I’m on Mere Fidelity

Did I say quit podcasts? I meant all of them except one.

I’m on the latest episode of Mere Fidelity, talking about my book The Doctrine of Scripture and, well, the doctrine of Scripture. (Links: Google, Spotify, Apple, Soundcloud.) It was a pleasure to chat with Derek and Alastair and (surprise!) Timothy. Matt had to bail last minute. I can only assume he was nervous.

No joke, it was an honor to be on. For the last decade, I have lived by the mantra, “No podcasts before tenure.” I’ve turned down every invitation. In 2020–21 I participated in three podcasts as a member of The Liberating Arts, the first two as the interviewer (of Alan Noble and Jon Baskin, respectively) and the third as interviewee, speaking on behalf of the project (this was 11 months ago, but the podcast just posted this week, as it happens). In other words, this experience with Mere Fi was for all intents and purposes my first true podcast experience, in full and on the receiving end.

It was fun! I hope I didn’t flub too many answers. I tend to speak in winding paragraphs, not in discrete and manageable sentences. Besides, it’s hard to compete with Alastair’s erudition—and that accent!

Check it out. And the Patreon, where there’s a +1 segment. Thanks again to the Mere Fi crew. I give all of you dear readers a big glorious exception to go and listen to them. They’ve got the best theology pod around. What a gift to be included on the fun.

The Church’s Book is here!

It’s here!

Or if you want a snazzy wrap-around image of the whole front and back matter…

The book is ready for order anywhere books are sold: Amazon, Bookshop, Eerdmans, elsewhere. Some websites may say that the publication date is May 24, but it’s available to be shipped at this moment—folks I know who pre-ordered it have already received a copy or are getting theirs by mail in a matter of days. And the Kindle edition will be available Tuesday next week, the 26th.

Here’s the book description:

What role do varied understandings of the church play in the doctrine and interpretation of Scripture? 

In The Church’s Book, Brad East explores recent accounts of the Bible and its exegesis in modern theology and traces the differences made by divergent, and sometimes opposed, theological accounts of the church. Surveying first the work of Karl Barth, then that of John Webster, Robert Jenson, and John Howard Yoder (following an excursus on interpreting Yoder’s work in light of his abuse), East delineates the distinct understandings of Scripture embedded in the different traditions that these notable scholars represent. In doing so, he offers new insight into the current impasse between Christians in their understandings of Scripture—one determined far less by hermeneutical approaches than by ecclesiological disagreements. 

East’s study is especially significant amid the current prominence of the theological interpretation of Scripture, which broadly assumes that the Bible ought to be read in a way that foregrounds confessional convictions and interests. As East discusses in the introduction to his book, that approach to Scripture cannot be separated from questions of ecclesiology—in other words, how we interpret the Bible theologically is dependent upon the context in which we interpret it.

Here are the blurbs:

“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

This book has been more than a decade in the making, being a major revision of my doctoral dissertation at Yale. It’s a pleasure and a relief to hold it in my hands. I’m so eager to see what others make of it. I’m especially grateful for it to be coming out so soon after the release last fall of The Doctrine of Scripture, my first book. The two are complementary volumes: one provides scholarly, theoretical, genealogical, and ecclesiological scaffolding; the other builds a constructive proposal on that basis. The sequence of their release reverses the order in which they were written, but that’s neither here nor there. Together, they comprise about 250,000 words on Christian theology of Holy Scripture and its interpretation. Add in my journal articles and you’ve got 300K words. That’s a lot, y’all. I hope a few folks find something worthwhile in them. Always in service to the church and, ultimately, to the glory of God.

What a joy it is to do this job. Very thankful this evening. Blessings.

Inoculation

Over the last year I’ve noticed something of a theme emerging on this blog. The theme is what people, especially Christians, and most of all well-educated Christians, feel permitted or pressured to believe (or not). I think a good deal of my experience of this phenomenon is a function of having lived for eight years outside of Texas or even the Bible belt—three years in Atlanta (technically the South but not exactly a small rural town in Louisiana) then five years in New Haven, Connecticut. At least weekly and sometimes daily a friend, a colleague, a pastor, or a student will remark in my presence about some topic, and invariably the remark reveals that s/he understands it to be outdated, unenlightened, or outlandish. As I wrote yesterday, usually the topic is one I care about and, indeed, the belief presumed to call for nothing so much as an eye-roll is one I myself hold.

I wrote last year about the existence of angels as a case study. At the very moment that certain aspirationally progressive (in west Texas “progressive” means “moderate-to-slightly-left-of-center on certain issues”) seminarians and pastors unburden themselves of belief in superstitious follies like angels—having belatedly received the decades-old message from third-rate demythologizers that celestial beings belong to a mythological age—at this moment, as I say, angels and demons are sexy again in academic scholarship. I could walk through the hallways of the most liberal seminaries in the country holding a sign that read “I believe in angels!” and from most professors it would elicit no more than a shrug. One more reminder that being intellectually in vogue is a moving target; best not to make the attempt in the first place.

But that’s not my point at present. I’ve already written about all that. Here’s my point.

I understand why people feel pressure to believe, or to cease to believe, in this or that old-fashioned thing. Likewise I understand why they assume that I—returning from a half-decade sojourn among the coastal elites, having pitched my tent in the Acela corridor, now with an Ivy doctorate in hand—not only share their up-to-date beliefs but will do them a solid by confirming them in their up-to-date-ness. I get it.

But the secret about having gotten my PhD at Yale isn’t that I learned the cutting edge and now live my life teetering on it. The opposite is the case. I didn’t journey to the Ivy League only to be disabused of all those silly beliefs I came in the door with—about God, Christ, Scripture, resurrection, and the rest. What I received was far better, if wholly unexpected.

What I received was inoculation.

What do I mean? I mean that I learned the invaluable intellectual lesson that knowledge, intelligence, and education are not a function of fads. I learned that substituting social trends for reasoned conviction is foolish. I learned that no one else can do your thinking for you. I learned that coordinating one’s own beliefs to the beliefs of an ever-changing and amorphous elite is a fool’s errand and a recipe for spiritual aimlessness. I learned that smart people are often wicked, and that sometimes even smart people are stupid—in the sense that raw intelligence is no match for wisdom, prudence, and practical reason.

Most of all, I learned that there are no “outdated” beliefs in Christian theology. As Hauerwas might put it, passé is not a theological category. Think of any doctrine or conviction that is particularly unhip today, or rarely spoken of, or even that you might be embarrassed to admit you believe in mixed company. At Yale, and in the circles of folks who criss-cross Ivy campuses and circuits and conferences, I met people who believed in every single one of those unfashionable doctrines, and they were the smartest, most well-read people I’ve ever met in my life. Certainly smarter and better read than I’ll ever be. To be clear, that fact alone doesn’t make them right: their frumpy beliefs may be erroneous. But the lesson isn’t that prestige or scholarly caliber validate theological ideas. The lesson, rather, is that the notion of some threshold of intelligence or erudition beyond which certain beliefs simply cannot across is a lie. Such a threshold does not exist.

In short, if what you want is for folks with an IQ above X or a PhD from Y to tell you what you’re allowed to believe while remaining a reasonable person, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that you can be a reasonable person and believe just about anything. No one above your rank is going to set the terms for what you’re permitted to suppose to be true about God, the world, and everything else. The good news is just a reiteration of these same truths, only in a different register: No one gets to make you feel bad for believing what you do. That’s not a license to believe untrue or foolish or evil things. It’s a liberation from feeling like personal conviction is a matter of not being made fun of by the Great and the Good peering over your shoulder, looking down their noses at you. Truth is not a popularity contest. Right belief does not follow from peer pressure. Be free. Be inoculated, as I was. Ever since leaving I’ve found myself blessedly rid of that low gnawing anxiety that someone is going to find me out, and what they’re going to find is that I’m a deplorable—not because what I believe is actually risible or indefensible, but because for about fifteen seconds of cultural time something I’d be willing to stake my life on (as I have, however falteringly) has become intellectually unstylish.

Style is deceptive, and the approval of the world is fleeting; but the one who fears the Lord will be praised. Fear God, not unpopularity. Your life as a whole will be happier, for one, but more than anything your intellectual life will benefit. Seek the truth for its own sake, and the rest will take care of itself.

The uses of conservatism

In the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks back Barton Swaim wrote a thoughtful review of two new books on political conservatism, one by Yoram Hazony and one by Matthew Continetti. The first is an argument for recovering what conservatism ought to be; the second, a history of what American conservatism has in fact been across the last century.

Swaim is appreciative of Hazony’s manifesto but is far more sympathetic to Continetti’s more pragmatic approach. Here are the two money paragraphs:

The essential thing to understand about American conservatism is that it is a minority persuasion, and always has been. Hence the term “the conservative movement”; nobody talks of a “liberal movement” in American politics, for the excellent reason that liberals dominated the universities, the media and the entertainment industry long before Bill Buckley thought to start a magazine. Mr. Continetti captures beautifully the ad hoc, rearguard nature of American conservatism. Not until the end of the book does he make explicit what becomes clearer as the narrative moves forward: “Over the course of the past century, conservatism has risen up to defend the essential moderation of the American political system against liberal excess. Conservatism has been there to save liberalism from weakness, woolly-headedness, and radicalism.”

American conservatism exists, if I could put it in my own words, to clean up the messes created by the country’s dominant class of liberal elites. The Reagan Revolution wasn’t a proper “revolution” at all but a series of conservative repairs, chief among them reforming a crippling tax code and revivifying the American economy. The great triumph of neoconservatism in the 1970s and ’80s was not the formulation of some original philosophy but the demonstration that liberal policies had ruined our cities. Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 and again in 1972 not by vowing to remake the world but by vowing to clean up the havoc created by Lyndon Johnson when he tried to remake Southeast Asia. George W. Bush would draw on a form of liberal idealism when he incorporated the democracy agenda into an otherwise defensible foreign policy—a rare instance of conservatives experimenting with big ideas, and look where it got them.

The three sentences in bold are, I think, the heart of Swaim’s point. Here’s my comment on his claim there.

At the descriptive level, I don’t doubt that it’s correct, if incomplete. At the normative level, however, it seems to me to prove, rather than confound, Hazony’s argument. For Hazony represents the conservative post-liberal critique of American conservatism, and that critique is this: American conservatism is a losing bet. It has no positive governing philosophy. It knows only what it stands against. Which is to say, the only word in its political vocabulary is “STOP!” (Along with, to be sure, Trilling’s “irritable mental gestures.”) Yet the truth is that it never stops anything. It merely delays the inevitable. In which case, American conservatism is good for nothing. For if progressives have a vision for what makes society good and that vision is irresistible, then it doesn’t matter whether that vision becomes reality today versus tomorrow. If all the conservative movement can do is make “tomorrow” more likely than “today,” might as well quit all the organizing and activism. Minor deferral isn’t much to write home about if you’re always going to lose eventually.

Besides, in the name of what exactly should such delay tactics be deployed? Surely there must be a positive vision grounding and informing such energetic protest? And if so, shouldn’t that be the philosophy—positive, not only negative; constructive, not only critical; explicit, not only implicit—the conservative movement rallies around, articulates, celebrates, and commends to the electorate?

Swaim is a prolific and insightful writer on these issues; not only does he have an answer to these questions, I’m sure he’s on the record somewhere. Nevertheless in this review there’s an odd mismatch between critique (of Hazony) and affirmation (of Continetti). If all the American conservative movement has got to offer is the pragmatism of the latter, then the philosophical reshuffling of the former is warranted—at least as a promissory note, in service of an ongoing intellectual project. That project is an imperfect and an unfinished one, but it’s far more interesting than the alternative. Whether we’re talking politics or ideas, we should always prefer the living to the walking dead.

“As we all know”

I have a friend who once told me of a professor he had in seminary. She instructed the class at the outset of the semester that, when they wrote their papers, she wanted them to imagine her peering over their shoulder. At every sentence featuring a claim, an assertion, or an assumption, they should imagine her asking them, “How do you know that?”

This bit of imaginative pedagogy might be a recipe for paper-writing anxiety, but it’s a good bit of writing advice. It’s a strong but necessary dose of epistemic humility. So little of what we take for granted is actually something we know, or at least can claim to know with some confidence, much less provide cogent reasons for knowing it. That’s not a problem in daily life most of the time. It’s rightly a matter for conscious attention in the academy, though.

I think of this anecdote regularly, for the following reason. In my experience, people consistently take for granted that they know in advance what I believe, including about the most important or controverted of matters. I don’t mean, say, that non-Christians assume I believe in God. That would be a reasonable assumption to make, given who I am and what I do. I mean fellow Christians who, because of my education or my profession or my reading habits or some other set of factors, project onto me beliefs regarding topics about which they have never heard me speak and about which I have never written.

It’s become a recurring phenomenon. Before commenting on a subject, a friend or acquaintance or colleague or person I’ve just met will either say aloud or imply, “As we all know…” or “As I’m sure you, like me, believe…” or “As any reasonable person would suppose…” or “Obviously…” or “We, unlike they, think…” or some similar formulation. I’ve come to learn that the phrase, spoken or unspoken, is a social cue. The other person is marking off the fearsome or foolish They from the wise or educated Us. Whatever the issue—usually moral, political, or theological—there is one self-evident Right Answer for People Like Us; but People Unlike Us (the dummies, the fundies, the voters or church folk who can’t be trusted) think otherwise, for some inexplicable reason. Typically the implication is that They are bad people; or, even more condescendingly, They would surely agree with Us if only They had (Our) education. Bless Their hearts, if only They knew better!

What’s remarkable is that, nine times out of town, the belief my interlocutor is attributing to Them is in fact my own. If I were inclined to take offense, I could do so with justice. I’m not so inclined, however, for the simple reason that I’m secure in my own convictions. I don’t need to roll my eyes at those I disagree with in order to feel confident in what I believe to be true. Nor do I need to whisper about Them in mock-conspiratorial or patronizing tones. After all, one thing all my education has done for me is show me how far from obvious any answer to any question is, certainly those questions that animate and roil our common life. People who think I’m wrong aren’t stupid; nor are they ignorant. They’ve merely come to a different judgment about a complex question than the one I have. Logically, I think they’re wrong just as they think I’m wrong; one of us is right (unless both of us are wrong and someone else is right), and this calls for humility, because it’s difficult to say in the moment, from the midst of one’s all-too-parochial life, whether one’s reasons for one’s beliefs are strong, weak, or just post hoc justifications for what one wishes were true or was raised to believe.

In any case, what most fascinates me here is the social phenomenon of presumptive projection onto others of what they must believe, given their intelligence, education, career, or what have you. I’m struck by the sheer lack of curiosity on display. People rarely ask me, directly, what I think about X or Y. Not that they don’t want to talk about it (whatever it is). Usually, though, they dance around the issue; or they assume they know what I think, and take the trouble to inform me of it. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I began, however so gently, to commit the faux pas of pausing the conversation in order to clarify, in no uncertain terms, that the Bad Belief my interlocutor has so passionately forced onto a Benighted They is actually my own. I almost always avoid doing so, since it would likely embarrass the other person, make him feel defensive, ruin the chat we were having , etc. On the other hand, it might actually make for a deeper and richer encounter, not least because here, in the flesh, would be a member of Team Stupid—ask me anything! A real education might ensue, in which it would become evident (using the same word in a different vein) that the world isn’t divided into stupid and smart groups, the latter tolerating the former with magnanimous mercy. This might also encourage avoiding such presumption in the future, and seeking to learn and to understand what other people believe and why.

Then again, maybe not. Regardless, the experience is a lesson in itself. Don’t assume you know what others think, and don’t carve up your neighbors into Good and Evil. Allow yourself to be surprised. People you love and respect have different beliefs than you. Formal education is not a one-way ticket to enlightenment, where “enlightenment” means “believe the same things as you.” Be curious. Ask away. You might learn a thing or two. You might even find one day that your mind has been changed. Imagine that.

Webinar: God’s Living Word

Earlier this week I was honored to participate in a live webinar hosted by the Siburt Institute for Church Ministry, which is a part of the College of Biblical Studies here at ACU. The webinar was in a series called Intersection; the topic was Scripture, using my book published last year as a point of departure. The conversation was hosted by Carson Reed and Randy Harris and lasted about an hour. It was a pleasure to participate. I’ve embedded the video below, but you can also find it here and here. Enjoy.

The vanity of theologians

The love of God in Christ is the model of all good theological work. That is Barth's basic thesis: “If the object of theological knowledge is Jesus Christ and, in him, perfect love, then Agape alone can be the dominant and formative prototype and principle of theology.” Yet who among us would claim to consistently meet this standard? It is one thing to agree that teaching ought to be an act of self-emptying love on behalf of students, but quite another to teach that way. And while each of us falls short of this ideal in our own ways, Barth draws our attention to an especially corrosive vice that commonly infects us. The illness presents as, among other things, an excessive concern for our reputations; a morbid craving for praise; a narcissistic pretentiousness combined with insecurity; a relentless desire to outdo our colleagues and to broadcast our accomplishments; a loveless envy when others succeed; and a gloomy anxiety about our legacies, about how people will remember and evaluate us when we're dead. The vice, of course, is vanity, and Barth considers it a menacing threat to theologians.

To put it simply, Barth thinks a vain theologian is an embodied contradiction of the gospel and the very antithesis of Jesus Christ himself. And he doesn't care how obvious this is. Barth doesn't care that making fun of self-important theologians is by now a tired cliché. He knows that vanity disables us, and because of that he is willing to sound the alarm. And we would do well not to evade his critique by dismissing it as moralistic or judgmental or whatever. . . .

It is tempting to interpret passages like these as nothing more than Barth's way of deflecting the ocean of praise that was being directed at him toward the end of his life. He was, after all, the most famous theologian in the world. When he traveled to America to give the first five lectures in Evangelical Theology, Time magazine put him on its cover. Or perhaps one sees in these statements a tacit admission that Barth did not always manage to live up to his own standards, and that is certainly true. But Barth is aiming these passages at us too, and only an instinct for self-protection would lead us to think otherwise. Because if he wasn't troubled by our desire for greatness, he wouldn't aggressively remind us that we are nothing more than “little theologians.” He wouldn't criticize us for being more interested in the question “Who is the greatest among us?” than we are in the “plain and modest question about the matter at hand.” If he wasn't worried about the way we inflate ourselves by demeaning our rivals, he wouldn't ask why there are “so many really woeful theologians who go around with faces that are eternally troubled or even embittered, always in a rush to bring forward their critical reservations and negations?” And he wouldn't keep reminding us that evangelical theology is modest theology if he wasn't distressed by our immodesty—by the serenely confident way we make definitive pronouncements, even as we theoretically agree that all theological speech is limited and subject to revision. You don't write passages like the ones in this book unless you are concerned by how easily theologians confuse zealous pursuit of the truth with zealous pursuit of their own glory. It would not be far off to say that Barth's examination of this theme is something like a gloss on Jesus’s claim that you cannot simultaneously work for praise from God and praise from people. You can seek one or the other, but not both.

It is important to see that Barth is not taking cheap shots at theologians here. Yes, he is giving us strong medicine, but he is giving it to us because he thinks vanity turns us into the kind of people whose lives obscure the truth people who make the gospel less rather than more plausible. We cannot, of course, make the gospel less true. God is God, and the truth is the truth, and nothing we do can change that. But Barth understands the role that the existence of the community plays in both the perception and concealment of truth. “The community does not speak with words alone,” he writes. “It speaks by the very fact of its existence in the world.” There's what we say, and then there's who we are, and who we are says something.

And the connection with teaching is obvious. We believe that God sometimes uses flawed and sinful people like ourselves to make himself known. Since those are the only kind of people there are, those are the kind God uses. But how compelling could it possibly be for our students to hear us say, for example, that the Christian life is a life of self-giving that conforms to Jesus Christ's own life, or that the church lives to point away from itself to its Lord, when at the same time they see us carefully managing our CVs, ambitiously seeking acclaim and advancement, and morbidly competing with one another in exactly the same cutthroat ways that people in every academic discipline compete with one another? It doesn't add up. Arcade Fire is right: it’s absurd to trust a millionaire quoting the Sermon on the Mount. And it’s no less absurd for students to trust vain theologians when they talk about a crucified God. 

I know this is not everyone's problem. Some readers don't need to hear this. They struggle with other vices. But anyone who has read the Gospels knows that Jesus goes out of his way to address this problem. Speaking specifically about teachers, he says, “They do all their deeds to be seen by others. . . . They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats . . . and to be greeted with respect . . . and to have people call them [teacher]. . . . [But] the greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Matt. 23:1–12). In Luke 14 Jesus tells his disciples that following him requires giving up their possessions, and for many of us, the possession we covet most, the thing we cling to like greedy misers, is our reputation.

—Adam Neder, Theology as a Way of Life: On Teaching and Learning the Christian Faith (Baker Academic, 2019), 64-70

Four loves follow-up

Consider the following portrait, all of whose modifiers are meant descriptively rather than critically or even pejoratively:

A man in his 20s or 30s who is godless, friendless, fatherless, childless, sexless, unmarried, and unpartnered, and who has no active relationship with a sibling, cousin, aunt, uncle, or grandparent. We will assume he is not motherless—everyone has (had) a mother—but we might also add that he lacks a healthy relationship with her or that he lives far away from her.

This, in extreme form, is the picture of loveless life I described in the last post, using the fourfold love popularized by C. S. Lewis: kinship, eros, friendship, and agape.

Here’s my question. In human history, apart from extreme crises brought about by natural disaster or famine or war or plague, has there even been a generation as full of such men (or women) as the present generation? The phenomenon is far from limited to “the West.” It includes Russia, Japan, and China, among others. Young people without meaningful relationships of any kind, anywhere on the grid of the four loves. They lack entirely the love of a god, the love of a spouse, the love of a child, the love of a friend, even the love of a parent.

On one hand, it seems I can’t go a day without reading a new story about this phenomenon; it’s on my mind this week because I just finished Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism. Yet, on the other hand, the crisis we are facing seems so massive, so epochal, so devastating, so unprecedented, so complex, that in truth we can’t talk about it enough. We need to be shouting the problem aloud from the rooftops like a crazy end-times street preacher.

But what is to be done? That’s the question that haunts me. Whatever the answers, we should be laboring with all that we have to find them. The stakes are as high as they get.

Four loves loss

More than sixty year ago C. S. Lewis wrote a book called The Four Loves. Ever since, his framework has proven a reliable and popular paradigm for thinking about different aspects or modes of love. The terms he uses are storge, eros, philia, and agape; we might loosely translate these as kinship, romance, friendship, and self-giving to and for the other. They denote the love that obtains between members of a family, between spouses in a marriage, between close friends, and between humans and God. (This last category is my own gloss; agape is, for Lewis and for the Christian tradition, the love God displays in Christ and thus the exemplary cause of both our love for him and our love for others.)

A thought occurred to me about these four loves, and I wonder if anyone else has written about it.

Our society is awash in loneliness, apathy, despair, and even sexlessness. The youngest generations (“Gen Z” and Millennials) are marrying later or not at all, and (thus) having fewer children or none at all. Divorce is rampant. Kin networks are declining in both quantity and quality, and what remains is fraying at the seams. Regular attendance of church (or synagogue, or mosque) reached historically low numbers before Covid; the pandemic has supercharged these trends beyond recognition. Even friendship, the last dependable and universal form of love, has seen drastic reductions, especially for men. I heard one sociologist, a middle-aged woman, remark recently that our young men are beset by “the three P’s: pot, porn, and PlayStation.” You can’t open an internet browser without stumbling upon the latest news report, study finding, or op-ed column on opioids, deaths of despair, hollowed-out factory towns, fatherless children, lethargic boys, screen-addled kids, housebound teens, risk-averse young adults, social awkwardness, and all the other symptoms of a sad, isolated, and unloved generation. They are like a car alarm ringing through the night. Eventually you get used to it and go back to sleep.

I don’t have anything especially insightful to say about any of this. But I found that, as Lewis’s book came to mind in conjunction with these trends, his framework suggested itself as a useful analytical grid. Perhaps one way to judge whether an individual is flourishing today is whether she can point confidently to the presence of all four loves in her life. A dense and supportive familial network of parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles; a spouse and children of her own; concentric circles of friends who know her well, whom she sees regularly in a variety of settings, and on whom she can rely; a church to she belongs and where she consistently worships and enjoys the presence of the God who created her and continues to sustain her, day by day.

In a sense it’s all too obvious: this description simply transposes into the vernacular the native grammar of the sociologist. We’ve been “bowling alone”—not to mention working alone, dating alone, praying alone—for some decades now; this is nothing new.

Granted! At least for me, though, using the four loves is a helpful way to identify the different ways in which certain loves are present or absent in one’s own life or in the lives of others. I can think off hand of any number of folks who can only count one or two or three of the four loves in their lives. Most of the twentysomethings I know who aren’t uber-churchgoers (as some of my students are—glory be) lack agape, storge, and eros; all they have are friends, and even then, those friends are good for little more than happy hour drinks after work or a concert or club on the weekend. In other words, they barely amount to friends at all.

The Lewis framework also helps us to see the feedback loop of love. Kinship, marriage, friendship, and church (again, feel free to substitute some other religious tradition; I admit readily that I am identifying the institution of religious piety with love for God, for it is in institutions that we embody our loves) each and all reinforce the others. And where one love is absent by unchosen fact—as for those who wish they were married, or whose parents are abusive, or who wish they had more or better friends—the other three loves (a) offer support for what is lacking or lost and (b) provide durable structures in which to persevere and, hopefully, to rectify or supplement the absent love in question.

Peter Maurin once remarked that we ought to labor to forge a society “where it is easier to be good.” That is, the laws and norms, institutions and habits of our common life ought to conduce to virtue—honesty, courage, prudence, kindness, justice, piety—rather than vice. We are social creatures, after all. Likewise we ought to make it our collective aim to build a culture where it is easier to discover, to receive, and to share in the four loves. A world in which the four loves “came easier” would be a world worth living in and working for. Unfortunately, we seem to have done the opposite.

Deposits of mercy

Tidal

By R. S. Thomas

The waves run up the shore
and fall back. I run
up the approaches of God
and fall back. The breakers return
reaching a little further,
gnawing away at the main land.
They have done this thousands
of years, exposing little by little
the rock under the soil’s face.
I must imitate them only
in my return to the assault,
not in their violence. Dashing
my prayers at him will achieve
little other than the exposure
of the rock under his surface.
My returns must be made
on my knees. Let despair be known
as my ebb-tide; but let prayer
have its springs, too, brimming,
disarming him; discovering somewhere
among his fissures deposits of mercy
where trust may take root and grow.

I’m in Comment on ed tech

This morning Comment published my review essay of Audrey Watters’ latest book Teaching Machines. The title of the essay is “Unlearning Machines.” Here’s how it opens:

Audrey Watters is a prophet. Prophets aren’t fortune tellers, however. The main business of prophets, even in the Bible, isn’t the future. It’s the present. Better to say: it’s the set of possible futures that are liable to follow from crucial choices made in the present. Israel’s prophets brought a word from God to the people of God, and that word was—as it always is for prophets, including Jesus—repent. To repent means to turn, to veer right rather than left, to take this branch on the decision tree, not that one, to see the fork in the road for what it is: an opportunity, probably the last, to avoid disaster. Because disaster is what awaits if you continue on the current path.

True, Watters is a secular prophet. She doesn’t speak on God’s behalf or for the sake of a chosen people. But like Amos, she brings a word of judgment to the powers that be. Those powers she calls Ed Tech. And like the nations against which Amos railed, Ed Tech is a bastion of avarice and injustice. It grinds the faces of the poor into the dust.

Ed Tech is short for education technology. Think Zoom, “learning management systems,” online anti-cheating software. At first glance those might seem harmless enough. Allow Watters to dissuade you. She has a decade’s worth of work with which to do so. Sometimes it seems she has the beat all to herself, a one-woman journalistic gadfly buzzing around the behemoths and motherships of Silicon Valley. Unswattable, she maintains a blog, Hack Education, and has self-published several collections of talks and essays. In August MIT Press published her latest book, Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, which she wrote as part of a fellowship at Columbia University.

Click here to read the rest. Let me add for the record that editor Brian Dijkema is a mensch. He’s edited me three times now for Comment and every time both the substance of the piece and its style is vastly improved. (“Plain English, Brad, plain English!”) Also, if you read the whole thing you’ll have the pleasure of stumbling upon a sentence that contains “some kind of Burkean phlegm,” which I trust is a phrase I’m the first to have used. I certainly enjoyed writing it.

I’m in CT on the conquest

I’m in Christianity Today with a review of Charlie Trimm’s new book, The Destruction of the Canaanites: God, Genocide, and Biblical Interpretation. Here’s how it opens:

There is a problem with the Old Testament. At a key juncture in salvation history, the God of Abraham commandeers one nation in order to destroy another. The aggressor nation attacks the second nation because God has judged the latter guilty. The aggressor is merciless, sparing neither women nor children, expelling the inhabitants from their land, and destroying sacred sites and symbols of religious practice—in effect, wiping them off the map. And, according to the Hebrew scriptures, all this happened by the terrible will of the sovereign Lord of Hosts.

It is a harrowing moment in the history of God’s people. But I am not referring to the conquest of Canaan by the tribes of Israel. I am referring to the assault on the northern kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians (a little over 700 years before the birth of Jesus) and the campaign against the southern kingdom, especially the city of Jerusalem and its temple, by the Babylonians about 130 years later.

Click here to keep reading. The book is excellent and I hope pastors and professors use it going forward. I also hope readers understand, once they finish the essay, that the opening line of the review is ironic.

Six months without podcasts

Last September I wrote a half-serious, half-tongue-in-cheek post called “Quit Podcasts.” There I followed my friend Matt Anderson’s recommendation to “Quit Netflix” with the even more unpopular suggestion to quit listening to podcasts. As I say in the post, the suggestion was two-thirds troll, one-third sincere. That is, I was doing some public teasing, poking the bear of everyone’s absolutely earnest obsession with listening to The Best Podcasts all day every day. Ten years ago, in a group of twentysomethings, the conversation would eventually turn to what everyone was watching. These days, in a group of thirtysomethings, the conversation inexorably turns to podcasts. So yes, I was having a bit of fun.

But not only fun. After 14 years of listening to podcasts on a more or less daily basis, I was ready for something new. Earlier in the year I’d begun listening to audiobooks in earnest, and in September I decided to give up podcasts for audiobooks for good—or at least, for a while, to see how I liked it. Going back and forth between audiobooks and podcasts had been fine, but when the decision is between a healthy meal and a candy bar, you’re usually going to opt for the candy bar. So I cut out the treats and opted for some real food.

That was six months ago. How’s the experiment gone? As well as I could have hoped for. Better, in fact. I haven’t missed podcasts once, and it’s been nothing but a pleasure making time for more books in my life.

Now, before I say why, I suppose the disclaimer is necessary: Am I pronouncing from on high that no one should listen to podcasts, or that all podcasts are merely candy bars, or some such thing? No. But: If you relate to my experience with podcasts, and you’re wondering whether you might like a change, then I do commend giving them up. To paraphrase Don Draper, it will shock you how much you won’t miss them, almost like you never listened to them in the first place.

So why has it been so lovely, life sans pods? Let me count the ways.

1. More books. In the last 12 months I listened to two dozen works of fiction and nonfiction by C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton alone. Apart from the delight of reading such wonderful classics again, what do you think is more enriching for my ears and mind? Literally any podcast produced today? Or Lewis/Chesterton? The question answers itself.

2. Not just “more” books, but books I wouldn’t otherwise have made the time to read. I listened to Fahrenheit 451, for example. I hadn’t read it since middle school. I find that I can’t do lengthy, complex, new fiction on audio, but if it’s a simple story, or on the shorter side, or one whose basic thrust I already understand, it goes down well. I’ve been in a dystopian mood lately, and felt like revisiting Bradbury, Orwell, Huxley, et al. But with a busy semester, sick kids, long evenings, finding snatches of time in which to get a novel in can be difficult. But I always have to clean the house and do the dishes. Hey presto! Done and done. Many birds with one stone.

3. Though I do subscribe to Audible (for a number of reasons), I also use Libby, which is a nice way to read/listen to new books without buying them. That’s what I did with Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks—another book that works well on audio. I’ve never been much of a local library patron, except for using university libraries for academic books. This is one way to patronize my town’s library system while avoiding spending money I don’t have on books I may not read anytime soon.

4. I relate to Tyler Cowen’s self-description as an “infogore.” Ever since I was young I have wanted to be “in the know.” I want to be up to date. I want to have read and seen and heard all the things. I want to be able to remark intelligently on that op-ed or that Twitter thread or that streaming show or that podcast. Or, as it happens, that unprovoked war in eastern Europe. But it turns out that Rolf Dobelli is right. I don’t need to know any of that. I don’t need to be “in the know” at all. Seven-tenths is evanescent. Two-tenths is immaterial to my life. One-tenth I’ll get around to knowing at some point, though even then I will, like everyone else, overestimate its urgency.

That’s what podcasts represent to me: either junk food entertainment or substantive commentary on current events. To the extent that that is what podcasts are, I am a better person—a less anxious, more contemplative, more thoughtful, less showy—for having given them up.

Now, does this description apply to every podcast? No. And yet: Do even the “serious” podcasts function in this way more often than we might want to admit? Yes.

In any case, becoming “news-resilient,” to use Burkeman’s phrase, has been one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time. My daily life is not determined by headlines—print, digital, or aural. Nor do I know what the editors at The Ringer thought of The Batman, or what Ezra Klein thinks of Ukraine, or what the editors at National Review think of Ukraine. The truth is, I don’t need to know. Justin E. H. Smith and Paul Kingsnorth are right: the number of people who couldn’t locate Ukraine on a map six weeks ago who are now Ukraine-ophiles with strong opinions about no-fly zones and oil sanctions would be funny, if the phenomenon of which they are a part weren’t so dangerous.

I don’t have an opinion about Ukraine, except that Putin was wrong to invade, is unjust for having done so, and should stop immediately. Besides praying for the victims and refugees and for an immediate cessation to hostilities, there is nothing else I can do—and I shouldn’t pretend otherwise. That isn’t a catchall prohibition, as though others should not take the time, slowly, to learn about the people of Ukraine, Soviet and Russian history, etc., etc. Anyone who does that is spending their time wisely.

But podcasts ain’t gonna cut it. Even the most sober ones amount to little more than propaganda. And we should all avoid that like the plague, doubly so in wartime.

The same goes for Twitter. But then, I quit that last week, too. Are you sensing a theme? Podcasts aren’t social media, but they aren’t not social media, either. And the best thing to do with all of it is simple.

Sign off.

Lecture recording: “The Word of the Lord”

A few weeks back I delivered a lecture here in Abilene for the Center for the Study of Ancient Religious Texts, at the cordial invitation of my colleague Jeff Childers, who is a world-class scholar of ancient and Syriac Christianity in the Graduate School of Theology. The lecture is an amalgamation of a few different sections of my book The Doctrine of Scripture, but it is also followed by 20-30 minutes of Q&A. Thanks to CSART for having me and to all the students, colleagues, and friends in town who attended. It was a pleasure.

The link above will take you to the CSART page hosting the video. Here is the link straight to Vimeo. If I can figure out how to embed it below, I’ll do so. Enjoy.

Double literacy loss, 2

A few more reflections following my previous post on the double loss of literacy in young people today: that is, the loss of ambient or default biblical literacy together with the loss of literal literacy, by which I mean the well-developed habits, eager interest, and requisite attention for sustained personal reading—of anything at all.

1. My main point had to do with evangelism and apologetics. Namely, clarifying a Bible young people are supposed to already know or introducing them to Jesus by means of close biblical study is not going to be the principal inroads for new conversions. They don’t know the Bible yet, and they lack any of the external conditions or internal habits necessary to come to know the Bible in a deep way through consistent deep private reading. If young people are going to come to the faith for the first time in the coming decades (that is, in our culture, the culture as it is, not some other culture at some other time in some other place), then most of them will not do so through Bible study.

2. My secondary point had to do with the role of personal Bible reading in young people’s daily spiritual lives, now and as they get older. There, too, I think our paradigm must change. They aren’t going to be super-readers, masters of the sacred page, the way our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers were. The days of the 82-year old church lady whose dog-eared pages of the KJV or NIV testify to her lifelong near-memorization of vast portions of Scripture—I’m not saying there won’t be any of them, I’m just saying that there will be fewer; and more to the point, the ambient culture that produced scores of them is no longer extant. The octogenarian wizard of the canon doesn’t appear fully-formed. She is the product of an extraordinarily concentrated and powerful formation from birth. Whereas what we are going to be dealing with, by and large, is either non-reading young people who’ve been raised in church but don’t know Achan from Abram from Adam from Absalom; or new converts to the faith who are beginning to live as disciples of Christ in their twenties or thirties—oh, and again, they don’t read in their spare time. Which means, as I say, that we must reimagine what role Scripture will and should play in their lives. If we don’t, then we’ll suppose they’re failures, since they’re not super-students of the word the way past generations were, all the while failing to equip them in the ways actually available to us.

3. None of this entails decentering Holy Scripture from the life of the church. To the extent that we take for granted that daily private Bible reading is synonymous with centering Scripture in the church’s life, we must realize that this is nothing more than an assumption, a contingent prejudice built on a particular historical moment and its attendant cultural conditions—none of which are universal, none of which are intrinsic to the faith. It’s time, as I said in the original post, to get to work rethinking how to be people, and how to train our youth to be people, of the word of God.

4. One route here is worship. Worship by definition ought to be drenched in the word of God through and through. If our young people are coming to church on Sunday, then we should see that time as our one, perhaps our only, opportunity to expose them to the truth and beauty and goodness of Scripture. So let’s not waste our chance. Let’s make sure they are hearing—hearing! I did not say opening their Bible and reading—long stretches of every part of the Bible read aloud: the Law, the prophets, the Psalms, the epistles, the Gospels, all of it. Trust the Spirit to do the principal work here. Let the word dwell in their and our midst. The sermon has a role, but it need not be anxious to explain (much less explain away) everything. The words are the vehicle of the Word. Let him do the work they’re meant to do: in this case, to elicit faith, to instruct, to edify, the convict.

5. Another route, then, is the sermon. And here is where my post dovetails with, rather than contradicts, a curious phenomenon these days. That phenomenon is the simultaneously decreasing and increasing length of sermons. Many churches I know have, over the years, slowly shrunk the sermon from 35 to 25 to 18 minutes or so. At the same time, I know of plenty of churches, and they are often communities that are “growing young” (i.e., attracting the 18-to-35 crowd), whose sermons stretch from 30 to 40 to 50 minutes long. Why? Precisely because they know the young people coming to worship do not know God’s word—so they provide it to them. The people are hungry, so these churches are feeding them. And the young people keep coming. Often the sermons are anti-pyrotechnic, even shockingly boring and tedious in their expository details. But starving people will eat anything; indeed, starving people know that what they need above all is sustenance. They’re not picky. Pastors and priests and preachers here see the opportunity: they are modern analogues to Ezra’s colleagues, walking among the people, giving the sense of God’s word, which on first hearing may be hard to grasp. If this generation’s literacy is doubly gone—few bits of Bible knowledge and fewer habits of private reading—then it’s the church’s job to give them the Bible, even if it’s from the pulpit for a full hour straight. Sounds to me like the leaders of these churches are being faithful missionaries to their context.

6. A third route is Bible class. Again, I want to be clear that my diagnosis of the double loss of literacy is not an excuse to cease, much less avoid, teaching the Bible to our children and young adults. It’s the opposite. It must begin, however, with the honest recognition not just that they don’t know the Bible already, but also that they are not, for the most part, going to engage in disciplined habits of sustained study of the Bible at home, in their daily lives. We’d have to nuke the internet from orbit for that to happen. So long as smartphones and social media dominate the attention spans of our young people (and our older adults as well), serious focused study of the canon among normie Christians is going to be the exception, not the rule. But once again, we have to wake up to the fact that any assumption otherwise is a historically exceptional one, distant from the ecclesial norm. Historically, most believers have been functionally illiterate and/or without possession of a personal pandect Bible. Where did they hear God’s word? In gathered worship. How did they learn about or study the Bible, if at all? In a room with other believers, under the wise guidance of a trusted teacher. So for today, and only more so in the coming years. That means reinvesting in Sunday school and Bible class, not discarding it as an artifact of bygone days. But the impulse to discard it is right insofar as “Sunday morning Bible class” suggests a group of Bible-knowing, physical Bible–carrying adult readers coming to church with very specific expectations for what study and learning means. Reinvesting in Sunday school therefore means reconsidering what it ought to look like going forward. Even our screen-addled youth can come to learn the broad story, the main characters, the central plot and subplots, the overarching themes, the fundamental doctrines of Holy Scripture. How we teach them these things, by what strategies, to what end—that is the question.

7. The singular error to avoid in coming to accept this double loss of literacy is the instinct to dumb down and de-biblicize both worship and church in general. What such an error looks like in practice is minimizing in the extreme all references to and exposition of Scripture. It means reducing the sermon to a brief talk and/or stripping it of depth and riches—not just a talk but a TED talk. It means ridding the service of both word and sacrament, so that worship becomes, in effect, one long concert. It’s true that plenty of young people will come for that. But if that’s all the church has to offer, there are better concerts than ours available out in the world. Eventually they will tire of the show. The church must be more than a show. Shoring up our celebration of word and sacrament, albeit in a register and in rituals and practices that show sensitive attunement to the circumstances and daily habits of the next generation: that’s the mission.

Lent: no Twitter + new piece in FT

As promised a few weeks back, I deactivated my Twitter profile this morning. (I thought to link to it and then realized … there’s nothing to link to!) It’s the first time I’ve done so since creating an account nine years ago. It was reading Thomas à Kempis that spurred me seriously to contemplate it; then it was reading Bonhoeffer for class this morning that prompted me just to get it over with already. Mortify the flesh, doubly so when that mortification is digital.

So you won’t see me on Twitter between now and Easter. We’ll see if I reappear after that. TBD.

While I’m at it, though, I’ve got a little piece over in First Things today. It’s about Ash Wednesday, naturally, and it’s called “Marked by Death.” While you’re there, read Peter Leithart’s lovely, moving reflection on the silence of Jesus in St. Matthew’s Gospel.

A blessed Lent to all of you.

Double literacy loss

Last week I was asked by a graduate student the following question: In today’s culture, what is the biggest challenge for Christians in attempting to steward and share the scriptures with the next generation—whether within the church or without?

This was a very helpful question to be forced to face head on. I’m not especially good at apologetics, either in practice or at the level of theory. But a concise answer occurred to me that I’ve been reflecting on since I gave it.

The biggest challenge, it seems to me, is a sort of double loss of literacy.

First is biblical literacy. For centuries this has been the ambient culture of Western societies, including the United States. Whether or not this or that individual was a Christian, the default setting around him or her was inflected by the Bible: its stories, its characters, its plots, its very verbiage. Read public speeches from the nineteenth century. They are positively studded with allusions to the Bible. A Bible nerd from 2022 wouldn’t catch them all. But a barely literate teenager in 1822 might have. That’s what “biblical literacy” means. Even a generation ago at my own institution, students came in with impressive knowledge of the Bible. Today, not so much—even from students who are committed Christians, having attended church all their lives.

But that’s not the only challenge, or rather, the only loss of literacy.

The second is literal literacy. People under 25 today, including those who earn high school and college and even graduate degrees, including those who get A’s and B’s and generally “succeed” at school, do not read. That is to say, they are not readers. For most of them, perhaps nearly all of them, sitting still with a book for 30 minutes, much less two or three hours, is either wishful thinking or a nightmare. One gets itchy after five minutes at most. Check for mentions, check for texts, check for DMs, refresh the feed, refresh the inbox, send a Snap, send a Polo, stream a video, play a game—the options are endless. This presumes one is already sitting down, book in hand, ready and even eager to read. That’s too much. Nine times out of ten down time is the same as it always is, every evening and late into the night: watching a show on a streaming service and/or YouTube, assuming all the social media and communication with friends are turned off (which they aren’t).

None of this is meant as criticism. Don’t (yet) imagine me as an old man waving my cane at the youngsters to get off my lawn. My register here is not pejorative. It’s purely descriptive. Teenagers and twentysomethings today, by and large, are not readers. By which I mean, they are not readers of books. They read endlessly, as a matter of fact, but their reading takes place in 5-15 second chunks of time on a glowing device, before the next image or swipe or alert restarts the clock. Minds trained on this from a young age simply lack the stamina, not to mention the desire, to read for pleasure for sustained stretches of time.

In a prior age of mass education and biblical literacy, one largely devoid of screens, literal literacy was crucial for apologetics as well as evangelism and discipleship, because it meant that the necessary conditions for coming to have a direct experience of and relationship with the Bible were in place. It meant too that, often if not always, a primary entry point for reaching someone with the gospel was studying the Bible with them. For their own preexisting habits, as well as their inherited mental atmosphere, conduced to support the reception of Bible reading in their daily lives. Getting to know the God of Christian faith and reading the sacred book of Christian faith were convertible; to do one was to do the other.

No longer. And it seems to me a profound error—the older generation “always fighting the last war,” as the saying goes—to assume that this once apt or successful strategy is a fitting approach moving forward. Even if you were to convince a 17-year old curious about Jesus that the Bible is the way to learn about Jesus, why assume that she will now do something she never otherwise does, namely spend hours in deliberate demanding literary study, in order to keep learning about him on her own? That’s a bad bet. Assume rather that she likes the idea of doing so but will never quite find the time to get around to it.

What does this mean for evangelism and discipleship today? For reaching the next generation with the riches and truths of Holy Scripture?

An answer to the second question will have to wait for another day. Partly I simply don’t know; partly a proper answer is too big for this blog post, perhaps for any such post.

As for evangelism and discipleship: What it means, negatively, is that the Bible will not, for most young people, be the principal means thereof. Which means, positively, that something else will be. Not that the Bible will be uninvolved. Only that it won’t (usually) be the point of entry, and it won’t (directly) play the starring role.

What will? So far as I can tell, the answer is liturgy, friendship, witness, and service. That is to say, the sacramental life of tight-knit Christian community in mutual support and external care. The Bible will and must saturate such a life, from top to bottom and beginning to end. Such a life will be dead on arrival if the testimony of the apostles and prophets does not animate it from within and at all times.

Nevertheless this role is different than the role the Bible has had in churches, especially “low” Protestant churches, these last two or three centuries. It will take some getting used to. It’s time we got started, though. The double loss of literacy is a fait accompli. It’s a done deal and already in the rear view mirror. The only question is whether we respond, and how. We can mourn and bemoan the loss, recalling the good old days. Or we can get to work.

I say let’s get to work.

Burkeman’s atelic self-help

Oliver Burkeman’s new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, is well worth your time. It is a splendid meditation on what it means to be a finite creature and what follows for making decisions, down to the most mundane, about how to spend one’s vanishingly small allotment of hours in this, our only world, with this, our only life. Like all Burkeman’s writing, the book is crisp, clear, well-researched, offered to the reader with a sincere smile of solidarity as well as a light touch. Like his other exercises in anti-self-help, Four Thousand Weeks is a gold mine for people obsessed with productivity, self-improvement, and endless to-do lists. That gold mine has a simple goal: for such people to cut it out. That is, to accept their limitations and to do what they are able, with pleasure, in the time they have with the people they love and the values they affirm. For the efficiency-obsessed, this message is doubtless a necessary tonic.

As I approached the end of the book, however, a single glaring weakness stuck out to me. It is a weakness shared by other entries in the genre today, including the very best. That weakness is simply put.

Neither Burkeman nor his other self-help authors can tell us the purpose or meaning of life.

Now, that may sound like rather unfair criticism. Who among us can articulate the purpose or meaning of life? Must it fit in a tweet? Be reducible to clickbait? How about the long title of a memoir?

But no, I’m not being unfair. Here’s why.

Burkeman wants his readers to see two things. First, that our lives are far shorter, far more limited, far less consequential, in a sense far less significant than we usually want to admit. We will almost certainly make no lasting difference in the world. The world will keep on spinning; the human race and/or the earth and/or the universe will endure perfectly well in our absence.

And that is true. But Burkeman goes on, second, to insist that this dose of reality is not (or should not be) depressing or frightening. Rather, it is a revelation, and a liberating one at that. It frees me from my narcissistic and false sense of my own self-importance. It bursts the bonds of my illusion of infinitude. Emancipated to see and accept my limits, I am enabled thereafter (and thereby) to live within them. And surely to live within the hard limits that bracket my life, whether or not I believe in them, is a recipe for happiness by comparison to the alternative.

But that “surely” is doing a lot of work in the previous sentence. Burkeman provides not one reason to suppose that human beings are built for happiness, living in accordance with our finitude or otherwise. Perhaps, instead, we have been programmed by natural selection to live a lie, the lie being our unbound immortality, and only so long as we believe in that are we (a) satisfied and/or (b) maximally productive. Perhaps we achieve great things only when we believe falsehoods about ourselves, our desires, or the world as a whole. Burkeman appears to be agnostic or atheist himself, which means that he must believe this to some extent. For most of civilization’s highest accomplishments—in music, art, architecture, and so on—have been conceived and produced by communities driven by zeal for God, for transcendence, for eternal life. Are we in a position to know, even and especially if we are secular believers in no intrinsic purpose apart from what remains after natural selection has done its work, that such ostensible illusions are not the requisite (false) premises for human and cultural greatness, not to mention happiness?

The answer is No, we are not. But there is more to say.

*

Burkeman rightly remarks on the pleasures of “atelic” practices. Walking in the woods, for example. There is no “point” to such a walk except the walk itself. It doesn’t lead to a product; there is no “winning” at such an endeavor. It is nothing but itself, and experiencing it is the only point of the practice: the telos is the doing of it, not something beyond or following it.

The problem is that Burkeman supposes, or assumes, that life is atelic: that the meaning of life lies not beyond itself, for it is its own point. The purpose of being human, on this view, is just the doing of it: to be human. But this doesn’t work, even on Burkeman’s own terms. There are at least three reasons why.

First, if an ordinary human being asks, What is the point or meaning of life?, it is inadequate to answer, The living of life. For the premise of the seeker’s question is that something beyond one’s life gives that life meaning, or purpose, or a point. So unless one is satisfied to reject the terms on which the question is asked, something more is required.

Second, then, Burkeman might have recourse to a constructivist answer: namely, that the purpose of one’s life is what one decides that purpose is. So the question remains meaningful but is turned back on the asker: Well, what do you value? But this answer fails in multiple respects. For one, it makes life’s meaning arbitrary, even relative. By the same token it suggests a fearsome causal sequence, as if the meaning of my life were what I value, and what I value is what makes it meaningful. In other words, my apparently random act of valuing (whether received from my genetic and social inheritance or chosen autonomously as a mature adult) carries an impossible burden: to create life-level significance where there is none in itself.

Does Burkeman, or anyone else in the self-help crowd, believe that ordinary human beings are capable not only of this purpose-conferring power but of self-consciously wielding it, that is, of engaging knowingly in making their lives teleological from within? As a matter of fact, while plenty of that crowd does believe this, I don’t think Burkeman does. But then, whence his confidence in essentially atelic normies self-bestowing meaning on their otherwise meaningless lives, underwritten by the active self-awareness that they are doing so while they are doing so?

This is not even to mention that, absent some antecedently given and shared human telos—some basic but substantive account of the goods and ends common to human life—“what I value” or “what I make the point of my existence” or “what I find meaningful in human life” or “what I want to spend my 4,000 weeks doing” may with perfect consistency be evil. Perhaps my self-constructed telos is serial murder, or ferocious avarice, or treating women like objects to be used and disposed of, or belittling children, or making the earth uninhabitable for future generations. When “the good” is a function solely of my own will, it is transmogrified into something called “value,” which is just another name for whatever I happen to want, prefer, or take pleasure in. The realm of “values” is paradise lost, which is to say, it is hell; as Milton has Satan declare:

All hope excluded thus, behold, instead
Of us, outcast, exiled, his new delight,
Mankind, created, and for him this World!
So farewell hope, and, with hope, farewell fear,
Farewell remorse! All good to me is lost;
Evil, be thou my Good: by thee at least
Divided empire with Heaven’s King I hold,
By thee, and more than half perhaps will reign;
As Man ere long, and this new World, shall know.

Third and finally, therefore, Burkeman has no answer or antidote to despair. It occurred to me, as I was writing this, that I’ve written about Burkeman once before, in a post responding to his review of a book by Jordan Peterson. I note the very same problem there. Burkeman seems genuinely not to countenance the seriousness of the problem of despair, precisely as a philosophical or theological problem. Imagine a young man who reads Burkeman’s book and finds himself persuaded that life is short, each of us is unimportant, and the whole shebang is without any meaning except what we bootstrap for ourselves. Far from embracing limits and finding, to his pleasant surprise, that he is even more economically productive than before, he kills himself instead. After all, he came to the conclusion that life is meaningless, and his self-assessment was just: he was neither impressive nor sufficiently special to manufacture enough meaning to get on with life without unmitigated pain, self-loathing, and anguish. Best to avoid that, all things considered. Whom will it affect, anyway? The universe goes on, without so much as a flinch.

There is not a doubt in my mind that such a scenario would fill Burkeman, who seems enormously decent and thoughtful, with sadness, compassion, and lament. Obviously he does not want anyone to commit suicide, not least someone who reads his book. He intends his message, as I said above, to be one of freedom, not bondage.

But I see no reason, given the parameters of his project, to forestall the judgment that atelic finitude is a cause for despair rather than joy. Why view limits as anything other than chains? Many people have seen them as just that, including some of the wisest of our writers and thinkers. Indeed more than a few of them, consistent with their principles, chose suicide as young or middle-aged men and women for this very reason: to escape the bonds of life, which held them in sway the way a despot might. Only by forcing death’s hand could they exert real agency in the sole respect that mattered: how and when one goes out, and on whose terms.

I don’t mean to pick on Burkeman (who in any case is safe and secure from being picked on by anyone, let alone me). Every other self-help and productivity guru is far, far more liable to the charges I’ve laid out than he is. But in another way he is the most guilty of this lacuna, because his book takes on board many of the ideas that despairing, existentialist, relativistic, constructivist, and nihilistic philosophers have proffered throughout the last two centuries. So he ought to know better. Yet he seems honest-to-God incurious about the fork in the road he constantly faces. The reader knows that he sees it as a fork, because whenever he comes to it, he reassures the reader, in assertive and consoling tones, that the annunciation of their atelic finitude is good news rather than bad. That implies the possibility of interpreting it as bad. Yet apart from his own confidence and kindness, we are provided no reasons to share his cheerful demeanor, at least no reasons that are not question-begging or that do not fall prey to the criticisms outlined above.

*

Two dissonances mark the book from beginning to end, and it is these dissonances that illuminate, not to say justify, the book’s failure to reckon with the terrifying possibility (a) that life is in fact meaningless or (b) that some, perhaps many, people, faced with a life made meaningful only by their own self-generated efforts, would judge it to be meaningless (whether or not they would be right to do so). Those dissonances are politics and religion.

Burkeman’s politics are clearly left-liberal, if of a moderate bent. Numerous times he admirably allows the convictions to which he has honestly come, about finitude and the unknown future and the relative unimportance of my or your life in the grand scheme of things, to override or modify political convictions he might once have believed or might, in the present, feel social pressure to maintain. Nevertheless, there are odd occasional interruptions of his otherwise steady emphasis on that one tiny sliver of a time-bound life you and I have to live. These interruptions almost always concern what he calls (always with nodding approval) “activism,” but especially climate change. It seems to me that he needs it to be true not only that the earth today is in dire straits (a premise I have no reason to doubt or dismiss) but also that urgent cooperative political action on its behalf, namely, making every effort to keep it from becoming worse, makes intuitive and even self-evident sense. But the truth is that it does not. Not, at least, on his own terms, terms he believes you and I may and ought to share. There are quite a few additional premises, premises that might call into question some of his own, required to cross that particular logical finish line. Yet he seems not to notice. Why?

I think it has something to do with his calmly but firmly non-religious beliefs. I call them “non-” rather than “anti-” religious because he doesn’t have an axe to grind against religion, and he is laudably open-minded about learning from religious and spiritual authors. (The self-help crowd may be alone among our public-facing and popular writers to read religious and theological texts seriously.) For example, I was delighted to see Burkeman quote Walter Brueggemann’s book on the Sabbath. He is also an avid reader of Buddhists and other adherents of Eastern, non-Abrahamic, and spiritual-not-religious thinkers. Again, I say, this is all to the good.

Burkeman himself, though, is non-religious, or at least presents himself as such. There is no God, at least one we may know or name. There is no afterlife. There is no soul, no eternity, no transcending the confines of this life, this world, these 4,000 weeks. Now Burkeman makes no arguments for this perspective, nor even alludes to them. He takes it for granted. So far as I can tell, he takes it for granted not only for himself or his readers but for all “modern” people living in the secular West.

That’s fine. He’s certainly not obliged to be a believer, or even to take seriously the counterclaims of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theology. But I do think the shortcomings of his book would be alleviated were he to do so. He would see that it is not obvious that a finitude absent God and ruled by death is a live worth living, much less a life capable of being made meaningful by one’s own labors. In this St. Paul and Nietzsche are of one mind. If Christ is not raised, Christians of all people are most to be pitied. Why? Because, as Paul says only a few verses later, death is the enemy of God—the “last” enemy, as he puts it—which means that death is the enemy of life, for God is the source and sustainer of life. Life without God is life without life. Or as St. Augustine puts it (anticipating Heidegger, but drawing a different conclusion), life defined by the inevitability and overawing power of death is not so much a life lived toward death as itself a living death. Which is no life at all.

That is why Burkeman is wrong to agree with the climate activist Derrick Jensen that life without hope is the only life we have, such that hopelessness is a spur to living life to the full rather than a sap to life’s vitality. To write such a thing is to betray a profound ignorance of actual human beings. Even if it were true—that is, even were it an undeniable and objective fact that there is no God, no hope, no meaning in life except what we construct of it and for it—it would be a recipe for despair for most of us, for all but the most heroic, most stoic, most self-possessed. Whether or not that tells us anything about the proposition’s likely truth or falsehood, to suppose that it is actually, really, believe-me-I’m-giving-it-to-you-straight a relief from unhappiness is pure folly. I share with Burkeman the premise that the truth sets one free. But I have grounds for believing it. He does not. His philosophy desperately wants, even needs, objective truth and personal happiness to be positively correlated. They may not be, however. The relationship between them might be inverted: the more of one the less of the other. Maybe there is no relationship at all. Best to face that uncomfortable fact, to admit it at the outset as an ineliminable question mark set next to all of one’s most cherished hopes.

But then, that would be to admit that hope is irreducible to the act of making sense of human life. And not only hope, but the irreducibly given. If we creatures who by nature not only pursue happiness but seek the truth, then we discover a telos within ourselves driving us beyond ourselves toward that which lies before, behind, and above us. The truth satisfies because and only because (a) it is other than us and (b) we were made to know it. That is, we were made for it. And it turns out that “it” is not an object but a person. St. Augustine was right all along; humans are teleological—rational, desiring, social, liturgical—creatures who, furthermore, cannot help themselves. We are not past saving, though. We just need to know where to look. Augustine knew. And so he prayed:

To praise You is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. You stir man to take pleasure in praising You, because You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.

More on post-biblicism biblicism

A few more points in addition to yesterday’s reflection.

1. The odd thing about the post-biblicism biblicism phenomenon is not that there are people in the pews, raised to be Christian, who now find themselves lacking trust either in tradition or in Scripture. That’s a common enough experience today, one we ought to be exquisitely pastorally sensitive toward. No, the oddity is that it’s a phenomenon in people who have devoted their lives to the truth of the gospel, whether in the pulpit or in the classroom. But why would one give one’s life to the study and exposition of the Bible and/or sacred tradition if one believes that neither entity gives one divine truth, the very truth that sets the captives free and imparts eternal life?

2. Lacking a reliable source for divine teaching in either the church’s kanon or the church’s doctrina, where do post-biblicism biblicists go instead? Where do they look for authoritative wisdom and instruction regarding what to believe and how to live? Let’s avoid the ascription of false consciousness. It seems to me the simple truth that they look inward, they look outward, and they look forward. That is, they consult their own intuitive sense of truth and morals; they read books and listen to podcasts from trusted authors and like-minded thinkers; and they project onto the future where the culture (or “history”) is headed, thereby discerning the work of God in their time. Set aside whether this conjunction of sources is a trustworthy repository of truth. Even bracketing that question, one can understand why post-biblicism biblicist church leaders and church planters suffer a predictable twofold sequence. On one hand, there is an initial wave of enthusiasm and interest. On the other, there is a rapid loss of attention, buy-in, and commitment. The reason is obvious. What such persons and their churches are selling is just whatever the wider culture is already offering, only without the trappings of “church” or “organized religion.” Why not get the real thing straight from the source, rather than mediated by these still-attached-to-Jesus oddballs?

3. Perhaps the strangest feature of all that marks PBB (why haven’t I been using initials this entire time?) is a sort of rhetorical reflex. It goes like this. If fellow Christians are talking about X, the PBB is liable to retort, “The Bible doesn’t talk about X.” Now here’s why that is strange. First, often the Bible does talk about X. The PBB in question usually means something like, “What the Bible says about X isn’t so cut and dry, or calls for interpretation.” True enough, but then you should have said that initially.

Second, sometimes the PBB is right that the Bible doesn’t talk about X, but then even more bizarre implications follow. For does the PBB mean that Christians shouldn’t talk about anything the Bible doesn’t talk about? That would be a rather extreme biblicism, even more extreme than the most biblicist biblicist I’ve ever encountered. The bizarreness is amplified, though, because the one thing that unites PBB adherents is that they love to wax dogmatically about issues the Bible doesn’t talk about.

Now, anyone who is not a biblicist agrees that we, that is to say, Christians, must talk about things the Bible does not mention: social media, cloning, CRISPR, extraterrestrial life, nuclear weapons, marijuana, secularism, Kant, comic books, CCM, movies, blogs, the academy, evolution, Wordle—you name it. In fact, one of the principal nudges of former biblicists into a full-hearted embrace of Christian tradition (saints, doctors, martyrs, dogmas, councils, creeds, synods, social encyclicals, and the rest) is that the living church must have a living voice about ten thousand matters the Bible is silent about. So finding occasions and causes to speak about that the Bible doesn’t speak about is the most ordinary, the most Christian, the most intellectually justified thing in the world.

What doesn’t make sense is castigating fellow Christians for doing so while doing so oneself. More, how could it possibly be just to do so as a biblicist while criticizing fellow biblicists? It’s as though post-biblicism biblicists find themselves in rarefied air, from whence they are able to see which subjects unmentioned by the Bible are worth caring and talking about today and which are not. Put more bluntly, PBB affords its members an arbitrary standpoint or tribal identity by which to say who’s Good and who’s Bad, who’s In and who’s Out. And if that’s all it is, then to hell with it.

Biblicism beyond biblicism

There is a strange phenomenon in graduate theological education that I’ve never quite been able to understand. Here’s my best attempt at describing it.

Many—it feels like most—young people who enter graduate education hoping to earn a degree in biblical or theological studies are a biblicist of some kind. By that term I mean a Christian, usually but not always evangelical or low-church, who believes that the only relevant source, norm, and authority in and for the Christian life is the Bible.

Upon learning about both the history of the canon and the history of the church, as well as the history and doctrines of theology, the young scholar in question has a choice to make. Assuming he (we’ll say it’s a he) remains a Christian, that choice concerns three options.

Option #1: To cease being a biblicist by embracing the authority of sacred tradition.

Option #2: To remain a biblicist, with an unmoved and likely redoubled commitment to biblicism as both (a) the proper theological understanding of scriptural authority and (b) the best—i.e., intellectually and academically warranted—historical construal of the role of the canon in the church.

Option #3: To remain a biblicist, with a deeply compromised view of the status of the Bible as (a) God’s word, (b) trustworthy, and (c) authoritative.

Any reader of my work knows where I stand on these questions. Moreover, I am friends with as well as read and profit from writers and teachers in camp #1 and camp #2 alike. Both options are long-standing, venerable positions that with good reason continue to converse, not to mention argue, with one another. I more or less make my living in those conversations and arguments. They are a pleasure to partake in because they concern what matters most and because their participants, on all sides, make good arguments full of interesting and compelling ideas.

What I don’t understand is camp #3.

I have never, not ever, not for the life of me, been able to make heads or tails of “non-biblicist biblicism”—that is to say, a radically nuda scriptura position that recognizes no one and nothing besides the Bible as bearing divine or doctrinal or moral authority in the church, whether from the past (sacred tradition from the apostles to today) or from the present (say, a living teaching office), while simultaneously denying to the canon of Scripture abiding, supreme, or final authority as God’s living word.

To compound the confusion, this “biblicism beyond biblicism” often manifests as a kind of mania or obsessive-compulsive focus on the text, on all its details, its every jot and tittle, yet absent the belief that such minute strokes of the pen are in fact the medium of God’s speech. So that, on one hand, we ought to devote ourselves to understand precisely what this redactor or that author of the canonical text meant to say at the time of its writing; and, on the other hand, once we have arrived at an assured deliverance of just what the text meant in its original context, we need not receive it as bearing divine authority in and for our lives—because the author of the Bible is not God but ancient human beings.

Well. Suppose I don’t want to pick at that particular scab (i.e., “not God but human,” as if we didn’t know humans wrote the Bible until recently, or as if the metaphysics of that presumptuous either/or were self-evident rather than question-begging). Suppose I grant the point as stipulated. Will someone then explain to me why it is we spent all that time drilling down into the fine details of the text only to emerge from our excavation with what we are antecedently confident is not God’s word? What is it we are doing here? And why?

The logical problems are bad enough. But if and when this shows up in church life, it’s game over. For once you’ve cut yourself off from sacred tradition and biblical authority, while ostensibly remaining biblicist (if in name only, or at least merely by reflex or temperament, and thus inconsistently applied), you have untethered yourself from any and all sources from beyond yourself. There is no longer authority extant in the parish or congregation. The pastoral leadership certainly make no claim to authority; tradition by definition holds no authoritative status; and now the Bible itself has had its knees cut out from under it. The old trifecta of canon, creed, and episcopate—Scripture, Tradition, and Holy Orders—is bid adieu, with nothing to stand in its place. The only thing to be done is to drift along aimlessly on the seas of personal, political, and cultural change, to be blown by the Zeitgeist this way and that. Eventually, though, the bottom of the boat is going to fall out. For there’s nothing keeping the ship afloat except the remaining vestiges of the old-time religion, that ballast of our faithful forebears. Once it runs out, we’re sunk.