Perennial epigraph

Plaster this as the epigraph or foreword to every work of theology, every essay, every review, every lecture, every class, every tract, every sermon, every degree in doctrine or ministry or biblical studies. It comes from the opening chapter of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ:

Quid prodest tibi alta de Trinitate disputare, si careas humilitate unde displiceas Trinitati? Vere alta verba non faciunt sanctum et justum, sed virtuosa vita efficit Deo carum. Opto magis sentire compunctionem quam scire definitionem. Si scires totam Bibliam, et omnium philosophorum dicta quid totum prodesset, sine charitate et gratia? Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas præter amare Deum et illi soli fervire. Ista est summa sapientia per contemptum mundi tendere ad regna cælestia.

Twitter and Thomas à Kempis

I’ve been on Twitter for nearly nine years. For the last three of those years I’ve wondered whether I should stay on, and I’ve gone back and forth. I quit for a few months while keeping my account active before returning in the spring of 2020, then took another big break that summer. Since fall 2020 I’ve stayed more or less consistent with a few self-defined rules for my Twitter usage:

1. The app is not on my phone.

2. I don’t scroll.

3. I don’t reply to tweets.

4. I don’t like tweets.

5. I look at half a dozen accounts daily or weekly, using them as RSS feeds.

6. I use my own account exclusively to share news about or links to my work.

This has been a winning formula the last 18 months. The first five are alike easy enough and simple enough to stick to, and following them has meant my Twitter usage has been both minimal and healthy, all things considered.

That said, the intentionally and insistently self-promotional aspect of #6 has begun to wear on me. On one hand, my Twitter profile has unquestionably been a boon to my writing career and whatever small profile I have among a few like-hearted readers. I’ve met genuine friends on there, and folks have bought my books after finding me on Twitter. On the other hand, can relentless flashing neon lights, operated by me, endlessly reiterating just how great I and my work are … can that possibly be good for the soul?

This morning I was reading Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Here is the second chapter of the opening book, reproduced in its entirety:

Every man naturally desires knowledge; but what good is knowledge without fear of God? Indeed a humble rustic who serves God is better than a proud intellectual who neglects his soul to study the course of the stars. He who knows himself well becomes mean in his own eyes and is not happy when praised by men.

If I knew all things in the world and had not charity, what would it profit me before God Who will judge me by my deeds?

Shun too great a desire for knowledge, for in it there is much fretting and delusion. Intellectuals like to appear learned and to be called wise. Yet there are many things the knowledge of which does little or no good to the soul, and he who concerns himself about other things than those which lead to salvation is very unwise.

Many words do not satisfy the soul; but a good life eases the mind and a clean conscience inspires great trust in God.

The more you know and the better you understand, the more severely will you be judged, unless your life is also the more holy. Do not be proud, therefore, because of your learning or skill. Rather, fear because of the talent given you. If you think you know many things and understand them well enough, realize at the same time that there is much you do not know. Hence, do not affect wisdom, but admit your ignorance. Why prefer yourself to anyone else when many are more learned, more cultured than you?

If you wish to learn and appreciate something worthwhile, then love to be unknown and considered as nothing. Truly to know and despise self is the best and most perfect counsel. To think of oneself as nothing, and always to think well and highly of others is the best and most perfect wisdom. Wherefore, if you see another sin openly or commit a serious crime, do not consider yourself better, for you do not know how long you can remain in good estate. All men are frail, but you must admit that none is more frail than yourself.

These words nailed me to the wall. Or rather, if I may be permitted the severity of the expression, to the cross. Can any serious Christian read this passage and approve of spending even ten seconds of a day cultivating and curating a Twitter profile dedicated to nothing whatsoever except self-promotion? St. James advises that not many of us become teachers, “for you know that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness” (3:1). What of those of us who proclaim our surpassing wisdom, our eloquent wit, our impressive pedigree, our latest important publication to the world? In an infinite scroll of self-regard and pride?

I’ve never used one of the penitential seasons to fast from Twitter, but I may do so this Lent. I may begin sooner than Ash Wednesday. My inner PR rep tempts me against this, urging me to consider that I have a book to sell this April, a profile to maintain, readers to woo and buyers to court. What self-indulgent nonsense. God help me if my insecurities and anxieties keep me on a website I know in my heart is wicked, on whose platform I continuously proclaim without shame my pride and self-importance to the world in a doom loop of frustrated desire, hoping beyond hope “to appear learned and to be called wise.”

As Thomas says just one chapter earlier, the whole aim of Christian faith is to study the life of Christ and thence to pattern one’s own life on his. What better time to get started than now? “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor 6:2); “you know what hour it is, how it is full time now for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed; the night is far gone, the day is at hand. Let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Rom 13:11-14).

With St. Paul and with St. Augustine, we all say: Amen.

New essay published in The Christian Century

An essay of mine is the cover story in the newest issue of The Christian Century; it’s titled “Jewish Jesus, Black Christ.” I first wrote it in late August 2020, about 18 months ago, and it’s finally here, in the world. Thanks to the editors at CC for their comments and for accepting it. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Outside the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, along lengthy walls that enclose the church’s courtyard, there is a series of portraits of the Madonna and Child. Each portrait is labeled with the nation whose culture and artistic traditions it represents. Ethiopia, Singapore, Thailand, France: each contribution is not only designated by its origin but marked as such by its features. Many are unmistakable; one knows where they come from at a glance. Some combination of aesthetic style, garb, skin tone, and ethnic and cultural features define the newborn Jesus and his mother as members of a particular people. They belong among them, and in so belonging the Christ Child claims that people as his own. By an unfathomable mystery, he is incarnate as one of them.

Inside the basilica, pilgrims descend to the cave where it is said that the angel Gabriel announced to Mary what was to come. On the altar in the cave is inscribed an amended version of John 1:14: verbum caro hic factum est—the Word became flesh here. The eternal God assumed humanity in the womb of a virgin at a place one can visit, at a date one can locate on a calendar. To the question, “When and where did it happen?” the church has a ready answer.

If that is so, why then a gallery of portraits of what we know Jesus and his mother did not look like? Representing times and places to which Jesus did not come some two millennia ago?

The essay then turns to violence against African-Americans, iconography depicting victims in christological terms, the history of racism in America, and the work of James Cone. Click here for the whole piece.

Perennial Lewis

As I’ve written about previously, I’ve spent the last 10-12 months rereading the major works of C. S. Lewis by listening to them on audio. That has meant nearly 20 books, split evenly between fiction and nonfiction. I’m on my last one now (I finished my romp through Chesterton earlier this month), which means 2022 will be wide open for my post-podcast listening habits.

In any case, a few final reflections on Lewis. In particular, on Lewis the apologist and why (a) there has not been a genuine successor to his genius or his stature and (b) why he remains so popular as we approach the 60th anniversary of his death.

1. The first answer is simple: they don’t make ’em like they used to. Lewis describes himself as a converted pagan among apostate puritans, and that’s the right way to read him. Even if he weren’t a first-rate stylist and multifaceted writer (novels, children’s stories, science fiction, literary criticism, poetry, memoir, philosophy, ethics, apologetics), his sheer learning sets him apart. Nor did he gain that learning as part of a strategy for something called “outreach” or intellectual evangelism. He came to the faith ready-made, the product of an extraordinary mind molded by an extraordinary education. I wonder sometimes whether there’s even one Anglophone Christian scholar today under 45 years old who does not spend his or her time regularly on the internet, social media, and/or streaming television. The sheer time given to such trifles (I’m looking at myself here) means ipso facto that one could not hope to reach one-tenth of Lewis’s erudition.

2. The next answer is obvious: the disciples of Lewis are not like Lewis, nor do they aspire to be. They do not come from where he came from; they do not share his education; their overlap with his literary and intellectual affections is minimal. Lewis came to Christ by way of myth and romance, epic poetry and the drama of pagan pleasures. These are foreign to Lewis’s foremost admirers, above all American evangelicals. This is a man who was (until the end) a bachelor who loved rich beer, good tobacco, other men, and talk of dragons. Preferably with a shared knowledge of half a dozen languages, ancient and modern. Whereas those who love Lewis most love him for his side hobby (which, granted, we may assume was his calling from God): putting the complexities of the faith into plain language for common people, against powerful cultural trends. None of them, in other words, is going to have a chance of becoming him.

3. But that’s a negative way of putting the matter. So let me say this. Going back over books I first read twenty years ago, now on the far side of a more or less continuous theological education in college and graduate school, I see now more clearly than ever Lewis’s brilliance. He really was a one of one. As I listen to his most popular—by which I mean not his most successful or beloved but his most vulgar or common—speeches and writings, I am consistently struck by how little has changed (at least, between postwar England and contemporary America), but more so by how excellent his answers are to the questions of the time. By and large they need not, because they cannot, be improved upon. There is no Lewis 2.0 because eight times out of ten, if an honest skeptic asks you a question, you should just point him to the essay or book that Lewis already wrote. If it ain’t broke, etc.

4. There are subjects that Lewis did not address or articulate as well as he did others; these remain for others to elaborate or expand upon. He is not, it seems to me, especially trustworthy on politics. His ecclesiology is thin. Though he can be quite good on sex and gender, at other times he is bad, and occasionally he is plain weird. In his time he was on the threshold—knowingly—of a truly post-Christian society. It was already present in the people, but the trappings remained in law, education, and culture. No longer. What does it mean to take up the baton from him? That is, to evangelize a re-paganized West at once post-Christian and anti-Christian yet also somehow formally and thus morally and spiritually Christian (without knowing or acknowledging it)?

That, so far as I can tell, is the question to ask. Not least because it’s the question he’d be asking. I don’t have hope that there will be another like him anytime soon. But God has done stranger things. At any rate, we can give God thanks for doing the altogether strange thing of converting Lewis to Christ. Lord knows Lewis is on the short list of reasons why I am a believer. How many others can say the same?

Evangelical addenda

As soon as I hit “Publish” on the last post, I felt some unease about how it might come across. I re-read it, and let me offer a few further comments, especially before I go read what anybody else makes of it.

1. My remarks there are meant primarily in a descriptive register. I’m trying to get at a dynamic I feel like I constantly observe, whether in person, in conversation, or in written form.

2. In that sense my post is one more mini-entry in a sort of sociology of American evangelicalism. What is going on with this community? is the founding question. Given that I live in Evangelical Land, I have a few thoughts.

3. I’m continually thinking about this question, since my students are mostly evangelicals, and I want to teach them well. Evangelicalism also (obviously) interacts with our politics and culture in significant ways. I’m thinking of this recent essay, as well as this one from a few years back; the latter essay I take to be one of the best and most succinct analyses of evangelicalism in the past few decades.

4. I imagine my rhetoric sounds more critical in tone than I meant it to be. I’m all aboard for educating anyone, not to mention evangelicals, in the faith and doctrines and ethics of historic Christianity. What I was wanting to recommend, though, is twofold. On the one hand, an awareness, on the part of those who belong or half-belong or once belonged to evangelicalism, that letting go of the evangelical hermeneutic just is to let go of a crucial, perhaps a fundamental, piece of what it means to live and move and have one’s being as an evangelical Christian. If that hermeneutic is a sine qua non of evangelical being, then it is worth admitting and accepting that the loss of one is the loss of the other.

5. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean a chasm separates former from current evangelicals. It doesn’t mean conversation is impossible. What it means it that, even more than awareness, what is required is explicit acknowledgement that one’s aims in teaching, writing, and argument are ordered to, or dependent upon, the student, reader, or listener rejecting the evangelical hermeneutic. It entails as well that one’s arguments that do not operate in accordance with that hermeneutic will just to that extent fail, falling on dear ears, at least for dyed-in-the-wool evangelicals; and thus that if one’s arguments are to succeed, even with the goal of persuading one’s audience to reject said hermeneutic, they must operate on its terms.

6. I am not myself an evangelical, though once or twice I’ve been mistaken for one. But because my own ecclesial tradition is currently in process of being absorbed by evangelicalism; because most of my students and neighbors are evangelicals of one sort or another; because I’ve gotten to know some thoughtful evangelicals over the years; because my research focuses on the doctrine and interpretation of Scripture (a hobbyhorse of evangelical scholarship); and because evangelicalism is such a potent force in American culture and politics, I find myself reflecting, even perseverating, on evangelicalism just about every day. Hence these observations.

7. Evangelicalism is undergoing what appears to me an epochal fracturing in our time, before our very eyes. One sees it everywhere. I see it especially in the relationship between church leaders (pastors, professors, writers) and church members, i.e., the rank and file. That relationship is frayed and fraying. It is often a function of class and/or education. Running parallel with those divisions is theology. Over and over I see the theology and ethics of leaders and of members drifting apart. Neither reflects or represents the other. In effect you have two different churches within a single church: the faith and morals of leadership versus the faith and morals of the pews. That is a real problem. In the case of the original post, I was trying to put my finger on the, or at least one, source of that divide. The presence or absence of the evangelical hermeneutic in leadership/membership is one such source, or so it seems to me.* My goal was to draw attention to that. If I didn’t, allow this post to rectify that error.

*A related but distinct problem that I see is not that either party rejects the evangelical hermeneutic, but that each holds to it on paper but in fact adverts to some other hermeneutic (typically, though not always, experiential, political, or cultural in nature) as determinative of theological judgments. If the second essay I linked to above is right, this dynamic follows the trajectory of Protestant liberalism overtaking, eventually, all churches and Christian institutions, however traditional or evangelical they may have begun as or may continue to claim to be. That phenomenon is worth reflecting on further in greater detail some other time.

The problem with evangelicalism

There’s not only one, granted. But this isn’t one of those posts. It’s not a beat-up-on-the-evangelicals manifesto in nine parts. It’s not about evangelicals and politics, or about that popular Christianity Today podcast, or about which marks truly define an evangelical, and whether they ought to be doctrinal or sociological or other.

This is a minor little comment about theology and hermeneutics. Here it is.

Evangelicalism isn’t merely a style (a way of being Christian) or a worldview (a set of beliefs). It’s a hermeneutic. It’s a path from here to there, a map for movement, a manual for drawing conclusions and making judgments about what Christian faith is, what Christian behavior entails, and how to inhabit the world. That manual occasionally takes written form but it usually operates in unwritten circulation, imbibed like mother’s milk from (successful) catechesis in active involvement in evangelical churches.

The substance of that manual may be summarized in a slogan: nuda scriptura. That is:

1. the Bible alone is for Christians the one encompassing and all-purpose practical guide to faith, ethics, politics, and culture;

2. the individual Christian is equipped and encouraged (perhaps required) to use the Bible in order to discover its normative teaching and guidance for him or herself regarding matters of doctrine and morals;

3. in principle no one and nothing—no person (a fellow Christian) or office (a pastor) or institution (a church) or text (past tradition)—is either better equipped or more authoritative with respect to reading the Bible for its normative teaching on doctrine and morals than the living baptized individual adult believer;

4. whatever the Bible does not speak about in clear, direct, and explicit terms is for Christians adiaphora.

Let me remind you again that few evangelical scholars would endorse this hermeneutic as a positive proposal. But it is unquestionably the default setting for numberless evangelical believers, churches, and institutions. And the main point I want to make here is that that is a feature, not a bug. Moreover—and this is the kicker—to cease to believe in and act according to this hermeneutic is in a real sense to cease being evangelical, at least as that term is embodied and enacted in concrete communities and the society at large.

This is why, for example, so many evangelicals who ostensibly remain evangelicals while earning graduate degrees and teaching in institutions of higher education no longer attend the kinds of churches in which they were raised but worship instead in Anglican or similarly liturgical traditions. Their on-the-page beliefs (inerrancy, sola scriptura, virginal conception, bodily resurrection, traditional marriage) remain the same, but the outward devotional and liturgical expression of those beliefs is different, indeed necessarily different, rooted as those external practices are in a crucial hermeneutical transformation.

So far I’m merely offering a description. This isn’t a critique. The title of this post, however, refers to a “problem.” Here’s the problem as I see it.

There are people who were raised evangelical and still claim, or at least do not repudiate, the title. But such people have migrated away from the evangelical hermeneutic in their studies, their experiences, their teaching and writing, and/or their ecclesial home. Nevertheless they still aim to speak to and for, if not on behalf of, evangelicals. They seek to persuade evangelicals to believe this or that, or reject this or that. Having unlearned or let go of the evangelical hermeneutic, though, they no longer speak from and to that hermeneutic; they don’t argue according to its premises; they write by different premises, rooted in a different hermeneutic.

Always—and I do mean always—the result is a failure to communicate (not to mention to persuade). The message is lost in translation. The speaker and listener, the author and reader, simply talk past each other. For they are not speaking the same language. They no longer share enough in common for their disagreements to be intelligible. Instead, their disagreements are an inevitable function of differing first principles, in this case, opposed hermeneutics of Christian faith and theology with respect to Holy Scripture.

Yet rather than this situation being seen as both obvious and unavoidable, the tenor of the constant miscommunication is, on both sides, rancor, distrust, and endless anathemas. I’m not so much concerned right now with the folks on the receiving end, those who still hold to the evangelical hermeneutic. I’m concerned with those who’ve lost or rejected that hermeneutic but who continue to speak to those who hold it.

It should be neither surprising nor frustrating if, should I say, “We as Christians ought to believe X doctrine because Y saint or Z tradition teaches it,” the response from a true-blue evangelical is, “Why should I care what Y or Z say? I don’t see X taught clearly, directly, and explicitly in the Bible.” For you are not seeking to persuade on the terms held by your listener or reader. The latter senses intuitively that what you are really asking him or her is to stop being the sort of evangelical they are, i.e., you are asking them to give up the evangelical hermeneutic. That may be a worthy endeavor—almost everything I’ve written as a scholar is in service to that endeavor—but that is a different task than making an argument by and for and among a certain community, on the terms set and shared by that community, that presupposes that those very terms, which in turn define that community, are wrong on principle. It’s a bait and switch, intended or not.

Furthermore, it’s important to see that you can’t have your cake (evangelical hermeneutic) and eat it too (sacred tradition). There are plenty of traditional doctrines that are plausibly compatible with the evangelical hermeneutic; there are fewer of them that follow, logically and necessarily, therefrom. Take divine simplicity, or the eternal generation of the Son, or the perpetual virginity of Mary, or even the creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople. None of these is incompatible with the plain teaching of Scripture. Can each and every one, in each and all of its details, be generated (1) directly from scriptural exegesis (2) to the exclusion of all other interpretive options (3) in accordance with the evangelical hermeneutic? I’m not so sure.

Which is why evangelicalism is such a rambunctious, fractious collective. It’s built for incessant, indefinite dissent. Someone or someones will always raise an objection, and precisely in accordance with the rules for assent and consent stipulated by the evangelical hermeneutic.

Biblicism is a woolly, ungovernable thing. It has a life of its own, because (among other reasons) it empowers individuals to interpret the text for themselves, with unpredictable results undecided in advance of reading, discussion, and debate.

In my view, for those who would remain in the evangelical family, you have to choose. You can be a biblicist, and stay; or you can stop being a biblicist, and leave. The sharpness of that choice need not be a matter of literal church membership. But theologically speaking, in terms of ideas and writing and how we make arguments and to whom and according to what premises, it seems to me that the choice is indeed just that sharp. It’s one or the other. There is no third way.

The endorsements are in for The Church’s Book!

My second book, The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context, will be published on April 26. That’s just three months away—fourteen weeks from Tuesday, if anyone’s counting. And if you are, pre-order it today! From Eerdmans, from Amazon, from Bookshop … wherever you prefer.

I first pitched the idea for this book to my doctoral advisor ten years ago this month. I finished the eventual dissertation in 2017, five years ago. And after what feels like ten thousand paper-cut edits—not to mention garden shears–sized snips in between machete-hacking cuts—the book is ready to be released into the world. Going into the Christmas break, the revisions were approved; the manuscript was typeset; the indexes were complete. Since then I’ve been waiting for the last piece of the puzzle, namely the endorsements. And they came in this week!

Without further ado, then, here are the blurbs. If you, like me, swoon in disbelief, know that you are not alone.

*

“How we understand the church determines how we understand Scripture. Brad East grounds this basic claim in a detailed examination of three key heirs of Barthian theology—Robert Jenson, John Webster, and John Howard Yoder. The corresponding threefold typology that results —church as deputy (catholic), church as beneficiary (reformed), and church as vanguard (believers’ church)—offers much more than a description of the ecclesial divides that undergird different views of Scripture. East also presents a sustained and well-argued defense of the catholic position: church precedes canon. At the same time, East’s respectful treatment of each of his theological discussion partners gives the reader a wealth of insight into the various positions. Future discussions about church and canon will turn to The Church’s Book for years to come.”
— Hans Boersma, Nashotah House Theological Seminary

“Theologically informed, church-oriented ways of reading Scripture are given wonderfully sustained attention in Brad East’s new book. Focusing on Karl Barth and subsequent theologians influenced by him, East uncovers how differences in the theology of Scripture reflect differences in the understanding of church. Ecclesiology, East shows, has a major unacknowledged influence on remaining controversies among theologians interested in revitalizing theological approaches to Scripture. With this analysis in hand, East pushes the conversation forward, beyond current impasses and in directions that remedy deficiencies in the work of each of the theologians he discusses.”
— Kathryn Tanner, Yale Divinity School

“In this clear and lively volume, Brad East provides acute close readings of three theologians—John Webster, Robert W. Jenson, and John Howard Yoder—who have all tied biblical interpretation to a doctrine of the church. Building on their work, he proposes his own take on how the church constitutes the social location of biblical interpretation. In both his analytical work and his constructive case, East makes a major contribution to theological reading of Scripture.”
— Darren Sarisky, Australian Catholic University

“If previous generations of students and practitioners of a Protestant Christian doctrine of Holy Scripture looked to books by David Kelsey, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Kevin Vanhoozer as touchstones, future ones will look back on this book by Brad East as another. But there is no ecclesially partisan polemic here. This book displays an ecumenical vision of Scripture—one acutely incisive in its criticism, minutely attentive in its exposition, and truly catholic and visionary in its constructive proposals. It has the potential to advance theological discussion among dogmaticians, historians of dogma, and guild biblical exegetes alike. It is a deeply insightful treatment of its theme that will shape scholarly—and, more insistently and inspiringly, ecclesial—discussion for many years to come.”
— Wesley Hill, Western Theological Seminary

“In the past I’ve argued that determining the right relationship between God, Scripture, and hermeneutics comprises the right preliminary question for systematic theology: its ‘first theology.’ Brad East’s The Church’s Book has convinced me that ecclesiology too belongs in first theology. In weaving his cord of three strands (insights gleaned from a probing analysis of John Webster, Robert Jenson, and John Howard Yoder), East offers not a way out but a nevertheless welcome clarification of where the conflict of biblical interpretations really lies: divergent understandings of the church. This is an important interruption of and contribution to a longstanding conversation about theological prolegomena.”
— Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

“For some theologians, it is Scripture that must guide any theological description of the church. For others, the church’s doctrines are normative for interpreting Scripture. Consequently, theologians have long tended to talk past one another. With unusual brilliance, clarity, and depth, Brad East has resolved this aporia by arguing that the locus of authority lay originally within the people of God, and thus prior to the development of both doctrine and Scripture. And so it is we, the people of God, who are prior, and who undergird both, and thereby offer the possibility of rapprochement on that basis. East’s proposal is convincing, fresh, and original: a genuinely new treatment that clarifies the real issues and may well prepare for more substantive ecumenical progress, as well as more substantive theologies. This is a necessary book—vital reading for any theologian.”
— Nicholas M. Healy, St. John’s University

“All of the discussions in this book display East’s analytical rigor and theological sophistication. As one of the subjects under discussion in this book, I will speak for all of us and say that there are many times East is able to do more for and with our work than we did ourselves. . . . I look forward to seeing how future theological interpreters take these advances and work with them to push theological interpretation in new and promising directions.”
— Stephen E. Fowl, from the foreword

New essay published in Comment

I’m in Comment today with an essay on gratitude to God. It’s called “Grace Upon Grace,” and here’s how it starts:

Gratitude to God is at the heart of Christian faith and theology. One comes to see the specific character of Christian gratitude—or rather, of Christian talk about gratitude—through an examination of the role it plays within, and the shape it receives from, the doctrine of God. For the doctrine of God is not only of God but extends to all things in relation to God. What it means to speak of God truthfully thus bears directly on our understanding of creation, redemption, humanity, virtue, and the church. Gratitude becomes a sort of red thread common to these topics, descending from the heights into the nooks and crannies of our daily lives.

The essay traces the role of thanksgiving through the whole dogmatic corpus, displaying its internal grammar and its intrinsic connection to Christ. Read on for the whole thing.

Masterly Spielberg

I’ve written before of my love for Steven Spielberg (whose critical fortunes, having waxed and waned over the decades, seem to have settled into a sort of consensus: whatever your personal feelings for this or that movie of his from the past 10-15 years, it’s undeniable that the man knows where to put the camera), and Tim Markatos, whose writing on film you should read and whose newsletter you should subscribe to, captures perfectly what makes Spielberg so great in his explanation for placing West Side Story at #5 on his list of the best 25 films of 2021:

This movie is so well blocked that it simply embarrasses nearly every other movie released this year (including some of the highbrow fare on this very list). Mise en scène alone doesn’t make a movie (“But what if it does?” whispers the little devil-horned Janusz Kamiński that suddenly appeared on my shoulder), but it matters more for a musical. The Spielberg–Kushner rendition of West Side Story lets the Robert Wise version alone and leans harder into political awareness (a key distinction, I would say, from political correctness) not merely by writing it into the script but also by building it into every material aspect of the production. Sometimes it gets a bit hokey, Ansel Elgort brings all his personal baggage to the screen in a way that will either alienate you or not, but none of that matters because I will watch “America” approximately 300 times once it’s inevitably uploaded to YouTube and be floored by Spielberg’s total mastery of this medium every single time.

I will, too. “Total mastery” is right. In those areas of which he is master, the man is without peer.

2021 recap: the blog

This was a banner year for the blog, for the simple reason that after 15 years of blogging I finally own my own turf. I’d been blogging on Google’s Blogger/Blogspot since spring 2006, but in June of 2021 my personal website (this very one) went live, and I moved over four years’ worth of posts from Resident Theologian (itself a successor to Resident Theology, my blog of nine years that I maintained during Master’s and doctoral work). That transition is marked by the distribution of posts: I wrote only 14 before June 12, and from then through year’s end I wrote 82, for a total of 96. That’s the most I’ve blogged since 2011, when I had 100 posts. That’s a lot of writing “on the side.” If I were to keep up the pace from the second half of the year, it would amount to a new post every two and a half days. And while I’ve partly stayed on mission—i.e., “mezzo blogging”—I’ve also written some rather huge posts.

Oh well. I’ve had a lot to say.

Given all that writing, I’d like to take a page from my friend and colleague Richard Beck’s long-running blog and do a rundown of the best, or at least my favorite, posts from the year, especially those you might have missed.

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10. On miscellaneous matters: aliens and Christian faith; Zuckerberg and the meta mafia; Enneagram anthropology; dreams and prayers; the secular spirit of Roger Scruton; biographies of theologians; Jordan Peterson, humor, and despair; the theology of C. S. Lewis; and a bit of nitpicking with Freddie deBoer’s anthropology.

9. On popular culture: Bezos Ad Astra; interpreting The Last Jedi; and, God help me, an MCU viewing order.

8. On art more generally: the catholicity of art; whether artists must be our friends; the fiction of P. D. James; and the heavenly vision of Piranesi.

7. On biblical scholarship: keeping up with the latest scholarship and writing in the subjunctive mood.

6. On the Bible and theology: a test for your doctrine of Scripture; anthropomorphism and analogy; heresy and orthodoxy; for angels; against theological fads.

5. On the state of the church in America: in tatters; slowly dying; and locally defectible.

4. On the (dis)contentment of affluent twentysomethings today who nevertheless need Jesus—and who feel the Ache for him, whether they know it or not.

3. On teaching the faith: (re)construction and deconstruction.

2. On life in the university: diverse academic vocations; emotional support in academia; authority in the classroom; and teaching a 4/4: office hours, tradeoffs, publishing, and freedom.

1. On podcasts: namely, why you should quit them.

2021 recap: reading

Ten years ago I cracked 150 books in a year; ever since, it’s been around 100 annually, give or take a few in either direction. Heading into 2021 I wanted to up that number—which felt just stuck—as much as I could. I met my minimum goal (I’m currently sitting at 120), along with some of my strategic goals, but I’m hoping to crawl back to 150 in 2022. Some of the successful strategies this past year that I hope to continue:

• Adding audiobooks to my regimen.

• Cutting out podcasts altogether.

• Reading less online.

• Reducing TV viewing.

• Keeping up an ongoing mix of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and academic works.

I didn’t crack the audiobook nut until March, nor did I drop podcasts until the fall (when a tsunami of work and illness and family commitments overtook my extra time), plus I was working on finalizing the proofs for not one but two books from May to November. Looking ahead to 2022, at the level of mere numbers, if I were to average 11 books per month during the two academic semesters and 16 books per month during the four summer months, that would come to 152. It’s doable, y’all! I’m going to make it happen. One year from today my reading recap for 2022 will be nothing but a Tim Duncan fist pump GIF.

And now, some of my favorites from the year, with scattered commentary.

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Rereads

5. George Orwell, Animal Farm

4. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

3. C. S. Lewis’s nonfiction. Some comments here.

2. G. K. Chesterton’s nonfiction. Some quotes and remarks here.

1. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia. I read all seven once as an 18- or 19-year old. The re-read (via Audible) was glorious. My favorite used to be Dawn Treader, and I had low memories of Caspian and Horse, few memories of Last Battle, and no memories of Silver Chair. Now my definitive ranking: 1. Silver Chair 2. Last Battle 3. Dawn Treader 4. Magician’s Nephew 5. LWW 6. Horse & His Boy 7. Prince Caspian. In truth none of them are bad, and Horse would be higher if its weird and indefensible religious, racial, and cultural stereotypes weren’t so interwoven in the story. As for Lion, if it weren’t the first or so foundational or so iconic, I’d rank it last. I used to think Caspian was the one bad egg, but now I think it’s no longer bad, just the seventh best. But it’s Puddleglum and Underland for the win.

Poetry

5. W. H. Auden, Early Poems

4. John Updike, Endpoint and Other Poems

3. Molly McCully Brown, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded

2. Franz Wright, selected volumes. Every year I re-read Wright’s best collections (Beforelife, Martha’s Vineyard, God’s Silence, Wheeling Motel), and every year he remains my favorite.

1. R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems. This year, though, I re-read Thomas’s best volumes (running from Laboratories of the Spirit up to Mass for Hard Times) for the first time in a decade, and he overawed me once again. The master.

Graphic novels

3. Gene Luen Yang, Boxers & Saints. Recommended. Go in not knowing anything, and read both back to back.

2. Art Spiegelman, Maus. A classic for a reason.

1. Craig Thompson, Blankets. This one walloped me.

Fiction

8. Patrick Hoffman, Every Man a Menace. Taut, brutal, surprising, and to the point. In other words, the best sort of crime fiction.

7. P. D. James, Death of an Expert Witness. You know I had to include the Queen.

6. Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

5. G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Orwell and Huxley are the standard scribblers of the dystopian future; what if Chesterton (Notting Hill) and Lewis (That Hideous Strength) were added to that duo? At least one result: the realization that wit and style, not to mention religious vision, don’t have to be excised from the genre.

4. Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon

3. Charles Portis, True Grit. As promised, this one’s perfect.

2. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace

1. Susanna Clarke, Piranesi. Charming and enrapturing from the first sentence to the last. I wrote about it here.

Nonfiction (popular)

11. James Clear, Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results & Cal Newport, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

10. Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth

9. Jesse Singal, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills. I wrote about it here.

8. Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

7. Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

6. Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. If you love style guides, as I do, this one might move to the top of your list, as it did mine.

5. Abigail Tucker, Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct & Ross Douthat, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. These belong together, both because their authors are married and because they tell parallel stories: about science, about knowledge, about family, about marriage and parenthood and children and illness. I wrote about Douthat here and included a nugget from Tucker here.

4. Andrew Sullivan, Out on a Limb: Selected Writing 1989–2021. A whirlwind tour of one of the most socially and politically influential public intellectuals and writers of my lifetime. A sort of chronological testament to that influence; you see the nation changing as time goes by in these essays.

3. Dwight Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain

2. E. H. Gombrich, A Little History of the World. Delightful. I wrote about it here.

1. Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays. A book that could change your life. As I read it in early 2021, I wondered why Kingsnorth wasn’t a Christian, or at least why he didn’t take serious Christian thinking and writing as a worthy interlocutor. Then he converted.

Nonfiction (scholarly)

5. Audrey Watters, Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning. Watters is the very best; my review of her book is forthcoming in Comment.

4. Jason Blakely, We Built Reality: How Social Sciences Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power. My review here.

3. Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left; Culture Counts; How to Be a Conservative. This year I read some of Scruton’s classics. I wrote about how they struck me as surprisingly but essentially secular here.

2. Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right. Required reading for the present moment. Get on it.

1. Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction. I’d never read a full-bore history of the Civil War. My mistake. This is the one. Magnificent.

Christian (popular)

5. Richard Beck, Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age

4. Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light: Praying with Icons of Christ

3. Peter Leithart, Baptism: A Guide to Life from Death

2b. Eve Tushnet, Tenderness: A Gay Christian’s Guide to Unlearning Rejection and Experiencing God’s Extravagant Love. I can’t count how many times this book brought me to tears. Why? Because Tushnet has the preternatural ability to force her readers to come to terms with just how much Jesus loves them. She is a treasure.

2a. Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep. Christianity Today was right to crown it the book of the year. My review here.

1. Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection. First published in the late 1960s, a book that cannot be categorized by genre or style, a true N of 1. Buy it, read it, love it.

Theology (on the recent side)

5. Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini: Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation

4. Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Revelation

3. Timothy P. Jackson, Mordecai Did Not Bow Down: Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Christian Supersessionism. My review here.

2. Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., Blood Theology: Seeing Red in Body- and God-Talk. My review here.

1. Paul Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar & Regret: A Theology. Now that Jenson has passed, there is no living theologian I take greater pleasure in reading or learning from—or being provoked by—than Griffiths. He never fails to make you think, or to re-think what you thought you thought before.

Theology (less recent)

5. François Mauriac, What I Believe

4. Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom

3. Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture. All Christian undergraduates should read this book, certainly those who already know they are interested in the life of the mind.

2. Oliver O’Donovan, Begotten or Made? I sometimes wish this little book had a different title, because it obscures both its subject matter and its relevance. Tolle lege.

1. Michael Ramsey, The Resurrection of Christ: An Essay in Biblical Theology. A model of succinct, stylish, substantive, scripturally normed, academically informed, and theologically rich writing. I want every book I write to be patterned on this minor classic.

2021 recap: writing

This past year was a big one for me, writing-wise. I published my first book, wrote about a dozen essays, curated a book forum in an academic journal, and got published for the first time in three of my favorite magazines. Here’s a quick rundown.

(Though first, here is a journal article that became available right as the clock turned from 2020 to 2021 a year ago—it’s an exploration of criteria for judging the success or failure of theological interpretation of Scripture—and a book review of Steven Duby’s volume on metaphysics, Scripture, and the doctrine of God’s life in se; the review was published in 2020 but I didn’t realize was in print until just a few months ago.)

*

The Doctrine of Scripture. The book! My first. Its topic is its title: it is about what it says it is. I’m very proud of this book. I hope you’ll give it a chance. Here’s more information about it. Click on the link to buy it on Amazon; click here to buy it from the publisher (use EASTBK2 for a discount); click here to get it from Bookshop. If you’ve got some Christmas cash on hand, I’ve a notion how you could spend it!

Theology in the Dark. This was my introduction to a forum I edited in an issue of Political Theology in response to Karen Kilby’s new volume of essays on the Trinity, evil, and suffering. The six contributors were Sarah Coakley, Andrew Prevot, Katherine Sonderegger, Kathryn Tanner, Miroslav Volf, and Rowan Williams. (I know.) You should go read all six of their essays, as well as Kilby’s reply, right this instant.

The Circumcision of Abraham’s God. A New Year’s Day reflection in First Things on the happy convergence of a number of distinct feasts on different liturgical calendars, centered on Mary, Jesus, and his circumcision.

To See God in the Darkness. A review essay in Mere Orthodoxy of Tish Harrison Warren’s outstanding book Prayer in the Night; the through-line of the piece is the long Lent of Covidtide.

Covidtide Triduum. A sort of sequel, and another liturgical reflection for First Things, this time for Holy Week.

When Losing Is Likely. My first essay for The Point: a lengthy response to the socialist critic George Scialabba on the politics of Wendell Berry (and why Scialabba should be friendlier to Berry’s subtle understanding of the personal and the political in their connection to mass policy consequences).

Market Apocalypse. A review essay in Mere Orthodoxy of Rodney Clapp’s book Naming Neoliberalism. I was impressed and chastened by the work, but also frustrated by the overall approach.

Statistics as Storytelling. A review essay in The New Atlantis (my first for them) of Jason Blakely’s We Built Reality. The critique of scientism on display here leads nicely to the next entry…

Dragons in the Deep Places. A review essay in Mere Orthodoxy of Ross Douthat’s The Deep Places, his memoir of chronic Lyme disease. As it happens, Douthat’s wife Abigail Tucker’s book Mom Genes gets a shout-out at the end of the next entry…

Power in the Blood. A review in The Hedgehog Review (my third first of the year) of Eugene F. Rogers Jr.’s Blood Theology. What a weird and wonderful read, even if the politics of the book turn out to be needlessly predictable in an otherwise surprising work.

Still Supersessionist? A long review for Commonweal of Timothy Jackson’s Mordecai Would Not Bow Down. A major contribution whose shortcomings concern not its treatment of Jews or Judaism but Christ and Christianity.

“The latest scholarship”

One often hears folks in biblical studies refer to “the latest scholarship” on such-and-such topic. Or they will refer to author X or book Y being “out of date.” Or when writing a scholar will refer to “the latest studies” or “the most recent research.”

I’ve poked fun at this tendency before. A few years back I penned “An honest preface to contemporary academic interpretation of the New Testament”:

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

I am.

That is the spirit of historical-critical hubris in a nutshell. Less sarcastically, I’ve reflected on what I call “subjunctive scholarship,” or biblical scholarship in the subjunctive mode (or mood, if we want to be strict about it). Here’s the object of critique:

If you read enough biblical scholarship, you come to realize that one of the guild’s endemic features—for at least a century, probably two—is an overweening confidence in its claims. Such claims usually partake of a rhetoric of calm certainty; all too often what are contestable judgments based on slim evidence are instead asserted as facts, or at least as bearing a supreme likelihood of being true. These judgments in turn become the basis for still further judgments, or proposals, that are themselves even flimsier in terms of probability or breadth of justifying reasons. So far as I can tell, this style of scholarship is of a piece with the broader approach not only of history but also the social sciences.

I offer a couple counter-proposals for how to frame a work of historical biblical scholarship:

(1) In what follows I will write as if it were the case that X, though I am by no means certain or even confident that this hypothesis is true…

(2) In this essay/book I will follow lines of speculative reflection regarding a set of issues about which we lack anything close to sufficient evidence to support confident claims; accordingly, my ideas and proposals will follow a certain pattern: “If it is the case that X, then Y might reasonably follow,” allowing that I can make no dispositive arguments in favor of X, and that any number of alternatives to X are plausible; for that reason I will also trace some of those plausible alternatives and see what they might lead.”

Such argumentative frameworks are, granted, not exactly sizzling compared to the sort of rhetoric that attends much “cutting edge” scholarship. But the gains are worth it, gains in both epistemic humility and intellectual curiosity. Also in the honest pursuit of truth, given how little we do or can or will ever know about, in this case, the texts and wider contexts of culture and politics, persons and happenings in the first century.

Here’s one other observation I make in that post:

[To write in the subjunctive would] make clear—with no ifs, ands, or buts—that one or more premises of [a scholarly proposal] are arguable, indeed so arguable that it would be laughable to presume them to be self-evidently true to any reasonable person. Such a proviso would also signal the self-awareness on the part of the scholar that seemingly commonsensical consensus scholarly judgments inevitably come under fire in and by subsequent generations of scholars. What is taken for granted today is up for grabs tomorrow. No reason to act as though that isn’t the case.

Here’s the question I want to ask (one I may have asked elsewhere, though I can’t seem to find it in the following form), a question that might sound pedantic or sardonic but is meant in earnest. What good is being “up to date” on “the latest research” on X when the one thing about which we may claim disciplinary or epistemic certainty is that, whatever “the latest research” says about X today, it will be disputed by whatever “the latest research” says about X tomorrow? Put differently, if the force of academic arguments in the present tense depend upon a rough consensus about intrinsically contestable matters, and if the history of the discipline reliably informs us that every rough scholarly consensus is inevitably heavily revised or jettisoned by subsequent generations of scholars, or at least becomes subject to destabilization and thus no longer remains a consensus, then isn’t the whole towering edifice built on sand? Isn’t every argument built, with full awareness, on a foundation that everyone knows, as a matter of fact, will no longer exist within a matter of decades?—just to the extent that the foundation’s stability depended (at the time of the argument’s being made) upon its being more or less unquestioned, which is to say, a matter of present-day (though not future) consensus?

Note well that I am not calling into question either growth in historical knowledge or the ability to make claims to knowledge in this or adjacent realms of inquiry. Rather, I am calling into question the rhetoric, the confidence, and the rhetoric of confidence that attend such claims to knowledge. At a deeper level I am further calling into question the method of the inquiry, built argumentatively and even logically upon claims to present-day achievements of consensus that everyone knows but chooses to forget will be undone eventually—and often sooner rather than later.

Instead of qualifying historical and textual arguments into oblivion, however, acknowledging and accepting this critique should function to liberate biblical scholarship and historiography more generally. For it entails that works in biblical studies do not expire the year after publication. The value of the car, so to speak, doesn’t plummet once it’s driven off the lot. Sometimes colleagues in biblical studies speak as though, on one hand, they can’t propose ideas in public unless and until they’ve read everything published up to and including today (perhaps also forthcoming works!); and, on the other hand, that the sell-by dates for the very ideas they’d like to elaborate are, sad to say, the day after they propose them.

That sounds at once emotionally grueling, humanly impracticable, intellectually stifling, and epistemically indefensible.

The fundamental problem, it seems to me, is construing biblical scholarship on analogy to the hard sciences, rather than classing it among the hermeneutical arts. To be sure, there is sifting of evidence, and some of that evidence qualifies as “hard.” But the work of making sense of the canonical Jewish and Christian texts, including making historical sense of them, is finally interpretive in character. Not only is interpretation not “scientific” in the colloquial or disciplinary sense. To treat it as such is essentially to distort the task of understanding—in this case, understanding texts in their historical and cultural contexts—as well as the nature of disputation regarding proposals for such understanding. It takes on faith what is unproven, considers evidentially dispositive what is anything but, concedes to consensus what is and shall always be arguable. In short, it artificially constricts both the range and the force of what one may (and must) say as a member of the guild. And it does so for no good reason.

That’s not to say one may or should avoid reading “the latest” in one’s discipline. Staying “up to date” is in general a reasonable expectation for academics. But it is not and cannot be a condition for holding or proposing a plausible opinion on a contested topic, much less for rejecting, out of hand and sight unseen, “old” or “outdated” scholarship on said topic. Nine times out of ten, what makes “new” research new is not an archeological discovery or fresh material evidence. It is an innovative theory, speculative reconstruction, or alternative explanation of preexisting materials (usually just the texts themselves) that is “the latest” on the scene. Such proposals are well worth appraising. But they do not ipso facto rule out antecedent ideas. Even where they attempt to do so, they rarely succeed on the merits; when they do so succeed, often as not the rationale is fashion, an itch for novelty, or social pressure (that latter phrase being a serviceable gloss for “scholarly consensus”).

In any case, what I most want, as an outsider to the field of biblical studies but as one who reads it regularly for pleasure and profit alike, is for members of the discipline to be and to write and to teach free of this tiresome burden imposed upon them. That burden is called “being up to date,” which in turn carries with it a methodological mindset that treats the humanistic arts of interpreting ancient texts as a sort of hard science that accords omniscient experts, and them alone, the authority to make even the most modest suggestions about how to understand the Bible in its original historical contexts. Such a mindset also renders all biblical scholarship negligible or moribund within a decade after its publication. That’s just silly. Moreover, it ends up lowering the quality of such scholarship even on the day of its publication, since it is invariably pitched in such a way both that it must be “cutting edge” (ramp up that PR machine) and aware of its immediately diminishing relevance (grasp for those straws while you can), all the while focusing disproportionately on minute debates from recent years instead of the big questions at the heart of the subject matter. Not to mention the typical unspoken pretense that no one tried to exegete the text in question until the last two centuries.

That’s what I’d call being “up to date.” If you can tell me what the Greek and Latin and Syriac fathers and medievals and reformers all thought about this or that text, then you’ve got my attention. If, by contrast, mostly you know the Anglophone academic “consensus” regarding half a chapter in Philippians circa 1986–2011, though you’re aware that’s been overturned in the last decade, so obviously you need to bone up on the latest articles before you proffer an opinion … you’ve lost me.

To that sort of disciplinary formation, I have a simple message.

Be free!

Three R. S. Thomas poems for Advent/Christmas

The Coming

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, A river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. many People
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

*

Nativity

The moon is born
and a child is born,
lying among white clothes
as the moon among clouds.

They both shine, but
the light from the one
is abroad in the universe
as among broken glass.

*

Coming

To be crucified
again? To be made friends
with for his jeans and beard?
Gods are not put to death

any more. Their lot now
is with the ignored.
I think he still comes
stealthily as of old,

invisible as a mutation,
an echo of what the light
said, when nobody
attended; an impression

of eyes, quicker than
to be caught looking, but taken
on trust like flowers in the
dark country toward which we go.

A taxonomy of academic vocations

A couple weeks back I wrote more than 12,000 words on the experience of teaching a 4/4 load as a professor while also trying to publish (and, if possible, live an ordinary life). Consider this post a coda to that four-part series.

Spending five years at Yale for my PhD was, in numberless ways, a blessing. But one of the few ways in which it was not was in its formation of my (and presumably others’) sense of what it means to inhabit the academy. To be an academic, I learned, was to be a top-flight scholar whose publications are not only numerous but significant: the sort of work that changes the field, that sets the terms of debate going forward. To be anything other than this is to fail at the academic calling, to fall short of the high ideals of serious scholarship.

It goes without saying that this vision of the intellectual life is a lovely and admirable one for a few. It is reserved for only a few for at least three reasons: because almost all academics are not at Ivy League schools; because for certain articles and books to be conversation-shapers and game-changers most publications cannot be; because most of us are simply not possessed of that rare combination of intelligence, upbringing, education, talent, discipline, health, and ambition necessary to produce polymathic scholarship. Hence, for the rest of us mere mortals—which means very nearly every working professor today, minus a fortunate handful—some other vision of the intellectual life must suffice.

Happily, one of the many gifts of teaching at my current institution has been an education in the diversity of academic vocations. It turns out there are more ways than one to inhabit the university. Here’s my own personal taxonomy.

NB: These are in no particular order; none are mutually exclusive; plenty of academics encompass more than one, though I doubt many, if any, do all eight well.

1. Scholar

The ideal and stereotype: the professor in her study, surrounded by stacks upon stacks of thousands of books, master of a dozen languages, slowly producing multi-volume works of guild-defining scholarship. Less ideal-typically, an academic in this mold lives for the work of the library; she considers it her number-one job, and organizes her life around it. Her principal academic aim is to make a contribution to her discipline.

2. Researcher

It seems simultaneously defensible and worthwhile to distinguish the scholarly labors of the humanities from those of the sciences. The way I’ve realized I do that mentally is by the word “research.” Obviously research can describe anything, including literary and textual research. But for lack of a more targeted term, I’ll reserve “scholar” for an academic-publisher in the humanities mold and “researcher” for an academic-publisher in the sciences mold. For the truth is that both the work and the product of each are almost entirely distinct, a disciplinary extension of C. P. Snow’s “two cultures.” When colleagues in the sciences describe their work in the lab, or on Amazon Mechanical Turk, or what they read, or what they write, or how they present at conferences, or the role of numbers and spreadsheets and studies in their day-to-day work—it sounds like we have different jobs. That’s because we do. “Research,” for me, names what the folks in STEM do with their time, alien though it may be to this theologian.

3. Writer

Academics are not usually writers, whether or not they write on the regular. In fact, most academics are poor writers, and many, if not most, academics hate writing. I speak from experience, which being anecdotal may be a small sample size, but I’m confident that it is representative. All you have to do is open a book published by an academic press, and you’ll see as quickly as you can read how boring, plodding, ugly, and jargon-laden the prose is. I’ve known very few academics, moreover, who like to write. But occasionally one likes to write; even more occasionally that writing isn’t bad. Since you can produce scholarship and engage in research without either of those things being true of you, and since you can be a good writer without being an especially good scholar or researcher, I think setting aside “writer” as a separate vocation is more than warranted.

4. Teacher

This one’s a given. Most academics teach, though far too many neither enjoy it nor are especially good at it. Check that: more are good at it than you might suppose. That’s part of the problem with imagining that Yale and Harvard, Chicago and Notre Dame are the norm, and the rest are the exception to the rule. (And those institutions contain lots of wonderful teachers, too!) So strike through that cynical reflex of mine. Most academics teach, and many, many of them both excel at it and find great fulfillment in it. What they don’t enjoy is the 70-hour work weeks, the professional precarity, the high teaching loads, the huge class sizes, the unreasonable expectations, the consumer mentality applied to students, the gutting of non-job-related course subjects, the collective societal presumption against the meaningfulness of their work, the condescension toward their work by uber-scholars—and so on. Nevertheless, it is true that some professors are not teachers by vocation but only by necessity.

5. Mentor

This is one I had some sense of during doctoral studies, given the role of advisors in dissertations, but I’ve had a front-row seat observing quality mentorship at my current institution—and let me tell you, it is a calling unto itself. Where I teach mentoring might be personal and spiritual in addition to being professional or academic, but that’s only a reminder that “academic” is not a distinct compartment in a fragmented life but seamlessly integrated into the whole of a young person’s maturing sense of identity, beliefs about the world, and hopes for the future. For many students, mentorship makes all the difference. It’s what makes this or that college, this or that professor special. If I were a department chair, and I could choose between a quality scholar who was a super mentor, on one hand, and a super scholar who was a “fine” mentor, on the other, I would opt for the former without a second thought. Good mentors trail behind them all manner of secondary virtues that invariably benefit their academics neighbors, both within the classroom and without.

6. Practitioner

Here think of all those majors in the contemporary university that are taught by what those students majoring in that field want to become: nurses, teachers, PTs, OTs, social workers, ministers, journalists, even businessmen. Often (though not always) these professors and instructors worked for years, maybe decades, as a professional before returning to college in order to train the next generation. It can’t be emphasized enough that these fields and their faculty are the reason academia is still afloat today. In my experience, most (but, again, not all) faculty in these areas do not understand themselves as “academics” in the way that many “scholars” (see above) are trained or socialized to do. To the extent that the ideal-type of the tweed-jacketed philosophiae doctor with his dusty library volumes and German-language poetry and career-spanning articles on erudite topics still exists, often as not practitioners neither desire it nor exemplify it nor feel intimidated by it. Practitioners are doers who train still more doers, and in general they are making the world a better place, and are constitutionally unimpressed by your transparent attempts at prestige. And rightly so.

7. Administrator

There is nothing less sexy in academia than administration, at least to purists of the scholar or teacher type, but like practitioners, administrators make the world go round. Working for a good chair or dean means your life, all things being equal, is a dream; working for a bad chair or dean, accordingly, is bound to become nothing short of a nightmare. Furthermore, many academics both enjoy the work of administration and are gifted at it. I have friends and colleagues around the country who are clearly meant for administration, and unless it would make them miserable, their going that route makes life possible as well as happier for the rest of us. Sometimes administration is a burden suffered for a time, out of duty or need. But the calling exists, it is an academic calling, and we should all be grateful for those who accept it.

8. Intellectual

Not every academic is an intellectual, and vice versa. What do I mean by that? By “intellectual” here I mean to refer to someone for whom the life of the mind is her central preoccupation, a preoccupation that takes the form of mental curiosity, wide learning, voracious reading, affection for big ideas, desire for debate, love of history, and the pleasures of disciplinary promiscuity. To be an intellectual means making time for the mind, which means making time for texts (print or digital). Not every intellectual produces, but every intellectual consumes: which is to say, takes in what she can, when she can, as often as she can. An intellectual may or may not be a hedgehog, but she is always a fox; she knows many things, or seeks to do so, and for their own sake. Intellectuals make up a higher percentage of academics than the ordinary populace—that’s a matter of self-selection—but if you are not yourself an academic you might be surprised by how many academics are not intellectuals in the sense here stipulated. You might then be inclined to interpret that observation as an indictment. It need not be, however. The point of laying out this taxonomy is precisely to call into question our widely shared assumptions of who or what the ideal-typical academic is or ought to be. There are many ways of inhabiting the academy; we need all of them; there is no prima facie reason to suppose any one of them is essentially superior to any of the others. The sooner some of us learn that lesson (and it took me some time, as I said at the outset), the better our common work is liable to be.

“The slow death of the Protestant churches”

Fifteen years ago, in a journal article on Karl Barth’s christology and Chalcedonian doctrine (among other things), Bruce McCormack concluded his article with the following paragraph (my emphasis):

It remains only to say a word about the situation—and the motives which have led me to elaborate precisely this form of Christology in the present moment. The situation in which Christian theology is done in the United States today is shaped most dramatically by the slow death of the Protestant churches. I have heard it said—and I have no reason to question it—that if current rates of decline in membership continue, all that will be left by mid-century will be Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and non-denominational evangelical churches (the last named of which will include those denominations, like the Southern Baptists, which are non-confessional in doctrinal matters and congregationalist in their polity). The churches of the Reformation will have passed from the scene—and with their demise, there will be no obvious institutional bearers of the message of the Reformation. What all of this means in practice is that it will become more and more necessary, for the sake of the future of Christianity, to establish stronger ecumenical relations with the Catholics and the Orthodox. And that means, too, coming to agreements with churches supportive of the classical two-natures scheme in Christology. The question is not, it seems to me, whether the two-natures doctrine has a future. That much seems to have already been decided. The only real question is what form(s) it can take. So it is for the sake of an improved understanding of the potential contained in the two-natures doctrine that I offer my ‘Reformed’ version of kenoticism.

To magisterial Protestant ears, that prediction must sound dire indeed. Dire or no, it seems on the nose to me. In my next book I lay out a threefold typology of the church for heuristic purposes: catholic (=Eastern, Roman, Anglican), reformed (=magisterial Protestant), and baptist (=low-church, congregationalist, non-confessional, believers baptism, etc.). What’s astonishing is simultaneously how much “the reformed” dominate Anglophone theology across the last 200 years and yet how institutionally and demographically invisible actual reformed churches are today, certainly on the North American scene. To the extent that that already-invisible presence is continuing to shrink, it is not unreasonable to suppose that it will continue to dwindle to statistical insignificance. That doesn’t mean there won’t be Lutherans or Calvinists in America four decades from now. But it may mean that they have little to no institutional form or heft—at least one that anybody is aware of who doesn’t already live inside one of their few remaining micro-bubbles.

To be clear, I don’t mean these words as a happy prophecy, dancing on the grave before the body’s interred. Some of my best friends are magisterial Protestants. (Hey oh.) And I wish those friends every success in their ongoing efforts to revivify the American Protestant community. History isn’t written until after the fact; perhaps McCormack and the rest of us naysayers will be proven wrong.

The lines aren’t trending in the direction of renewal, though. So it’s worth reflecting on what the future of American Christianity looks like: either catholic or baptist, which is to say, either “high” (liturgical, sacramental, episcopal, conciliar, creedal, etc.) or “low” (non-creedal, non-confessional, non-sacramental, non-denominational, non-doctrinal, in short, biblicist evangelicalism). To my inexpert eyes, that also seems to be the global choice, not least if you include charismatic traditions under the “low” or “free” category.

The question then is: Do the latter communities have what it takes to weather the storm? Do they, that is, have the resources, the roots, the wherewithal to sojourn, unbending and unbent, in the wilderness that awaits? As Stanley Hauerwas once remarked, the evangelicals have two things in spades: Jesus and energy. What more do they have?

Fred Sanders, in a blog post commenting on McCormack’s programmatic prediction at the time of its publication, thinks evangelicals are possessed of that “more,” or at least are possessed of the relevant potential for the right kind of “more.” He runs a thought experiment, thinking “back” from the perch of 2047 when the dire prophecies of the death of American Protestantism have come to fruition. He writes:

It’s 2047: Bruce McCormack is just over 100 years old and is trying to figure out where to go to church. He’s not picky, he just wants a place that teaches justification by faith and sola scriptura. There are no mainline Protestant churches to choose from, no “obvious institutional bearers of the message of the Reformation.” Everywhere he goes, there are non-denominational evangelicals, and Roman Catholics, and the Orthodox. Who’s got the Reformation theology, where can I go to get it?

Jumping back to 2006, and back to my own evangelical (just barely denominational) context, I can see the advantages of doing what McCormack ’06 recommends: “for the sake of the future of Christianity, to establish stronger ecumenical relations with the Catholics and the Orthodox.” But as an evangelical theologian committed to the theology of the Reformation, I think my more pressing task is to work for a clearer theological witness in evangelical congregations and institutions. I think it’s possible for evangelicalism to function as a much more “obvious institutional bearer of the message of the Reformation.” Indeed, with the mainline keeling over and dropping the Protestant baton, the people most likely to pick it up are people like my people, or maybe Pentecostals in the developing world. Everything hinges on greater theological sophistication and stronger commitment to doctrines like sola scriptura and justification. I actually wonder why McCormack pointed instead to Roman Catholic and Orthodox dialogue partners. Probably it’s because his speech was about reinvigorating traditional Chalcedonian christology, and he (rightly) thinks he’s more likely to find conversation partners about that among Catholics than among evangelicals.

To evangelical theologians (Baptists, non-denominationals, etc.) I would take a hint from McCormack and say: The baton is being dropped, the mainline churches are going down. Study harder, learn the great tradition of Christian doctrine (from the Catholics and Orthodox perhaps), and keep your hands ready to take up the baton of Protestant teaching. Plan for mid-century, when there will be a crying need for an “obvious institutional bearer of the theology of the Reformation.”

That is laudable and wise advice. I do wonder: After what has happened in and to American evangelicalism in the last 15 years, what, if anything, would Sanders (or his Protestant comrades in arms) say about the prospects of such a vision? Can evangelicalism as it stands be reformed—that is, converted to the confessions and doctrines of the magisterial Reformation—from within? Is the rot not yet too deep? Is the form of evangelicalism—that is, its bone-deep opposition to extra-biblical doctrinal formulations and practices, to formal institutional organization and authorities, to anything that might mitigate the frontier revivalist spirit—open to the sheer degree of ecclesial, liturgical, and theological change that would be required to conform to actual magisterial teaching and practice?

My questions are leading, and in the extreme. Granted. I’m open to being wrong. Ratzinger’s oft-quoted words from half a century ago, about the church shrinking in size and prestige but becoming purer and more faithful as a result, may well apply to the churches of the Reformation as much as to Rome. Nor do the trend lines mean anything, literally anything, with respect to whether or not Christians who find themselves in true-blue Protestant churches ought to seek to be faithful as best they can in the time and place in which God has placed them. Obviously they should.

But at the macro level, looking at the big picture, I can’t escape the sense that McCormack is right, and hence that in the coming decades the ecclesiological choice we face, and our children face, will be between two options, not three. If true, that makes a big difference—for church conversations, for theological arguments, for political debates. We ought therefore to face it head on, with courage, clarity, and honesty, and most of all without pretense. Collective denial is not going to make the present crisis disappear. Let’s be thinking and talking now about what it is the times, which is to say the Holy Spirit, requires of us. Let’s not wake up in 2047 and realize we missed our only opportunity to avert disaster.

Deconstruction

My post on Thursday generated a lot of responses, many of which were positive. One mostly mild but nevertheless negative reaction was a defense of the concept of deconstruction, seeing in my post an unfair diminishment of what for many has proven to be both a necessary and a healthy process of growth in faith and repudiation of false or destructing teaching.

That’s fair. The piece I wrote was a blog post, shot off on little more than a whim. The point of it was less why deconstruction is bad, more why my friends and colleagues who presuppose that my main task in the classroom is deconstructing my students’ beliefs are dead wrong. I didn’t intend the post as an entry in the Deconstruction Wars—God forbid—which I find to be simultaneously vicious, vacuous, and largely pertaining to highly specific sub-cultures in American evangelicalism. The soldiers in these wars seem insistent on refusing to listen or understand one another. And since I’m not enlisted in either this or any intra-evangelical war, I don’t think of what I write as ever anything more than observations from a friendly outsider who lives in, if not enemy territory, than a sort of foreign land.

Having said that, in the hopes of clarifying where I was coming from in my post and offering some of those observations, here’s my two cents on that ill-famed and contested word, “deconstruction.”

*

Deconstruction is just a word. It’s not a technical term. Like every ordinary word, you know its meaning by the way people use it. To be sure, people don’t use it in identical ways, but those ways are nonetheless quite similar, and one or two primary meanings rise to the top of common usage.

By way of comparison, consider transubstantiation. That is a technical word. It has a prescriptive meaning however you or anyone else uses it correctly. Why? Because it was a term of art invented for a purpose: to give a name to whatever it is the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church believes (which is to say, teaches) occurs in the eucharistic rite, following the fourth Lateran Council and as developed by St. Thomas Aquinas and the Council of Trent.

Deconstruction is not like that. Unless you’re exegeting Derrida—and here’s the part where I remind you that exegeting Derrida gives you quite a bit of (shall we say) hermeneutical latitude—deconstruction is not a piece of jargon, a technical word, or a term of art. Its meaning is not determined by any magisteria of which I am aware, and that includes Christian Twitter. What it means is how it means in the natural discourse of those who deploy it. Which means, in turn, that to say, “D doesn’t mean X, D means Y,” is only a rather implausibly dogmatic way of saying, “I use D differently than you do,” which is itself just a way of saying, “I would prefer to restrict the use of D to mean Y instead of X.” The first phrasing sounds like a statement of grammatical fact, and thus a sort of rebuke; the second is mere description of difference of usage; the third is a normative claim, supportable by argument if one is in a mood to supply it.

It is perfectly defensible to opt for the third phrasing. That’s part of how the meaning of contested terminology gets sorted out. The second phrasing is a way of making disagreement intelligible, though it doesn’t move the needle of the conversation one way or the other. The thing to avoid is the first phrasing. There is no eternal dictionary definition on hand to which one may refer in parsing and correcting others’ usage of deconstruction. So it’s not only silly to bang one’s fist on the digital disk, insisting, flush-faced, that the word doesn’t mean X because it only means Y. It’s false.

The good news is, when faced with a novel word trailing behind it a range of possible meanings, we can hash out together how we think we ought to use the word, and why. That’s worth doing in this case, since deconstruction is very much a feature of The Discourse today. Even if we only establish distinct meanings that different people use in various contexts for diverse purposes, we might understand one another better, which is a worthy goal in itself.

*

I’m not going to try to settle what we all ought to understand by deconstruction. That’s a fool’s errand in any case. I do want to make a few remarks on the wider cultural trend the term names and why I said about it what I did in my original post.

Lest I be at all unclear, there are many, many people for whom deconstruction describes a crucial part of their spiritual formation in which they divested themselves of wicked or false beliefs or practices and learned to amend or replace those beliefs or practices with true or life-giving ones. To the precise extent that that experience is what is meant in general by deconstruction, then it is obvious to me that deconstruction is both necessary and good, a work of the Holy Spirit worth celebrating and commending. And I personally know folks, both college students and friends in mid-life, who fit this description and who unquestionably needed such an experience—if, that is, they or their faith were going to survive.

At the same time, I do not think this is the only experience named by deconstruction. And if I’m honest, I do not think it is the primary one, common though it may be.

The primary one is what I named in my post on (re)construction:

The form is the thing: deconstruction is a style. Deconstruction is a mode of being, a moral, social, and spiritual habitation in which to dwell, for a time or indefinitely. Deconstruction says: I’m unlearning all that I ever thought I knew—usually about the Bible, Christian teaching, Jesus, faith, or some charged element therein. Deconstruction in the imperative says: You must unlearn what you have learned. And what you have learned, you learned from an authority in your life, namely a parent, a pastor, a church, a school, a mentor, a sibling, an aunt, a grandmother, a coach, a friend. Which means, at least as the message is received, that you must unbind yourself from the wisdom of such authorities; you must accept me, your teacher, as an authority above your inherited authorities, and defer to my learning over theirs.

This, as I hope is evident, is foolish, self-serving, and manipulative pedagogy. But it is the regnant pedagogical mode not only for professors but for every would-be influencer, life coach, self-help writer, and podcaster on the market, doubly so if they purport to be an expert on matters spiritual. And the content (i.e., the catechesis) matches the form (i.e., the pedagogy): nothing concrete whatsoever. Generic therapeutic self-affirmation clothed in whatever the latest HR-approved, capital-appropriated progressive cause happens to be. Goop gone wild; woke goop. De-toxined crystals against toxic positivity, VR social justice in the metaverse, and oh by the way click here for your subscription to the weekly newsletter from Deconstruction, Inc, it’s only $39.99/month.

Granted that I allow myself to get carried away there a bit (though forever and always you must credit me, I demand it, for “woke goop”), the basic point stands. Deconstruction today has become a sort of brand with which a certain class of evangelicals and exvangelicals would like to be identified. It has been transformed into a commodity that confers upon the person a particular social status, a status apt to those who have passed an invisible threshold of salary, graduate degrees, and political opinions. That status we may call “not disreputable.” To be disreputable is to be associated with the wrong people, in this case the people who raised you or the people you worship with, people who lack in the extreme the right status and the right opinions. Deconstruction™ provides permission structures for you either to hold such people at arm’s length or to renounce all their ways and works. You need not be associated with them, because (you now realize) you are unlike them. And the prompt for such realization is deconstruction.

At this point I will repeat: Is this all that deconstruction is, for anyone and everyone? No! I just said above that it is altogether something different for plenty of folks. But is it also this, namely the influencer-mediated mass phenomenon of Insta-trademarked social and spiritual status marked above all by the public signaling of newly disavowed disreputable and offensive beliefs and associations (or, as it happens, newly acquired reputable and inoffensive beliefs and associations)? Yes, it is. And I don’t know that I could believe you were being honest if you denied it.

*

There’s a third style of deconstruction worth mentioning, and its complexity is found in its unstable placement between the two I’ve already described. It’s this one that I was largely after in my original post, because it’s the one I see my students most susceptible to at this stage in their lives. Recall: I’m not a pastor. I’m a professor. My responsibility is the classroom, not the sanctuary. But because I teach at a Christian university and I have students of every major in my classes, it is part of my charge to teach on this or that aspect of Christian faith and theology in such a way that I am forming my students in the truth of the gospel as an outworking of the academic task.

Among the ways by which one can approach that charge, I identified two. One is deconstruction, the other is (re)construction. Deconstruction as a pedagogical mode treats students as ill-formed fundies in need of a sort of intellectual transfusion: my wisdom replacing their corrupted upbringing. I cannot put into words my contempt for this style of teaching. It is self-aggrandizing nonsense. It spits on students’ families and communities of origin. It presumes to know in advance that they come from ignorance and stupidity, whereas I represent knowledge and enlightenment.

This is an abject and risible failure of the high calling of teacher.

When I say I don’t deconstruct in the classroom, this is what I mean. I don’t set myself in opposition to all that my students have ever known or trusted, asking them to place their faith in me instead. That doesn’t mean I abjure my authority or expertise. It just means teaching does not have to be contrastive to be successful. It doesn’t have to involve evacuation of the contents of students’ minds before learning can begin. It certainly does not require covertly incepting students such that they learn from the professor that, to be an educated person, they must actively distrust the very source of their life: their parents, their churches, their neighbors and coaches and mentors—in short, everyone they’ve ever loved.

Let me give a concrete example. I am explicit in my classroom that I hope to make an anti-Marcionite of every one of my students. I suppose I could do that by telling them, in so many words, that their churches are just the very worst for instilling in them, intentionally or not, a tacit skepticism of Israel, Israel’s scriptures, and Israel’s God. Why, though? Why must I engage in “them bad, me good” to make my point? Instead, among other things, what I say is: Think through the logic of your commitments, which are by and large the commitments of your churches and families. Do they believe the Bible is the word of God? Is the Old Testament in the Bible? Do they believe the God and Father of Jesus Christ is the God of Abraham who created the world? So on and so forth. It’s not hard at all for them to see, and quickly, that they and their communities are already committed to not being Marcionite. The subtle question then becomes, Where and how and why did they imbibe the assumption, however deep-seated, that the Old Testament is a second-class citizen in Holy Scripture? And that’s when we get cooking.

Do you see? You could describe what I’m doing there as deconstructing my students’ Marcionite beliefs. Is that really necessary though? Because you could equally describe it as building up (and grounding) my students’ antecedent but largely implicit beliefs about the unity of God, God’s people, and God’s word. And if what I’m after here is a choice between alternative pedagogies, then the latter is not only a superior description of what is happening. It is a guide to the “how,” the style and sensibility, of my teaching. It shapes my approach and governs my words. It reminds me, constantly, that I’m in the business of building, not tearing down—all the while allowing that building sometimes involves rebuilding, or removing this slat for that one, or securing walls or foundations in a more reliable way, and so on. The end is the edifice, which is why St. Paul calls for edification. That end has an aim or goal, then. It also implies a terminus, a destination, a point of completion. Ultimately that completion is in God’s hands, in God’s time, and arrives only after death. Keeping the end in mind, though, helps the teacher, or at any rate this teacher, from supposing that the construction project is aimless or without guidance, a wholly human endeavor in the philosophically constructivist sense: something we do, on our own for our own purposes, since of all things the measure is man.

In the world of education, especially academia, it can be tempting to believe that Protagoras is right. But he’s not. And my worst fear for my students is that they will be seduced by the most childish of all the deconstructions on offer, namely, that there are no answers, only questions, that deconstruction is a journey without a destination, that faith is only faith so long as you don’t believe in anything in particular, that what the gospel is good for is reinforcing what makes me comfortable and never demanding of me risk or loss, suffering or sacrifice, or (horror of horrors) disreputability.

I want my students to know Christ, the living Christ who is both more beautiful and more terrible than they’ve ever imagined. That means training them to ask good questions, and it certainly means crucifying their (and my) expectations of what may be true of God, what may be true of us, and what the true God may truly ask of each of us. If the result for my students is deconstruction in the good and proper sense, then so be it: you’ll get no protest or complaint from me. But if the result is the loss of Christ, if the result is an endless voyage away from God into the false self fashioned for them by the postmodern merchants of identity (whose god is their stomach, which is to say, Mammon), and if they call that deconstruction—then I don’t want anything to do with it. Such deconstruction will find no ready welcome in my classroom, only hostility and refusal.

Like everything that can be used well or poorly, then, deconstruction may be judged by its fruits. If it gives us Christ, we ought to welcome it. If it does not, we ought to turn it away. If sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, then we ought to judge case by case. At the very least, we should know in advance the good it is capable of doing and judge it accordingly. If by and large it fails to do that good, doing it only on rare occasions, then we are justified in viewing deconstruction as a general cultural trend to be something worth lamenting and resisting. And if I’m wrong, if the bad sorts of deconstruction outlined above are the exception to the rule, then God be praised: he’ll have proven me a fool again, and not for the last time.

(Re)construction

There’s a lot of talk these days about deconstruction. I’m often asked how I approach deconstructing my students’ beliefs in the classroom; it’s typically a given not only that I do it but that I ought to do it, that it’s part of my job description.

I do not deconstruct what my students come into my class believing. I don’t as a point of fact and I don’t on principle. Why?

Not because my students lack beliefs worth giving up (which, by the way, we all do, all the time). I’ve written elsewhere about what I call theological demons that demand exorcising in this generation of Bible-belt students. So it’s true in one sense that I identify and criticize particular beliefs that (I am explicit) I want my students to reject.

But that isn’t what people mean by deconstruction, either in form or in content. The form is the thing: deconstruction is a style. Deconstruction is a mode of being, a moral, social, and spiritual habitation in which to dwell, for a time or indefinitely. Deconstruction says: I’m unlearning all that I ever thought I knew—usually about the Bible, Christian teaching, Jesus, faith, or some charged element therein. Deconstruction in the imperative says: You must unlearn what you have learned. And what you have learned, you learned from an authority in your life, namely a parent, a pastor, a church, a school, a mentor, a sibling, an aunt, a grandmother, a coach, a friend. Which means, at least as the message is received, that you must unbind yourself from the wisdom of such authorities; you must accept me, your teacher, as an authority above your inherited authorities, and defer to my learning over theirs.

This, as I hope is evident, is foolish, self-serving, and manipulative pedagogy. But it is the regnant pedagogical mode not only for professors but for every would-be influencer, life coach, self-help writer, and podcaster on the market, doubly so if they purport to be an expert on matters spiritual. And the content (i.e., the catechesis) matches the form (i.e., the pedagogy): nothing concrete whatsoever. Generic therapeutic self-affirmation clothed in whatever the latest HR-approved, capital-appropriated progressive cause happens to be. Goop gone wild; woke goop. De-toxined crystals against toxic positivity, VR social justice in the metaverse, and oh by the way click here for your subscription to the weekly newsletter from Deconstruction, Inc, it’s only $39.99/month.

So no. As far as I can help it I don’t add my voice to the deconstruction chorus. What do I do instead then?

I build. Which is to say, I construct, or reconstruct. It’s all foundations, floor plans, building permits, and fashioning of pillars in my classroom. We don’t tear down an inch, not if I can help it.

The reason is simple. My students don’t have anything to deconstruct. Deconstruction implies the razing of a building, the demolition of a house. But for the most part, my students don’t walk into my classes with mental palaces furnished in gold, granite, and crystal. All too often, their faith is a house of cards. One gust of wind, one gentle puff of air will knock it down. I’m not interested in that. Not only am I not teaching at a state school in a religion department. I’m a Christian theologian, a teacher in and for the church. It’s my business to fortify, to strengthen, to secure, and to ground their faith—not to tear it down. Deconstruction is a razing, as I said, but I’m in the business of raising homes to live in. I want sturdy foundations and load-bearing walls. I want to build houses on the rock.

Because the storm is coming. It’s already here. I’m given students who for the most part believe already, or want to believe. What I do is say: Guess what? It’s true. All of it. You can trust what you’ve been taught, though you may not have been given the resources to explore the how or the why or the what-for. But Jesus really is God’s Son; he really did rise from the dead; he really is the Lord and savior of the cosmos. And from there it’s off to the races: church history, sacred tradition, ecumenical councils, creedal formulas, saints and doctors, mystics and martyrs, doctrines and dogmas and the rest.

Not one word is meant to undermine the faith they brought with them to the course. It’s meant to bolster and stabilize it. The unmaskers and destabilizers, the Deconstructors™ with all their pomp will be knocking on the doors of their hearts soon enough. I’m doing what I can in the time that I have to reinforce and buttress their defenses, so that when the time comes they are ready. Not because I want them to live free from risk; not because I want them to avoid hard questions. On the contrary. I’m usually the first to raise some of those hard questions on their behalf. But I don’t pretend that it’s better to leave questions untouched than to seek truth by answering them; I don’t model for them the faux profundity of the hip philosopher who hides his actual convictions while interrogating everyone else’s unfashionable ones.

On that day, fast approaching, when my students find themselves facing an unexpected question or challenge to their faith, instead of thinking, “My deconstructing professor was right: this Christian thing is a sham,” they might think instead, “I’m not sure what the answer is here, but the way my theology professor acted, I bet the church has thought about this before; I should look into it.” I want my students to learn the reflex, at the gut level, that there’s a there there, i.e., there’s something to be looked into—not merely something to be walked away from.

That’s why I don’t deconstruct. My classroom is a construction site. Day and night, we’re building, building, building, world without end, amen.

A church in tatters

In my review of Rodney Clapp’s new book on neoliberalism a few months back, I write the following:

Clapp sometimes partakes of a certain Hauerwasian grammar, whereby the indicative is used to describe what the church ought to be but is not (yet). Call it the eschatological indicative. Such language can function prophetically, calling the church to enact its baptismal and pentecostal identity, whatever its past or present failings. But it can also mystify the facts on the ground. Those facts are plainly put: The American church is in tatters. Our witness is shredded, our integrity a joke, our children bereft of a heritage and leaving the faith in droves. Reading Clapp’s book, at least until I reached the restraint of the epilogue, I simply did not recognize in his rhetoric the church as it currently exists. The rot, neoliberal and otherwise, runs deep. I want to amen the confidence of Clapp’s homiletic. But mostly I just find myself sighing in lament and anguish.

That passage has stuck with me, partly because it surprised me when I wrote it, partly because it gave words to an unexpressed emotion that, the moment it was on the page, I realized articulated exactly how I had been feeling for some time. The church is in tatters: lament and anguish. That’s it, right there. That’s the alternately benumbed and depressed sensibility I find in myself as I survey the church in America today, a sensibility I detect in many others.

Most folks I know who are in their 30s and 40s and who were raised in the church fall into only a few categories. One is ex-Christian: they’ve left the faith. Another is ex-church: they like Jesus but they don’t do the public-worship-and-assembly thing. A third is deconstructing: they’re currently in the midst of a sincere and long-ranging reconsideration of all they’ve been taught, about God, Scripture, Jesus, religion, ethics, politics, family, what have you. A fourth is imploding: their marriage or job or kids or personal life hit some wall or obstacle and a metaphorical IED blew it all to smithereens, and they’re doing their best to pick up the pieces. The fifth and final group comprises those whose faith as well as church membership are living and active and relatively stable, but who are hanging on by a thread. A single modest financial or family crisis, a lost job or a sick parent, a church scandal or a friend’s move away—a real but not life-altering event—would cut the thread and send them spinning into one of the first four categories.

And that’s about it. If I were to select a single word to unite all of these groups, it would be exhausted. And that exhaustion is ecclesial and spiritual as much as it is economic, professional, political, medical, familial, marital, or social. Even the best and most faithful Christians I know in this demographic are spent, tired, struggling with mental health, terribly lonely. They are, in a word, suffering a kind of sustained desolation while clinging to Christ with all they have—which is not much.

Is it always like this? Has it ever been thus? If I went back and polled our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents at this stage in life, would they report the same? Yes, granted, life happens, and life includes pain and suffering, job loss and cancer, divorce and broken friendships and the rest. Life has always happened. But this feels more specific. It is not as though the church has never been well, in this or that time and this or that place. I know enough of church history to tell you about some of those times and places. Some of them were recent. The church and its members sometimes are brimming with confidence, catechesis, and overall health.

This does not seem to be one of those times, whether one looks at the hard data (the sociological research is rather devastating here) or the anecdata (i.e., one’s neighbors and friends and community). The Lord’s promise to the church is that the gates of hell will not prevail against it. But as I’ve written elsewhere, that promise applies to the church, not to yours or mine, not even to a regional or national collection of believers. The Lord will remain faithful to his people even should it be depleted to a remnant of one. Sometimes, though, it feels like that’s precisely what’s happening in America, a winnowing and whittling down, until there’s none of us left, not even one.

Teaching a 4/4: freedom

This is the fourth and final post in a series of reflections on what it means to be a scholar in the academy with a 4/4 teaching load. The first discussed the allotment of one’s hours in a 4/4 load; the second identified the unavoidable tradeoffs that come with either having a family or serving at a particular kind of institution; the third offered a series of tips and strategies for 4/4 profs who want to make, foster, and protect the time necessary for reading and writing. This fourth and last post is a companion to the third, discussing in broader terms some of the gifts and opportunities afforded by serving at a teaching-heavy university as well as having a time-demanding family life outside of work.

Let’s say you accept my terms and agree that it’s possible to find the time to publish while teaching a 4/4. Still, you reply, that doesn’t make the high teaching load good; the load remains a hindrance to research, only a hindrance that can be (partially) overcome.

There are two things to say to this. First, teaching isn’t a hindrance. Nor is it just your job. Teaching is a calling. If it’s not your calling, you might want to get out of the game. As I’ve repeated throughout this series, research is a component of and companion to teaching; the job is twofold, a balance or dance. You don’t teach in order to write. You teach and you write; that’s the scholarly life.

Second, a high teaching load isn’t solely a set of challenges for research by comparison to positions in the scaling heights of the ivory tower: the Ivy League, the R1 state schools, the super-rich private universities whose research operations are a well-oiled machine. A high teaching load, which is usually a function of serving at an institution with less prestige, less money, less power, and so on, also presents unique opportunities for your research.

How so?

First, by taking the pressure off. I cannot put into words the relief I have felt every day on my job not having to publish or perish. Note well: I’m still publishing. But there is no one peering over my shoulder, no one nudging and shoving me toward some invisible finish line extending forward ahead of me, always within sight but never within reach. The sheer benefit to one’s mental health makes it worth a positive mention. When I compare notes with friends who work in The Big Leagues, their jobs sound claustrophobic, stultifying, enervating, depressing. Like a panic attack waiting to happen. Who wants that?

Second, by taking the pressure off what I’m supposed to write. Three months ago my first book was published. I first drafted it two years ago, in the fall of 2019. Would I have written that book, the way that I wrote it, were I at a different, more research-heavy institution? Answer: Not on your life. And it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. I couldn’t be prouder of it. But the spirit that breathes across its pages, a spirit I trust you can sense as a reader, is the spirit of freedom. I wrote exactly what I believed to be true, in the style I thought most apt to the content. The book is what I wanted it to be. Never, not in a million years, would I have done that had an administrator been breathing down my neck, asking me when my Next Big Book would be coming out, and with what university press, and on what topic, and written with what level of dense and unreadable prose. I didn’t write to make a splash. I wrote what was burning up my insides, what was begging to come out. And you know what? If the book ends up making any kind of splash, it’ll be because I wrote from passion and desire, not from administrative pressure or T&P criteria. And praise God for that.

Third, of a piece with an overall reduction of pressure is a broader freedom to pursue interests as they arise. In the last five years I have somehow, by God’s grace (and editors’ largesse), become a person who writes essays and criticism for magazines on wide-ranging topics that include but are not limited to my scholarly expertise in theology. I’m going to say it again: I could not and would not have done that at an Ivy or R1 institution. Why? Because their incentive structures do not care about such writing. But you know what? Alan Jacobs is right: Literary journalism (a term he takes from Frank Kermode) is a lot harder to write than peer-reviewed journal articles. Not only that, doing so makes you a much better writer, doubly so if you have no training as a writer and the only writing you cut your teeth on was inaccessible, jargon-heavy academic “prose.” Working with editors from The Point and The Los Angeles Review of Books and The New Atlantis and The Hedgehog Review and Commonweal and First Things and Comment and elsewhere has made me an immeasurably better writer than I was before I started, indeed than I ever would have been had I never tried my hand at such writing. Thank God, then, too, that I’m here at ACU and not at some soul-destroying publish-or-perish elite place that doesn’t care one whit whether you write well or whether what you write is read widely, only whether the right number of PRJAs is checked on the T&P portfolio. No thanks.

Fourth, my entire “research profile” bears the imprint of this pressure-free vocational freedom afforded by working at a teaching-heavy institution. On one hand, my third book (beginning to draft next month!) is a 25,000-word popular work on the church meant for lay audiences. Would I have signed that contract elsewhere? Probably not. On the other hand, my fourth book (not due for a few years) is a similarly popular work, longer and more detailed, however, on the proper role of digital technology in the life of churches and their ordained leaders. I’m currently reading my way into being able to write about that topic; I’ve also just finished a pilot course teaching on the same. Are you sensing a theme? My writing habits have followed an unplanned and undirected course these last few years; or rather, I have allowed those habits to follow desires that sprang up organically from my reading and teaching, and my institutional location not only permitted but encouraged that process. I can tell you, my conversations with colleagues at other institutions do not report a similar story.

Fifth, I have learned to accept my reading and writing limits in (what I take to be) a healthy way. I’ve always loved a moment that comes early in Wallace Stegner’s novel Crossing to Safety; the narrator is speaking of his early days as a college prof:

I remember little about Madison as a city, have no map of its streets in my mind, am rarely brought up short by remembered smells or colors from that time. I don’t even recall what courses I taught. I really never did live there, I only worked there. I landed working and never let up.

What I was paid to do I did conscientiously with forty percent of my mind and time. A Depression schedule, surely—four large classes, whatever they were, three days a week. Before and between and after my classes, I wrote, for despite my limited one-year appointment I hoped for continuance, and I did not intend to perish for lack of publications. I wrote an unbelievable amount, not only what I wanted to write but anything any editor asked for—stories, articles, book reviews, a novel, parts of a textbook. Logorrhea. A scholarly colleague, one of those who spent two months on a two-paragraph communication to Notes and Queries and had been working for six years on a book that nobody would ever publish, was heard to refer to me as the Man of Letters, spelled h-a-c-k. His sneer so little affected me that I can’t even remember his name.

Nowadays, people might wonder how my marriage lasted. It lasted fine. It throve, partly because I was as industrious as an anteater in a termite mound and wouldn’t have noticed anything short of a walkout, but more because Sally was completely supportive and never thought of herself as a neglected wife—“thesis widows,” we used to call them in graduate school. She was probably lonely for the first two or three weeks. Once we met the Langs she never had time to be, whether I was available or not. It was a toss-up who was neglecting whom.

Early in our time in Madison I stuck a chart on the concrete wall of my furnace room. It reminded me every morning that there are one hundred sixty-eight hours in a week. Seventy of those I dedicated to sleep, breakfasts, and dinners (chances for socializing with Sally in all of those areas). Lunches I made no allowance for because I brown-bagged it at noon in my office, and read papers while I ate. To my job—classes, preparation, office hours, conferences, paper-reading—I conceded fifty hours, though when students didn’t show up for appointments I could use the time for reading papers and so gain a few minutes elsewhere. With one hundred and twenty hours set aside, I had forty-eight for my own. Obviously I couldn’t write forty-eight hours a week, but I did my best, and when holidays at Thanksgiving and Christmas gave me a break, I exceeded my quota.

Hard to recapture. I was your basic overachiever, a workaholic, a pathological beaver of a boy who chewed continually because his teeth kept growing. Nobody could have sustained my schedule for long without a breakdown, and I learned my limitations eventually. Yet when I hear the contemporary disparagement of ambition and the work ethic, I bristle. I can’t help it.

I overdid, I punished us both. But I was anxious about the coming baby and uncertain about my job. I had learned something about deprivation, and I wanted to guarantee the future as much as effort could guarantee it. And I had been given, first by Story and then by the Atlantic, intimations that I had a gift.

Thinking about it now, I am struck by how modest my aims were. I didn’t expect to hit any jackpots. I had no definite goal. I merely wanted to do well what my inclinations and training led me to do, and I suppose I assumed that somehow, far off, some good might flow from it. I had no idea what. I respected literature and its vague addiction to truth at least as much as tycoons are supposed to respect money and power, but I never had time to sit down and consider why I respected it.

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else—pathway to the stars, maybe.

I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.

My wife just about spit out her coffee when she read that for the first time. She could relate. But part of the point, aside from the sheer dictatorial vision required to devote all the time one has to what one wants to achieve, is that hour-counting and hour-assigning is not a way of disregarding limits. It’s a way of admitting them and working within them.

For me, those limits bear less on writing than on reading. I’m a fast writer but a turtle-slow reader. I’ve never known someone who reads regularly, for work or for pleasure, who reads as slowly as I do. What that means is that I have to make choices. Here are two choices I’ve had to make that, upon reflection, have made me a better scholar—or at least a practicing scholar, whatever my merits; someone who’s in the game, not on the sidelines.

One choice was to accept that my reading would never be comprehensive. That’s an obvious thing to say, but you might be surprised by how few academics accept it in their heart of hearts. And it’s true, I’ve known one or two polymaths who genuinely seem to have read it all. But that ain’t me. Not even in a single area, not even in a subtopic of subtopic of a subtopic, like the doctrine of Scripture, about which I’ve now written two books. What I’ve not read vastly outweighs what I’ve read. That truth (and it is a truth) can be paralyzing or liberating. I’ve chosen to let it be liberating. Read what I can and write what I’m able, and if people find it of any use, God be praised; if not, then I guess I didn’t meet the magical threshold of “enough, though not everything.” Naturally you don’t want such self-allowance to avoid total comprehensiveness to slide into a permission to be lazy, to avoid covering all one’s bases. Yet the point stands: it’s never enough; let that be enough. Get on with it and do your work, in acceptance that someone someday will read what you’ve written and point out the text you should have cited. It’ll happen. Be grateful they pointed it out to you. You can take the time to read it for the next thing you write!

The second choice followed from the first. If I wasn’t going to be an independent scholar or research professor who reads 1,000 pages a day (as I’ve heard the encyclopedic Wolfhart Pannenberg did, before writing a book by dinner time), then I might as well broaden my reading to include both academic works far from my area of research and books (old or new) acclaimed for their insights, their impact, or the beauty of their prose. Not only has this practice proved a revolution in my reading habits, and for the better. It has made me a far better academic, scholar, writer, and teacher. Why? Because what I read and know is more than a mile deep and an inch wide. I try to read the dozen or two dozen annual “biggest books,” whether trade or academic, that get press in the NYRB or NYTBR or New Yorker or elsewhere. I read political philosophy and biblical studies and philosophy of science and social science and critical theory and memoirs and novels and collections of essays. Sometimes I review them. I don’t do this reading only at home. I do it in my office. It’s part of my scholarly labor. At this point I’d feel irresponsible if I stopped. It’s helped me resist the siren song of becoming a hedgehog, or a hedgehog alone. In the few areas on which I publish in academic journals, I am a hedgehog: ecclesiology, bibliology, Trinity. But otherwise I’m a fox, reading and writing on as many topics and authors and books as I can lay my hands on.

And I’m telling you: Not only would I not have done that were I not teaching a 4/4. It wouldn’t even have occurred to me. It wouldn’t be possible. The material conditions don’t encourage it, at least for pre-tenure faculty, at least most of the time. Usually they actively block or prohibit it.

That’s why I’m happy where I am. That’s why I don’t resist my high teaching load. That’s part of what makes teaching a 4/4 not just “not as bad as you think,” but (apart from the teaching, which is itself fun and rewarding and good work) a surprisingly conducive environment for research and publication. If you can make and guard time for it, it might actually turn out to be better than it would have been were you elsewhere. Who would have thought?

*

I’m not quite done, though. Consider the following something of a coda.

In the second post in this series I discussed not just institutional but personal and familial tradeoffs. So I want to add a word here about how and why having a rich life beyond work, full of bustling households bursting with children as well as friends, neighbors, churches, sports leagues, and community service, is not only good—being far, far more important than publishing—but, perchance, itself a boon to your academic work.

Here’s the nutshell version. Having something to come home to makes the work you do during the day meaningful, even when it doesn’t always feel like significant work. I never ask myself the question, Why am I even doing this? What’s it all for? That’s not because I think my writing will outlive me. It certainly will not. It’s because having four children who don’t know and don’t care that Dad’s an author (not to mention a wife whose stated marital purpose in life is to be unimpressed with me) puts my work into perspective. The souls for whom I am responsible are not only worth more than the straw that is my writing and teaching. They are a reminder that my job, though a vocation, is also, well, a job. More than a job, perhaps, but not less than one. It pays the bills and puts food on the table. That’s a worthy thing in its own right. And given that I do what I love with a flexible schedule that more than pays the bills, the truth is that I’ve got it made in the shade, professionally speaking. I’m employed, in a time of precarity, anxiety, uncertainty, and fear. What’s not to be grateful for?

Furthermore, as I briefly alluded to in the second post, having a family does important motivational and boundary-setting work, if you’ll let it. I don’t choose not to bring work home with me. That choice is made for me by my children. I can’t be working while driving them to basketball or picking them up from school or attending church or cooking dinner or singing them to sleep. And when they’re finally in bed, should I be a good husband and spend time with my wife, or each and every night march to my office to get a few more hours in? The question answers itself.

Here’s the irony, if it counts as one. Having fewer hours in the office and stronger boundaries between work and home—having, in a word, both more and more fixed limits on one’s time—can have the unexpected effect of supercharging what work time you have. Because I know I have to accomplish X, Y, and Z in only three or 12 or 20 hours, then I don’t have a choice (there’s that freedom in unchosen commitments theme again): I’m just going to have to get it done in the time I have, because once I clock out, the work is finished in any case. What such expectations within limits produce, at any rate in me, is a singularity of vision that crowds out all the usual distractions and detours and time-sucking routes of avoiding work. No Slack, no Twitter, no Facebook, no Instagram, no Gmail, no Messages, no WhatsApp, no nothing. Turn Freedom on or the internet off; kill your inbox or set your phone in another room. Whatever it takes, read the book or write the essay or fix the draft or review the submission or complete the grant or prepare the lesson or grade the papers. Just do it. The only time you have is now. Take advantage of it.

My anecdotal experience in doctoral studies confirms this dynamic. Especially when ABD, my single friends—some of them, I should say, some of the time—had many a day like the following: sleep in (that is, relative to my 6:07am baby-crying human alarm), check email and social media, drag themselves to a coffee shop, work for an hour or two, meet a friend for a late lunch, work a little more, grab drinks at a bar, then work into the wee hours of the night. Their self-report would then describe such an experience as “working all day”—not without some self-awareness, but all the while underwritten by a mixture of disappointment, frustration, and resentment at the lack of some objective structure or set of involuntary strictures organizing their time.

By comparison I often had exactly four total daytime hours in which to get the same amount of work done (sharing, as I did, childcare with my wife; stipends rarely stretch so far as to cover daycare or nannies). And so I did the work in the time I had. I didn’t have another choice. Would I have been as efficient had I been in their shoes? No way. It was the inflexible limits placed on my time that forced my hand. And I’m grateful they did.

The same dynamic obtains beyond the PhD, if you’re fortunate enough to have a tenure-track gig. Limits aren’t the enemy. They’re the secret sauce of happiness. Once accepted, or even befriended, they might just help you publish.

Even while teaching a 4/4.