
DIY Christianity is a mortal enemy to the faith once for all delivered to the saints and handed on, generation after generation, from the apostles to the present day. In all that I do—writing and teaching, at church or in the classroom—my singular goal is, so far as I am able, to excise this malignant tumor from the hearts and minds of anyone who will listen.
In positive terms, what I want is for American Christians today to learn, or relearn, to be catholic: to belong to the one great tradition, the one apostolic faith, the one universal church. To reimagine faith not as something they create or manufacture or curate or judge for themselves, but that to which they submit, in joy, the way one simply receives an unexpected gift, a beloved friend's return, the birth of a child. The faith as a given, and the real matter before us one of how to live that faith today, in the midst of so many challenges.
For catholic faith to reign, and DIY Christianity to die: that is the task before us, and therefore the prayer on my mind and on my lips, every single day.
My answer is DIY Christianity.
That's the term I use with my students to communicate the notion—which they readily recognize—of the Christian faith as recreated anew in, by, and for each generation, or even perhaps each local body of believers. This is Christianity without history, without tradition, without authority, without saints or martyrs or anything mediate, that is, anything intervening (thus obtruding, thus obstructing) between the individual and Jesus. DIY Christianity is "founding" a local church the way entrepreneurs found a start-up, with Big Ideas and Enough With The Old and Radical Innovation. (DIY Christianity thinks "innovation," like "curiosity," is a virtue rather than a vice.)
DIY Christianity is a mortal enemy to the faith once for all delivered to the saints and handed on, generation after generation, from the apostles to the present day. In all that I do—writing and teaching, at church or in the classroom—my singular goal is, so far as I am able, to excise this malignant tumor from the hearts and minds of anyone who will listen.
In positive terms, what I want is for American Christians today to learn, or relearn, to be catholic: to belong to the one great tradition, the one apostolic faith, the one universal church. To reimagine faith not as something they create or manufacture or curate or judge for themselves, but that to which they submit, in joy, the way one simply receives an unexpected gift, a beloved friend's return, the birth of a child. The faith as a given, and the real matter before us one of how to live that faith today, in the midst of so many challenges.
For catholic faith to reign, and DIY Christianity to die: that is the task before us, and therefore the prayer on my mind and on my lips, every single day.