A therapeutic church is an atheist church

Two friends of mine, Richard Beck and Jake Meador, have been beating similar drums lately, and it occurred to me today that their drums are in sync.

For some time, Richard has been writing about churches that function as though God does not exist. These churches advocate for forms of life, perspectives on the world, and political activism that often are, and certainly may be, good, but which do not in any way require God. God is an optional extra to the main thing. Needless to say, the children of these churches correctly imbibe the message, and eventually leave behind both church and God. After all, if you can have what the church is selling without either faith in God or, more important, the demands God places on your life, then it is only prudent to keep the baby but throw out the bathwater.

There’s much more to say than this, and Richard is very eloquent on the subject. Summarizing the point: The only reason to be a Christian is if (a) the God of Israel has raised Jesus the Messiah from the dead and (b) this event somehow does for you and for me what we could never do for ourselves, while being the singular answer to our most desperate needs. The only reason to be a Christian, in other words, is the gospel. And if the gospel is rendered redundant by a congregation’s life, worship, and teaching, then said congregation has put itself out of business, whether or not it knows it, whether or not it ever intended to do so. It has become, for all intents and purposes, an atheist church.

As for Jake, he has been writing recently about the therapeutic turn in the American church. A church has become therapeutic if the gospel is reduced, and reducible, to the premises and vocabulary, concepts and recommendations of therapy. A therapeutic church does not speak of sin, judgment, guilt, shame, wrath, hell, repentance, punishment, suffering, crucifixion, deliverance, salvation, Satan, demons, exorcism, and so forth. It takes most or all of these to be in need of translation or elimination: the latter, because they are outmoded or harmful to mental health; the former, because they are applicable to contemporary life but only in psychological, not spiritual, terms. A therapeutic church speaks instead, therefore, of wellness, health, toxicity, self-care, harm, safety, balance, affirmation, holding space, and being well-adjusted.

A church is not therapeutic if it endorses therapy and counseling offered by licensed professional as one among a number of potentially useful tools for people in need; any more than a church in favor of hospitals would be “medicalized” or a church promoting the arts would be “aestheticized.” The question is not whether mental health is real (it is), whether medication is sometimes worth prescribing (it is), or whether therapy can be helpful (it can be). The question is whether mental health is convertible with spiritual health. The question, that is, is whether the work of therapy is synonymous with the work of the gospel; whether the task of the counselor is one and the same as that of the pastor.

Answer: It is not.

This is where Jake’s point intersects with Richard’s. If the gospel is interchangeable with counseling, then people should stop attending church and hire counselors instead. Why not go straight to the source? Why settle for second best? If a minister is merely a so-so therapist with Jesus sprinkled on top, then parishioners can sleep in on Sundays, drop Jesus, and get professional therapy as they please, whenever they wish. I promise you, if what you’re after is twenty-first century quality therapy, neither Holy Scripture nor the Divine Liturgy is the thing for you.

Hence: a therapeutic church is an atheist church. Not because therapy is anti-gospel. Not because therapeutic churches are consciously atheistic. No, a therapeutic church is atheist because it has lost its raison d’être: it preaches a gospel without God. Which is not only an oxymoron but a wholesale inversion of the good news. The gospel is, as St. Paul puts it, “the good news of God.” And if, as he puts it elsewhere, God has not raised Jesus from the dead, we of all people are most to be pitied.

A therapeutic church has, in this way, lost its nerve. It simply does not believe what it says it believes, what it is supposed to be preaching. It does not believe that the God revealed in Jesus Christ is the best possible news on planet earth, meant for every soul under heaven. It does not believe that the problems of people today, as at all times, have their final answer and ultimate fulfillment in the Word made flesh. Or, to the extent that it does believe this, it is scared to say so, because the folks in the pews do not want to hear that. They want to be affirmed in their identities, in their desires, in their blemishes and failures and foibles. They do not want to be judged by God. They do not want to be told they need saving by God. They do not want to learn that their plight is so dire that the God who created the universe had to die for their sins on a cross. They want to be told: I’m okay, you’re okay, we’re all okay—so long as we accept our imperfections and refuse the siren songs of guilt and shame. They want, in a word, to be heard, to be seen, and to be accepted just as they are.

There is a reason people are going to churches looking for that, why churches are increasingly offering it to them. It’s near to the gospel. But the overlap is incomplete. God is not a therapist, and his principal goal in Christ is not to ensure a high degree of mental health in the context of a larger successful venture in upper-middle class professional/family life. God, rather, is in the business of holiness. And as Stanley Hauerwas has observed, vanishingly few of the saints would qualify as “well-adjusted.” The risen Lord without warning struck Paul blind and subsequently informed Ananias, “I will show him how much he must suffer for my name” (Acts 9:16). Has anyone read a Pauline epistle and thought, Now this is a picture of stable mental health? The flame of holiness knows no bounds; it leaves burns and scars painful to the touch; it scorches the mind no less than the body:

And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor 12:7-10)

I cannot say whether the author of these words was entirely well. But he was an apostle, and then a martyr, and now a saint. To say the same thing another way, his life was and remains unintelligible if the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is a fiction. No God, no Paul. The same should be said (should be sayable) of every church and every Christian in the world—at least by aspiration, at least in terms of what they say about themselves, whatever the extent to which they succeed or fail to meet the goal.

The more, however, a congregation becomes therapeutic, in its language, its liturgy, its morals, its common life, the more God recedes from the picture. God becomes secondary, then tertiary, then ornamental, then metaphorical, then finally superfluous. The old-timers keep God on mostly out of muscle memory, but the younger generations know the score. They don’t quit church and stop believing in God because of a lack of catechesis, as if they weren’t listening on Sundays. They were listening all right. The catechesis didn’t fail; it worked, only too well. The twenty- and thirty-somethings were preached right out of the gospel—albeit with the best of intentions and a smile on every minister and usher’s face. They smiled right back, and headed for the exit sign.

Expertise

Expertise is under attack is a common theme in journalism and academic writing today. I don’t doubt it, and I don’t doubt its importance. Expertise is real and the loss of public confidence in persons whose office, education, training, or experience have historically granted them some measure of authority is an all too real problem. Implicit distrust of the very notion of authority, the very suggestion of expertise, makes a common life impossible, in more ways than one.

But there is a fundamental misunderstanding in defenses of expertise, and not only in high-minded venues. Even at the ordinary level of daily life or—where I spend my days—in the academy and the classroom, there is a basic confusion regarding what expertise is, what credentials are, and how either ought to function in social relations.

I wrote about this at length in my essay for The New Atlantis a year ago, titled “Statistics as Storytelling.” I won’t rehash that argument here. Let me do my best to boil it down into its basic components. I’ll spell it out in six principles.

The first principle of expertise is a defined scope of competence. An “expert”—if I’m honest, I hate that term; it’s a weasel word, invariably used to enhance status or dismiss objections; but I’ll keep using it here, since it’s the one in circulation—possesses some relevant knowledge about a particular domain: embryology, archeology, Greek sculpture, Moby-Dick. If the Melville scholar comments on anything outside her expertise, therefore, she is by definition no longer an expert, and thus bears no authority worthy of deference or respect. This is the Richard Dawkins phenomenon: He is welcome to speak and to write about philosophy and theology, but he does not do so as a philosopher or theologian, but as an evolutionary biologist addressing questions and subjects outside the scope of his formal training.

The second principle of expertise is that, without exception, all members of the same field, whether delimited by discipline or study or practice or training, disagree with one another about matters crucial to the field to which they belong. Expertise, in other words, is not about unanimity or agreement; it is about membership in a group defined by disagreement and disputation. It is about being party to the contest that is the field; being part of the argument that constitutes the guild. Expertise is not consensus: it’s the very opposite. It’s the entry point into a world of bitter, sometimes rancorous, conflict.

That doesn’t mean that everything is thereby in question. One must agree about certain things to disagree about others. Intelligible disagreement presupposes prior agreement. 2 + 2 = 4 is a premise for mathematicians’ arguments; certain claims build on others. That’s true of every realm of knowledge. But the interesting thing is always what’s not agreed upon. And outsiders are always surprised by just how little is agreed upon, even by like-minded experts in the same field.

The third principle of expertise is that, whenever and wherever what is called for in a given moment or in response to a certain question is not a set of empirical facts but a judgment, then the presumptive force of expertise is immediately qualified. There is no such thing as expertise in judgment. Or rather, there is, but one cannot be credentialed in it, for its name is wisdom. Wisdom is not and cannot be the result of formal education. It does not come with a degree or diploma. There are no letters to append to your name that signify wisdom. The least learned or educated person in the world may be wise, and the smartest or most educated person in the world may be foolish. (Indeed, Christians say that’s the normal run of things.) Good sense comes from living. Prudence is a virtue. Neither is the domain of an expert. There are no experts in good judgment, in wisdom, in prudence. As often as not, expertise functions as an obstacle to it, or a shield from it.

The fourth principle of expertise, then, is that typically what expertise provides is a set of facts or conditions, sometimes necessary but never sufficient, for the possibility of exercising wise judgment. It is true that I know more about Christian theology than most believers in the pews. That does not, in any way, mean that I am more likely to be right than they are about this or that Christian doctrine. A monk of Mount Athos is far wiser to submit to Orthodox tradition than to listen to me, even if I’ve read more Orthodox theologians than he has. A lifelong elderly believer who has never read theology may have keener insight into the mystery of the Eucharist than I do. True, I know the date of the second Ecumenical Council, and she may not. That’s not at issue though. What’s at issue is whether my expertise, such as it is, is either necessary or sufficient for knowing sound doctrine. And it is not. (If you’d like to meet a passel of heretical PhDs in theology, I can arrange an introduction.)

The same goes for biblical scholars. Knowledge of Greek gives you a leg up on having some plausible sense of what St. Paul might have had in mind in the mid-50s, writing to Corinth. But it doesn’t ensure that your exegesis of any New Testament text will be right, or even more likely to be right than the exegesis of an ordinary believer in the pew, ignorant of Greek as well as first-century Greco-Roman culture. Why? First, because New Testament scholars themselves don’t agree about how to read the text. The Pauline guild is that group of experts than which there is no more cantankerous or quarrelsome. Second, because the New Testament is Holy Scripture, and what God has kept from the learned he has revealed to the simple. That is, what God has to say in and through the canon may just as well bypass the intricacies of academic method as be accessed by them. In my experience, that is often the case.

The fifth principle of expertise is that all fields or domains that presuppose or assert normative (rather than empirical) claims logically may and necessarily will come into conflict. This is usually most quickly revealed in anthropology. An economist supposes homo sapiens to be a utility-maximizer, say, while the therapist sees a self-actualizer, and the theologian a sinner in need of Christ. To be sure, some aspects of these visions might be harmonious. But not all. Each, for example, takes a different and mutually opposed view of desire. Are all desires good? Are all to be affirmed or fulfilled? Is desire as such self-validating? And so on. The theologian is not departing from her realm in contesting the claims of the economist or the therapist, for the ground being contested is common to the three of them. It concerns the nature and purpose of the human person. Hence, when areas of expertise overlap, it is wholly proper for argument to ensue. No one’s view is invalidated in advance by dint of lacking the relevant credentials.

The sixth principle of expertise is that sometimes experts are wrong. It may be some group of experts, or all of them. The error may be partial or complete. But experts are wrong, and in fact, regularly so. That is to be expected, since there are no angelic experts, only human ones. The practice of knowledge is just that: a practice, and so subject to all the ordinary human foibles: vanity, greed, oversight, shortsightedness, limitations of every kind, fallibility, haste, contempt, and the rest. Sometimes we want something to be true when it isn’t. Sometimes we wish something were good when it isn’t. Sometimes we can’t stand the thought that our enemy isn’t wrong, and we work overtime to show that he is, or might be. Sometimes our blinders—the products of inheritance, culture, genetics, generation, education, prejudice, peers, parents, friends, what have you—keep us from seeing what is right in front of our noses. Whatever the reason, experts are far from infallible. The one thing you can take to the bank is that every expert in every field at this present moment believes something profoundly wrong or untrue in relation to his or her field, not to mention other fields. That includes me. The problem is just that none of us knows which one of our beliefs is the wrong one, amid all the right ones.

For experts of all kinds, the upshot should be a severe and sincere humility about the range and competence of our knowledge. For normal folks, such humility should be the expectation of experts, not the exception; and when it isn’t present, they are not wrong to be skeptical.

A test for exegesis

A simple test for any proposed reading of Scripture, but especially for those put forth by biblical scholars:

Is God understood as (presupposed to be) a living agent…
(a) within the world described by the text, whatever its genre? or
(b) both within the world of the text and behind, in, and through the text itself?

In other words, is God a character in the text? an author of the text? or both?

What I find, in far too much Christian scholarship on the Bible, is option (a). God is taken seriously as a character, an agent, a force, a presence, an actor, a protagonist—within the narrative or poetry or whatever pericope or canonical book. Apparently, for many Christian biblical scholars, that is what it means to read “theologically.” The modifier “theological” denotes a “more than humanist” or “non–methodological atheist” hermeneutic; God is not presumed to be a superstition best elided in interpretation. This principle might extend to the present, so that the God at work in the world of the text is taken to be at work in the world of the reader.

But a crucial premise has been overlooked or denied. To read in the way thus delineated is to read the Bible “like any other book,” as if its form and content, its status, were no different in kind from any other work of literature. But why, then, should you or I or the scholar give it our attention, indeed a unique attention incomparable to any other book? The answer is simple: Because, as the church confesses, what the Bible mediates or bears to us is “the word of the Lord.” The Lord God of Israel stands behind the words of the text that attest him. They are inspired by him; he is, in the phrase of St. Thomas Aquinas, their “principal author.”

If that is true—and its truth is a matter of faith, not demonstration—then it must, and invariably will, affect how one reads the text. Nor is there anything unscholarly about this. Method is apt to subject matter. The subject matter of Christian exegesis of canonical Holy Scripture is the living word of the living God to his living people: the speech of Christ to his body and bride, in the present tense.

Christian scholars should read it as such. Bracketing the text’s inspiration or divine authorship is a dodge. A reading that limits God to intratextual agent while ignoring God’s role as extratextual author is not yet theological in the fullest sense.

Exegetes, take note.

“Arbitrary”

A lexical nitpick.

In contemporary journalistic as well as postmodern academic writing, and various intersections thereof, there is a habit of using the word “arbitrary” to describe what is anything but. In its usage, it is intended to denote or connote something both random and irrational. But invariably the referent is neither. There are always “reasons why,” and almost never are the reasons self-evidently wrong or bad. The author simply doesn’t accept them as persuasive. That doesn’t render the phenomenon arbitrary, though. It just makes it conventional, or arguable. But what isn’t?

I’ve seen this trend applied to weeding treatments in one’s lawn; to the distinction between men’s and women’s sports; to clothing style; to rules in a game; to questions of propriety or decorum in public spaces and in online images; to methods in biblical interpretation; and to much more besides. It’s a weird trick and usually a cheap one. It’s often unclear whether the author knows the inapplicable unfairness of the usage, and both options are bad: either dishonesty or superficiality.

There’s something else going on, too. Typically the author makes clear how magnificently aware he is of the social constructedness of everything in our common life. This, that, and the other thing is a social construction; ergo, it’s turtles all the way down; ergo, it’s all arbitrary anyway—nothing but a choice of arbitraries: ecco homo, behold the human condition.

But that is either the wrong conclusion to draw, or the author hasn’t followed it to its logical conclusion. If the former, then what he means is that social and cultural and political life is unavoidably and essentially contingent—and that is true. But contingency does not mean arbitrary. Whereas if is the latter, then absolute and irreducible arbitrariness as a feature of every aspect of reality entails that the author’s preference for (non-arbitrary) X over (arbitrary) Y is a nonstarter. He’s sawed off the branch he was sitting on. There’s no longer any argument to be had. In which case, he should drop the rhetorical gamesmanship and accept that his opponent’s position is no more or less arbitrary than his is.

Unless he already knows that, and is using words as a mere means to the end of getting what he, arbitrarily, wants. No inconsistency there, albeit at the price of reducing language to power and exalting the ego’s desires as final. The price, in other words, is nihilism as a social, political, and rhetorical philosophy. Which, if we’re honest, is sometimes what lies behind the public writing of academics and journalists today.

Out of touch

Before they premiered, I assumed that both House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power would flop. The assumption was pure projection. I couldn’t gin up an ounce of interest in either. Why? Because they were both inessential prequels produced entirely for reasons having to do with the bottom line, i.e., competing corporations spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the service of diminishing returns from previously profitable IP. Did anyone ask for them? Are they answering some urgent question about the fantasy worlds or original stories told about them? No. HBO wanted more of that sweet sweet GRRM cash, and Bezos wanted his own GRRM, so he opted to buy the next best thing: the rights to JRRT.

Clearly I was wrong. Both shows were enormous “hits,” in the sense that millions of people watched them and, apparently, cared about what happened on them. I confess it felt a little like going through the motions, watching from the outside; the precaps and recaps, podcasts and explainers, reviews and “arguments.” Do people actually enjoy these shows, or are they playing the old hits, reliving the glory days of Peter Jackson’s films and the initial shock and awe of Benioff and Weiss’s show?

But I may be wrong, since I was wrong the first time. What the popularity of these series showed me is just how out of touch I am. It was a pleasant surprise. Once upon a time, the mere existence of these shows and their accompanying buzz would have made them irresistible to me. No more. And thank God.

*

My rule with TV, as I’ve written about before, is that it either needs to be weightless fun (Top Chef, Great British, Brooklyn 99) or an A/A+ (Better Call Saul, Succession, Mare of Easttown). My students have time for C+ and B– shows. I once did too—or I thought I did: the truth is, there’s always something better to do with your time—but no longer. An episode or two of TV per week works for me. I can certainly do with less. More, and I should reconsider my priorities.

So regarding the other big franchise premiere this fall, Andor, I stayed away. I’ll eventually consider checking out HOTD or TROP if people are saying either show is genuinely A-level headed into season 4. Until then, it’s just a waste of time. But friends have been telling me that Andor is worth the time, so I finally gave it a watch this week. Some habits never die, and this childhood Star Wars fan is a sucker for more time in the galaxy.

And it’s not bad! It’s actually quite good, and getting better with each episode. A far cry from the useless, boring redundancy that was Kenobi. Some thoughts on the first eight episodes:

• True to his word, Tony Gilroy has made what appear to be four mini-movies, each made up of three episodes. I wish this had led to greater formal experimentation. What if the season actually were four movies, and edited accordingly, rather than randomly sliced and diced episodes? The opening three in particular feel random in when and how they begin and end. One more example of a filmmaker not quite understanding the television medium.

• Having said that, “movement two” (i.e., the arc spanning episodes 4-6) is magnificent, and if episode 9 delivers, then the third movement will be too. You can feel the Gilroy-ness of it all (brother Dan is writing as well). They’re in their element with the plotting, characters, and intrigue. It may well be the first successful live-action depiction of these things. Even Rogue One was beset by the dual shadow, on one hand, of Vader and the Force, and on the other, of our knowledge of the Death Star, its plans, and its eventual destruction. The mini-dramas of “BBY 5” and these heretofore unknown characters (minus Mon Mothma and Andor, only one of whose fate we know—we’ll think of her as Kim and him as Jimmy for now) have no canonical future for viewers. Their simultaneously small and large stakes create wonderful narrative tension.

• By contrast to the other Star Wars shows so far, the acting has been uniformly excellent. No comedic guest stars, no amateurs doing their damndest to make gibberish sound profound. Gilroy hiring top-notch old British guys and letting them chew scenery is just what the doctor ordered. Even smaller parts like Fiona Shaw’s adoptive mother lend gravitas that, in their absence, would make the show feel small and forced.

• The show is at its best, surprisingly, on Coruscant and inside the walls of the infinitely byzantine corridors of the immaculately white Imperial Security Bureau. (Cue Melville on the whiteness of the whale.) Kyle Soller, Alex Ferns, Denise Gough, Anton Lesser, and Genevieve O'Reilly are brilliant in their roles, and Gilroy et al give them both the words and the direction to make it all feel far more than glorified galactic dress-up. Whereas whole stretches of Kenobi felt like low-rent TV—“where’s the money???”—most of Andor makes clear exactly where the money went. Who knew Star Wars minus wizards and laser swords could be fun?

• The weakest link so far is the titular lead. Diego Luna plays Andor as a twitchy, world-weary, unsmiling Han Solo. All exposed nerve and bitter anger. That’s fine. But it drains him of any charisma. He’s supposed to be a womanizer. But who would want to go near this guy? He seems brittle and sketchy, not alluring or mysterious. Clearly he’s playing the role “correctly”—in the seventh episode, we understand why the stormtrooper stops him (however unjustly): Cassian Andor always wears a guilty look on his face, as if he’s only one step ahead of the law (which he is). His tell is his nervous constant surveillance of his own person. In that sense, Luna is doing his job. But why should we, the audience, care? We’ve got to have a reason at some point. When he vanished for a full 15-20 minutes in a later episode, I didn’t miss him at all. I wanted to stay on Coruscant with Mothma and Luthen and the rest. Make him matter, Gilroys!

• Having said that, Luna was quite impressive in episode 8, in which, from memory, Andor basically lacks a single line of dialogue, except to repeat, over and over, his own false name to judges, stormtroopers, pilots, and prison guards. The dawning realization of his situation in prison is almost feral in its raw bodily expression. The addition of Andy Serkis was a grace note in an otherwise brutal episode. If what we’ve got waiting for us in episode 9 is one long masterfully executed prison break, I’m here for it.

• The real weakness of the series so far is its opening three episodes. I understand why something like the story they sketch was necessary, but again, I think something more formally interesting could have served the show’s purposes much better. What if, for example, the show began with season 4, in media res, with the viewer as clueless about who Andor is and why he’s there as any of the other rebels? Then you fill in the back story at the necessary moments, when other characters are also learning these things for the first time, surprised when they are surprised (as when he reveals he’s a mercenary, for example), all while stretching out the suspense of the planning and undertaking of the robbery and escape. You scrape away the fat of those first 105 minutes while filling in the gaps in a much more engaging way. You also do away with some of the pro forma “yes, this is the backstory for the guy whose backstory we’re telling in this prequel” paint-by-numbers feel of the opening episodes, which surely turned many viewers away from what quickly becomes a richly suspenseful story of empire, law, bureaucracy, sedition, criminality, justice, morality, politics, and spycraft.

• I do hope Gilroy is able to make season 2. It would be a bust if the low viewership of season 1 led to premature cancellation. If season 2 really does stretch from BBY 4 to, more or less, the opening scene of Rogue One, that could be an absolute blast in the right hands—and so far, these are the right hands. Here’s hoping Kathleen Kennedy agrees.

Rules for reviewing and being reviewed

Twelve rules for writing a book review:

1. The subject of the review should be the book and its ideas, not you or your ideas. If you are inclined to write a piece you could have written had you never read the book in question, beg off immediately.

2. Any reader of your review should know, after reading it, who the author is and in particular what the book is about.

3. A review should give the reader some taste of the prose, some sense of the voice of the author and not only the author as mediated by your voice.

4. The object of your review is the book as written, not the book as you would have written it.

5. If the review is under 1,000 words, then you do not have space to formulate either a wholesale critique of the book or an alternative argument. You have space, instead, for a few small criticisms or one main criticism.

6. Most books are bad, but few books are all bad. Find something positive to say about the book under almost any circumstances. (As Roger Ebert liked to say, don’t be parsimonious in your joy.)

7. It is all too easy to write a “take down.” Don’t do that. A book must be unremittingly wicked or dangerously foolish to merit the critical shotgun blast. And if you’re eager to pull the trigger, that’s a sign that you shouldn’t.

8. Be charitable: imagine why someone might think this book worth writing, exactly in the way it was written.

9. Be disinterested: if you have personal animus against the author or some reason to wish him or her ill, do not write the review. A reviewer is an arbiter, of merit and of preference, and the reader should be able to trust that the reviewer is a fair judge in the matter. Don’t be a hack.

10. Be critical, but not cheap. Hold the book to a high standard, but don’t go looking for flaws, and don’t view your review as an occasion to parade each of those flaws before the mocking eyes of a mob. If you expect the book to be substantive, hold yourself to the same standard; don’t suckerpunch an author under any conditions, but certainly not by means of a double standard.

11. If the form is a review essay, then your voice and views and arguments rightly enter the field of play. But it remains a review essay, not an essay simpliciter. Your many tangents, comments, and reflections ought to circle or spiral around the subject and substance of the book, intersecting at crucial moments. All of the above still applies; in fact, it applies more stringently. The review essay is a longer leash, but a tighter one.

12. In sum: Review unto others as you would have them review unto you.

Twelve rules for being reviewed:

1. To be read, by anyone, for any reason at all, is an honor and a privilege. Most authors go their whole lives without an audience to speak of. Be grateful.

2. To be reviewed is therefore a double honor. Not just an individual reader but multiple people—with busy lives, deadlines, finite attention, not to mention editorial demands, publication schedules, and a readership of some sort—decided that your book was worthy of public attention. Get down on your knees and thank God!

3. A review is not a personal comment on the quality of your character. It is not an expression of like or dislike. It is not an act of friendship or unfriendship. It is an intellectual (possibly scholarly) assessment of the quality of your writing: its style, its substance, its contribution to the world of letters and ideas. Receive it as such.

4. Do not write, give up the writing life altogether, if you fear or resent or otherwise cannot handle being reviewed. It is a vulnerable and often nasty experience. Being an author is not for you if you are, shall we say, a touchy person. Defensiveness is never a good look, but for authors—whose entire job description is assessing others (and their ideas) and being assessed (for the same)—it is a sorry state indeed.

5. A bad review is not the end of the world. It is to be expected. It is the ordinary run of things. It may hurt. But for a writer, getting a bad review is just another Tuesday. Likely as not, the review won’t matter. Sometimes, bad press is good press. Sometimes, even, the reviewer might be onto something.

6. A largely positive review that includes modest criticism is not a bad review. Every author wants adulation and affirmation. But even the best reviews place some question mark here or there next to the book’s claims. Charles Taylor and Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robinson and Cormac McCarthy, Barbara Ehrenreich and Mary Karr are allowed to expect “Good Reviews.” (Though, to be clear, all of them have gotten bad reviews!) You and I are not.

7. Because you are not a perfect writer and no one has ever written a perfect book, you should not only be unsurprised by criticisms of your work, you should expect and even welcome them. Go into a review presupposing the reviewer to be a good-faith interlocutor. What might they have to teach you, including about your own work? Probably not nothing. Learn!

8. Credentials will not save you. Do not use them as a crutch or as a lifeline. It doesn’t matter what letters run after your name or how many degrees hang on your wall. “Experts” write bad books all the time. No one is disregarding your training by suggesting your work needs improvement. (Don’t you agree that it does?)

9. Do not go reading in between the lines. Do not impute to the reviewer something that he or she has not put down in black and white. Do not suggest ulterior motives; do not conjure unstated beliefs; do not make accusations of malice. Do not go on the hunt for reasons to justify yourself in the court of public opinion. Most important, do not take the review as a personal slight, as though the reviewer has done you an injustice. That is a category mistake. Reviewers may be—they are allowed to be and sometimes encouraged to be—mean, caustic, brutal, uncouth, biting, sarcastic, disparaging, dismissive. Are you surprised? Welcome to the world of writers!—just about the most insecure, miserable, miserly, skeptical, and suspicious crew around. They are not easily pleased. You are unlikely to prove an exception.

10. If you receive a genuinely, objectively disingenuous review, a vicious piece of spite animated by everything but an unbiased evaluation of your work—then kindly ignore it. If you have the will power, don’t read it; if you do read it, don’t give it a second’s thought, don’t share it with others, don’t write about it, don’t reply to it, don’t respond in kind. Pretend that it doesn’t exist, that it was never written. Any such review wants your blood up as a result: that’s why it was written in the first place. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Like the sound of a tree falling in an empty forest, does an unfair, ugly review exist if the author doesn’t promote it and the world doesn’t read it? Answer: No. So don’t feed the trolls.

11. Where do trolls live and move and have their being? On Twitter, and social media generally. The most important thing you can do, then, is to delete every one of your social media accounts, Twitter above all. I repeat: Get. Off. Twitter. Twitter is poison, but it’s an addictive poison for writers. In truth, it’s nothing but an endless diet of empty calories for attention-starved, affirmation-seeking scribblers. But it never leaves you full. It just makes you hungrier and looking the worse for wear. For not only is it a giant waste of time. Not only does it steal your focus and rob your capacity for sustained, thoughtful attention. Not only does it warp your sense of the world. It’s bad for your writing. Without exception, every writer who spends time on Twitter is worse for it. So the very best thing you can do, hands down, is log off entirely, and for good.

12. But since there will, alas, continue to be writers either who suppose Twitter is good for them (I’ve never met one of these in the wild, but I’m told they exist) or (more likely) who know it’s bad but see certain benefits as personally or professionally indispensable, here’s how to navigate being reviewed on Twitter:

    1. Follow rules 1-11 above; they still apply in full.

    2. Always and only express gratitude for being reviewed at all.

    3. Share links indiscriminately, and don’t prejudice readers with passive aggressive framing.

    4. No matter what, do not make Twitter a therapist’s couch for your wounded ego. It is impossible to overstate how sad and pitiable this is. Come feel sorry for me—a review of my work was mildly critical! It even used a mean tone and a loud voice! Unfair, am I right? Get over yourself. The very fact that your instinct is to run to Twitter or Instagram to fish for compliments and bask in your followers’ pity party is prima facie evidence that the review in question was on to something. You are earning no one’s respect, and only confirming priors you’d rather not confirm. Avoid this at all costs.

    5. Do not use any review as an opportunity to hold an online referendum on the character, integrity, or credentials of the reviewer or of the venue in which the review appeared. Remember, apart from the merits of such a question or of the quality of a particular review or of your feelings in response to it: your followers constitute an echo chamber. There is no reason to listen to anything they have to say—even more than you, they are likely to perceive written criticism as a personal affront rather than what it is: business as usual. The temptation is great, certainly if you have a bona fide following or sizable readership. But don’t give in. Resistance is not futile.

    6. The sad fact is that (a) popular authors have modeled this habit for up-and-coming writers as an unquestioned norm rather than as a cautionary tale; (b) this trend is itself the leading symptom of the poor health that besets the current writing–reviewing(–academic–journalist–publication) ecosystem; (c) following the trend, rather than avoiding it, perpetuates the very dysfunction everyone is suffering from and seeking relief from. It’s certainly true that an individual writer opting out makes only a minor difference, maybe no difference at all in the grand scheme of things. But there’s no reason to be part of the problem, once you know it’s a problem. And opting out will absolutely make a difference to you: your writing, your mental and emotional health, and much else besides. So get out while you can, if you can. You won’t regret it.

New article published: “Is Scripture a Gift?”

As of this morning, I have a new article published in the journal Religions. It’s called “Is Scripture a Gift? Reflections on the Divine-Ecclesial Provision of the Canon.” Here’s the abstract:

This article investigates whether the canon of Christian Holy Scripture is properly understood as a gift and, if so, what theological implications this might entail. Following the introduction, the article has three main sections. The first section proposes an expanded grammar by which to describe the production and reception of the canon in and by the church, under the superintending sovereignty of the divine will and action. The second section offers a guide to recent inquiry into “the gift” in the fields of philosophy and theology, particularly those theories that might prove useful for applying the concept of “gift” to Scripture. The third section unfolds a normative account of the Christian canon as a gift of the triune God to his people and through his people, thus making sense of the long-standing liturgical practice of responding to the reading of the sacred page in the public assembly with a cry of thanks to God.

The article arose out of research I conducted as part of the “Gratitude to God” project at Biola University, which was funded by the Templeton Foundation. The article is only one part of a whole special issue dedicated to the question of gratitude to God. Most of the other articles are either social-scientific or philosophical; contributors include Christopher Kaczor, Kent Dunnington, and Matthew Lee Anderson, among others.

As part of the same “G2G” project, I also wrote a popular essay for Comment published this past January titled “Grace Upon Grace.” It distills some of the broad contours of a theological conception of grace or “the gift” with respect to the total grammar of Christian doctrine, whereas the article homes in on a particular locus: namely, whether “the gift” applies to the canon and, if so, how and with what theological implications.

It was a pleasure spending more than two years reading up on the literature—theological, philosophical, historical, economic, literary, and biblical—on gift, gratitude, grace, and exchange. It was always on the edge of my interests but never at the center of them. I didn’t come close to a comprehensive investigation. But I learned enough to realize how fascinating the subject is, and I’m glad I did.

A few other odds and ends:

• I already spotted a typo, for what it’s worth: page 21, endnote 45: “field yield” should be “first yield.” (UPDATE: I found a few more, alerted the editors, and they fixed them all.)

• The article is—how should I put it?—long. As in: 19,000 words, if you include endnotes and the list of works cited. It’s a very small book, in other words. Take a deep breath before plunging in.

• This article completes, not a series, but at least an ad hoc sequence of articles on the doctrine and interpretation of Scripture. I’ve been waiting for it to come out so that I could gather together links to all of them in one place, along with links to books, reviews, and occasional writings. All together I imagine they amount to 400,000 words on this single locus, give or take 50,000. And that’s not even to mention the Big Book I hope to publish on the subject in a decade or so. At this point, though, I’ll admit I feel somewhat spent. I’ll gladly take a little break from writing about this doctrine. That word count is high enough as it is; nobody needs more from me on the topic for the moment.

• Religions has a practice more common to the soft and hard sciences (as far as I understand it), that is, of publishing the comments of blind peer reviews; here’s the page for all of them, along with my replies.

• Three of the reviewers’ comments came in all at once; all had good things to say, and approved publication without need for revision. So I made final revisions, submitted it, and we were good to go. Then a fourth reviewer’s comments came in belatedly, and s/he judged the article in need of some more work. Both the editor of the special issue and the journal’s editors decided that the three “yay” votes qualified the article to be worthy of publication, hence its coming out today. But I wanted to flag this reviewer’s comments (a) because this is my first time with “open” reviewer comments and (b) because the comments in question are rich, substantive, and worthy of further reflection. Indeed, granted all the work that went into the article as it stands, I don’t doubt that incorporating this feedback into another version of it would have improved it even more; and if I end up doing any further work on the topic of Scripture and the gift, I will doggedly pursue the lines of inquiry raised by this reviewer, since they demand more attention that I was able to grant them. For that reason, whoever the comments’ author is, he or she has my thanks.

On “Christian masculinity”

Christian talk about what it means to be a man begins and ends with the man Jesus Christ. The church looks to Jesus the Nazarene first in everything, and this topic is no exception. The church does not begin elsewhere, either in Scripture or in tradition or in history or in literature or in contemporary culture. The church begins with the gospel of Jesus, always.

The gospel tells us of the Word made flesh, the man who was and is God incarnate. Jesus contains the fullness of wisdom and knowledge concerning all things, but it is not as though we have to try hard to see the relevance of Jesus to questions about masculinity. We aren’t asking about the capital gains tax or whether plants have souls. The man Jesus shows Christian men what it means to “be a man”—which is an implication of, though not the same as, the claim that Jesus, qua human, shows Christians what it means to be human—and he does so together with the great cloud of witnesses that surround him like so many echoes and images of the one archetypal anthropos. So in answering this question we look first to Jesus but also to his exemplary followers: apostles, saints, martyrs, doctors; Paul and Peter, Francis and Ignatius, Maximus and Cyprian, Basil and Gregory, et al.

What do we see when we look at these men, looking at Christ?

Here is what we don’t see. We don’t see worldly power. We don’t see physical potency. We don’t see wives. We don’t see children. We don’t see virility. We don’t see households. We don’t see possessions or estates or acclaim or family names passed on by sons, generation to generation. We don’t see dominion, rule, or lordship—not of the pagan kind, anyway. We don’t see violence. We don’t see what our culture understands as “manliness,” whether that word calls forth adulation or repudiation.

Here’s what we see instead.

We see dispossession. We see abstinence. We see defenselessness. We see, in worldly terms, powerlessness. We see loss, pain, rejection, and suffering. We see poverty, obedience, and celibacy. We see the end of a family name, the selling or giving away of inherited wealth. We see passivity: being mocked, being scourged, being handed over, being arrested, being tortured, being killed. We see public shame in public death.

These are the marks of the Messiah and, just so, the marks of his holy ones. They do not look like “masculinity” by any common definition I have encountered. Inasmuch as they relate to such a concept, they appear to be nothing so much as its refusal or inversion.

This is why I find myself so confused and repulsed by popular writing about “Christian masculinity.” I don’t reject all of its premises. Many parts of our culture today have made “being a man” a kind of pathology, at the very same time that young men, and men in general, are in dire straits. Our young men—society’s, to be sure, but I have in mind the boys in our churches—absolutely need our attention, our care, our instruction, our help. They need a vision of the good life straight from God. They need a word from Christ that meets them where they are. I am trying to do that with my own sons and with the young men in my classroom. It’s a group effort, and it’s all hands on deck. Let’s work up solutions to this crisis!

Yet invariably when I click on a link or open up a book on the subject, what I find is either pure paganism or a strange alchemy of biblical and cultural ideas about capital-m Manliness. Always such Manliness finds its highest expression in notions like physical strength, protection, procreation, provision, husbandhood, fatherhood, forging a household, entrepreneurship, forms of exercise, diet, hobbies like hunting, and military service. None of these things (with one or two possible exceptions) are bad in themselves. But they have next to nothing to do with a Christian understanding of manhood.

Again, fix your eyes on Jesus. Did Jesus marry? No. Did Jesus father children? No. Did Jesus protect others? No. Did Jesus defend himself? No. Did Jesus own possessions? Not really. Did Jesus build or maintain a household? No. Was he physically or socially impressive? Not by the standards of his day or ours.

Okay, granted, Jesus is the Son of God. What about a mere human man like Paul? Every single answer is the same. And unlike Jesus Paul is explicit that he wishes other believers were like him: sexless, childless, itinerant, and willing to suffer every hardship, including penury and mockery, for the sake of Christ crucified. When the world looks at Jesus and Paul, they see foolishness. The church believes this foolishness is the wisdom of God, but in earthly terms, it is foolishness nonetheless. Paul spends half his letters defending himself against the very sort of accusations the Manliness crowd would throw at him today: What a fool! Unimpressive! Chronically ill, physically disabled, dependent on others, a poor public speaker—who is this man? Why should we listen to him? There are certainly others (call them super apostles) who would make a better impression, not least on pagan neighbors who have reasonable expectations about manly church leadership.

But that’s just why Jesus chose Paul: “for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel; for I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name” (Acts 9:15-16). As Paul confirms:

on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses. Though if I wish to boast, I shall not be a fool, for I shall be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think more of me than he sees in me or hears from me. And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor 12:5-10)

Worldly weakness is Christian strength. Human impotence is divine power. Suffering and death are signs of the Lord’s favor.

Earlier this year one author wrote:

A man embodying healthy masculinity knows who he is. He is physically healthy and strong. He is pursuing and developing his skills and capabilities to make him more competent and able to take action. He has a sense of agency, drive, and desire to make his mark on the world.

The indispensable Eve Tushnet replied on Twitter:

a man embodying healthy masculinity knows Whom he loves. he receives the stigmata regularly. he is pursuing and developing his prayer life to make him better prepared to suffer. he has a sense of obedience, humility, and desire to take the last place.

Eve is right. The paradigm of a faithful male human being is Jesus of Nazareth, and he doesn’t measure up to the earthly standards of masculine glory. Read The Iliad and see if you can find intimations of Jesus or Paul there. You won’t. The men of Achaea and Troy win glory and honor through killing other men, begetting other men, taking other men’s women, and plundering other men’s wealth. Neither Jesus nor his apostles does any of these things. Conjure up an image of them, as well as other male saints. They do not have the praise of men. They sire no sons, “win” no prizes (whether in gold or in flesh). The world accords them no honor. The contrast is extreme: They are instead punctured and penetrated, humbled and humiliated. The nails leave scars; the lungs expire; the blood spills; the skin is flayed; the head is lopped off. Jesus dies naked on a tree, to show pilgrims to Jerusalem who’s boss. All while peasant Peter, traitor and coward, weeps alone, away from the action.

These are the men who define what it means to be a Christian man; and they have countless imitators and exemplars who have persisted in their stubborn witness to Jesus’s way down through the centuries. To be sure, it is permitted to Christian men to marry, to have children, to own possessions. But this is the lesser way. The greater way is found in the monastery, where vows of obedience, poverty, and celibacy offer a taste, in this life, of the life of the world to come; a glimpse, in this earthly flesh, of the kingdom of heaven, come and coming in Christ. For in heaven there will be no marrying or giving in marriage; there will be no procreation; there will be no walls or armies or violence, for there will be no need for them. The Lord will provide all that we need. That life, the heavenly life to which we are all destined, is not the calling of all believers on earth, here and now, while we continue our sojourn from Eden to new creation; but it is available to all, and the vocation of some. In them—in those who renounce money and family along with their very autonomy—we see, not a pitiable lower estate, but the highest form of human flourishing this side of glory. What they have now, in part, we all will have then, in full. They are therefore, at present, the church’s models of the good life; accordingly, when they are men, they are models of masculinity. In them we see the Christ life made manifest among us. In them we see just what it means to taste and see that the Lord is good. For all they have is him. To have the Lord alone is by definition to have everything one needs. To have the Lord is to know him, and this knowledge is intimate, even conjugal. The monastic soul, figured feminine by sacred tradition, is betrothed to Christ the bridegroom; she has made room for him to enter, longing eagerly for the kiss of his mouth. In sweet union with him, in utter dependence on him, in total transparency to his will and his action, she is made complete. She is happy, at rest at last.

In a word, the monk of whose soul we speak has finally become what he was made to be: a man of God.

Trusting the Bible

I have a dear friend I’ve known most of my life who came to me recently with a question. The friend in question is a lifelong Christian; he loves Jesus, attends church, is a faithful person. He doesn’t struggle with “doubt” per se. It’s not the spooky stuff in Christian teaching that bothers him; God exists, Jesus rose from the dead, we’re sinners in need of grace, angels and demons are real—whatever: all a given.

No, what trips up my friend is the Bible. But again, a particular sort of obstacle. Not the Bible per se. He finds the Gospels utterly trustworthy: they give us Jesus, the real Jesus, the Jesus who lived two thousand years ago and who is alive and active today. Their accounts of him are accurate and we’re right to turn to them to hear his voice, learn his way, follow his example and teaching.

The rest of the Bible? Not so much. Or at least: TBD. Sure, the rest of the New Testament gives us much of importance. But just because it’s “apostolic,” does that necessarily mean it bears divine authority? that it’s infallible? that it’s inerrant? Might it call for a bit of picking and choosing, or sifting the wheat from the chaff?

All the more so, my friends avers, regarding the Old Testament. Does it contain wisdom and beauty and powerful stories? No doubt. Is it “revealed,” though? Not so sure. Is it all true? Meh. Is it “the word of God” himself? Nah.

At least, that’s his disposition, his instinctual posture toward the Old and New Testaments excepting the Gospels and granting the basic truth of (e.g.) the Apostles’ Creed. Knowing that this combination of beliefs—the reliability of the Gospels (and of the gospel) alongside the relative unreliability, or basic human fallibility, of the rest of the canon—is not exactly the traditional Christian position, he came to me with the question: Why should he place his trust in the Bible-full-stop? Why should a Christian like him who loves and follows Jesus confess that the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms and the Epistles are all alike “the word of the Lord”? Why, for instance, care about “getting the text right” when the text is Genesis 1–3? Why not just say it’s a lovely story full of rich insights without going further and committing oneself to believing it to be true in the sense of divinely inspired truth?

That’s the question. I think it’s a very good one. And I bet it, or something like it, is a lot more common in our churches than we might suppose. So I’d like to try to answer it as best I can below, leaving aside whatever is immaterial to the substance of the particular question in view.

I can think of six overall reasons to believe the Bible as such is God’s word, three regarding the Old Testament and three regarding the New.

1. The first and best reason for trusting the Old Testament as God’s word is that Jesus did so. This reason doesn’t apply to people who don’t already believe in Jesus, but if you already know Jesus and trust him, then that trust should follow Jesus’s own judgment that the scriptures of Israel are holy, reliable, and a revelatory vehicle of God’s will, character, and commands. Pick any Gospel at random, and you can’t go three paragraphs without finding Jesus somehow at the center of a question surrounding the interpretation of the Old Testament. Moreover, as children are rightly taught early in their time in Sunday school, Jesus’s manner of battling the temptations of Satan consists of nothing but the quotation of Torah. This is God himself in the flesh, facing down a rebellious angel who supposes he can force God’s hand with petty offers of power and fame, and what God does is put the words of Moses on his own lips. That’s because Moses’s words are his words; Jesus stands behind Moses. Quoting Moses is quoting himself, as it were, finding the right occasion for those words’ truest meaning and supremely fitting application. A holy mystery!

2. The second reason for trusting the Old Testament as God’s word is that it speaks of Jesus before his advent. One way of describing this is to say that Israel’s scriptures “predict” the coming of Jesus. That’s a perfectly fine way to talk about it, but it lends itself to oversimplification. The Old Testament isn’t merely a collection of oracles, each of which finds one-to-one correspondence with something that happens later in Jesus’s career. Rather, its correspondence is much greater, more encompassing, and therefore more interesting than that. Jesus, as the Gospels and other apostolic writings proclaim, “fulfills” the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms. They “speak” of him, sometimes with astonishing clarity, sometimes with mysterious hiddenness. But they speak of him nonetheless—Jesus himself says so: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” (John 5:46-47). Or consider the time following his Resurrection, when Jesus appeared to the apostles and said, “O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” (Luke 24:25-26). Then the Gospel goes on: “And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (v. 27). And a little later, just before ascending to heaven:

“These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” (vv. 44-48)

Jesus, in short, was a Jewish rabbi who believed what all Jewish rabbis have always believed about the scriptures. This belief was and remains a nonnegotiable given for anyone who would come to follow Jesus or put faith in his name. This doesn’t mean such belief is easy, simple, or straightforward. But given Jesus’s own trust in the scriptures, and his teaching that those scriptures have much to tell us about him—miraculously, ahead of his coming, by the work of the Spirit in the minds, hearts, and words of the scriptures’ authors and editors—it follows that Christians have good reason to call the Old Testament the word of God for the people of God.

3. The third reason for trusting the Old Testament as God’s word follows from the first two: namely, that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is none other than the God of Israel revealed in the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. The God of Jesus is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah, the God of Joseph and Moses, Aaron and Miriam, Joshua and Rahab, Hannah and Samuel, Ruth and David, Solomon and Josiah, Ezra and Nehemiah, Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel—and the rest. (Go read Hebrews 11: Jesus’s God is their God, the God of the cloud of witnesses, because Jesus is the One to whom they looked and in whom they placed their faith, ahead of time.) In other words, if you want to know who the God is whom Jesus called Father, go read the book of Exodus. Read the Psalms. Read the Song of Songs. Read Jonah. That’s him. That’s the one. No one else. And that’s part of the point: there is no other God except this God. As the Shema says, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God, the Lord is one” (Deut 6:4). Consider this encounter in the twelfth chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel:

And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” And the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that he is one, and there is no other but he; and to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” (vv. 28-34)

There is even more than this, however. It isn’t just that the Father of Jesus is one and the same as the God of Israel whom we find in the pages of the Old Testament—though that is true. It’s that the God we meet in Jesus is himself the Lord of Israel. That is to say, the God who is incarnate in and as the man Jesus is YHWH: He who called Abraham, the One who appeared to Moses in the burning bush, the Almighty who delivered Israel from slavery—in fact, the Creator of heaven and earth. “The Word became flesh” means that to see Jesus is to see the God of Sinai; to embrace Jesus is to embrace the very One Jacob wrestled with by the Jabbok River. The face of Jesus, in a word, is the face of God, the one true God manifested to Israel. This gives greater depth and meaning to the claim that the Old Testament speaks about Jesus. It certainly does, since it speaks about God, and this God became incarnate in Jesus.

So much for the Old Testament. What about the New?

4. The first reason for trusting the New Testament as God’s word is that it is apostolic. Why should that matter? Weren’t the apostles only human like you and me? To be sure. But they were also more than that. The apostles were personally chosen by Jesus himself to be his emissaries in the world. To be an apostle is to have been commissioned by the risen Jesus for the lifelong work of bearing testimony to the good news about him to whoever might listen. In the final words Jesus spoke to the apostles before his Ascension (words recorded by St. Luke, the same author as the third Gospel):

It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth. (Acts 1:7-8)

The apostles are the reason any of us know or believe the gospel in the first place. No apostle, no gospel; no gospel, no faith; no faith, no church. And without faith or church, neither you nor I, as believers, exist. We have Jesus because of the apostles and only because of the apostles. Christian faith is mediated faith. Mediation is baked in from the beginning; it’s a feature, not a bug. We know Christ through others: first of all the apostles, then through their successors, then through all of Christ’s many sisters and brothers, including the parents or mentors or ministers or teachers who gave him to us—all, it goes without saying, by the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit.

For the purposes of our question, it is crucial to see that the Bible is part of this chain of mediation; in particular, the writings of the New Testament. In these writings we hear the voice of the apostles down through the ages, giving us once again their testimony concerning Jesus, risen from the dead. They knew him on earth. They saw him alive on the third day. They, and they alone, have the power and the authority to tell us the truth concerning him. All we have to do—all that falls to us to do—is either to trust their witness or to reject it. There’s no third option. We can’t take it piecemeal. It’s an all or nothing affair. That goes for the letters of St. Paul as much as the four Gospels. Every one of the 27 documents of the New Testament is “apostolic”: it contains and communicates the teaching of the apostles as the founders of the Christian community, apart from whom it would not exist and, consequently, none of us would know of the good news of Jesus. Most of the apostles eventually gave their lives for Jesus. Their credibility is airtight. We have all the reason in the world to trust them.

5. The second reason for trusting the New Testament as God’s word is that it is all of a piece. Jesus did not write the Gospels. His followers did. We are right to trust their testimony, but that testimony is not different in kind from other types of apostolic testimony, such as Acts, the Epistles, and the book of Revelation. All of them speak of Jesus, and all of them are apostolic in character. When the preacher of the sermon we call “Hebrews” tells us that Jesus is a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek, such a claim calls for our assent in the very same way as when the biographer we call “Saint Matthew” tells us that Jesus was born of Mary, a virgin betrothed to Joseph. The latter is not only a historical claim; it is theological, for it is supported in part by reference to the prophet Isaiah, just as Hebrews relies on Psalm 110 and Genesis 14. (Indeed, one useful way to approach the innovative way the apostolic writings reinterpret the Old Testament is as an extension of Jesus’s own exegetical practice: the disciples learned it first from him; it doesn’t originate with them alone.)

In short, believing Hebrews’ words about Jesus and believing Matthew’s words about Jesus are one and the same kind of action for Christians. There’s no reason to opt for one but not the other. Even biography is never mere reportage. It involves interpretation, selection of material, sequence of presentation, and so on. The gospel is mediated, as we’ve seen, which means it requires trust. To trust Jesus means trusting the testimony about Jesus given by his followers, which means finally trusting the whole New Testament, and not only part of it, in conjunction also with the prophetic (Mosaic and Davidic) testimony contained in the Old Testament.

Recall, furthermore, that I’m not adducing the best possible arguments for a nonbeliever to put her trust in the Bible. I’m offering reasons for someone who already believes that Jesus is risen from the dead and reigning from heaven as Lord to see why the Bible as a whole, and not only the Gospels, is reliable and true, is divinely inspired, and therefore is to be received and confessed as the word of the Lord to his people. Here’s one more.

6. The third reason for trusting the New Testament as God’s word is that the church does. What do I mean by this? Simply this: Christianity precedes us. We don’t make it up ourselves. We certainly don’t build it from scratch. It’s not a DIY project. It’s just there, waiting for us before we come on the scene. It possesses something truly precious, or so it claims. That something is the good news of Jesus. As I’ve argued above, the church has the good news to share with others because she received it first from the apostles. The church continues to preserve and proclaim this message, keeping faith with the apostles, by means of the New Testament (along with the Old). It is the texts of the New Testament that ground, govern, and norm the church’s teaching about the gospel. Were it not for the New Testament, we would have no means of ensuring we were still getting Jesus right, all these centuries later. They function not only as a source for our beliefs and practices but also as a judge or measure of them. They keep us on the straight and narrow. Without them, we’d be lost.

It is for this reason that the church has always placed the scriptures at the center of her life, in her worship above all. Within that worship the full diversity of scriptural voices is always read—an OT text, a Psalm, an Epistle—but the heart or climax of the reading in the liturgy always comes from one of the Gospels. For these tell explicitly of Jesus and feature his very words. It is as if the “red letter Bibles” of recent American vintage were inscribed for centuries in the liturgical practice of catholic tradition: all rise, the priest processes with the holy Gospel to the center of the assembly, and both before and after the reading, all cross their minds, lips, and hearts, in order to hear the living Jesus speak in their midst by the words of his servants.

I am saying all this in order to complete the circuit we began earlier, regarding trust. We cannot trust Jesus without also simultaneously trusting his apostles; this trust in turn entails trusting the Bible, on one hand, and the church, on the other. For the church is the body and bride of Christ, and her task from Pentecost to Parousia is to maintain and to announce the gospel of Jesus. She does this by constant, daily recourse to the scriptures of Israel and the writings of the apostles. From them she hears the truth about God, God’s Son, and God’s Spirit; she learns of his ways and will and works in the world; she assents to what he would have her do, as she undertakes the great mission given her by Jesus between his Resurrection and Ascension. It follows that for us, for ordinary believers, to trust him is to trust her, for without her we would not have him; and vice versa, we would not have her were it not for him, for he and he alone is the founder, head, and Lord of the church, which is his body and the temple of his Holy Spirit on earth. It is she from whom we received faith in Jesus; she who baptized us in his name; she who feeds us his flesh and blood. And it is she who directs our eyes and ears to his living word in Holy Scripture. Having trusted him, we ought to trust her; having trusted her to give us him, we ought to trust her again that we will find him there, in the sacred pages of the canon.

In sum: The church believes the Bible is the word of God. If it’s good enough for her, it’s good enough for me. And, I hope, good enough for a faithful friend and member of the church, eager to learn from her what to believe about God’s word.

Evangelical and evangelical

The estimable Timothy Crouch raises a question about my series of posts, not from the CoC side, but from the evangelical:

This intriguing paragraph from Brad East (from the coda of his series of posts on the Churches of Christ: https://bradeast.org/blog/coc-coda), in which he offers a ten-point description of “evangelicalism,” inadvertently suggests that denominations like, say, the PCA are not “evangelical.”

To my mind, this mostly just indicates that we need more language than “evangelical.”There is no use denying that there are real differences (theological *and* sociological) between Stone-Campbellites, the PCA, Dutch Reformed, Southern Baptists, charismatic megachurchers…

… AND there is no use denying that all five of those groups (and many more which I could name) have something important in common, that the non-Christian world — to say nothing of the liberal mainline Christian world — recognizes, dislikes, and calls “evangelical.”

I tend to use the word “evangelical” expansively, to describe whatever that common sensibility is, which (on balance) I share. But being raised Anglican and now part of a Presbyterian church (and studying historical theology), on Brad’s definition I am not an evangelical.

The intriguing paragraph in question is this:

evangelicalism is not a particular confessional tradition. Rather, it is a family of non-traditions, a dominant way or mode or ambient religious culture of being (1) a Christian community (2) in America, defined by (3) biblicism and (4) congregationalist polity, lacking (5) external tradition and (6) holy orders and being led instead by (7) elders, focusing above all on (8) personal faith, (9) the worship experience, and (10) active evangelism.

Timothy’s is a worthy rejoinder, and it calls for comment. Since I talk about evangelicalism a lot, I figured I should put down in black and white what I mean and why.

For starters: I’m neither a historian nor a sociologist. I’m a theologian commenting on sociohistorical categories and terminology. So I have far from the last word on this. But given how disputed the term is in the literature, I think it’s fair to have a “take” on the question as a non-expert.

To me, any definition of “evangelical” that is primarily theological in nature is a nonstarter. It will always include more than it’s meant to, and often exclude groups that are clearly evangelical in the way most people use the word. Rather, “evangelical” names a certain subset of American Christianity, a subculture with marked family resemblances across branching genealogies and descendants. Some of these resemblances include:

• a principled commitment to biblicism;

• a leveling or egalitarian or democratic impulse;

• an association with frontier revivalism;

• an emphasis on the proclamation of the word;

• an emphasis on the event or experience of conversion;

• an emphasis on living personal faith;

• a consistently conservative approach to law, family, and gender relations;

• a certain style of hermeneutical literalism;

• a certain kind of individualism;

• a certain entrepreneurial spirit: a flair for innovation, adaptation, and deployment of new strategies and technologies in the service of the gospel;

• a deep concern for evangelism and world missions;

• a relative lack of emphasis on structures of governance, sacramental administration, holy orders, or patristic-medieval tradition.

It is true that many, perhaps most, of these features may be found, and are historically found, in Christian communions whose polity is neither congregationalist nor dismissive of sacred tradition or historic patterns of liturgy. Here’s what I want to say about that.

On one hand, I’m wanting to use “evangelical” as a meaningful term in the present, not as it was or could be used one or two centuries ago, retrospectively. And it seems to me that, for a number of reasons, the term is better reserved today for those American churches or individual Christians who do not belong to the kinds of creedal/confessional traditions Timothy has in mind. First, because there are just so few of them left, relatively speaking. Second, because evangelicalism is such a different animal than it once was. Third, because so many of those traditions have themselves been colonized by what I’d call “the evangelical style”: diminished emphasis on denominational distinctives, increased emphasis on the musical and emotional experience of Sunday morning worship, etc., etc. Just as many Methodist churches in the south are called “Metho-Baptist,” given how similar they are to their Baptist neighbors, so confessional Protestant churches are effectively post-Protestant in America, just to the extent that they have become “properly” evangelical. This is what Bruce McCormack once called “the slow death of the Protestant churches” in North America.

On the other hand, I’m not actually persuaded that “Stone-Campbellites, the PCA, Dutch Reformed, Southern Baptists, charismatic megachurchers” “have something important in common” that outsiders see, a “common sensibility” evident to the naked eye. A good number of the twentysomethings I know from those groups wouldn’t recognize the others as Christian. I don’t mean they’d condemn them to hell. I mean they would be, and are, utterly alienated by them, almost as if the latter belonged to some other religion altogether. This very alienation was what prompted my first post about “CoC catholicity”: I have never found anything meaningful in common with evangelicals, in terms of spiritual sensibility or theological instincts or sacramental practice, and it took me a long time to figure out why. Furthermore, the very things that annoy and repel nonbelievers and mainline liberals about evangelicals also annoy and repel them about Catholic and Orthodox Christians. (Consider the constant confusion in elite journalism about “evangelical Christians” and pro-life activism. Catholics are constantly written out of the story by classifying them under the unsavory category of “evangelical.”)

Here’s my proposal. As a capitalized noun, “Evangelical” is used with greatest clarity when applied to the kinds of Christians, churches, and communities I’ve been describing, not Presbyterians and Anglicans. But as a lower-case adjective, “evangelical” may be employed with much wider scope, whether modifying conservative mainliners or even Catholics (as in George Weigel’s usage). This sort of distinction would recognize that, at this point in American history, “Evangelical” names a tribal identity, membership in a large and unruly family only partly defined by religious belief or practice. In that sense it is a sociological designation, not a theological one. Whereas “evangelical” as an adjective modifies the mode of any kind of Christian at all, including those who are unconnected to the frontier, undefined by biblicism, unattracted to ahistorical presentism, or otherwise governed by centralized authority, historic confessions, and sacred traditions.

Whether or not that distinction is a satisfying proposal to others, it’s how I aim to use the terms, and why.

CoC: coda

A wee postscript to the series of posts these last few weeks about the churches of Christ (a topic about which I have almost never written!), based on some conversations with friends and colleagues.

1. I trust it is clear that, when I talk about the “catholic” part of CoC DNA, I’m not suggesting that churches of Christ are, or are in any way close to being, Roman Catholic. I take the point of the analogy to be the observation of what is “like” between two entities that are very much “unlike.” The term “catholic” with a lower-case “c” is something of a technical term in my own writing and elsewhere. It denotes, not the church whose head is the bishop of Rome, but the larger phalanx of historic communions that trace their history back through the middle ages to the church fathers and apostles; whose governing structure is episcopal, that is, a succession of bishops; whose sacred tradition bears real and lasting authority; whose preeminent post-biblical authorities are the creeds and dogmas of the seven ecumenical councils; whose liturgy is sacramental and finds its consummation in the celebration of the Eucharist; etc. The communions thus referred to include not only Rome and the Eastern Orthodox but also the non-Chalcedonian churches of the East, not to mention (in my view) the global Anglican communion. It is a certain doctrinal and sacramental sensibility, a latent sense of the centrality of the church, the efficacy of her sacramental ministrations, and the vocation to universal holiness, among other things, that one finds in common between these communions and, I argue, the churches of Christ.

2. What one does not find in the latter is easily stated: a centralized hierarchy, bishops, creeds, dogmas, councils, sacred tradition, church history, saints, icons, martyrs, feast days, a formal liturgical rite, a church calendar, organs of authority beyond the local church, a formal act of canonization (just who did decide what was included in the Bible for Stone-Campbellites, I wonder?), and much more besides. In this respect churches of Christ very much resemble their evangelical cousins, governed as they are by a locally elected group of elders, centered on the exclusive authority of Scripture, with no substantive doctrinal or sacramental connection to any other church, any other time period, any other teaching apart from what any one congregation judges worthy of and demanded by the canonical texts. Lacking holy orders, lacking any authoritative tradition, CoC polity and practice are decidedly biblicist and congregationalist, thereby standing in a long line of American religious piety. This is why, though CoC-ers have always repudiated Catholics as beyond the pale, their real animus has been reserved for Baptists and other evangelicals, who are just close enough to be almost-saved, but just wrong enough to be not-saved. You argue with those you have the most in common with, after all. Hence two centuries of CoC–Baptist bickering and debate. (Hence, too, the more or less total cessation of the same in recent years.)

3. Along those lines, I neglected to mention social, cultural, or political factors in the evangelicalization of churches of Christ. I alluded to a more recent one in the third post, regarding tribal affiliation and political realignment. Another major factor is the ongoing de-Christianization of the public square and the nation as a whole. Note well: This is a descriptive claim; it is neither celebration nor lament, nor still a judgment on the quality of American culture or politics when its Christian identity was at high tide. A civilization might be Christian in the sense that (for example) the Bible suffuses its rhetoric and cultural products, its laws and policy debates, its education and self-understanding. That doesn’t tell us anything of the quality of such saturation, i.e., whether anyone, much less a majority, follows faithfully the way of Christ.

In any event, the apex of Christian confidence and ecclesial power in America was the 1960s, and since then it has suffered one long sustained decline. This is relevant to the CoC/evangelical story because the context in which American churches find themselves makes an enormous difference to how they approach both their own mission and their relationship to other Christian traditions. When (it feels like) everyone in America is a Christian, then a particular church has the luxury to say, and to mean, that every other church is wrong, and it alone is right. When (it feels like) barely anyone in America is Christian anymore, and the churches are at best hemorrhaging members, at worse under cultural and political assault, then that luxury is gone. The CoC-er is stuck in the foxhole with his Baptist brother, and obviously the latter is a fellow believer (if still in error about one or two things…); what matters now is survival, not doctrinal purity. This sort of martial rapprochement is evident in the 1994 statement in First Things by “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” The same dynamic on display there is evident, in microcosm, in churches of Christ beginning to trend evangelical around the same time.

4. One thing I left out in my series of posts is the liberal mainline. That term refers to what once constituted the “mainstream” Protestant establishment in America (the types who were on top in the ’60s): Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodists, to list only the big guns. One hears less of them these days, outside of certain enclaves and seminaries, because their numbers have, in the last half century, decreased by the millions. They have neither the political power nor the cultural capital they exercised from the time of the Founding through the Civil Rights Movement. It was to some extent from the American mainline that the Stone-Campbell movement both arose and rebelled, in the beginning. It just so happened that, instead of looking like their Great Awakening peers, Stone-Campbellites followed their restorationist hermeneutic to prioritize different texts, generate different readings, and arrive at different conclusions as to the purpose and fundamental patterns of corporate Christian life. Which, in turn, produced what I have been calling a sort of “catholic” ecclesiology and sacramentology by comparison to typical American evangelicalism.

Be that as it may, what of the mainline today vis-à-vis churches of Christ? I’m inclined to say there is no “vis-à-vis” to speak of, with one exception. As I wrote originally, in my experience there are three types of CoC-er today:

1. Someone satisfied with the old-time, if declining, CoC style;

2. Someone happy to be/come evangelical (whether by leaving the CoC or by remaining in a CoC that is, or is in process of becoming, evangelical);

3. Someone desirous of catholic tradition, liturgy, and practice.

The third group, as I said, consists mostly of folks who’ve earned graduate degrees, especially in a theological discipline. But I inadvertently left out a fourth group, which partially overlaps with the third:

4. Someone drawn to the Protestant liberal mainline.

The force of that “drawn” comes in a few flavors. First, and most prominently, women raised in churches of Christ who, discerning a call to ministry, end up leaving their tradition of origin and serving a mainline denomination as ordained pastors. Second, seminarians and ministers who, remaining in churches of Christ, appreciate aspects of catholic tradition but, at the same time, are socially and politically progressive. Third, the churches of those selfsame ministers (and lay leaders) that, over time and through their leadership, come to resemble neither the CoC nor catholic practice but the liberal mainline instead.

I’m most intrigued by this last group, and I’m glad a colleague pointed it out. So far as I can tell, actual ministers in churches of Christ do not really encompass the “catholic” option canvassed in my earlier posts. Rather, they include (1) true-blue CoC-ers, (2) normie evangelicals, and (3) liberal mainliners. Think of these categories in practical terms: Where would a minister from each group go if his or her church did not exist? I mean: If a CoC was not there to be attended? Answer:

• Minister #1 would be, and would feel, ecclesially homeless (and thus would probably start a house church!);

• Minister #2 would (without a second’s thought) go to the nearest non-denom Bible/community church;

• Minister #3 would (without missing a beat) join the Methodists or Episcopalians down the street.

Usually, you can tell which group a minister belongs to pretty easily. And the interesting thing is, you can often tell by just looking at what his or her church looks like, because the direction in which the church is headed follows closely what the minister views as the ideal. Indeed, conflict arises precisely when the ecclesial vision of a minister or ministry staff and that of an eldership are at loggerheads. If one aspires to the liberal mainline and the other to evangelicalism—not to mention if either wants to ride or die as old-school CoC—you can imagine the fireworks that will inevitably result.

The other observation I’ll make is that ministers in the first category have not only been migrating to the second category; the very boundaries between the two have been blurring for going on two decades, and for all the reasons I outlined in the second post in this series. The upshot is that soon, even very soon, CoC ministers and the congregations they lead will by and large be evangelical in tone, sensibility, doctrine, and liturgical practice, with one or two holdover curiosities from bygone days (like weekly communion or gorgeous four-part harmony)—while, say, 10-15% rep the old line and another 5-10% are stuck in a sort of no-man’s-land, one foot placed in evangelicalism and one foot squarely in the mainline. If you’ve made it this far, you know where I’m putting my money.

5. A final word, though. If I’ve only tangentially mentioned the mainline in this series, I’ve not at all mentioned the Anabaptists. Although churches of Christ lack a genetic connection to Mennonites or Brethren, there is a real family resemblance, and for many of us—especially readers of King, McClendon, Yoder, Hauerwas, Stringfellow, Camp, and other radical types—there has always been a dream that, steering between the Scylla of evangelicalism and the Charybdis of catholicism, some segment of CoC congregations would reclaim their pacifist, primitivist patrimony and pursue a third path, Anabaptist style. Alas, it was not to be. The catholic genes were too weak, the siren songs of the evangelicals too strong. (Sirenum scopuli: the birthplace of CCM!) The truth is, even the Anabaptists have authoritative tradition. An anti-tradition tradition can maintain itself as a tradition for only so long. Eventually, a pull from without or a push from within will break the spell; and once it’s broken, there’s no means of recasting it. Tradition necessarily requires concrete, practical means of perpetuating itself in recognizable continuity across generations and geography. All the more so when, as in the case of Anabaptists, the community’s self-definition requires unanimous agreement to forsake violence in all circumstances. Given the history of congregational conflict in churches of Christ, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that they aren’t going to spontaneously become pacifist tomorrow.

In other words, the lesson reiterated in earlier posts remains true: Try as you might, you can’t change yourself from having been one particular tradition into having been a different tradition all along. You are what you are. Yet change, perhaps counterintuitively, remains a possibility. How so? Let me put it this way. It is possible to “be changed” from what one was—in this case, a sort of catholic restorationist sacramental free church—“into” evangelical because evangelicalism is not a particular confessional tradition. Rather, it is a family of non-traditions, a dominant way or mode or ambient religious culture of being (1) a Christian community (2) in America, defined by (3) biblicism and (4) congregationalist polity, lacking (5) external tradition and (6) holy orders and being led instead by (7) elders, focusing above all on (8) personal faith, (9) the worship experience, and (10) active evangelism.

And this is why, to bring matters full circle, I made clear in the third (“and final”—ha) post why so many CoC-ers welcome the evangelical transition and, just so, why that transition has been so apparently frictionless. Very few people see it as a negative thing, much less a betrayal. It just seems like being, well, Christian. And once non-denom evangelicalism becomes synonymous with being Christian, it’s the only game in town.

CoC: past, present, future

My two posts on churches of Christ—the first on CoC-past as not-evangelical-but-catholic, the second on CoC-future as no-longer-catholic-but-evangelical—were intended to be merely descriptive, but I think their overall effect was something of a downer.

On one hand, many people reached out to say how much the “catholic” piece resonated with them, giving words to something they’d never quite been able to articulate. Most of these comments were tinged with lament, however. They came from people who either (1) ended up leaving churches of Christ for catholic traditions or (2) have remained, but regret and mourn the loss of the very elements that once distinguished the CoC from evangelicalism (which elements are now receding in the rear view mirror). On the other hand, the second post seemed to pour cold water on the whole thing, framing the potentially positive way of telling the “free church catholic” Stone-Campbell story as a sort of declension narrative: i.e., a tale of a movement “falling” from its evangelical-distinct origins into evangelical-adjacent status before eventual, total evangelical absorption (or acquiescence).

It turns out there are a lot of people who love what historically made the CoC distinguishable from evangelicals, and it stirs up a lot of emotions to see that passing away.

I wanted to add a few final comments along these and other lines, based on some questions and comments I received.

1. There’s an inevitable imbalance in my presentation of the “catholicity” of churches of Christ. More than one reader argued that, while the “CoC as more catholic than evangelical” frame might be on to something at the historical-theological level, the super-majority of actual CoC-attending Christians would never dream of darkening the doorstep of a catholic church (certainly Roman, but also Eastern or Anglican). That’s true. Also true: There is no mass exodus at present from churches of Christ to catholic traditions. At first I worried I’d overstated this point, but actually, you’ll see in the original post that I carefully qualified my claim:

When I was in seminary, surrounded by mainline liberals, I quickly realized that the simplest way to explain the CoC sensibility is to describe it as catholic, not evangelical. Indeed, of those I know who were raised in the churches of Christ who have earned degrees in graduate theological education, not one (of whom I’m aware) has “gone evangelical,” or even magisterial Protestant. They have either remained CoC, or left the faith, or joined a high-church tradition: whether swimming the Thames, the Bosporus, or the Tiber. And no one “in house” is surprised by such a move.

I’ve emphasized the relevant clause. It’s clear that I don’t have in view normie CoC-ers. They’re not headed in droves for Rome or Constantinople. Rather, the people I’m thinking of are CoC-ers who’ve earned graduate degrees, particularly in a theological discipline. Minimally, they no longer fit the typical CoC mold: they’re pro-creed, or pro-tradition, or pro-icons, or pro–feast days, or high-liturgical, or post-biblicist, or in love with the church fathers or medievals, or what have you. Maximally, they end up converting. (Anecdotally, the more progressive go Episcopalian and the more conservative go Roman or Orthodox.)

In any case, that should clear up, if it wasn’t clear before, the subset of folks I have in mind. Which leads to the next point.

2. My broad thesis can be stated plainly:

Those churches of Christ that still exist today are increasingly evangelical in doctrine, practice, and worship; the members of such churches, especially Millennials and Gen Z, are increasingly evangelical in both style and substance; and these trends are picking up speed with every day.

I take this as given. I’ve run it by multiple scholars of CoC history. No one has gainsaid it. Every piece of anecdotal evidence confirms it. Unless and until someone objects to it as a true description of a social phenomenon, I will assume everyone agrees to its truth, however they may feel about it.

An additional anecdotal observation: For five years I have been teaching 18-22-year olds who are, nine times out of ten, the products of Bible-belt low-church traditions. In nearly every case the CoC-ers are indistinguishable from their Baptist and non-denom peers. This is because, at root, Millennial and Gen Z Baptists and CoC-ers alike have become non-denom-ers in all but name. For this reason, likewise, the “members” of each of these categories church-hop between Baptist, CoC, and non-denom congregations (without, naturally, placing actual “membership,” which now also appears to be a thing of the past), and they see no discrepancy or oddity in their doing so. And this, finally, is because, mostly to a person, they are DIY evangelicals at heart. The name or tradition on the side of a church building (or, as they might say first, in the URL of the church website) means next to nothing; for someone who attends there, at least from these generations, such an identity is only skin deep. Beneath the skin lies the soul of non-denom evangelicalism. And it is strong; it is a force to be reckoned with.

So: The flip side of being clear (negatively) that the catholic vein of CoC-dom has nearly run dry is being clear (positively) that there is a theological sensibility winning out in churches of Christ. That sensibility is evangelical. It is found in the pews, in the pulpits, in the worship, and in the doctrines (or lack thereof) that one finds on the websites and in the elderships and classrooms of CoC congregations.

3. A friend asks: Why so certain? Even if I’m right about the trajectory, is my confidence about the future warranted?

Theoretically, I grant the point. No one knows the future. In this case, though, I think I have very good grounds for confidence. Here’s why.

First, I’m not so much predicting the future as commenting with honesty about the present. There are approximately one-seventh as many CoC-ers in America as there are Mormons. That number has been declining for a long time. Covid only sped up the process. Some churches are closing their doors; some are changing the name over the doors; some are losing their younger members, not only to unbelief, but also to the local community church; and most of those that remain are changing so as to look more like said community church. In a few pockets (Abilene, Searcy, Nashville, et al) the old-school persists, and some congregations that look like “traditional” churches of Christ continue to flourish. But even these, while retaining the trappings of the old line, are different than they once were, in subtle but significant ways. The most important difference is an overt political and cultural realignment with American evangelicalism. Which means that, for them, their evolving sensibilities may, for now, be located less in worship style or explicit doctrine than in tribal affiliation. But the latter will begin to manifest in the former sooner rather than later.

Second, there are simply no reasons I have ever encountered, in any context, to believe that any of the trends identified above is likely to cease. This is because, while it may sound like I am sounding the death knell of churches of Christ, that’s not in fact what I’m doing. So far as I can tell, most adult believers in CoC congregations today, and many of their children, will remain Christian in twenty or forty years, just as a sizable number of the congregations they inhabit will still be around. The question is not a matter of wholesale denominational disappearance or widespread apostasy. The question, instead, is: Will they—will any of them—identify as “church of Christ”? And even when they do, will such an identification entail a substantial resemblance to CoC doctrine and practice 150 years prior? Or will the resemblance be far closer to their evangelical neighbors? The question answers itself.

Third, then, while it may be the case that “trending evangelical” is something to bemoan on the part of old-timers, catholic weirdos, and Stone-Campbell eggheads, what is evident is that most ordinary CoC members, leaders, and congregations don’t see it that way. They see their evolution as both consistent with their past and desirable as their future. Such persons would, I think justifiably, roll their eyes at my reflections in these posts. They don’t see American evangelicalism as a fate worse than death. They see it as an imperfect but nonetheless healthy expression of the gospel in our context. Now, it is undeniable, at the historical, sociological, and theological level, that for churches of Christ to complete their annexation by evangelicalism would mean, in one sense, the end of churches of Christ as we have known them. But from death comes life; resurrection follows crucifixion; organic, healthy change sometimes requires painful pruning. That’s what mainstream evangelical-trending CoC-ers would say and do say. They’re perfectly within their rights to do so, and nothing in principle makes their judgment problematic. It’s only old-school and/or catholic oddballs and academics who find themselves squirming in their pews.

4. What then? After all this analysis, is there anything constructive to be said or done? Let me close by making a few gestures in this direction.

(a) Many churches of Christ are not in a good way. I know multiple consultants who receive weekly calls from congregations asking for help, and all the consultants can offer is wisdom about how to die well. This is a fact on the ground that anyone plugged into CoC networks knows full well, and it’s neither pessimistic nor alarmist to say it out loud. As I have written elsewhere, what many churches need today from their elders and pastors is nothing so much as hospice care. They’re going to die anyway. A church can die faithlessly, grieving as those without hope, or it can die faithfully, with hope in Christ our Savior. Aiding communities in doing the latter is good, sacred work. We need more ministers willing to do it and trained in the art of how to do it well. And we’re aren’t doing anyone a favor by putting our head in the sand, pretending it’s not happening.

(b) There is a fundamental misdiagnosis I have also written about elsewhere. That is, pastors and elders—always fighting the last generation’s war—suppose that what ails their churches is too much: too much doctrine, too much orthodoxy, too much firmness, too much concreteness, in short, too many answers and not enough questions. This is wrong. What bedevils churches today, and above all the under-30 crowd, is too little: too little doctrine, too little liturgy, too little substance, too little stability, too little confidence, too few answers. Young people today are begging for answers and what they’re receiving is mostly scraps and shrugs. They are drowning, and no one is throwing them a life raft. Instead, they hear a voice calling to them: “I’d try to help, but I wouldn’t want to presume!” Presume away. If the church lacks confidence in the truth of the gospel, then of all people we are most to be pitied. Preach the truth in love. That’s the answer now, as it always was and always will be, because both truth and love are synonymous with Jesus himself, and Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

(c) Evangelicalism is not a monolith. It includes charismatics, prosperity preachers, entertainment mega-churches (think: spotlights and smoke machines), generic DIY-ers, and confessional traditions. For CoC-ers trending evangelical, it is certainly possible to find prudent ways to avoid the first four and aim for the fifth. It’s possible, I say, but difficult. The reason is that confessional traditions belong, as the name says, to traditions defined by confessions. Those confessions may be broadly Reformed, or Anglican, or Lutheran, or Wesleyan, or other. They are embodied in books of discipline, common prayer, catechisms, institutes, seminaries, synods, and more. They characterize an entire ecclesial culture, rooted in a particular history out of which the tradition itself and its manifold churches spring forth and from which they continue to be nourished.

That’s what makes “becoming” confessional-evangelical difficult for churches of Christ. Not only would a congregation need to be led by a wise and trusted pastor. The elders would all have to be on the same page. And they, together with the pastor and the rest of the ministry staff, would have to guide and catechize the congregation such that folks in the pews—not only formed as CoC-ers but trained, as levelers, to think like egalitarian biblicists—would consent unanimously to become, or even to join, a preexisting confessional tradition. Doubtless such a process could begin incrementally, without many people realizing it. And a partial move in this direction is easy to imagine. But a comprehensive transformation? Possible in theory, I suppose, but difficult in practice.

(d) Having said that: You’d be surprised, if you know anything about churches of Christ, what you’re liable to find in some of them today. I know one that recites the Apostles’ Creed. I know another that practices corporate confession and absolution of sin in weekly public worship. I know another that says the Lord’s Prayer. Others process to the front to receive communion; still others locate communion at the climax of the liturgy, following the sermon. Many have begun following the church calendar and/or preaching according to the lectionary (goodbye, sermon series!). Taken together, these are rather radical changes to two centuries’ worth of habits; these habits amounted to a default setting for Sunday morning once assumed to be an immutable blueprint. So perhaps I am overestimating the potential resistance to change and underestimating the hunger for sacred tradition and historic liturgical patterns.

(e) The challenge that remains is this. If part of the underlying problem is DIY-ness, how does a congregation opt, with radical autonomy, to submit to an authority beyond itself? How, in a word, can a church use its autonomy to undo its autonomy? And with lasting effects? No one wants to make a change today that’ll probably by reversed tomorrow. Nothing could be more enervating for the task of reform.

In this case, I have little to offer. It feels like an intractable problem. But perhaps it is not. Here, as always, we are reduced to prayer, specifically to invocation of the Spirit. The church is dead apart from the life the coming of the Spirit brings. What we must do, then, besides our analysis and our planning and our working, is beg the Spirit to come to our aid.

So we cry: Veni sancte Spiritus!

And it’s a sweet irony, ending there, if you recall the role of the Spirit in Stone-Campbell teaching. Having once shrunk him down to size—to the size of the Bible on the lectern, in fact—we now plead for his sovereign presence once more. Mortification and vivification: that is what we need. To be slain by his fiery power and raised by his might to the only life worth having; his life, which is the unquenchable life of Christ.

Jimmy’s change

So far as I can tell—but I haven’t been trawling Twitter for contrarian takes—Alan Jacobs’ negative reaction to the Better Call Saul finale (spoilers herein, obviously) is the exception to the rule. The people I read loved it. Friends and family who watch it loved it. I loved it. But it’s useful to read a take against the grain. Is Alan right?

His case is simply stated. Jimmy’s volte-face in the third act of the finale is unwarranted either by the episode’s events or by the series’ narrative thrust as a whole. Who Jimmy is, deep down, has more or less always been set in stone, and that concreteness was not softened by these final episodes. Jimmy-as-Saul-as-Gene has only become more narcissistic, more reckless, more negligent, even murderous and sociopathic. Are we really supposed to believe that a single remarkable deed by Kim has the power to undo all of that, to make of Jimmy a Sydney Carton bound, selflessly, for the guillotine of a lifetime in prison?

Answer: Yes, actually. I think so. But before I defend that view, let me say why I resonate with Alan’s disappointment.

His disappointment was my disappointment with the original finale of Breaking Bad, which just about everyone else I read and know thought was perfect. It was not perfect, and for the same rationale Alan offers for BCS. Vince Gilligan loved his character too much to let him down. Though Walt had to die, though he had to be humiliated, he also had to go out in a blaze of glory. He had to earn some degree of redemption. He had to do something good, or at least something on his own terms. And thereby, all fans, not just “bad” fans, could get some measure of catharsis for watching and secretly (or not so secretly) cheering on a wicked and murderous drug dealer for five years.

Ever since that finale first aired nearly a decade ago, I’ve proposed an alternate ending. It’s only slightly different than what occurs in the final ten minutes of the episode. Walt arrives in his car, parks it where he does, walks into the building with all going according to plan. Only: when the button is pressed and the machine gun lets loose, the bullets spray wildly without hitting anybody. The plan fails. The cowboy’s last hurrah is an anticlimax. Walt doesn’t win. Instead, once the bullets are finished, the neo-Nazis look at Walter, look at Jesse, and shrug. Then they take them both outside. First they shoot Jesse, as Walter looks on. Then they shoot Walter. They dump both in an unmarked grave. Fade to black; end credits.

That’s a bleak ending, but its bleakness matches the bleakness of the show’s story. For that story is one without any happy endings. Walt doesn’t get to save his orphaned would-be son. His outlandish plan doesn’t succeed. Such plans don’t always work. He doesn’t get to pass out and pass on in the midst of the humming chemistry of a meth lab, happy in his own way, dying as he lived. He doesn’t get to set the terms of his exit from this life. That’s the way he thought he could live. But he was wrong. And the show’s writers mistook their protagonist’s self-understanding as the show’s own inner meaning. An easy error to make, but a costly one. Not just the bad fans rejoiced at the finale. Even ordinary viewers left with a sense of cathartic release: Jesse got away, the bad guys lost, and Walt redeemed himself. Good for him.

It seems to me that Alan thinks the same (whatever his actual thoughts on the BB finale) of the BCS finale. I wondered, going into the episode, whether Gilligan and Gould would be tempted by the same error: the need to make their evil lead good by the end; the desire to make things right that can’t be made right; the pull to let Saul undo, by TV magic, what can’t be undone.

I understand why one might see “Saul Gone,” the name of the series finale, as indulging that temptation. But I don’t agree, for the following four reasons.

First, there’s a lot more going on in Jimmy’s incredible courtroom speech than breaking good, for Kim’s sake. He’s putting on a performance. That performance is Heisenberg-like in its pomposity and pride. He doesn’t want seven years in a cush prison with the world thinking he was a victim. Instead, he wants the world—the feds, the judge, his future inmates, even Kim—to know that without him, Heisenberg wouldn’t have lasted a month as a free man. The real hero of Walt and Jesse and Mike and Gus’s story was Saul Goodman. He made it all possible. After all, he’s the only one still standing. Are you not impressed? Are you not entertained?

Second, so much of what the previous 61 episodes of BCS gave us, which the 62 episodes of BB did not, is that, unlike Walt, who was rotten to the core from the beginning and just needed the opportunity to show it, there was always a goodness to Jimmy intermingled with the bad. Not only certain good inclinations, but the desire to do and to be good. Granted, that desire is snuffed out by the time he’s transformed into Saul. But we have no reason to suppose that it’s gone forever, that it’s beyond recovery. Moreover, he didn’t leave Kim; she left him. It is precisely her reentry in his life that reawakens that desire once more. On the phone, she tells him to turn himself in; he scoffs and tells her to take her own medicine. She does. At great cost to her own life, possibly bringing it to an end. I find it wholly plausible, not that her extraordinary good deed converts him from pure evil to pure good, but rather that her action, like a flash of lightning, transforms the scenery before him. It shuffles the board of his potential actions. It makes possible certain decisions that he would never have considered before. He doesn’t become a martyr. But he does tell the truth.

Why? Because, third, what we know of Jimmy—again, from those prior 61 episodes—is that his moral psychology is not defined solely by greed or victory or successful schemes. An additional and irreducible element is his desire to please those he loves or reveres, even in spite of himself. (In this, too, he is different and, I think, a more complicated character than Walter White.) That’s the thing that made his relationship to Kim so complex. Together, they were bad. But in truth, while he made her worse, she made him better. She kept him from from the dark side, from truly breaking bad all the way. Only in her absence does does he do that. All his worst propensities, however much he toyed with them and leaned in their direction, he kept at bay so long as she was still around. That’s not to say such an arrangement would have lasted forever. But he always cared what she thought. Because he always truly loved her, as she did him. And what he is doing in that courtroom is trying to earn her approval, trying to see a glimmer of the love that once burned bright in her eyes. I have to say, this strikes me as absolutely and unquestionably psychologically and emotionally plausible. The man is a living image of self-sabotage in service of his insatiable desires. He never knows when to stop. Only now, he isn’t risking everything for the sake of some petty score. He’s forsaking a short time in prison for an indefinite one for the sake of the woman he never stopped loving, because the one and only thing that ever competed with his love for self and love for money was love for her. Which is to say, his need for her requited love. So he schemes one last performance for the ages. (Showtime!) And, as ever, he gets what he wants. It works—like Walt’s plan worked—except no one thinks him a hero, and the cost is a life sentence.

Fourth and last, it’s essential not to overlook what Gould shows us on the bus and in the prison. Jimmy isn’t in chains. His spirit isn’t quenched. He’s finally at rest. He’s among the people he always worked for and with and among. He always had their back, and now they’ve got his. They’re chanting his name. They’re fist-bumping him as he swaggers by. He’s not a fish out of water. He’s not suffering in squalor. He’s king of the castle. He’s come home. This is where he belongs. This is where he’s comfortable. This is where he was always meant to be, where his path always led. There’s not a trace of pain or resentment on his face. Not, again, because he’s a martyr. But because he’s accepted who he is and what he’s done, in an irresolvable combination (one that defined his life from start to finish) of chest-thumping pride, feigned performance, and quiet shame.

Nor is Kim’s visit an absolution. Their few words reflect the years and the distance between them. There’s nothing he can do to change the past, to rectify his wrongs. But behind bars, in the plain light of day, he can acknowledge who he is to the one person (apart from his brother) whose opinion he values, and she can accept that knowledge so long as he isn’t hurting anyone or inciting her to do the same. His quiet bravado (“…with good behavior…”) is a sign that he’s no Sydney Carton, nor does he imagine himself to be. He’s Jimmy. But then, Jimmy isn’t the antithesis of Saul Goodman, since Jimmy always was and always will be Slippin’ Jimmy. Kim, though, always loved Jimmy, and Jimmy always loved Kim. If what it took to see her again, to see her look at him like he was Jimmy, not Saul, one more time, was this—getting all the credit for Heisenberg’s crimes while serving time he always knew was coming down the pike—then so be it.

His whole life was a tissue of tradeoffs, anyway, cooking up some brilliant idea in the moment to get what he wanted most, without necessarily thinking of the long-term effects. He did it one last time. Who’s to say he’d regret it now anymore than he did in the past? In the time machine motif that haunts the episode like the ghosts of another Dickens tale, Jimmy wonders about regrets, his own and others. We know he always regretted losing Kim. His moment in the courtroom is his last chance to hop in his own personal time machine and make one single change. Not to alter the laws broken, the people conned, the lives ruined, the victims murdered. Not even—though he does regret it—to unwind his brother’s end.

No, the one change concerns Kim, having once lost her, seemingly forever. Once that change is made, he can live with the consequences.

What Christian parents hope for their children

Not wealth or health. Not success. Not intelligence or skill or talent. Not safety per se. Not freedom from suffering. Not a long life for its own sake. Not goodness, considered as a moral achievement. Not even happiness, in the popular sense.

No, each of these things is secondary. Naturally, every Christian parent prays for all or most of them. But they’re not primary. What’s primary, what a Christian parent hopes above all as most important for his children, is that they know Christ. And knowing Christ, apart from having priority, cuts against those secondary desires in two important respects.

The first is this. To know Christ is not to have it all together. Far from it. To know Christ is to know that, far from having it all, one has nothing. Having it all is the illusion from which Christ delivers us. There is no one righteous, not one. Like our children, we sometimes imagine the world is divided between good and bad people. But those aren’t the basic Christian categories. The basic Christian category for human beings is sinner, and we all belong to it. The aim of the Christian life isn’t to avoid being Peter, the betrayer of Christ; Paul, the persecutor of Christ; Thomas, the doubter of Christ. For we are all, every one of us, Peter and Paul and Thomas. The aim instead is to be the Peter and Paul and Thomas we already are on the far side of Christ—on the far side of seeing and recognizing Christ for who he is: the lover of our souls, the One who forgives seventy times seven, the grace of God incarnate. The aim is to know Christ, as the One who sees us for who we are and forgives us as the sinners we are. Kichijiro, in the novel Silence, is not the paradigmatic “bad” Christian. He’s the paradigmatic Christian full stop. His perpetual failure is ours. We are all Kichijiro: believing, confessing, failing, betraying, and in sincere contrition falling prostrate before the Lord, begging mercy once again. And receiving it.

That is the shape of the Christian life. That, therefore, is what a Christian parent hopes for her children. She knows in advance that the shape of human life is failure, so she doesn’t kid herself that her children might escape such a fate. What she prays for instead is that her children’s inevitable failure might be cruciform, that is, formed and defined by the cross of Christ. For when our failures are united to his, then his triumph becomes ours. Per crucem ad lucem. Only by darkness, light; only by death, life; only by the cross—by suffering, shame, rejection, and humiliation—comes resurrection life, which is the life of God: eternal life.

This is the second element of knowing Christ. To know Christ is to follow Christ, taking up our crosses in his wake. For the way of Christ is the way of the cross. To follow him is to be conformed to his image, to the pattern of his life, death, and resurrection. Far from the path of passivity or unrighteousness, this is the path of holiness. What it means, in a word, to follow the Christ, the Anointed One, is to become holy as he is holy. It is to become a saint.

As Léon Bloy famously remarked, “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.” Few of us, alas, become saints in this life, though all the baptized are bound for it, here or in the life of the world to come. But what does it mean to be a saint?

The answer to that question is found in the lives of the saints. And as C. S. Lewis wrote, “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints.” Their fundamental differences doesn’t mean there is no commonality, however. The commonality is their proximity to Christ: their having been seized, captured, and won by Christ and for Christ to serve his will alone. What he wants, they want; what he does, they do; what he commands, they obey. The heart of the saint is the prayer of St. Augustine: “Command what you will, and will what you command.” A saint, therefore, is someone whose total life and being are utterly transparent to the desires and actions of the Lord.

The thing about the Lord’s will, though, is that it, too, is not primarily interested in wealth, health, success, intelligence, skill, talent, safety, long life, mortal righteousness, earthly happiness, or freedom from suffering. To be a saint, as the lives of the saints suggest, is as a rule to be asked to relinquish or avoid such things. For the crown of sainthood is martyrdom, and all saints are called to be martyrs in one form or another. A saint is likely, as a result, to be marked not by worldly signs of flourishing but, instead, by ostracism, loneliness, pain, mockery, ill health, poverty, neither spouse nor children, a brief life, and, on the part of the wider society, either befuddled neglect or outright repudiation. I might as well be describing St. Paul, after all. Or Jesus.

And that’s the point. To raise children to be Christians is to raise them to follow Christ; to raise them to follow Christ is to unclench one’s parental fists, entrusting them to the Lord’s care, with the full knowledge that the Lord may lead them to where he himself was led: Gethsemane, Golgotha, a garden tomb. The reason why a parent might even consider this is, on one hand, because we know what follows that sequence: an empty tomb. And, on the other hand, because Jesus says that even in this world, even in this life, the only true life is following his way, wherever it may lead. Resurrection life looks like cruciform life even before one arrives in Jerusalem.

“I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.” As parents, we either take Jesus at his word or we don’t. If we do, our prayers and hopes for our children will look wildly, even scandalously different than our neighbors’. If we don’t, then of all people we are most to be pitied. If Jesus can’t be trusted, we should let our children know as soon as possible, and quit all this church business for good.

CoC: evangelical, not catholic

I’ve had a number of readers reach out to me about my reflection on the churches of Christ as catholic rather than evangelical. I’m gratified to learn that what I was trying to put my finger on is something others resonate with. Some wrote as still-CoCers to say that it helped them articulate “the difference” they had always felt but had never been able to name; others wrote to say that, yes, indeed, they were raised CoC but were now a part of one of the three great episcopal branches of catholic tradition: Anglican, Eastern, or Roman.

So that’s the good news: what I identified is real and recognized as such by others. More good news: CoC theology of the church and her sacraments is both good on the merits and in line with patristic and medieval teaching, rather than merely a recent innovation. Best of all, at least for some: We’re not evangelicals, like we’ve been saying all along!

Now for the bad news.

The bad news comes in two forms, one about CoC past and one about CoC future.

Regarding the former, the thing about CoC virtues, which broadly overlap with catholic tradition, is that they are the flip side of CoC vices. These vices likewise sometimes overlap with catholic vices. A high ecclesiology all too often trades on a sectarian ecclesiology: no one outside this church (rather than the church) will be saved. Hence the CoC’s justly earned reputation for supposing all other Christians to be damned, or at least very unlikely to be saved. The same goes for sacramental practice, which can verge on the obsessive, the mechanical, or both. If it’s even thinkable for a well-formed member of your ecclesial tradition to wonder seriously whether a person who died in a car accident on the way to being baptized would, as a result of thus not being baptized, go to hell, then you can be sure that something has gone terribly wrong. Doubly so if your catechesis generates rather than relieves this anxiety. (My students are shocked to learn how open-handed actual Catholic doctrine is on this question: not only are unbaptized martyrs saved, but any person with the sincere intention to be baptized, who for reasons outside her control is kept from being baptized, is received by the Lord in death as though she had been baptized.) The same obsessive-compulsive severity can be found in “re”-baptizing someone whose hand or foot didn’t go all the way under during the first try—taking to a literal extreme the understanding of baptism as total immersion, and just thereby undermining the very point of once-for-all believers baptism.

I could go on: the granular scholasticism of kitchens in church buildings, church buildings in general, instruments in worship, paid parish preachers, and the rest. Anyone who was raised in churches of Christ or who grew up in an area with one on every corner knows what I’m talking about.

No church is perfect, however, nor any church tradition. The wheat and the tares grow together, as do the virtues and vices of any particular movement. That’s to be expected.

The second element of the bad news, though, is related to the first, which is why I mentioned it. It is true to say, as I did in my original post, that the CoC is more catholic than evangelical. That catholic sensibility still lingers on in some congregations, especially in members over 50. But it is dissipating, and fast. As I wrote, churches of Christ are currently in process of being absorbed into American evangelicalism, a process that, if not already finished, will be completed in the next decade or two. It’s a fait accompli; the only question is the timing.

This CoC future is a function of CoC past. There is a reason why churches of Christ are becoming indistinguishable from non-denominational churches. Well, there are many reasons, but here’s one big one: The oldest three generations of CoC-ers finally got fed up with the sectarian fundamentalism in which they were raised. They saw that they were not the only Christians; that church history was not misery and darkness until 1801; that Stone-Campbell tradition was just that, a tradition, one like many others; that “being right” was not synonymous with “doing what we’ve always done”; and that “what we’ve always done” was not sufficient as a reason to keep on doing it.

Those are all true insights, and their fruit, across the last thirty years, has been lifting up mainstream churches of Christ from the sectarian muck in which it had been mired. Many experienced that lifting-up as a deliverance, even a liberation. They were in the light, having been in shadow and twilight for so long. They were grateful for the tradition they’d received; they were willing to remain in it; but they would contribute to its healthy evolution: from sect to tradition, from exclusivism to ecumenism, from dogma to generous orthodoxy. This would, in a way, honor the Stone-Campbell roots of churches of Christ, since those roots were about prioritizing Christian unity above all else.

Many welcomed, and continue to welcome, the resulting changes. But there were unintended consequences. Chief among them was the loss, on one hand, of the features that made churches of Christ distinctive in the larger ecclesial landscape; and, on the other, of the practical means of maintaining and handing on those very features to the next generation.

Here is the great irony. The upshot of rescuing the CoC from its worst vices was the loss of its greatest virtues—of what made it it in the first place.

Hence the CoC’s absorption into evangelicalism. And try as some might, there’s no arresting this process. Why? For the following reasons.

First, the CoC began as an anti-tradition tradition. This means there are no organs of authority for any one congregation besides the Bible, its elders, and its ministry staff. There is, in a sense, no tradition to which such a congregation might be faithful. It doesn’t exist. There’s no “there” there.

Second, even granting that, in one sense, there obviously is a “there” there—after all, churches of Christ have a history and founders and influential leaders—there are no reasons, internal to the tradition, why anyone should care. In a theological debate between two Orthodox theologians, it is valid and weighty to assert that St. Irenaeus, St. Basil, and St. Maximus are on one’s side. They’re not quite Scripture, but they’re close. Not so in a CoC context. If someone in a local congregation says, “I hear what you’re saying, but Stone-Campbell Movement Leader X once wrote Y,” the only reply necessary is, “So?” Moreover, the very point of “moving” the CoC beyond its sectarian postwar malaise was for it to be changed. But if such change is both possible and desirable, then crying “Halt!” because Proposed Change Z doesn’t accord with CoC tradition is nonsensical. You can’t sit on the branch you’ve already sawed off yourself.

Third, there is only one way of being anti-tradition (indeed, anti-creedal) with a congregationalist polity in America: it’s called evangelicalism. By definition you do not belong to a larger ecclesiastical body. By definition you have no larger set of authoritative canons or confessions or doctrines. By definition you are making it up as you go. We have a name for that in this here frontier land. It’s the E-word, God help us all. American evangelicalism is DIY religion through and through, and that’s the only route available to a tradition without a history, a church without a creed, a polity without authority—that is, authority beyond the Bible as read by a local group of staff and elders.

This is why flagship and even normie churches of Christ today look like carbon copies of their next-door-neighbor non-denom churches. (It’s why some of them have dropped the “…of Christ” from their buildings and websites, and why others are soon to follow.) Increasingly they’re ditching a cappella singing for CCM praise music; they’re placing far less of an emphasis on baptism as restricted to adults or as a sacrament of divine action, much less as necessary for salvation; and I’d be willing to wager that weekly communion, already felt to be gumming up the liturgical works, will be the last domino to fall in the coming years. What’s holding all of this together, anyway, is the oldest two generations. Once they pass away, and once younger people start asking (as they already are), “Why does this have to be weekly? Won’t it be more meaningful if we make it monthly instead?” you can set a timer for the eventual change. Remember, “we’ve always done it this way” no longer holds water as an answer.

For CoC leaders who don’t like the look of this trajectory, there are limited options. You can’t bootstrap an ecclesiastical hierarchy into existence ex nihilo. Nor can you DIY yourself out of DIY-ness. That’s the DIY trap. If you make yourself just-a-little-progressive-mainline, you’re not mainline, you’re just progressive evangelical—the worst of all possible worlds. Besides, if the point was to avoid being evangelical, you’ve failed. If, by contrast, you make yourself just-a-little-traditional-catholic, you’re not catholic, you’re just traditional—but what does that mean? You can’t be “traditional” as an optional extra chosen by lay vote or ministerial preference; tradition either is or is not authoritative. And if it just happens to be a congregation’s preference today, who’s to say it will remain their preference tomorrow?

In short, the question isn’t whether churches of Christ already are, or soon will be, one more tributary in the great evangelical delta. They are and they will be. It’s whether they will even exist once the process of absorption is complete. For many congregations are closing their doors, as the CoC rolls in the U.S. decline; many others are dropping the name; others still are dropping the distinctives that make them CoC (whether or not they still claim the name). Doubtless a few will remain, repping the old line. But they won’t amount to a statistically significant number in the scene of American Christianity. At that point—2045? 2060?—this whole conversation will be moot. Mostly there won’t be churches of Christ around anymore; and those that exist won’t look like they once did, a century prior. The transmutation to evangelicalism will be total.

I know plenty of folks in churches of Christ who see this as either a good thing or, at most, neutral. Their CoC catechesis was weaker on the catholic stuff and stronger on low-church ecumenism, marked by things like missionary flexibility, freedom from the authority of tradition, aversion to creeds and confessions, openness to change, inattention to history, an entrepreneurial spirit, and a high priority on spiritual unity and personal faith. American evangelicalism has all these in spades. This helps to explain the curious fact that, for most CoC congregations, the shift from catholic to evangelical has been so swift, so striking, yet so smooth, devoid (for the most part) of dispute and strife. Arguments have centered on culture-war flashpoints like gender rather than creedal doctrine or sacramental theology.

Yet this shift leaves the decidedly non-evangelical folks who remain in churches of Christ more or less homeless, exiles in their own spiritual household. But because the writing’s on the wall—because there’s no putting the evangelical cat back in the catholic bag—there’s nothing, really, to do. You can accept the trend lines, hunker down, and grin and bear it. Or, as I concluded in the previous post, you can leave.

As I see it, by and large those who stay will be those who resonate with evangelicalism, and those who leave will be those who long for catholic doctrine and practice. The sorting has already been happening, quietly, the last twenty years; it should be done, I’d say, in the next twenty. Some will leave who’d prefer to stay, and vice versa. But for the most part, that’s how it’ll shake out.

I’m in Theopolis with Alastair Roberts

Peter Leithart was kind enough to host a little conversation about my new book over at Theopolis: a long first round by Alastair Roberts, followed by my reply, and concluded by Alastair’s reply to my reply. Alastair is his usual gracious, perceptive self, and it’s an honor to have his keen eye range over my work. Thanks to him and to Peter. Enjoy the conversation.

Jenson on metaphor and theological language

Across the two volumes of his systematic theology, Robert Jenson makes a number of comments about the nature of metaphor in theological speech. I tracked down one of these the other day, only to stumble across others. I thought I’d share them here. Some are in the body of the text, some are footnotes; I’ll signal when which is which.

At the first mention, Jenson has just spent some paragraphs discussing the Old Testament’s description of the relationship between God and Israel, as well as between God and individual Israelites, “as a relation of father to son” (I:77). He then writes, “Given that such language is indeed used, we should not too quickly interpret it as a trope.” To which is appended the footnote (n.20):

That is, “. . . is a Son of God” is used in these passages as a proper concept. If someone has a theory of “metaphor” such that the use can be both concept and metaphor, well and good.

Clearly, Jenson has certain theories of metaphor in mind. We see in the next chapter whose these are. As he writes (I:104):

When the bishops and other teachers left Nicea and realized that, along with condemning Arius, they had renounced the established subordinationist consensus, many began to backtrack. Indeed, refusal to face Nicea has remained a permanent feature of Christianity’s history. If modalism has been the perennial theology of the pious but unthinking, Arianism has continually reappeared in the opposite role, as the theology of those controlled more by culture’s intellectual fashion than by the gospel.

He then adds in a footnote (n.99):

Most blatantly in recent memory, the “theology of metaphor,” paradigmatically represented by Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982).

The culprit at last! Nor is she, or theories like hers, far from Jenson’s mind in the next volume. Three chapters in, he is writing of “the sheer musicality” of “the divine conversation”; he argues that “to be a creature is to belong to the counterpoint and harmony of the triune music” (II:39). Immediately he anticipates an objection:

The previous paragraph is likely to be read as metaphor, and indeed as metaphor run wild. It is not so intended, or not in any sense of “metaphor” that is alternative to “concept.” Such words as “harmony” are here conscripted to be metaphysically descriptive language more malleable to the gospel’s grasp of reality than is, for central contrary example, the language of “substance” in its native Aristotelian or Cartesian or Lockean senses. That we are used to the metaphysical concepts of Mediterranean pagan antiquity and its Enlightenment recrudescence does not mean they are the only ones possible; there is no a priori reason why, for example, “substance”—which after all simply meant “what holds something up”—should be apt for conscription into metaphysical service and, for example, “tune” should not.

On the second sentence he hangs a footnote (n.41):

This may be the place to insist on a vital point against most recent “metaphor” theology. Its practitioners want to have it both ways. Sometimes it is important for them to note that metaphor is a universal function in all language. This of course is a truism, and when we think of “metaphor” in this way, there is no opposition between “metaphor” and “concept.” But then the key step in their theological arguments is that they pit metaphor against concept: we have, they say, “only” metaphors for God. It is perhaps safe to say that what most theologians now have in mind when they speak of metaphor is trope that is not concept; it is for this reason that I am so leary of “metaphor.”

Later in the same volume the subject reappears one last time, in the opening to the chapter on the church’s polity (II:189-190):

In ecumenical ecclesiology it has become customary to discuss the church’s reality under three headings drawn from the New Testament: the church is the people of God, the temple of the Spirit, and the Body of Christ. The trinitarian echoes of the pattern are obvious, as must be its attractiveness to this enterprise.

But much twentieth-century theology has succumbed here also to an endemic strategy of evasion: “people,” “temple,” and “body” have been treated as unconnected “images” or “metaphors” of the church, which at most need to be balanced or variously emphasized, that is, which need not be taken seriously as concepts. But although “temple” may be a simile when applied to the church, which to be sure is not literally a building or place, “people” clearly is neither metaphor nor simile; and if one pauses to examine Paul’s actual use of the phrase “body of Christ,” it becomes obvious that neither is it.

If we are to follow this scheme, then it must be the task of systematic theology to take “The church is the people of God, the temple of the Spirit, and the body of Christ” with epistemic seriousness by displaying the conceptual links between these phrases.

In the second paragraph, after the word “emphasized,” Jenson attaches the following footnote (n.2):

It perhaps needs to be repeated in this volume: I am well aware of the sense in which all language may be said to be metaphorical in its origins. But this trivial obsession has recently been widely used to escape the necessary distinction in actual usage between concepts and tropes. Both concepts and tropes are “functions,” sentences with holes in them. A concept is a function that, if the hole is filled in, yields a sentence that can be a premise in valid argument. Thus “The church is the temple of the Spirit” is a properly metaphorical proposition precisely because it will not, together with “All temples are containers for a god or gods,” yield “The church is the container of a god.”

Jenson was always attentive to the nature of language and, in particular, to the linguistic turn in philosophy and theology. See his long footnote back in the first volume, incidentally in a chapter dedicated to God the Father, here following discussion of Jonathan Edwards and Immanuel Kant (I:120n.21):

The most notorious line of this line of work [that is, the postmodern deconstruction of the “Western notion and experience of the self”] begins, significantly, with a theory of language, the “structuralist” theory founded by Ferdinand de Saussure . . . . A “language,” in structuralist theory, is a system of signs, whether of words, gestures, or other cultural artifacts. Each such system functions as possible discourse merely by the internal relations of its constituent signs, independently of any relation to a world outside the system. A language system as such can therefore have no history. It simply perseveres for its time and then is replaced by another, built perhaps from its fragment-signs; a favorite term in this connection is bricolage, the assembling of a new structure from fragments of former structures.

“Poststructuralism” combines structuralist understanding of language with an ontological position widely held in late-modern Continental thought: the personal self is said to be constituted in and by language, to subsist only as the act of self-interpretation. The emblematic figure in this movement has been Jacques Derrida . . . . The combination undoes the self, for the human self, inescapably, does have history. If then the self is linguistic, constituted in self-interpretation, and if language’s history is discontinuous, then so is the self’s history; then the self is constituted only as an endless bricolage of succeeding self-interpretations. A human life can have no status as a whole; that is, there is no self.

There’s much more where that came from. For essays along this line, there are some great ones available online. For a whole book on the matter, consult The Knowledge of Things Hoped For: The Sense of Theological Discourse.

Inegalitarian Acts

For various reasons I’ve been reading and re-reading Acts a lot this year. One reason is that I’m co-leading a Sunday School class through the book, slowly, chapter by chapter. This past Sunday I had Acts 15: the climactic moment in the story, the hinge of the great gentile missions of the Jewish churches in Jerusalem and Antioch.

In the process of reading and teaching Acts I’ve acquired many unfounded and decidedly unsexy opinions about it. My sense of its dating has been moving steadily earlier and earlier (like Harnack), and I enjoy mentally fiddling with authorship questions (St. Luke? St. Titus? Another?). Since I’m not a New Testament scholar, I’m freed from worrying about being found out with this or that frumpy position on these questions. Theologians are allowed to speculate, no?

In any case, teaching Acts 15 brought home to me one thing in particular in a new way: namely, just how inegalitarian it is. By this I don’t mean to refer to contemporary Christian debates about gender. I’m referring instead to structures of leadership and authority. I’ve seen this chapter used countless times as a paradigm for how a local church should practice corporate discernment, or come to a decision on some contested matter. But reading the chapter, you realize that that’s a fundamental misconstrual of the Jerusalem council.

For the council is not, nor is it about, a local matter. It’s quite explicitly about a distant matter, prompted by events and experiences hundreds of miles away. The Jerusalem church isn’t full of uncircumcised converts to The Way. Rather, Jerusalem is the origin and abiding center of The Way, housing its primatial leaders and authoritative spokesmen. The matter of gentiles and circumcision is taken from Asia Minor and Antioch through Phoenicia and Samaria to Jerusalem. And even those who bring it to Jerusalem have only a testimonial role to play; it is St. Peter, the chief apostle of the Twelve, and St. James, the head of the Jerusalem community, who declare (with the only speeches reported to us) the Spirit’s will in the dispute.

To be sure, we are told that the declaration involves the unanimous consent of the whole church (cf. v. 22); but even the most stubborn conservative will admit that the author is synthesizing and perhaps theologically airbrushing what continued, for some time, to be a question of considerable dispute among the churches—not least because they were spread far and wide, and technologies of communication meant that it took years of testimony, explanation, and persuasion to ensure that the faithful came to one mind on the matter. Note further, too, that it is not the people in general who gather for deliberation, but “the apostles and elders” (a phrase repeated no fewer than five times: vv. 2, 4, 6, 22, 23; following these mentions, the word apostolos does not appear in the remaining 13 chapters of the book, only presbyteroi—quite a fascinating lexical signal to the reader, when you think about it). Which means it is not only the formal, appointed leaders of the church who gather to discern and decide a contested question for “the” church; it is those leaders who reside in and speak from a location of recognized authority, in this case Jerusalem.

That sounds a whole lot like an ecumenical council, and not at all like a particular congregation practicing communal discernment. It’s neither local nor democratic. Some people’s voices bear authority, and others’ do not. Some are tasked with discovering the Spirit’s will, and others are not. Once the matter is decided, a document is issued, and the dispersed churches are tasked with receiving, obeying, and implementing the decision, not disputing or modifying it.

Again, isn’t this precisely what the episcopal synods of the fourth and fifth centuries, which set the template for subsequent councils, sound like? It’s not mere PR when the church fathers compare Nicaea and Constantinople and the rest to the blueprint of Acts 15. The Jerusalem gathering is the proto–ecumenical council, and thus the paradigm for all future attempts by the church’s supra-congregational hierarchy to respond to, and when necessary settle, volatile questions of major scriptural, theological, or moral import. Accordingly, the promulgations that proceed from such councils are rightly prefaced by, and received as justifiably asserting, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…”

All the more so if, as the church claimed from the beginning (and, so far as I am aware, continued to claim universally and unanimously from the third century through the fifteenth), her episcopoi are appointed, or ordained, as successors to the apostles. So that, in an ecumenical council beyond the apostolic age, episcopoi and presbyteroi gather on the model of Acts 15, hear testimony, deliberate, argue, pray, interpret Scripture, and render a judgment—with authority.

Perhaps there are reasons not to think such an action desirable, possible, or otherwise worth pursuing, whether in the past or in the present (after, for example, the Great Schism or the Reformation). At a minimum, it’s difficult to deny that the pattern is in strict imitation of the Jerusalem council, or that seeing in the Jerusalem council a pattern for local congregational discernment is a poor interpretation indeed.

CoC: catholic, not evangelical

For the whole of my academic career, it has been difficult to explain to friends and colleagues who have no prior knowledge of the Stone-Campbell Movement why churches of Christ are not best understood as “evangelical,” that is to say, as part of that rambunctious and dysfunctional family called “American evangelicalism.” Even, for a time, it was hard for me to understand it myself. But I knew it at a gut level and at the level of anecdotal experience. Regarding the latter, for example, I never once heard the term “evangelical” growing up in church; the way evangelical friends would describe their theological assumptions and church practices sounded bizarre and alien to me; and even at the level of guest speakers, popular books, websites, music, and the like, there was usually slim overlap, if any at all.

The difficulty in explanation is made the harder by the fact that, beginning a couple decades ago, mainstream churches of Christ began to be absorbed into American evangelicalism, a process that will reach completion in another decade or two. Walk into a local CoC congregation today, that is, and likely as not you won’t be able to tell much of a difference between it and the neighboring non-denominational or otherwise evangelical church. (The most probable oddity would be a cappella singing or weekly communion, the first of which is already on the wane, the second of which, I fear, is not far behind it.) But the very fact that this registers as a jarring change, that sociologists and historians of American religion see it as a dramatic shift, tells you that once upon a time, and for most of their history, churches of Christ were set apart from evangelicalism as a whole, and thus poorly understood as a subset thereof.

When I was in seminary, surrounded by mainline liberals, I quickly realized that the simplest way to explain the CoC sensibility is to describe it as catholic, not evangelical. Indeed, of those I know who were raised in the churches of Christ who have earned degrees in graduate theological education, not one (of whom I’m aware) has “gone evangelical,” or even magisterial Protestant. They have either remained CoC, or left the faith, or joined a high-church tradition: whether swimming the Thames, the Bosporus, or the Tiber. And no one “in house” is surprised by such a move.

Why is that? Why would going from the lowest-of-low congregationalist, non-creedal, primitivist traditions to the highest-of-high episcopal-creedal traditions make a kind of intuitive, not to say theological, sense? Why would I call the CoC DNA catholic and not evangelical, even though the Stone-Campbell tradition has its origins in frontier revivalism and nineteenth-century American restorationism?

For the following reasons. Each of these is fundamental conviction either taught explicitly or imbibed like mother’s milk from pulpit and classroom in historic churches of Christ (prior to the ongoing evangelical takeover); taken together, they form a kind of unofficial catholic catechesis:

1. The founding of the church is the climax and telos of the biblical story. The church is the point, not an incidental or accidental or epiphenomenal feature of both the Christian life and the good news of the gospel.

2. It is impossible for an individual to be saved alone, by herself, apart from the ministerial intervention and interposition of Christ’s church. In other words, the church is herself the corporate sacrament of salvation.

3. The church is therefore necessary for salvation: extra ecclesiam nulla salus. To be saved is to belong to the body of Jesus Christ, which is the bride for whom he died.

4. “Faith alone” apart from baptism, which is to say, apart from the sacramental administration of the church, is insufficient for salvation.

5. Baptism, in short, is necessary for salvation. Why? Because by its instrumentality God himself acts to cleanse you from sin, unite you to Christ, knit you to his body, and fill you with his Spirit.

6. “An unbaptized Christian” is an oxymoron. To be Christian is to be baptized; to be baptized is to be Christian. The two are synonymous.

7. Public worship in the assembly on Sunday morning without the celebration of the Lord’s Supper is a self-contradiction in terms. When the church gathers on the Lord’s day, she administers the sacrament of the Cross and Resurrection of Christ. If she fails to do so, she has failed to worship in the Spirit as the Lord commanded.

8. In a word, communion is to be celebrated each and every Sunday, where two or three are gathered in Jesus’s name. (And if you missed it on Sunday morning, when everybody gathers again for another service that evening, you step out at a fitting time with others who missed it in order to partake now: better late than never.)

9. It is possible, by apostasy or moral failure, to fall from grace, that is, to lose one’s salvation. In traditional terms, mortal sin is a live possibility.

10. The moral, the spiritual, and the liturgical are utterly intertwined, so much so that they are inseparable. On one hand, nothing is more important than the worship of Christ in and with his body on Sunday morning; on the other, a life of Sunday worship apart from daily discipleship would be an act of self-condemnation. Following Christ is a comprehensive task, demanding one’s all. Everything else is secondary. But it is found in and made possible by thick membership in the Christian community—and only there. Christianity is impossible without the church, for the church simply is Christianity as God instituted it on earth.

11. The life of the early church, for all its faults, is the paradigm of moral, spiritual, and sacramental faithfulness. It is there to be imitated by the saints for all time.

12. The canon within the canon is not, as heirs of Luther and Calvin suppose, Galatians and Romans. Instead, it is the book of Acts together with the Pastoral Epistles. There we see the blueprint for ecclesiology, God’s vision for a lasting society on earth that exists for the praise of his glory in the midst of a fallen world. The leadership structure and overall organization of God’s church is therefore of paramount importance, as is her unity, being the chief object of the Spirit’s will and work, not to mention the high priestly prayer of Jesus himself.

I could go on, but that covers the main themes in broad strokes. I trust these convictions make legible, first, why churches of Christ have always been out of step with evangelicals; second, why those raised in the CoC don’t find themselves, their beliefs, or their practices reflected in American evangelicalism; third, why it’s not unfitting (however odd it may sound) to describe CoC-ers as more catholic than evangelical; and fourth, why it is that folks with CoC backgrounds who go to seminary or pursue doctoral studies in theological disciplines so often find themselves drawn to capitalizing the “c” in “catholic”—i.e., seeing little appeal in the churches on offer between their own movement (on one pole of the continuum) and the great episcopal-creedal traditions (on the other pole). Go big or go home, you know?

Besides, if what you’re after is an authoritative community that makes the church and her sacraments central, both to God’s salvific purposes revealed in the Bible and to the daily lives of the faithful, while giving doctrinal, liturgical, and moral priority to “the early church,” then it makes all the sense in the world that exposure to the church fathers—from St. Ignatius to St. Irenaeus, St. Justin Martyr to St. Cyprian, St. Athanasius to St. Basil, St. Augustine to St. Cyril, St. Ephrem to St. Leo, and so on—would have the simple but logical effect of expanding the meaning of “the early church” to more than the initial apostolic generation(s). That particular marker in time is somewhat arbitrary, anyway, given that the first Christian assemblies were terribly imperfect (hello, Corinth) and that the very notion of a neatly pristine, bow-tied “apostolic age” is possible to conceive only in retrospect, following centuries of debate regarding, among other things, the boundaries of the canon. And since we know that such debate was itself normed by the Rule of faith, which was transmitted orally, and by the authority of bishops, who were ordained in succession from the time of the apostles, then we have no clear (non-question-begging) demarcation between “early” and “late” or “developed” doctrine and practice in the first half millennium of the church. Only consider Lutheran and other modern Protestant disdain for the Pastorals, along with the rest of the “catholic” epistles. They spy “development” already within the canonical New Testament, so they relegate it to “later,” “secondary” status by the slander term “catholic.”

But that just won’t do for a proper doctrine of Scripture or of the church. And if it won’t do, then there are only so many alternatives. One alternative is to remain. Another is to go. The middle options are small beer by comparison.

The Gray Man

Why is The Gray Man so bad? Chris Evans is in top form, while Ryan Gosling and Ana de Armas are always game. It could be the script; but then, dumb action scripts have the potential to be elevated by competent direction into quality entertainment, and occasionally even excellent art.

The culprit has to be the Russo brothers. Yet they are the same directors of this scene, which contains more clarity, line of sight, and visual creativity in three minutes than anything in the full running time of TGM. Don’t they know they now live in a world ruled by action auteurs like Christopher McQuarrie, Chad Stahelski, and Gareth Evans? Are there more than three straight seconds of coherent, sustained editing in TGM before a careening drone shot or confusing cut renders the action visual gibberish? Why all the CGI smoke, gas, and fire? Why the constant haze, a sort of vague fog constantly filtering the audience’s sight? Is it cinematographer Stephen Windon’s fault? Someone else’s? Who is spending all that Netflix cash? On what, exactly, other than an outlandish and unnecessary travel budget? Why are the visuals and action of Extraction, another Netflix film produced by the Russos but directed by first-timer Sam Hargrave, superior to TGM’s? Why, why, why?

Does anyone know the answer? I certainly don’t.