I’m in First Things + on a podcast

An essay of mine called “Theology in Division” is in the new issue of First Things. Here’s a link. I’ve had something like it half-written in the back of my mind for the last five years. I’m glad for it to be in print finally. I’m also glad for it to honor both Robert Jenson and Joseph Ratzinger, two theologians whose legacy I treasure who have now gone on to their reward.

I’m also on the latest episode of a new podcast called The Great Tradition. We recorded the interview back in December. It’s about the Bible. This time I’ve got a good mic, so I don’t sound like I’ve yelling through feedback the whole time.

After declining invitations to appear on podcasts for years, I’ve now been on 5-10 of them over the last 12+ months. My line used to be “Friends don’t let friends go on podcasts before tenure.” I have tenure now, so I guess I’m covered. In any case, I’ve come to enjoy the interviews. This one was fun, and I think we found a way to cover all the main theological issues raised by my two books on Scripture.

Prestige scholarship

No, not that kind of prestige. I mean the kind you find in Christopher Nolan’s movie of the same name, based on the (quite good, quite different) novel by Christopher Priest. Wherein—and here I’m spoiling it—a magician so committed to entertaining audiences and to defeating his competitor uses a kind of real magic, or outlandish science, to make a copy of himself each night, drowning the old man and watching from afar. Why does he do it? Why go to such lengths? Because, little does he know, the trick performed by his competitor, in which he seems to be in two places at once, is a con: he’s not one man but two; identical twins. That’s why he, the competitor, appears to be so superhumanly productive, so supernaturally capable of bilocation. He does exist in two places at the same time. Because he’s not one person. He’s two.

That’s the way I feel about people I think of as super-scholars. There are many of these on offer, but I’ll use Timothy Burke as an example for now. The man writes a daily Substack, almost always with a word count in the thousands. He reports continuously on the books he’s reading, the New Yorker articles he’s reading, the peer-reviewed journal articles he’s reading, the comic books he’s reading, the genre fantasy he’s reading, the novels he’s reading, the Substacks he’s reading—and more. In addition, he reports the dishes he’s cooking, the video games he’s playing, the photos he’s editing, the book manuscripts he’s drafting, the syllabi he’s re-writing, the institutional meetings he’s attending. Oh, and he has a spouse and children. Oh, and he teaches classes; something he’s apparently well regarded for.

Reading him isn’t masochistic for me so much as uncanny. He belongs to this (in my eyes fictitious but clearly all too real) tribe of academics and journalists who appear never to sleep, only to consume and produce, consume and produce, without end or exhaustion. Do they speed read? Are they lying? Do they refuse to close their eyes except for six carefully timed and executed 20-minute naps every 24 hours? Are they brains in vats operating their bodies from afar? Do they have assistants and researchers doing the actual work that comes into my inbox every single day of the week?

No, I don’t think so. They’re really doing all of it. It’s them. No tricks.

Well, except the one. Like Alfred Bordon in The Prestige, there’s more than one of them. Sometimes twins, sometimes triplets; occasionally more. Nothing magical. No futuristic science involved. They just don’t want us in on the secret. Which I get. I wouldn’t either. The result is marvelous, even unbelievable.

It’s prestige scholarship. It’s the only explanation. Good for them.

A new book contract! And other coming attractions

It’s official!

This week I received and signed the contract for my next book. Eerdmans is publishing it, and the tentative publication date is late 2024. The title is Letters to a Future Saint: A Catechism for Young Believers. It is what it sounds like: an epistolary catechism intended for readers in their late teens or early twenties. Not an apologetics for nonbelievers, but a catechism for would-be believers, folks who’ve grown up in the church, or perhaps in its orbit, but are relatively ignorant about the ABCs of the Christian faith while hungry to learn more.

I drafted a good two-thirds of the book in a brief but intense span of time last year, then sat on it. Now that the contract’s official, the writing will re-commence forthwith. I hope to have a rough draft by this summer, and then it’ll be time to revise the manuscript to the death. I want this thing to be perfect—by which I mean, not perfect, but absolutely accessible to my intended audience, and not only accessible, but appealing, fascinating, stimulating, even converting. I want not one word out of place. So I’m sure I’ll be road-testing it on some students in the summer and fall.

I’ve known this was coming down the pike for a while, but I didn’t want to make an announcement until it was for sure. I couldn’t be more excited. I can’t wait to share the final product with the world. I hope it finds a real readership and makes a real difference, however modest.

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While we’re on the topic, here is a larger update on other writing projects, whether books or essays, imminent or far off.

–My first two books were published in the fall and spring of 2021 and 2022, respectively. The first was about the Bible. The second was about the Bible and the church. Book #3, not yet released, is about the church. (Are you sensing a theme?)

That book is written and in the hands of the publisher. It’s called The Church: A Guide to the People of God, and it will be the sixth entry in Lexham’s Christian Essentials series. The first five treat the Apostles’ Creed (Ben Myers), The Ten Commandments (Peter Leithart), The Lord’s Prayer (Wesley Hill), baptism (Leithart again), and the Bible (John Kleinig). I’ve read all of them, and each is fantastic. I’ve assigned more than one of them many times in classes. I’m honored to join the series. I’m eager to read the entry on the Eucharist, whoever ends up writing it!

The publication date for my entry on the church is TBD, but my guess is sometime between December 2023 and March 2024.

–Book #4 is my big news above, and as I said, I expect it to be released sometime between late 2024 and early 2025.

–Book #5 is not news, as I signed the contract nearly two years ago. It will likewise be with Lexham, in another series called Lexham Ministry Guides. The subtitle for the series and for each book in it is For the Care of Souls. Four have been published so far: on funerals, stewardship, pastoral care, and spiritual warfare.

My entry in the series will be on the topic of technology. Specifically, the role and challenge of digital technology in the life of pastoral ministry. It’s a topic close to my heart and one I’ve developed a class on here at ACU. The book will be midsize and written for ordained pastors in formal church ministry of some kind. I hope it will not be like other books of this sort. We shall see.

Anyway, I expect that book to be published in the spring or summer of 2026. And beyond that, while I have more book ideas germinating—one in particular, a “big” scholarly one—no contracts or hard plans are in place. I’d be surprised if I didn’t take a bit of a break after this one. After all, if everything goes according to plan, and God is so gracious as to permit it, I’ll have published five books in a stretch of about five years. That’s a lot. Readers, editors, and publishers will have to tell me at that point whether they want more from me, or whether that’s good enough, thank you very much.

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As for other writing…

–My most recent peer-reviewed journal article came out last fall. I don’t currently have another one teed up, but I do have an idea for one. I’m going to let it ruminate for a while. It’s about Israel, the church, the Torah, and Saint Paul.

–In the next print issue of Mere Orthodoxy I have an essay called “Once More, Church and Culture.” It’s a reflection on Christendom, America, Niebuhr, and James Davison Hunter. Not quite an intervention, but I do offer a constructive proposal.

–In the print edition of First Things I have a reflection forthcoming on what it means to do theology when the church is divided, as it is today. This one’s a long time coming, because it is an answer to a question I get all the time about my ecclesial identity. I’m pleased to see it in the magazine, a first for me.

–This summer I have a chapter in a book published by Plough on the liberal arts. The volume came out of the grant project I was a part of called The Liberating Arts. More on this one soon.

–This summer I am writing a chapter for a book due to be published in 2024 dedicated to the topic of teaching theology. I won’t say much more about it at the moment, but I’m positively giddy to be included in the volume. Anyone in theology will recognize pretty much every name in the collection—minus mine. I still can’t believe I was invited to contribute. And I love the idea of theologians writing about teaching, which is a practice too many of us were trained to avoid or at least to resent the necessity of.

–Later this month (or next), I’ll be part of a symposium in Syndicate on Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz’s new book The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything. Should be good fun.

–Later this spring I should have a review essay in The Christian Century on Mark Noll’s book America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization.

–Possibly this spring or summer I might have an essay in The Point that uses Wendell Berry’s new book on race, home, and patriotism as a point of departure. I’ve got the green light, but I also have to sit down and do the thing…

–In Restoration Quarterly I plan to publish an essay on churches of Christ, evangelicalism, and catholicity, building on and synthesizing my series here on the blog last summer/fall.

–In the Journal of Christian Studies I plan to write a defense of holy orders from and for a low-church context that spurns ordination and affirms the priesthood of all believers.

–In Comment I’ll be writing a review essay of Christopher Watkin’s Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture. Kudos to Brian Dijkema, editor extraordinaire, for nudging me into it.

–My review of Jordan Senner’s book on John Webster just came out in Scottish Journal of Theology.

–My review of David Kelsey’s Human Anguish and God’s Power is with the editors at the Stone-Campbell Journal; I imagine it’ll be published later this year.

–My review of Fred Sanders’ Fountain of Salvation is with the editors at Pro Ecclesia; should be published soon.

–Same for my review of R. B. Jamieson and Tyler Wittman’s Biblical Reasoning, to be published in the International Journal of Systematic Theology.

–I’ll soon be writing a (long) review of Konrad Shmid and Jens Schrötter’s The Making of the Bible for the journal Interpretation.

–I’ve already recorded an interview for the podcast The Great Tradition; the episode should drop by month’s end.

–I’m giving talks here and there, in Abilene and elsewhere, but nothing to advertise here.

And I think that’s it. For now. Thanks for reading. Much to come. Now back to work.

Christians and politics

My friend and colleague Richard Beck did me the honor of writing a seven-part series in response to a post I’d written last May, itself a reply to a previous post of his a few days prior. I told him I’d find the time to write about the new series, but I haven’t found it until now.

There’s much to say. As it turns out, Richard and I are not far apart here, but our instincts lead us in slightly divergent directions. Let me see if I can summarize his own views before laying out my own.

Richard begins by taking my point: In a liberal democracy, it can be an all-or-nothing proposition for Christians; namely, electing (or not) to be politically active and engaged. He allows that perhaps his hope for a kind of holy ambivalence, to use Jamie Smith’s phrase, is unrealistic. Democracy saps the energies of the electorate, Christian or otherwise. Be that as it may, Richard wants a certain baseline for Christian thought and practice with respect to political witness, in this or in any context. In ten theses:

1. The powers that be are always already at war with the kingdom of God.

2. The church, therefore, ought always to be on the side of God’s kingdom over against the kingdoms of this world.

3. It follows that the first and enduring political vocation of the church is prophetic criticism. Whatever else the church does, it begins and ends with the prophetic task.

4. Because the powers are fallen, our view of both the state and the arc of history should be deeply Augustinian: not tragic, but pessimistic. We are not going to bring heaven to earth, or establish God’s kingdom here and now, or proclaim peace in our time. Utopian dreams, including the Christian variety, are false and dangerous.

5. Because the powers are created, though, Christian pessimism need not write off the state altogether. This isn’t pure Anabaptism. Not only does the state have a divinely ordained role to maintain a modicum of peace and relative justice; Christians may—within limits, with modesty and caution—participate in and contribute to governance and other forms of political action in the wider society.

6. Such modest involvement does not lead to Christendom, however. Christendom is a dead end, precisely because it is not pessimistic enough about either the powers or the perduring sinfulness of Christian communities, projects, and institutions.

7. Together, these commitments repudiate any and all nostalgia for or attempts to “reclaim” a lost Christian past, pristine in innocence or even supposedly preferable to the present. Whatever one thinks of the middle ages, they aren’t coming back and Christians in America should not try to resuscitate an erstwhile medieval order. Stop working toward your imagined American Christian Commonwealth. Not only is it not happening (being a fool’s errand), it’s not worth the effort: it’ll blow up in your face like all the other attempts.

8. In a word, Christian politics should begin wherever we are, not in some other time or place where we most decidedly are not. Given the Augustinianism (or Pascalianism) of the foregoing, then, there is no One Right Way for Christians to approach politics. It’s piecemeal personal discernment all the way down, based on context, temperament, local conditions, prayer, opportunity, and other similar factors. Some Christians in the U.S. will “get involved”; others won’t. Realists will vote, march, and advocate, thereby getting their hands dirty; radicals will find themselves unable to do so. Neither is right or wrong. It’s a matter of prudence. We should stop duking it out to see who’s the victor between the Augustine of Niebuhr and the Yoder of Hauerwas.

9. The political challenge for American Christians today is thus an odd one: emotional disengagement via recalibration. American Christians have to find a way to stop caring so much, to stop finding their identity in politics, to stop investing the totality of themselves in winning or losing the latest (existential) political fight. Even if this borders on the impossible, it’s what’s called for in our situation.

10. To illustrate the point, suppose Christians in America stepped away from politics entirely for the next decade. From 2023 to 2033, no one in this country heard from a single Christian about political matters. A ten-year silence from the church. Christians kept living their lives, going about their business, seeking to be faithful, following the Lord—but without commentary of any kind (personal, public, digital, media, pulpit) on political affairs. Richard asks: “Do you think this ten year season would improve the church? Would this season improve the church internally, helping us conform more fully to the image of Jesus and more deeply into the kingdom of God, and externally, in how the world might perceive us?” He believes the answer is yes. The church needs a political detox, and it would be good for all involved.

I hope I’ve done Richard justice. Let me make one major point before I try to unpack a few more minute ones.

I take my original challenge to be this: Democracy is a genuinely new challenge for Christian political thought, because democratic involvement makes comprehensive demands of citizens. Self-governance is an exacting affair. Even prior to matters of identity, democratic action has the potential to be all-consuming. Because it is the business of life, our common life, it soaks up the whole of one’s attention, energy, and emotion. The most successful democratic movements in American history never could have happened if their adherents had been half-invested. Richard makes this observation a premise of his response, rather than a point of disagreement. The upshot as I see it, then, is twofold.

On one hand, it seems to be the case that democracy is a problem for Christian discipleship. Democracy wants your soul. But no servant can serve two masters. So how can politically engaged Christians also be disciples of Christ alone? I’m far from the first person to ask this question. Roman Catholic political thought has had anxieties on this score for two centuries and more. But it’s worth highlighting outright because it’s something of a taboo for American Christians to see democracy per se as a problem. To say it is a problem is not to say it should be dismantled or replaced. Only that it shouldn’t be assumed to be unproblematic from a Christian perspective.

On the other hand, Richard’s series left me thinking that we find ourselves where we started (or so it feels to me): that is, with the BenOp. Or in Richard’s words, from a post written six years ago, a progressive version of the Benedict Option. But the overall picture is the same. The American imperium is at odds with Christian witness. Don’t make the error of shoring up the imperium, much less mistaking shoring it up for the mission of the church. Instead, withdraw your heart, mind, voice, and labor to what is before you: the local congregation in its surrounding community. Attend to that. Think little, as Wendell Berry puts it. Stop thinking big; stop selling your soul to politics, only to be shown a fool for the umpteenth time.

In my view, this is where Richard lands: at a theologically orthodox, socially progressive version of the Benedict Option. A soft Anabaptism that doesn’t scream Nein! to politics so much as ignore it with a shrug before turning to love one’s neighbor—whose face and name one knows, living as one does in a flesh-and-blood neighborhood, not on Fox News or CNN or Twitter or TikTok.

I think this is wise counsel. For individual believers, I think it’s good advice, and especially for those most in need of a detox, i.e., folks who can tell you in detail what happened yesterday in D.C. but not the names of a neighbor in any direction, or the problems facing the city they actually live in.

So that’s that. Now let me turn to some larger thematic or architectonic matters that Richard’s series raised and about which I think we disagree.

First, while the “ten years of silence” proposition is an instructive thought experiment, I don’t think it works on its own terms. What it reveals, after reflection, is how it is impossible to live as a Christian without doing politics. For example, there are a lot of school-age children in Abilene (where Richard and I live) who are homeless. Christians here rightly see this as a pressing problem that calls for their involvement. But issues like family breakdown, poverty, nutrition, abuse, schooling, and homelessness are all political matters. Christians can’t be part of the solution if they forswear politics. Moreover, the call for silence overlooks the fact that speech is a part of action, indeed is a form of action. “I have a dream” is far more than a set of words. It’s a public political performance. It’s a world-shaping deed, expressed verbally. Words get things done. We know this from the Bible. That’s what prophecy is! Words that do things, words that make things happen. In short, Christians can’t follow Christ without doing or speaking about politics. That means ten years of silence is a nonstarter—even if we all (as I do) understand what Richard has in mind.

Second, I am very wary of framing the question of Christians and/in politics by present conditions and possibilities. Doing so results in ahistorical assumptions and parochial answers. Twenty-first century American liberalism sets the terms of the debate. But why should we let it? The church has two millennia of reflection and practice on these matters. If we allow ourselves to listen to it, not only will we expand the horizons of our imagination (the proverbial Overton window); we will see that the status quo to which we are so accustomed is far from necessary or immutable. It is contingent, like all social and political arrangements. We need not take it for granted.

Third, I am equally wary of issuing judgments in the present that entail wholesale indictment or repudiation of past Christian teaching and practice. It may well be true that American believers need not advocate for Christendom in 2023. That is not the same as saying Christendom is and always was an error. Whatever seems given in the moment appears inevitable and right to those living in it. I don’t want to fall for that temptation. To see all past political forms endorsed by Christians as fundamentally wrong, because they had not yet arrived at what we, now, endorse and inhabit, seems to me undeniably myopic, anachronistic, and uncharitable. To be clear, I doubt Richard would endorse that view, but it is all too common in modern Christian political thought. I want to avoid it at all costs.

Fourth, some political questions are existential. Granted, most political questions are prudential and still others can be disagreed about by reasonable people (Christians included). But some are matters of life and death, or of ultimate, or at least penultimate, significance. Chattel slavery is one example from our history. Civil rights is another. War and capital punishment are perennial. Abortion and euthanasia are relatively newer, in terms of laws and technology. If, for example, prenatal life is human life created and beloved by God, then it would seem to follow that political regimes should protect it and, to the extent that they do not, Christians should work to persuade them to do so. If the vulnerable, the poor, the unhappy, the lonely are finding themselves ushered by a medical bureaucracy to allow themselves to be killed rather than to be cared for, then Christians’ obedience to the command of Jesus would seem to require their active political involvement, precisely for the sake of the least of these. “Lord, when did we see you a victim of MAID and intervene…?”

Fifth, we should not presume to be more Augustinian than Saint Augustine himself. Augustine saw that, all things being equal, a polity that pays homage to Christ as Lord and seeks to do justice in accord with Christ’s teaching is a polity to be desired, to be sought, and to be received with gratitude. Personally, I want to live in a city and a state whose laws and social norms run with and not against the grain of the Word made flesh. Now, is that easier said than done? Yes. Does it open up leaders, of the church as well as the state, to abuse, corruption, hypocrisy, and dissimulation? Yes. Has such an approach failed before? Yes. All granted. I fail to see, though, that these admissions automatically and in all circumstances render the question moot. Christianity has never taught that one form of polity is ordained of God: empires, city-states, nation-states, monarchies, republics, democracies, and others have been led and supported by Christians. All I want to add is that I see no reason to rule out, on principle, the possibility of a genuine Christian commonwealth, whether in the past, the present, or the future, here or elsewhere.

Sixth and finally, there is no way banish God from politics. That’s true for Jews and Muslims as well as Christians, because God is one, and his claim to allegiance is total. That allegiance cuts against the claims of the state but also makes inroads on the state. For example, if the state is grinding the faces of the poor, followers of Christ know this is wrong. More, they know whose side God is on in the struggle. And they therefore know what to say to the state as the word of the Lord. This is exactly when prophetic criticism enters into the equation. My only point is that prophetic criticism is not a distancing mechanism; not a way to keep church and state separate. It’s a way of holding the state’s feet to the fire—that is, the consuming fire of God’s judgment. And if God is both the judge and the desire of the nations, then we are never going to be free of the entanglement of faith and politics, church and state, discipleship and governance, prophecy and law.

That indefinite entanglement suggests to me, in conclusion, that the sort of emotional and psychological disengagement (and recalibration) for which Richard is calling is a dead end. I too want Christians in America to call cease-fire in the infinite culture war and to stop letting tribal identities overwrite their baptismal identity in Christ. I too want Christians to worship God and love their neighbors and to worry less about Washington. In general, arguing over Christendom and Commonwealths and Integralism and Christian Nationalism (Lord help us) can easily become a distraction from the command of Christ to me, here and now, to do his will within the limits and opportunities of my life, not another.

Nevertheless, the command of Christ also, as we’ve seen, necessarily includes the realm of politics, a realm from which Christ is by no means absent. Finding him there, following him there, obeying his will there is not for the faint of heart. It takes much wisdom. It usually ends in one form of failure or another. But it can’t be avoided. And Christians are right to want to succeed there, and to care about the results. For the results bear on the lives of their neighbors—lives of great concern to the Lord.

Calvin, zombies, and the false faith of the reprobate

This week I read Edward Feser’s wonderful book Philosophy of Mind. One section in particular brought to mind an interesting connection.

In the middle of a dense discussion of Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, and property dualism, Feser adverts to a common trope: namely, the difference between a conscious human person and a zombie duplicate. While criticizing Chalmers, Feser deploys the zombie example to show that Chalmers cannot account for a conscious human being’s knowledge of qualia as reliable knowledge if his theory would imply also, and necessarily, that a zombie would falsely but sincerely suppose it had qualia. If the latter were true, in other words, then why should anyone believe that her qualia are real and not the figment of her imagination? On what grounds would you or I suppose we are not zombies? For, epistemically speaking, we are in an identical position as a zombie that believes itself to be the conscious subject of genuine experiences. Even if it is just the case that I am a non-zombie with qualia and the zombie is a zombie without qualia, I have no good reason to believe I am any different; and the zombie may equally well believe its condition not to be what it in fact is.

A complex matter, to be sure. What it brought to mind is this.

In the third book of the Institutes, Calvin takes up, among other things, faith and election. After a brief introductory treatment, chapter 2 addresses the matter in detail. In section 11, Calvin faces head-on the obvious question: Aren’t there people who sincerely believe that they believe in Christ? I.e., believe they have saving faith in Christ? But who, according to Calvin, lack saving faith? I.e., are not among the elect? What of them? Not least given Calvin’s understanding of divine sovereignty?

Calvin bites the bullet, as only he can. Let’s just say it’s not the most satisfying part of the Institutes. And given the intended pastoral aspects of the doctrines of election, sola fide, assurance, and the perseverance of the saints, Calvin’s answer is doubly unsatisfying. In a word, it’s the original zombie problem, at least for Christian theology. Here’s how it unfolds:

The elect (non-zombie) “knows” he is saved, whereas the reprobate (zombie) believes (falsely) that he is saved. But precisely because there are reprobate (zombies) intermixed with the elect (non-zombies), the elect have no certain grounds for supposing themselves not to be reprobate (zombies)—for it has already been established that the reprobate (zombies)’ belief that they possess saving grace is utterly sincere; and, moreover, that God himself is the agent and source of their having this belief. Why, then, should anyone in the church, in the full knowledge of this spiritual and epistemic situation, suppose himself truly saved, because elect, rather than falsely confident (even “certain”) of a status lacking all independent verification?

That, it seems to me, no Calvinist, including Calvin, has ever resolved satisfactorily. At least not in this non-Calvinist’s eyes.

In any case, here are the two passages in full. I’ve not indented the quotations, given their length; I’ve placed in bold the crucial sentences; and I’ve broken up a few of Calvin’s ultra-long paragraphs. The first passage comes from pages 111-114 in Feser; the second comes from sections 11, 12, and 19 in chapter 2 of book 3 of the Institutes.

Feser on the zombie problem

The whole point of property dualism is to insist that there are non-physical qualia; if the theory also entails that we can never know that there are such qualia, then how (and why) are we even considering it? How can dualists themselves so much as formulate their hypothesis? Chalmers attempts to deal with this problem by suggesting that the assumption that there must be a causal connection between the knower and what is known, though appropriate where knowledge of physical objects is concerned, is inappropriate for knowledge of qualia. The existence of a causal chain implies the possibility of error, since . . . it seems to entail a gap between the experience of the thing known and the thing itself, a gap between appearance and reality: it is at least possible that the normal causal chain connecting us to the thing experienced has been disrupted, so that the experience is misleading (as in hallucination or deception by a Cartesian evil spirit). But knowledge of qualia, Chalmers says, is absolutely certain. Here there is no gap between appearance and reality, because the appearance—the way things seem, which is constituted by qualia themselves—is the reality. Knowledge of qualia must therefore somehow be direct and unmediated by causal chains between them and our beliefs about them. The fact that they can have no causal influence on our beliefs thus does not, after all, entail that we can’t think or talk about them.

But an objection to this is that it seems question-begging, since whether our knowledge of qualia really is certain is part of what is at issue in Dennett’s argument. Moreover, Chalmers’ claim that there is no gap between appearance and reality where knowledge of qualia is concerned seems problematic, given the assumption he shares with other property dualists that propositional attitudes can, unlike qualia, be reduced to physical processes in the brain. For while there is a sense of “appearance” and “seeming” which involves the having of qualia (a sense we can call the “qualitative” sense), there is also a sense of these words (call it the “cognitive” sense) which does not, but instead involves only the having of certain beliefs: one might say, for example, that at first it seemed or appeared to him that Chalmers’ arguments were sound, but on further reflection he concluded that they were not. Here there need be no qualia present, but only a mistake in judgment or the having of a false belief. But the having of beliefs and the making of judgments are, by Chalmers’ own lights, identical with being in certain brain states, so that there is a sense in which even a zombie has beliefs (including false beliefs) and makes judgments (including mistakes in judgment). But in that case, it could “seem” or “appear” even to a zombie that it had qualia, even though by definition it does not. So there can be a gap between appearance and reality even where qualia are concerned. Dennett’s challenge remains: how can property dualists so much as think about the qualia they say exist? How can they know that they aren’t zombies?

Chalmers’ view seems to be that this sort of objection can be avoided by arguing that it is just in the very nature of having an experience that one is justified in believing one has it, that there is a conceptual connection between having it and knowing one is having it. The evidence for my belief that I’m having the experience and the experience itself are the same thing; so I don’t infer the existence of the experience from the evidence, but just know directly from the mere having of the evidence. But this seems merely to push the problem back a stage, for now the question is how one can know one really has that evidence—the experience—in the first place, given that an experienceless zombie would also believe that it has it (and, if it’s read Chalmers, that there is a conceptual connection between having it and being justified in believing it does). Chalmers’ claim seems to amount to the conditional: if you have qualia, then you can know you have them. But that raises the question of how one can know the antecedent of this conditional, i.e. of how one can know one does in fact have qualia. Chalmers’ reply is “Because it seems to me that I do, and its seeming that way is all the justification I need.” But a zombie would believe the same thing! “But I have evidence the zombie doesn’t have my experience!” Chalmers would retort. Yet the zombie believes that too, because it also seems to it (in the cognitive sense) that it has such evidence. Any response Chalmers could give to such questions would seem to invite further questions about whether he really has the evidence he thinks he does. His only possible reply can be to say that he has it because he seems to have it, but if he says that he seems to in the cognitive sense of “seems,” then he’s saying something even a zombie would believe, while if he says, even to himself, that he seems to in the qualitative sense of “seems,” then he’s begging the question, for whether he has the qualia that this sense of “seems” presupposes is precisely what’s at issue. Chalmers’ reply to the sort of criticism raised by Dennett thus seems to fail.

Property dualism would thus appear to lead to absurdity as long as it concedes to materialism the reducibility of the propositional attitudes. If it instead takes the attitudes to be, like qualia, irreducible to physical states of the brain, this absurdity can be avoided: for in that case, your beliefs and judgments are as non-physical as your qualia are, and there is thus no barrier (at least of the usual mental-to-physical epiphenomenalist sort) to your qualia being the causes of your beliefs about them. But should it take this route, there seems much less motivation for adopting property dualism rather than full-blown Cartesian substance dualism: it was precisely the concession of the materiality of propositional attitudes that seemed to allow the property dualist to make headway on the interaction problem, an advantage that is lost if that concession is revoked; and while taking at least beliefs, desires, and the like to be purely material undermines the plausibility of the existence of a distinct non-physical mental substance, such plausibility would seem to be restored if all mental properties, beliefs and desires, as much as qualia, are non-physical. Moreover, property dualism raises a puzzle of its own, namely that of explaining exactly how non-physical properties could inhere in a physical substance.

Property dualism, then, is arguably not a genuine advance over substance dualism . . . .

Calvin on reprobate “faith”

11. I am aware it seems unaccountable to some how faith is attributed to the reprobate, seeing that it is declared by Paul to be one of the fruits of election; and yet the difficulty is easily solved: for though none are enlightened into faith, and truly feel the efficacy of the Gospel, with the exception of those who are fore-ordained to salvation, yet experience shows that the reprobate are sometimes affected in a way so similar to the elect, that even in their own judgment there is no difference between them. Hence it is not strange, that by the Apostle a taste of heavenly gifts, and by Christ himself a temporary faith, is ascribed to them. Not that they truly perceive the power of spiritual grace and the sure light of faith; but the Lord, the better to convict them, and leave them without excuse, instills into their minds such a sense of his goodness as can be felt without the Spirit of adoption. Should it be objected, that believers have no stronger testimony to assure them of their adoption, I answer, that though there is a great resemblance and affinity between the elect of God and those who are impressed for a time with a fading faith, yet the elect alone have that full assurance which is extolled by Paul, and by which they are enabled to cry, Abba, Father.

Therefore, as God regenerates the elect only for ever by incorruptible seed, as the seed of life once sown in their hearts never perishes, so he effectually seals in them the grace of his adoption, that it may be sure and steadfast. But in this there is nothing to prevent an inferior operation of the Spirit from taking its course in the reprobate. Meanwhile, believers are taught to examine themselves carefully and humbly, lest carnal security creep in and take the place of assurance of faith. We may add, that the reprobate never have any other than a confused sense of grace, laying hold of the shadow rather than the substance, because the Spirit properly seals the forgiveness of sins in the elect only, applying it by special faith to their use. Still it is correctly said, that the reprobate believe God to be propitious to them, inasmuch as they accept the gift of reconciliation, though confusedly and without due discernment; not that they are partakers of the same faith or regeneration with the children of God; but because, under a covering of hypocrisy, they seem to have a principle of faith in common with them. Nor do I even deny that God illumines their minds to this extent, that they recognize his grace; but that conviction he distinguishes from the peculiar testimony which he gives to his elect in this respect, that the reprobate never attain to the full result or to fruition. When he shows himself propitious to them, it is not as if he had truly rescued them from death, and taken them under his protection. He only gives them a manifestation of his present mercy. In the elect alone he implants the living root of faith, so that they persevere even to the end. Thus we dispose of the objection, that if God truly displays his grace, it must endure for ever. There is nothing inconsistent in this with the fact of his enlightening some with a present sense of grace, which afterwards proves evanescent.

12. Although faith is a knowledge of the divine favor towards us, and a full persuasion of its truth, it is not strange that the sense of the divine love, which though akin to faith differs much from it, vanishes in those who are temporarily impressed. The will of God is, I confess, immutable, and his truth is always consistent with itself; but I deny that the reprobate ever advance so far as to penetrate to that secret revelation which Scripture reserves for the elect only. I therefore deny that they either understand his will considered as immutable, or steadily embrace his truth, inasmuch as they rest satisfied with an evanescent impression; just as a tree not planted deep enough may take root, but will in process of time wither away, though it may for several years not only put forth leaves and flowers, but produce fruit. In short, as by the revolt of the first man, the image of God could be effaced from his mind and soul, so there is nothing strange in His shedding some rays of grace on the reprobate, and afterwards allowing these to be extinguished. There is nothing to prevent His giving some a slight knowledge of his Gospel, and imbuing others thoroughly. Meanwhile, we must remember that however feeble and slender the faith of the elect may be, yet as the Spirit of God is to them a sure earnest and seal of their adoption, the impression once engraven can never be effaced from their hearts, whereas the light which glimmers in the reprobate is afterwards quenched.

Nor can it be said that the Spirit therefore deceives, because he does not quicken the seed which lies in their hearts so as to make it ever remain incorruptible as in the elect. I go farther: seeing it is evident, from the doctrine of Scripture and from daily experience, that the reprobate are occasionally impressed with a sense of divine grace, some desire of mutual love must necessarily be excited in their hearts. Thus for a time a pious affection prevailed in Saul, disposing him to love God. Knowing that he was treated with paternal kindness, he was in some degree attracted by it. But as the reprobate have no rooted conviction of the paternal love of God, so they do not in return yield the love of sons, but are led by a kind of mercenary affection. The Spirit of love was given to Christ alone, for the express purpose of conferring this Spirit upon his members; and there can be no doubt that the following words of Paul apply to the elect only: “The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts, by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us” (Rom. 5:5); namely, the love which begets that confidence in prayer to which I have above adverted.

On the other hand, we see that God is mysteriously offended with his children, though he ceases not to love them. He certainly hates them not, but he alarms them with a sense of his anger, that he may humble the pride of the flesh, arouse them from lethargy, and urge them to repentance. Hence they, at the same instant, feel that he is angry with them or their sins, and also propitious to their persons. It is not from fictitious dread that they deprecate his anger, and yet they retake themselves to him with tranquil confidence. It hence appears that the faith of some, though not true faith, is not mere pretense. They are borne along by some sudden impulse of zeal, and erroneously impose upon themselves, sloth undoubtedly preventing them from examining their hearts with due care. Such probably was the case of those whom John describes as believing on Christ; but of whom he says, “Jesus did not commit himself unto them, because he knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew what was in man” (John 2:24, 25). Were it not true that many fall away from the common faith (I call it common, because there is a great resemblance between temporary and living, ever-during faith), Christ would not have said to his disciples, “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:31, 32). He is addressing those who had embraced his doctrine, and urging them to progress in the faith, lest by their sluggishness they extinguish the light which they have received. Accordingly, Paul claims faith as the peculiar privilege of the elect, intimating that many, from not being properly rooted, fall away (Tit. 1:1). In the same way, in Matthew, our Savior says, “Every plant which my heavenly Father has not planted shall be rooted up” (Mt. 16:13). Some who are not ashamed to insult God and man are more grossly false. Against this class of men, who profane the faith by impious and lying pretense, James inveighs (James 2:14). Nor would Paul require the faith of believers to be unfeigned (1 Tim. 1:5), were there not many who presumptuously arrogate to themselves what they have not, deceiving others, and sometimes even themselves, with empty show. Hence he compares a good conscience to the ark in which faith is preserved, because many, by falling away, have in regard to it made shipwreck. . . .

19. The whole, then, comes to this: As soon as the minutest particle of faith is instilled into our minds, we begin to behold the face of God placid, serene, and propitious; far off, indeed, but still so distinctly as to assure us that there is no delusion in it. In proportion to the progress we afterwards make (and the progress ought to be uninterrupted), we obtain a nearer and surer view, the very continuance making it more familiar to us. Thus we see that a mind illumined with the knowledge of God is at first involved in much ignorance,—ignorance, however, which is gradually removed. Still this partial ignorance or obscure discernment does not prevent that clear knowledge of the divine favor which holds the first and principal part in faith. For as one shut up in a prison, where from a narrow opening he receives the rays of the sun indirectly and in a manner divided, though deprived of a full view of the sun, has no doubt of the source from which the light comes, and is benefited by it; so believers, while bound with the fetters of an earthly body, though surrounded on all sides with much obscurity, are so far illumined by any slender light which beams upon them and displays the divine mercy as to feel secure.

Publication promiscuity

Every writer has to make decisions about where to publish. Not just where she would like to be published, but also where she would be willing to be published. All publications have a certain flavor or character, a back catalogue of writers, an ideological bent, an editorial slant, a reputation with readers and other writers.

I often get asked about why I publish with X or Y. I’m not nearly as well or as widely published as others, but here’s what I say in reply.

I am utterly promiscuous in my publishing habits. I would allow something I’d written—taking for granted that I wrote it, I was happy with it, and nothing more than the usual editorial oversight and revising was involved—to be published just about anywhere.

“Just about” rules out a tiny sliver of obviously objectionable venues: nothing, say, that calls or stands for armed rebellion, or racial supremacy, or some philosophy or politics so worthy of contempt that one could not possibly be associated with it or its adherents, much less aid and abet its cause. So if there’s a local chapter of some terrorist militia group with in-house literature, then no, I won’t answer any of their calls.

But beyond that, I’m very likely to say yes, and not with a tortured conscience but with a shrug. Moreover, even my definition begs for clarification. Because whether or not a viewpoint is contemptible is itself baked into the question of where to publish.

For precisely that reason, though, I think writers (and academics and journalists more broadly) shouldn’t worry so much about publication purity. Here’s why.

First, because there is no publication free of error. There’s always going to be some argument or position on offer in the venue with which you would take issue—perhaps serious issue. That’s just called writing in public.

Second, because every publication has skeletons in the closet. No magazine or journal has a blameless, infallible history. They’ve all issued corrections, errata, and apologies. Every one. (Those that haven’t, if they exist, should have; and the episode of their not having done so probably remains a stain on their reputation.)

Third, because no publication knows the future of any writer it publishes at the time of publishing him. So he goes on to be a wicked public personage, infamous for this opinion or that behavior. Editors don’t see the future. All they have to go on is the past in making judgments for the present.

Fourth, because writers are all wicked anyway. My tongue is in cheek, yes, but the claim also happens to be true, in more ways than one. Great writers are often awful people. More to the point, we Christians know that anyone you’ve ever read was a sinner. Every beautiful poem or essay or novel you’ve loved came from a wretched and damnable mind and heart. This doesn’t make the artifact any less lovely, nor does it excuse anyone’s actual sins (great or small). But it puts things into perspective.

Fifth, because publications don’t have cooties. Writing for X won’t infect you; reading Y isn’t contagious. You don’t contract uncleanness by reading or writing for a certain magazine. That’s not the way reading and writing work. Such a mindset is all too common among writers and intellectuals, but it’s childish and unwarranted. It’s the high school cafeteria all over again. Don’t fall for it.

Sixth, because writing for a given venue is not an endorsement, either of the venue’s usual views or of the particular views of any one of its writers or editors. I have no idea why anyone would suppose this, but many do, although typically only selectively—that is, with the “bad” outlets, whichever those may be. Such unthinking (often unreading) guilt by association isn’t worth a second’s thought.

Seventh, because great writers are themselves promiscuous. Some of my favorite writers today are fantastically diverse in where and with whom they will publish, including the most successful and respected. Off hand, I’m thinking of folks like Eve Tushnet and Phil Christman, Christopher Caldwell and David Bentley Hart, George Scialabba and Samuel Moyn, B. D. McClay and Paul Griffiths, or Wendell Berry and Christopher Hitchens in their younger days. Part of the discipline of publishing promiscuity is that it requires you, the writer, to be interesting enough and independent enough that editors at a bewildering variety of venues would kill to feature you, even though you “might not quite fit” with the norm there. Well done then. That means you’re doing something right.

Eighth and last, because writing wants to be free. It wants to get out. If someone wants to publish you, take them up on it. It’s unlikely you’ll regret it. Nor, if you do regret it, do you have to do it again; look elsewhere. But you’ll never be a writer if you don’t get your writing out in the world. Take some chances and don’t be picky, certainly not with active suitors.

In fact, go ahead and consider this post as good as giving you my card: if you want to publish me, you already know my answer.

Two ways of reading

One way of reading something is to ask what’s wrong with it: what’s missing, what’s out of place. Another way of reading something is to ask what one might learn or benefit from it.

It’s a mistake to see the first as “critical” reading. This is the perennial academic error. Finding fault with a piece of text—whether an op-ed, an essay, a journal article, a monograph, a novel, or a poem—for being imperfect (i.e., human) or finite (i.e., limited) is absurd. We know in advance that every text we ever read will be both finite and imperfect. This is not news. Nor is “critical” reading the smirking discovery of whatever a given text’s limits or imperfections are. Who cares?

Roger Ebert liked to admonish Gene Siskel for being parsimonious in his joy. The principle applies to reading and indeed to all intellectual activity. Why should what is flawed take priority over what is good? Why not approach any text—any cultural artifact whatsoever—and ask, What do I stand to receive from this? What beauty or goodness or truth does it convey? How does it challenge, provoke, silence, instruct, or otherwise reach out to me? How might I stand under it, as an apprentice, rather than over it, as a master? What does it evoke in me, and how might I respond in kind?

Such a posture is not uncritical. It is a necessary component of any humane criticism. It is the first step in the direction of genuine (rather than superficial) criticism, for it is an admission of need: of the limits and imperfections of the reader, prior to mention of those of the text.

In a word, humility is the condition for joy, in reading as in all art. And without joy, the whole business is a sad and rotten affair.

I’m in Mere O on streaming worship

Three weeks after Tom Hanks and Rudy Gobert tested positive for Covid, Mere Orthodoxy published an essay of mine titled “Sacraments, Technology, and Streaming Worship in a Pandemic.” It’s a long exploration of the nature of Christian liturgy and the questions posed to it by an emergency like a global pandemic. It uses Neil Postman and Robert Jenson to place a question mark next to the seeming self-evident answer to the question, To stream or not to stream? In particular, it makes the case that, if churches are going to stream worship, they should not include the sacraments. That is, they should fast from the Eucharist while separated in the body; they should not encourage individual believers to “self-administer” communion at home.

Nearly three years later, I’m back in Mere O with another essay on the same topic, this time titled “Stream Off.” It’s about the lingering questions posed by the emergency measures implemented during lockdown and the broader crisis phase of Covid. Namely: Granting that nearly every church did turn to streaming worship online, should they continue to do so? Moreover, should they actively seek to “expand their reach” through live-streaming? Should they invite people to “join us online”? to “be a member of church from afar”? to “worship from home,” if and as they please?

You know my answer. This essay, long burbling in the back of my mind, makes the case.

Update (January 12): LOL. Apparently a full year ago Tish Harrison Warren wrote about this in the NYT, followed by some responses from readers. Twelve months ago! Obviously it’s kosher to write about the same topic, especially one that’s continuing in the way streaming is, but I’m not sure how I overlooked it. As they say, I regret the error.

I’m on the HOCT podcast

A couple months back Chad Kim and I had a lovely conversation about The Church’s Book for his podcast A History of Christian Theology. The episode just went up this morning. Here’s the link to the pod’s website, but you can also find it on Spotify, iTunes, etc.

Two apologies:

First, my audio is awful. I used the same professional mic (on loan from the library) that I always do, but for whatever reason, the sound is grating. Alas.

Second, in the interview I somehow attribute two very famous quotes to Tertullian that actually come from St. Cyprian, a fact I knew then and know now but which my mind misplaced in real time. Or maybe I’m just keeping you on your toes. Who can say?

Slow Horses

In adapting the novels, here’s what the show gets right:

1. Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. Not only a perfect match between actor and character, a so-obvious-it’s-inspired choice given Oldman’s previous role as Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

2. The rest of the casting in season 1. Jack Lowden’s River is a would-be cross between Bond and Bourne, except he’s a bit of a doofus, self-regarding, a screw-up, and still in the service owing mainly to nepotism. The rest fit their roles perfectly, whether Kristin Scott Thomas, Christopher Chung, Saskia Reeves, Freddie Fox, or Dustin Demri-Burns. Give the casting director a raise.

3. The general atmosphere and vibe: the former within the world of the story, the latter put off by the same. Slough House is dark, dank, and cranky; Lamb is genuinely embittered and misanthropic; redeeming qualities are few and far between; you really believe this is an island for MI5’s misfit toys. The vibe thus produced is simultaneously cool (spies!) and bitterly funny (losers!), placing the audience always on the ironic edge between cheering on the slow horses and laughing at their incompetence. And it’s hard to believe when actual danger and daring-do come along and rope these has-beens and second-rates into the game.

Here’s what the show gets wrong:

1. The final episode of season 1. In the book, not only do we get to live inside Ahmed’s head as a character in his own right. For all the slow horses do to find him, much less to save him, Ahmed rescues himself. All the Lamb/River action is at Regent’s Park. The others try to track Ahmed from a deli or coffee shop. But the kidnapping and attempted execution are botched due to a combination of foolishness (Lady Di), in-fighting (the two remaining kidnappers), and shrewdness (Ahmed). The slow horses are nowhere to be seen! That is, in the book. In the show, Lamb and River and Min and Louisa speed down the highway to find Ahmed and, eventually, save him—more or less on camera! Give me a break. It’s absurd TV high jinx that lights the subtext of the show on fire. All of a sudden we’ve got real spies doing real Bond–Bourne–Jack Ryan stuff, rather than the back-ups to the back-ups accidentally stumbling upon observing some spy stuff … on their laptop screen.

2. The second season is a mess from start to finish. Marcus and Shirley are both duds—whether as written or as acted, it’s unclear. The plot of the book is so complicated that the writers attempted both to simplify it and to make it more closely connected to Lamb and the slow horses, but the result is a story impossible to follow by anyone unfamiliar with the novel and finally nonsensical on its face. I still can’t believe that the finale opts to leave both the “evil pilot mom” and the “cicadas” plot threads utterly dangling, unaddressed. Including the bald man in the action, making Roddy an action hero with his laptop, putting Lamb and Popov in the same room, flying River to the OB’s house to save the day … once again, the finale is absurd, on its own terms, while also being a denial of the whole point, ethos, and thematic heart of the show.

3. I’m also unsure about the wisdom of beginning to reveal, as soon as the season 1 finale, secrets about Lamb, the OB, Partner, and their interlocked past that might be best reserved for later. That is, the shock of some of their secrets needs time to become shocking. If we learn them more or less up front, then they’re just part of who the characters are, rather than revelations that complicate what we thought we know.

4. The second season also ups the “feel good” schmaltz a couple notches compared to the first season. It feels the need, in other words, to give the good guys a heart, rather than to keep them the losers they are. Lamb in particular basically just becomes a grand master spy, running his joes, rather than a cynical drunk who can’t spare a single second’s thought for another person’s feelings—especially if that person is someone he cares about. I hope, in the next season, they have the wisdom to drop the warmth and return to the cold the way it should be.

2022: the blog

Unless I’m mistaken, this is my 102nd blog post of 2022. That comes to one post every 3-4 days; about twice per week. I’m happy with that pace. Sometimes I’m quoting, sometimes I’m linking, sometimes I’m writing. Here’s a rundown, by general category, of the last group.

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10. On pop culture, I wrote about Spielberg, The Gray Man, and why some movies don’t sell tickets. Also about Kenobi and Andor. I wrote thrice about Better Call Saul: on Kim, on happy endings, and a long reply to Alan Jacobs’ disappointment with the finale. Finally, in what I think is one of the better things I wrote this year, I compared the theological visions of Malick and Scorsese in A Hidden Life and Silence.

9. On various authors, I wrote about C. S. Lewis’s perennial appeal; about some clever ripostes to the claim that we can’t “turn back the clock”; about Robert Jenson, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and the bishop of Rome on Alpha Centauri; and about Oliver Burkeman and atelic self-help advice.

8. On Christian ethics, I wrote some theses as well as a primer, both for my students.

7. On writing, I wrote about sticking with blogging versus moving to Substack; about the way some journalistic and other popular writing feels like it was written by an algorithm; about the annoying tic of the same sort of writers to use “arbitrary” in useless ways; and about how to review and be reviewed.

6. On academia, I wrote a little spoof of deutero-Pauline studies and other claims to pseudonymity in “Pseudo-Scorsese.” I also wrote about the touchiness of major scholars; about the difference between being gotten right versus getting at the truth; and about what expertise is and why academics and other “experts” should be a little warier in their frontal assault on the “war against expertise.”

5. On technology, I wrote about the take temptation; about Twitter and podcasts and a general personal tech use update; and a series of three responses to Andy Crouch, Jeff Bilbro, and Alan Jacobs: tech-wise BenOp; tech for normies; and deflating tech catastrophism.

4. On politics, I wrote about the uses of conservatism; about prudence policing; and about politics cathexis (which has spawned a new series by Richard Beck). I also wrote three reflections prompted by Aaron Renn, James Wood, Tim Keller, and Christians in American politics: Wood v. Keller; so-called negative world; and another word on negative world.

3. On the Bible, I wrote two posts about Acts: one about its Jewish leaders, another about its inegalitarian treatment of leadership and discernment. I also proposed a test for Christian exegesis and tracked Jenson on metaphor, Scripture, and theology; I further noted the complexities of the church’s relation to the canon and popular sophistry about X or Y “not being in the Bible.” I wrote a bunch about biblicism, too: post-biblicist biblicists (and a follow-up); the alternatives to inerrancy and sacred tradition (hint: there aren’t any); and reasons why a Christian should trust the Bible.

2. I wrote the most this year about a convergence of topics, all centered on the church, division and reunion, the rising generation (“Gen Z”), ministry, worship, preaching, teaching, evangelism, and catechesis. In terms of young people and nonbelievers, I wrote about what I want for my students, what Christian parents (should) want for their children, double literacy loss (and follow-up), four loves loss (and follow-up), misdiagnosis of the problem churches are facing, and the post-Christian West. I also wrote about so-called Christian masculinity, “church people,” and church for normies (not for heroes). Finally, I wrote about temptations of the over-educated to making silly assumptions about what “smart” Christians are allowed to believe, and my own inoculation against this temptation.

1. In terms of church practices, pastoring and worship, and ecclesial institutions, I wrote about the prospects of reunion; about church on Christmas; about lifelong ministry; about CCM; about sermon length; about the atheism of the therapeutic church; and about principles for non-therapeutic preaching. Alongside the Crouch-related pieces above, the most read posts on the blog this year belonged to a four-part series about churches of Christ and, in conjunction with it, some further reflections on evangelicalism: CoC as catholic; CoC as evangelical; CoC future; CoC coda; defining evangelicalism; the problem with evangelicalism; and evangelical addenda.

2022: reading

On its own terms, it was a solid year for reading. In terms of my goals, however, not so much. What with health, travel, and professional matters hoovering up all my attention from July to December, my reading plummeted in the second half of 2022. Last year I wrote about how, for years, I’d been stuck in the 90-110 zone for books read annually. Last year I climbed to 120. This year I hoped to reach 150. Alas, by the time Sunday rolls around I’ll have read 122 this year. At least I didn’t regress.

The environmental goals I made, I kept: namely, to cut down TV even more; to stick to audiobooks over podcasts; and to leaven scholarly theology with novels, nonfiction, poetry, and audiobooks. I make these goals, not because I value quantity over quality, nor because I want to read faster or just read a bunch of smaller books. It’s because setting these goals pushes me to set aside much less worthy uses of my time in order to focus on what is better for me and what I genuinely prefer. Both the direct effects (more reading) and the knock-on effects (less TV, less phone and laptop, less wasted time on mindless or mind-sucking activities) are what I’m after. And, as I’ve written before, I didn’t grow up reading novels. Which means I’m always playing catch-up.

My aspirational monthly goal is 2-3 novels, 2-3 volumes of poetry, 2-3 audiobooks, 3-4 nonfiction works, 4-8 works of academic theology. That alone should push me to the 140-160 range. I was on pace heading into August this year, then cratered. As 2023 approaches, I won’t make 150 my “realistic” goal; I’ll set it at 135. But one of my brothers as well as another friend both hit 200 this past year, which puts me to shame. So perhaps a little friendly competition will do the job.

In any case, what follows is a list of my favorite books I read this year. Two new books I was disappointed in: Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom and The Ink Black Heart, the sixth entry in J. K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series. I won’t write about the latter, but I might find time for the former. I also read J. G. Ballard’s Crash for the first time, a hateful experience. I “get” it. But getting it doesn’t make the reading pleasant, or even justify the quality of the book. I do plan to write about that one.

Here are the ones I did like, with intermittent commentary.

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Rereads

5. Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time.

4. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man. Hadn’t picked this one up in 22 years. Magnificent.

3. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. I’m willing to call this a perfect book. I should probably read it every year for the rest of my life. Lewis really is a moral anatomist nonpareil.

2. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451. Hadn’t read this one since middle school. Had completely forgotten about the technologies Bradbury conjured up as substitutes for reading—the very technologies (influencers live-streaming the manipulated melodrama of their own lives into ordinary people’s homes via wall-to-wall screens) we have used to the same end.

1. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. I could not remember when or whether I’d read this years and years ago, but I listened to Forest Whitaker’s rendition on Spotify and it was excellent. Highly recommended. (The audio recording; I know Douglass himself doesn’t need my stamp of approval.)

Poetry

I won’t pretend to have read as much poetry as I have in previous years. I finishing rereading R. S. Thomas’s poems; I got to a couple more collections by Denise Levertov; and I read Malcolm Guite’s The Singing Bowl, my first of his volumes. I’m hoping to get back into more poetry in the new year.

Fiction

10. William Goldman, The Princess Bride. Never knew Goldman wrote it as a book before it became a screenplay and a film. A delight.

9. John Le Carré, Silverview. A fitting send-off to the master.

8. Ian Fleming, Casino Royale. Brutality with flair. I wasn’t prepared for how good the prose, the plotting, the thematic subtext would all be. I wonder what would happen if, in the next film adaptation, they actually committed to adapting the character rather than a sanitized version of him. I’m not recommending that: Bond is wicked, and the Connery films valorized his wickedness. But the books commit to the bit, and it makes them a startling read some 70 years later.

7. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan. The second entry in the Earthsea saga. I expect to read the rest this year.

6. Walter Mosley, Trouble is What I Do. My second Mosley. Someone adapt this, please! Before picking it up, I had just finished a brand new novel celebrated by the literary establishment, a novel that contains not one interesting idea, much less an interesting sentence. Whereas Mosley is incapable of writing uninteresting sentences. He’s got more style in his pinky finger than most writers have in their whole bodies.

5. Mick Herron, Slow Horses & Dead Lions. I got hooked, before watching the series. Casting Oldman as Jackson Lamb, he who also played Smiley on film, is inspired. I expect to finish the whole series by summer. Herron isn’t as good as Le Carré—who is?—but his ability to write twisty plots in punchy prose that intersects politics without getting preachy: that’s a winning ticket.

4. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House. My first Jackson. As good as advertised. Read it with some guys in a book club, and one friend had a theory that another friend who’d read the novel a dozen times had never considered. I’m still thinking about it.

3. Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz. Wrote about it here.

2. Brian Moore, The Statement. I’ve never read anything like this novel. It floored me. James and Le Carré are my two genre masters, each of whose corpus I will complete sometime in my life. Moore may now be on the list, not least owing to his genre flexibility. I’ve read Catholics. I just grabbed Black Robe. Thanks to John Wilson for the recommendation.

1. P. D. James, The Children of Men. I’m an evangelist for this one. Don’t get me started. Just marvel, with me, that a lifelong mystery writer—who didn’t publish her first novel till age 40—found it within herself, in her 70s, to write a hyper-prescient work of dystopian fiction on a par with Huxley, Orwell, Ballard, Bradbury, and Chesterton. I would also add Atwood, since this novel is so clearly a Christian response to The Handmaid’s Tale. As ever, all hail the Queen.

Nonfiction

10. A bunch of books about liberalism, neoliberalism, and the right: Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society; Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism; Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal; Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents; Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture; Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order; Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind; Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences; Matthew Continetti, The Right.

9. John Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform. Outstanding. Hat tip to Matthew Lee Anderson for the recommendation.

8. Christopher Hitchens, A Hitch in Time. A pleasure to dip back in to some of Hitch’s best work. But also a reminder, with time and distance, of some of his less pleasant vices.

7. James Mumford, Vexed & Yuval Levin, A Time to Build. Imagining life beyond tribalism, neither pessimistic nor optimistic. Just hopeful.

6. Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks & Phil Christman, How to Be Normal. I wrote about Burkeman here. Christman is a mensch. Read both, ideally together.

5. Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story & Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War.

4. Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel.

3. Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

2. Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush. He’s still got it. There are a couple essays here that rank among Berry’s best.

1. Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope. The best book of any kind I read in 2022. One of the best books I’ve ever read. A one of one. On a par with After Virtue, A Secular Age, and other magisterial table-setters. Except this one is half the size and happens to focus on Plenty Coups, the Crow, and the moral and philosophical grounds for continuing to live in the face of reasonable despair. Take and read.

Christian (popular)

8. John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life. Hand on heart, I’d never read a Piper book in my life. I wanted something short and punchy on audio, and this fit the bill. Turns out the man can preach.

7. John Mark Comer, Love-ology & The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry & Live No Lies. Hopped on the JMC train this year, since all of my students and many of my friends love his books. He’s doing good work. Pair him with Sayers, Crouch, Wilson, and Dane Ortlund, plus the younger gents at the intersection of Mere O, Davenent, and Theopolis—Meador, Loftus, Anderson, Roberts, Littlejohn, et al—and if you squint a bit, you can see the emerging writers, leaders, and intellectuals of a sane American evangelicalism, should that strange and unruly beast have a future. And if it doesn’t, they’re the ones who will be there on the other side.

6. Ronald Rolheiser, Domestic Monastery. Simply lovely.

5. Mark Sayers, Disappearing Church. Shrewd, lucid diagnosis. Not so sure about the prescription.

4. Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For. Click on the “Andy Crouch” tag on this blog and you’ll see tens of thousands of words spilled over this book as well as Andy’s larger project. A wonderful man, a great writer, a gift to Christian attempts to think and live wisely today.

3. Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved. I listened to this one on audio. I wept.

2. Andrew Wilson, Spirit and Sacrament. Just what the doctor ordered for my students.

1. Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender. The unrivaled summer beach read of 2022. No joke, I was at the beach in July and looked to my right and then to my left and saw more than one person reading it. You heard it here first.

Theology (newer)

15. Some books on Christian ethics: A Guide for the Perplexed (by Victor Lee Austin), A Brief History (by Michael Banner), A Very Short Introduction (by D. Stephen Long).

14. Myles Werntz, A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence & From Isolation to Community. Two accessible entries from a friend on Christian pacifism and Christian community. Nab copies of both today!

13. Charlie Trimm, The Destruction of the Canaanites. See my review in Christianity Today.

12. David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse & You Are Gods.

11. Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human. Victor makes a case that friendship is not just the heart of being human, but the heart of the gospel; or rather, the latter because the former; or vice versa.

10. Fred Sanders, Fountain of Salvation. See my forthcoming review in Pro Ecclesia.

9. Edwin Chr. van Driel, Rethinking Paul. See my review in Modern Theology.

8. Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, The Love That is God. This one will be on a syllabus very soon.

7. R. B. Jamieson and Tyler Wittman, Biblical Reasoning. See my forthcoming review in International Journal of Systematic Theology.

6. William G. Witt, Icons of Christ: A Biblical and Systematic Theology for Women’s Ordination. So far as I can see, immediately the standard work on the question. I’d love to see some good-faith engagements from the other side, both Protestant and Catholic.

5. John M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift & Paul and the Power of Grace.

4. Christopher Bryan, The Resurrection of the Messiah. Historical, textual, linguistic, literary, and theological scholarship at its finest.

3. Mark Kinzer, Searching Her Own Mystery. I learned a lot from this book. I try to read everything Kinzer writes on the topic of Israel, church, and messianic Judaism. Even better something focused on a particular text, in this case Nostra Aetate.

2. Adam Neder, Theology as a Way of Life. Pellucid and compelling. A beautiful vision that captures heart and mind both. Here’s a taste.

1. Jonathan Bernier, Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament. What can I say? I have a thing for contrarian dating of the NT. I’m not at all persuaded by the consensus dating of most first-century Christian writings. Bernier updates John A. T. Robinson’s classic Redating the New Testament, with a clearly enunciated methodology deployed in calm, measured arguments that avoid even a hint of polemic. For that very reason, an invigorating read.

Theology (older)

6. A Reformation Debate: The Letters of Bishop Sadoleto and John Calvin. (Whispers: Calvin doesn’t win this round.)

5. Papal social encyclicals: Veritatis Splendor, Evangelium Vitae, Humanae Vitae, & Lumen Gentium. Always worth a re-read.

4. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God & Homilies in Praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Beautiful, devotional, exemplary models of spiritual theology.

3. St. Cyprian of Carthage, On the Church: Select Treatises & On the Church: Select Letters.

2. St. Basil the Great, On Social Justice. Blows your hair back then lights it on fire.

1. Michael Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church. Is Ramsey the most underrated Anglophone theologian of the twentieth century? The man had exquisite theological sense; he wrote with style and passion; he cared about the unity of the church; he was a bona fide scholar; he wrote about everything; he became Archbishop of Canterbury; what’s not to love? Both this work and his little volume on the resurrection are classics.

2022: a year in two parts

My year could be divided roughly in two parts. Between January and early August, I had at least ten essays published in various venues, plus a book, a few podcasts, and reviews in academics journals. During that time I gave a number of presentations and also wrote a peer-reviewed journal article that was published later in the fall. But since the start of the fall semester, it’s been pretty quiet.

The reasons why are many. Two are professional; the others are related to family, health, and travel. First, I submitted my application for tenure and promotion in late September, so I spent August and September on that. Second, I completed the revisions and endnotes for a new book manuscript, which I submitted in early December. On the personal side, our house got hit with Covid a third time in ten months in late summer, followed by some other health issues with our kids. Thankfully, all of that is behind us now. But it meant that every waking second not sleeping, teaching, revising the manuscript, or applying for T&P was spent caring for the family. Oh, and did I mention we’re in the middle of a move? I’m told those are stressful, too.

It was a good year, though. I found out last week that I have officially received both tenure and promotion, which is a relief. The book is in the hands of the publisher. I’ve recorded two podcasts due out in the next couple months. I’m working on not one but two books due in the next thirty months. And I’ve got a bunch of smaller pieces in process of being published or set to be written this winter and spring. More on that in a coming post.

For now, here’s a list of publications, presentations, and interviews from my year.

Podcasts

The Liberating Arts (Liberal Learning for Life, 25 April 2022). A short interview on the liberal arts and education I recorded way back in May 2021.

The Doctrine of Scripture (Mere Fidelity, 26 April 2022). My first bona fide theology podcast, with the lovely guys at Mere Fi, covering my first book.

Faith, Politics, Ecology, and Despair (The Arts of Travel Podcast, 19 June 2022). A somewhat random, challenging, but invigorating conversation about Wendell Berry, ecology, left politics, and Christian faith.

The Bible as the Church’s Book (Crackers and Grape Juice, 8 July 2022). A conversation about my second book with another OG faith-and-theology pod.

Essays

Grace upon Grace (Comment, 13 January 2022). The first of two pieces this year on gratitude to God. This is the synthetic one, locating gratitude in Christian theological grammar.

Jewish Jesus, Black Christ (The Christian Century, 25 January 2022). A long-simmering essay—the magazine’s cover story!—first drafted in August 2020.

Marked by Death (First Things, 2 March 2022). A short liturgical reflection for Ash Wednesday.

The Question of the Conquest (Christianity Today, 21 March 2022). A review of Charlie Trimm’s book about the conquest of Canaan. My favorite opening to something I wrote this year. And apparently the ninth most-read book review on CT’s website this year!

Unlearning Machines (Comment, 24 March 2022). A long review essay of Audrey Watters’ latest book, reflecting on Ed Tech and digital’s long mission to colonize education of every kind. This or the next essay were, I think, the best things I wrote this year, though it felt like no one happened upon this one. So be it.

Can We Be Human in Meatspace? (The New Atlantis, 2 May 2022). An even longer review essay, this time of Andy Crouch’s latest book. It sparked a whole series of exchanges, on Twitter, on blogs, and on email, with Alan Jacobs, with Jeff Bilbro, with Andy himself. All were gracious and kind. A blast to participate, and a fun and worthwhile book to kick it all off.

Another Option for Christian Politics (Front Porch Republic, 4 July 2022). A short piece proposing, somewhat tongue in cheek, one more saint as a substitute for the Benedict Option. My first for FPR.

The Ruins of Christendom (Los Angeles Review of Books, 10 July 2022). A review essay of Stanley Hauerwas’s latest book on Hauerwas and politics. I promised to come under 2,000 words, and I kept my word. This one pairs well with the next piece.

The Church in the Immanent Frame (First Things, 14 July 2022). A shorter review of Andrew Root’s book on the crisis of church decline in the West. So much of Root’s diagnosis is apt, but I took modest issue with what I perceived to be a kind of resignation to social and cultural norms and presuppositions the church not only need not accept, but will assuredly outlast.

Response to Alastair Roberts (Theopolis, 11 August 2022). A long response to Alastair’s own long engagement with my second book. He then replied to my reply. Just wonderful.

Academic

Review of Edwin Chr. van Driel, Rethinking Paul: Protestant Theology and Pauline Exegesis (Modern Theology, online 2022). This one was published early-access online in February, though only now is it in print, in the January 2023 issue of the journal. It’s a superb and thought-provoking book, so I’m glad the editors gave me some real space to engage it in the review.

The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context (Eerdmans, May 2022). The book! My second. My second overall, that is, and my second on the Bible. But my first written, in a sense, since it’s a major revision of my dissertation, initially completed in May 2017. So happy to see this out in the world. Originally $50, then $25. Now down to $20 on the Bezos site. Go buy it today!

Is Scripture a Gift? Reflections on the Divine-Ecclesial Provision of the Canon (Religions, Fall 2022). This one was a labor of love, though emphasis on labor. My second piece related to gratitude to God, albeit focused on the canon, in a sort of experimental key. Not sure the whole thing holds together, but I’m confident the pieces work. And it was a pleasure canvassing the literature on the gift.

Talks, Lectures, Presentations

“The Word of the Lord: Reading Scripture in and for Christ’s Body,” CSART Public Lecture, Abilene, TX, February 15, 2022. Link to video here.

“Hearing the Word of the Lord,” Intersection Webinar: Siburt Institute for Church Ministry, April 12, 2022. Link to video here.

“Response to Reviews of The Doctrine of Scripture,” Christian Scholars’ Conference, Nashville, TN, June 8, 2022. The CSC devoted a session to my first book. They met in person, but alas, I wasn’t able to be there. So I Zoomed into the session, listened to the papers, then gave my response via Zoom. They could actually see and hear me! No tech snafus! An academia miracle.

“Tradition and Liturgy for Churches of Christ,” University Church of Christ, August 24, 2022. A two-part presentation on sacred tradition, liturgy, and the role of Christian doctrine in hearing and reading Scripture. There’s nothing quite like committed CoC laypeople in a Wednesday night class. You rise to their level, not the other way around.

“Reading Scripture with the Church,” University Church of Christ, August 31, 2022. The aforementioned part two.

“Preaching for Martyrs in Training,” Summit Lectureship, Abilene, TX, October 14, 2022. A chat with some CoC preachers about the state of the church, Gen Z, and the power of preaching for the spiritual formation of an illiterate and uncatechized generation.

“The Word of the Lord,” Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest, Abilene, TX, October 19, 2022. A happy visit to the local Episcopal parish—they’re like CoC-ers, only their potlocks include wine and Compline. I talked about the Bible. They were a rapt audience. It was lovely.

“Knowing Christ,” ACU Commencement Address, Abilene, TX, December 16, 2022. This one was a surprise. Last May, at commencement ceremonies, I was shocked and overwhelmed to receive the award—voted on by the students!—of Teacher of the Year. (Here’s the write-up by the student newspaper and ACU’s magazine, respectively.) One of the honors of the award is that the TOTY give the December commencement address later the same year. So here I am, in all my glory, giving a charge to the December 2022 graduating class of ACU; I’m introduced around 1:02:00 and I finish the speech around 1:14:00. Enjoy:

Church on Christmas Day

Allow me to stick up for the normies.

All my people—church folk, academics, readerly believers—are worked up about (the always excellent) Ruth Graham’s New York Times piece from two days ago about Christmas Day falling on a Sunday. And rightly so: it should be a no-brainer for Christians that Christmas Day is a day to go to church. A day to worship God. A day to gather with sisters and brothers in Christ to worship the child Christ. A day about him, not a day about us. The reason for the season, you might say.

No one is wrong about this. But there’s a touch of mercilessness in the proceedings, underwritten by a lack of context, which both ups the ante and elides understanding. So let me give a cheer and a half for staying home on Christmas, or at least for grasping, in something other than shock and disbelief, why it is so many devout believers do so.

First, we aren’t talking about catholic Christians. We’re talking about Protestants.

Second, we aren’t talking about Protestants in general. We’re talking about low-church, evangelical, biblicist, frontier-revival, and/or non-denominational American Protestants.

Third, for two centuries or more this specific subgroup of American Christians—I like to call them “baptists,” the lower-case “b” coming from James McClendon—have studiously avoided any and all connection to sacred tradition, particularly the liturgical calendar. In the Stone-Campbell movement, for example, most churches would studiously avoid mentioning even the existence of either Christmas or Easter, especially (as it always does in the case of the latter) when it fell on a Sunday. In other words, what you’ve got with American baptists is a wholesale lack of a Christian calendar governing, guiding, or forming their theological, liturgical, and festal imaginations—much less their family practices.

Fourth, and simultaneously, the practice of Christmas as a cultural event has been wholly subsumed by the wider society. Advent simply doesn’t exist; Christmas—all six to eight weeks of it—does. Asking baptist Christians to go to church on Christmas Day strikes many of them like asking them to go to church on Thanksgiving. Is this historically parochial? Yes. Is it liturgically lamentable? Yes. Is it a sad reflection of the total secularization of Christmas as a national holiday? Yes. Should this occasion anger and bewilderment at the millions of laypeople who have been successfully formed by both their churches and their culture to understand and celebrate Christmas in just this way? I don’t see why. The problem is the catechesis, not the catechumens. To overstate the matter, it’s an odd instance of blaming the victim, seasoned with overripe overreaction.

Fifth and finally, in a mitigating factor, most baptist churches of which I am aware have, over the last few decades, added or expanded a major liturgical celebration of Christ’s birth, in imitation of their more liturgically catholic neighbors: a Christmas Eve service. This has come to function, albeit accidentally I’m sure, as something akin to an Easter Vigil. It isn’t the prelude to the feast on the following day. It is the feast, or rather its beginning. Just as the sun sets, God’s people gather in darkness and candlelight to mark the moment when God came to earth in a manger. They sing and pray and celebrate and remember—prior to opening gifts or doing Santa. Only once this is complete do they disperse to their homes to begin the festivities, which continue into the following morning. And since it’s only every so often that Christmas Day is on a Sunday, it’s an odd and somewhat confusing eventuality when it does. Like Catholics who opt for Saturday 5:00pm mass, these baptists intuitively sense that they have already paid homage to the child Christ the night before. Christmas Day, even on a Sunday, becomes a kind of family Sabbath. Not necessarily (though granted, surely often in fact) to Mammon and his pomp, but to gift of multiple generations of family, grandparents and grandchildren in the same home, gratitude and feasting and toys and surprise gifts and laughter and exhaustion all giving glory to God in the domestic church of one’s household, free from work and duty and consumption and travel and the rest. You don’t do anything on such a Sabbath. You don’t go anywhere. Even, as it happens, to church.

What I’m saying is: I get it. It isn’t hard at all to understand why this default setting makes all the sense in the world to normie, mainstream, low-church American Christians. I’m not angry about it. I’m not sure you should be either. I even see the Christmas Eve service as a step in the right liturgical direction. Would I prefer for baptists, like catholics, to grasp in their bones that Christmas Day is a day for church, for worshiping Christ as Christ’s body, gathered in a single place? Yes, I would. Is it reasonable to expect that to be true at this moment, given our history and where the church is today? No, I don’t think so. To get from here to there, it seems to me, is the work of generations, a decades- or even centuries-long process of cultural, familial, liturgical, and ecclesial change. I’d like to see that change happen. I think it’s happening even now. But no shade on my neighbors.

Like I say, I get it.

Around the web

It’s been a happy last month, in terms of reviews and references across the web. I already linked in a previous post to the double-review of my two books on Scripture in Christian Century. Here are some other links and bits of news, gathered here, as in the olden days, on the blog, since I don’t have a Twitter or Facebook profile from which to share these things with the world:

• Cole Hartin reviews The Doctrine of Scripture in the latest Scottish Journal of Theology. He’s very kind, though he doesn’t think it’s perfect. He does call the book, and I quote, “jaunty” in the opening line of the review. Jaunty!

• Brandon Crowe reviews The Doctrine of Scripture in the latest issue of The Expository Times. He’s less enamored of the book, understandably so from his Reformed perspective. I do wish he might have found some virtues in the work, granted our theological disagreements. Though perhaps he didn’t find (m)any to speak of.

• I have it on good authority that reviews of The Doctrine of Scripture are imminently forthcoming in Stone-Campbell Journal, co-written by C. Leonard Allen and Lauren Smelser White, and in Pro Ecclesia, written by Brett Vanderzee. Also a review of The Church’s Book in The Expository Times by Gregory Vall. I’ve heard about others through the grapevine, but nothing as concrete or imminent.

• The week of Thanksgiving, Christianity Today published a short piece by Kaitlyn Schiess called “Thanks Be to God for Scripted Gratitude.” It references The Church’s Book alongside J. Todd Billings and Ellen Davis (not too shabby company, that) to talk about giving liturgical thanks for the reading of Scripture in worship. A former student of mine who follows Schiess pointed me to it. Lovely!

• On Thanksgiving Day, Comment published a wonderful essay by Caitrin Keiper, an editor at Plough and The New Atlantis I’ve had the pleasure to work with before. It’s called “Heartbeat of the World,” and uses her own story of giving birth to think about natality, motherhood, Christmas, and C-sections. She graciously quotes from my essay for Christian Century a few years back called “Birth on a Cross.” Very much worth a read.

• Back in April, Trevin Wax wrote a piece for The Gospel Coalition called “Bible Reading in an Age of Double Literacy Loss.” It uses my reflections on this blog about literal and biblical illiteracy as a point of departure for thinking about lay reading of the Bible today. Thanks to Trevin for a stimulating response.

• Finally, I noticed that, sometime after AAR/SBL/Thanksgiving, my second book—The Church’s Book (I know, I know, writing it out like that is so clunky)—which is usually a whopping $50, is now selling for a hair under $25. Buy it today! Even if it means patronizing the Bezos Beast. I’ll give you preemptive absolution, just this one time.

Sin, preaching, and the therapeutic gospel

Regular readers will have noticed a regular theme, or convergence of themes, on the blog over the last few years. In a phrase, the theme is the question of how to be and to do church in a therapeutic age. This question includes a range of issues: evangelism, liturgy, sacraments, preaching, class, education, literacy, exegesis, culture, technology, disenchantment, secularism, functional atheism, and more.

Three constant conversation partners are Richard Beck, Alan Jacobs, and Jake Meador (the persons and the blogs!). A fourth is my friend Myles Werntz, whom I’ve known for more than a decade, whom I’ve had as a fellow Abilenian for more than five years, and whom I’ve had as a colleague at ACU for almost three years. His Substack is called “Christian Ethics in the Wild.” You should subscribe!

His latest issue is on holiness, prompted by a conversation with an undergraduate student. The student earnestly asked him the following: Why doesn’t anyone—at church or university—ever talk about sin? Neither the student nor Myles is sin-obsessed. They just find themselves wondering about the fact that, and why, sin-talk is in retreat.

They’re right to do so. Sin is a byword these days. There are many reasons why. Much has to do with generational baggage. Boomers, Gen X, and even some older Millennials do not want to reproduce what they understand themselves to have received: namely, an imbalanced spiritual formation, whereby believers of every age, but especially youth, are perpetually held out over the flames of hell, rotting and smoldering in the stench of their sin, unless and until God snatches them back—in the nick of time—upon their confession of faith and/or baptism. Such ministers and older believers do not want, in other words, young people to feel themselves to be sinners, tip to toe and all the way through. Instead, they want them to feel themselves beloved by God. For they are. They are God’s creatures, made in his image, for whom Christ died.

But there’s the catch. Why would Christ die for creatures about whom all we can say is, they are beloved of God, and not also, they have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory? The more sin drops out of the grammar of Christian life, the more the cross of Jesus becomes unintelligible. So much so that children and teenagers can’t articulate, even in basic terms, why Jesus came to earth, died, and rose again.

There is much to say about this phenomenon. As ever, the church’s leaders are fighting the last generation’s war. The result is extreme over-correction and, however unintended, the mirror-image mis-formation of the young. Instead of believing they’re worth nothing, being filthy sinners whom God can’t stand the sight of, they now believe they’re worth everything, and therefore utterly worthy—sin being a word they’d barely recognize, much less use to describe themselves. Moreover, this is where therapy enters in. Self-image and self-esteem and mental health having taken over load-bearing duty in Christian grammar, replacing concepts like sin and righteousness, holiness and justification, atonement and deliverance, the Christian life comes to be understood as the achievement of a certain well-adjusted standing in the world. The aim is to find emotional, physical, financial, relational, vocational, and spiritual balance. The aim, in a word, is health. And it is utterly this-worldly.

Note, in addition, the burden this places on the believer. When sin-talk is operative, it does a great deal of work in making sense of one’s unhappiness, one’s sense of there being something wrong, not just with the world but with oneself. Whereas when the message is simultaneously that (a) God affirms me just as I am, so that (b) I don’t need God to move me from where I am to where I’m not, then (c) the upshot is a sort of therapeutic Pelagianism. Or, as Christian Smith has popularized the term, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD). God is there to observe and to affirm, but neither to judge nor to save. And this is a burden, rather than a relief, because all of a sudden I seem to, need to, matter a lot. Yet one look in the mirror shows me that I don’t matter at all. I’m a blip on the radar of cosmic time. I’m nothing. So I keep upping the ante of just how much God loves and values me, even though I and everyone else I know sense that something is amiss. But saying “something is amiss” sure smells like shame, guilt, and sin … so I turn back to the latest self-help Instagram influencer to help me see just how worthy and valued I am.

In sum, a therapeutic gospel that has excised sin from the Christian social imaginary not only reduces God to a bit of inert furniture in a lifelong counseling session. It’s also bad for mental health. This shouldn’t surprise us. If original sin is true—if you and I and every human being on earth is conceived and born in bondage to Sin, Death, and the Devil, so that we cannot help but sin in all we say, do, and think and thus desperately need deliverance from this congenital moral and spiritual slavery—then pretending as if it were not true could never be conducive to a life well lived. The concept of mental health, as with any form of health, presupposes the concept of truth and therefore of a truthful, as opposed to false, understanding of ourselves and our condition. Sin is part of this condition. We cannot understand ourselves without it. Cutting it out, we lose the ability not just to understand ourselves, but to help or be helped, in any way, by anyone. Denial of sin is, in this way, a form of willful self-deception. And self-deception is the first thing we need to be freed from if we would pursue either mental or spiritual health, much less both.

If, then, preaching is the first (though not the only) place where the grammar of Christian life and faith is fashioned and forged for ordinary believers, then how should the foregoing inform preaching today? Put differently, how should preachers go about preaching the good news of Christ instead of a therapeutic gospel? What are a few simple marks of faithful proclamation in this area?

I can think of four, plus an extra for good measure.

First, preach God. This is a no-brainer, but then, you’d be surprised. As I’ve written elsewhere, God should be the subject of every sermon, and ideally the grammatical subject of most of any sermon’s sentences. God is the object and aim, the audience and end of every sermon. A sermon is not advice about life. It is not commentary on current events. It is the announcement of what God has done in Jesus Christ for his beloved bride, the church, and in and through her, for the world. The rule for every sermon is simple: God, God, and more God. The living God, the triune God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. No one should ever walk away from a sermon wondering where God was, or supposing that the onus lies on me rather than God.

Second, preach salvation. Likewise, this one surely seems a strange suggestion. I might as well recommend using words when preaching. But the therapeutic temptation is strong; MTD has no soteriology, because it lacks both a savior and a condition to be saved from. So the god proclaimed ends up being an inert deity, a lifeless idol, a bystander who at most serves as cheerleader from the sidelines. He’s not in the game, though. He doesn’t act in your life or mine. He isn’t up to anything in the world. He certainly hasn’t already done the marvelous work of redemption. But this is a flat denial of the gospel. Preaching ought therefore to be about salvation from beginning to end. Both the act and the effect of salvation. God, the saving God, the delivering God, the rescuing God: He has done it! It is finished! You are saved! You, right there, in the pews, worried about debt and anxious about your kids, you have been saved by God, are saved, even now. Rejoice!

Third, preach (about) sin. To be saved, as we’ve already seen, entails something to be saved from. Preaching that fails to mention sin thereby fails to proclaim the gospel of salvation and, ultimately, fails to proclaim the God of the gospel. Sin—though not only sin—is what we are saved from. Not his sin or her sin, but yours and mine. I am a sinner. Like David, I was a sinner from my mother’s womb. I was born into quicksand, and the harder I struggle the deeper I sink. God alone can help me. No one else. What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

This is the promeity of proclamation. It is pro me only so long as I’m personally in the condition that needs resolving, and no one but God can do the resolving. I need to know it, to feel it in my bones. Not to see myself as a disgusting wretch whom God can’t bear to look at. God loves me. I’m the prodigal. But like the prodigal, I’m a thousand miles away, lying in the mud, eating pig slop. Sin has reduced me to porcine living. I yearn for the Father’s house. The Father yearns for me to be in his house. But I need to be lifted up, to be rinsed and washed and cleaned of the sin that clings so closely. I need to be freed of these chains, chains that I all too often prefer to freedom. God is ready to liberate. He is the great emancipator. He is standing at the door, even now, knocking. But if preaching never shows me my bondage, how can I ever ask God to unshackle me, much less accept his offer to do so? Preaching, rightly understood, is nothing other than the weekly heralding of this very offer: the offer of freedom to sinners.

Fourth, preach heaven. It is in vogue these days to avoid talk of heaven. Again, I’ve written about this elsewhere, but the reasons have to do with class, education, and baggage. The baggage is an upbringing that made the gospel exclusively about the next life, with nothing to say about this one. One’s postmortem destination exhausted the church’s message. As for education, it concerns an influential turn in evangelical scholarship the last two generations, represented symbolically by N. T. Wright. This turn uses the already/not-yet eschatology of the New Testament, wedded to a certain understanding of the new creation, to subvert colloquial talk of “this world/earth” and “the next world/heaven.” Instead of this schema, because heaven is breaking into earth, because God is going to renew all creation rather than burn the earth to ashes, it follows that we should care about this world and not only the next. Practically, this means focusing on social issues like poverty and homelessness as well as matters of culture, like the arts, film, TV, and so on. On the ground, the effect can be a kind of embarrassment about old-school evangelism. After all, isn’t that passé? Haven’t we learned that the gospel isn’t about leaving this world for the next, abandoning earth for heaven?

Well, no, we haven’t. For ordinary believers, “heaven” may be mixed up with imperfect eschatology—they may imagine it as disembodied and distant rather than redeemed and resurrected, God dwelling with us forever in the new heavens and new earth—but what it mainly signifies is the next life, beyond death, with God, minus sin, death, suffering, and evil. And that is as right as right gets. There’s nothing to correct there. Further, ordinary believers are right in their instinct that if this is what “heaven” means, then heaven is a big deal, even the main thing. Eternal life with God, beyond this vale of tears, is what the gospel brings to us. It is the good news. Yes, we have a share of it in this life: a glimpse, a foretaste. But it’s nothing in comparison to the real article. This is why the Christian life is defined by hope. Yet if the church does not give her members anything to hope for, truly to spend a lifetime yearning for with a deep hungry ache, then she has failed in her task. Preaching, accordingly, should proclaim this hope: with gladness and without apology. Just as preaching should form listeners over time to understand themselves as sinners saved by almighty God, it should also form them to understand themselves as pilgrims journeying from earth to heaven, from the city of man to the city of God, from this life of injustice, idolatry, sin, suffering, illness, and death, to eternal life free of every such enemy, all of which God himself has put away and destroyed, forever. Such is hope worth living for. Such is hope worth dying for.

Finally, preach (about) Satan. One test for preaching that seeks to avoid reducing the gospel to therapy is whether it mentions the Devil, demons, and evil spiritual forces. Show me a church that talks about Satan, and I’ll wager it also talks about sin, salvation, heaven, and God. Show me a church that never talks about Satan, and I’ll wager that next Sunday’s sermon won’t mention sin or heaven. Such a church is on its way to disenchantment, secularism, a therapeutic gospel, and functional atheism. The point isn’t that talk of devils is spooky, though it is. It’s that talk of devils presupposes and projects a universe with stakes. I didn’t mention hell above, but the popular imagination pairs heaven with hell. If there’s a good destination, then there’s also a bad one. Matthew 25 suggests as much. And if there’s good at work in the world—his name is God—but also Sin to be rescued from, then there must be some kind of agency that does Sin’s bidding—his name is Satan. Heaven and hell, God and Satan, angels and demons: this is the language of spiritual warfare, of cosmic stakes that hold all our lives in the balance. For ordinary believers, this cashes out in how they understand their daily lives. Are they living in enemy territory? Are they constantly under assault by the Enemy? You don’t have to be charismatic to think or talk like this. But preaching makes evident whether this is the right way to experience the world.

Here’s the fundamental question: Is following Christ like living in wartime or in peacetime? The flavor of a sermon tells you all you need to know. And if, as I began this post, therapeutic preaching finally serves to reassure disenchanted professionals in the upper-middle-class that God affirms them as they are—that a well-adjusted life is attainable, though ennui on the path is to be expected—then we have our answer: there are no demons; there is no war on; we are living in peacetime.

Such a message may be the best possible way to lull believers to sleep. Not literal sleep (a TED Talk can be entertaining), but spiritual sleep. Jesus commands us to be alert, to be watchful, to stay awake as we eagerly await his coming. The command, in short, presumes a wartime mentality. Peacetime is thus a myth, a lie from the Enemy. Each of us forgets this at our own peril, but preachers most of all.

Substack vs. blogging

Everyone has a Substack these days. Is that a good thing?

I’ve toyed with starting my own this past year. But I keep pulling up short. Here’s why.

Blogging is its own form at this point. It isn’t an essay. Nor is it a scholarly article. It has no length requirements: a blog post can be a sentence, a paragraph, 500 words, twice that, or twenty times that. Neither does blogging come with expectations of frequency. Some folks blog daily; others multiple times a day; others twice a week; others unpredictably, as a kind of clearinghouse for random ideas or thinking out loud.

Blogging is the shaggy dog of internet writing. It’s playful, experimental, occasional, topical, provisional, personal, tentative. It is inexpert, even when written by experts. It is off the cuff, even when polished and thought through.

And it is conversational, at its origins and in its form. It’s constantly linking, talking, referring, thinking out loud by bouncing ideas off of other ideas, typically found on other blogs. The so-called “blogosphere” really was a marvelous time to be on the internet. And it never died, though it shrunk, and its spirit lives on in various ways.

I understand how and why certain Substackers treat their new medium as a kind of Blog 2.0. But I don’t think it qualifies. Whatever Substack (along with its many peers and predecessors) is, and even if it is here to stay, it isn’t blogging.

I’m gratified to see Substack succeed, and I think all writers (and readers) should be grateful for its continued viability. The larger ecology of writers and writing has benefited tremendously from it. Writers are getting paid for their labor. Niche subjects are being funded by committed readers. I have more than a few friends who are finding and growing a readership by means of Substack. I subscribe to at least one or two dozen Substacks, and some of them make for essential reading.

But it’s not a blogging replacement, a blog-killer. And inasmuch as writers flock to Substack as the one real option today, I do think it has a certain distorting effect. For what Substack does is impose a certain discipline on its writers. The writing becomes formal, focused, and routinized. Writers produce at least one entry weekly, but typically two to three (or more) per week. Series abound. The word count is expansive. Not only are editors few and far between; quality, as in GRE grading, is tied to length. After all, it’s hard to justify subscriptions without regular, “meaty” posts.

Put charitably, it’s as though everyone is now a writer for Harper’s or First Things or the NYRB or NYT Magazine, only they produce copy at an outrageous rate. Put less charitably, the Substack-ification of writing makes an op-ed columnist out of everyone—except twice or thrice as prolific, minus the journalistic chops, and lacking in editorial oversight.

Hear me say: The net effect of Substack remains good. I don’t want it to go away. What I want is a diverse publishing environment, which includes but is not limited to Substack. Sure, it would be nice to lock in a concrete number of readers who chose to sign up for my newsletter. It would be lovely to start making one or two hundred bucks per month for my writing. It would be reassuring to my sensitive writer’s soul to know that, when I press “publish,” the post I’ve just crafted wasn’t just being launched into the void but into 50 or 500 or 1500 (or more!) inboxes the world over.

But my writing would suffer. I’d start writing like a Substacker. And I don’t want to write like that. I want to write books, journal articles, and magazine essays. And when I’m not doing that, I want to blog.

Kudos, then, and all good things to friends and colleagues who’ve found a home and an audience on Substack. As for me and my writing, however, we’ll stay here, on my own turf.

Once more, negative world

I sometimes think of what I write on this blog as mostly just drafting off two other, far superior blogs: Richard Beck’s and Alan Jacobs’. Both are friends whose work I’ve been reading for more than a decade, and who have been kind enough, more than once, to link to my own work or to respond to it in some way.

Recently Alan wrote a follow-up to his blistering rejection of Aaron Renn’s “Three Worlds” framework for understanding Christians’ social status in the United States. In the follow-up, Alan mentions both Derek Rishmawy’s and my respective attempts to interpret and commend a version of Renn’s framework. Gently but firmly, he rebukes these attempts and underscores why he finds the whole business—the whole conversation—a misdirect: a futile, self-regarding failure to attend to the main thing, namely following Christ irrespective of our surroundings and their purported (in)hospitality to the gospel. We do not, Alan argues, need detailed plans in order to fulfill this charge. Nor do we need an ostensibly (or fantastically) friendlier society in order to succeed. We just need the will, the resolve, the obedience to Christ requisite to set one foot in front of the other, answering the call of the Lord whatever it may be, wherever it may lead, whenever it may come.

I see that Derek has written his own response to Alan (though I haven’t yet read it). I’m going to attempt my own here, with the aim both of understanding what Alan is concerned about and of clarifying my own position.

The simplest way to put my view is in the form of two broad questions:

1. Do different societies, in different times and different places, treat an individual’s or a community’s public identification as Christian in different ways?

2. If yes, does knowledge of those differences make some relevant difference for how Christians should understand, approach, engage, and inhabit their societies?

I take the answer to the first question as read: yes, obviously. I take the answer to the second to be yes as well.

To me, that settles the matter—at least at the formal level.

The third question descends from the heights of history and missiology, respectively, to applied sociology: Is it accurate to say, all things being equal, that being known publicly as a Christian in the U.S. is less likely to enhance one’s social status than at any time since World War II? Or, to put it differently, that public identification as Christian is more likely to downgrade one’s social status that at any point in living memory? Or, to put it more weakly and less comparatively, that in general “being identified as Christian” is not something a non-Christian would, in our society today, be tempted to pursue nominally for the sole reason of trying to enhance his or her social status?

Granted, the U.S. is a big country. I live in a town of 120,000 in west Texas. Having a nominal membership at a local church one doesn’t actually attend or care much about might still grant a certain cache here. (Though, in most circles, I doubt it.) Any comment, then, about “the U.S. today” is going to be an “in general, on balance, all things being equal, thinking about the country as a whole” comment. If you don’t think such comments can be meaningful, fair enough. But if you do, then this sort of comment is permissible like any other.

Region and subculture are one element here. Institutions and professions are another. Some organizations and careers will be neutral as regards religious identity; others, far from it. Also granted.

The upshot, all qualifications made, is simply that something has changed in the last century regarding how self-identifying as a Christian orients oneself to the wider culture; how one is perceived as a result. And apart from claims about this as a change, the point about the present moment is that, whether or not there ever was such a time (in this society or another) when being seen to be a Christian was something that might raise one’s prospects—marital, educational, financial, professional, political—this time, in this society, is not one of them. We can haggle over whether it’s preferable to say “it is not” one of them versus “it is no longer” one of them. But either way, it’s not.

Suppose Alan agrees with me (though, if I’m reading him correctly, I don’t think he does). Does it matter?

I think it does. But let me say how I don’t think it matters before I say how I think it does.

It does not matter “because America is no longer a Christian nation.” It does not matter, that is, as if this analysis were at heart a declension narrative, according to which things have been getting worse and worse and now, at this moment, we’ve reached the nadir; or at least have crept up to the edge of the cliff. No. The social status of being-seen-as-Christian is simply one among many sociological variables relevant to Christian consideration of the church’s mission.

I also don’t think it matters “because things are really bad out there.” They’re not. It’s bad when Christians get thrown to the lions. It’s bad when Christians can’t vote. It’s bad when certain Christians aren’t afforded basic rights and privileges common to civic society. It’s bad when it is against the law for Christians to gather on Sunday mornings, to pray and celebrate the Eucharist, to read their Bibles and worship without fear, to share the gospel with whomever will listen.

American society does not fit these descriptions, and it isn’t close to any of them. Christians in America are remarkably free; our privileges are innumerable. Words like “persecution” are inapt to our context, and unwise to use—not least since we have sisters and brothers elsewhere in the world who suffer actual persecution at this very moment.

How, then, is the social status of public identification as Christian relevant? In this respect:

The church cannot bear faithful witness to Christ in a given context if she lacks awareness of the particular features that constitute that context, that make it what it is.

Think about different locations and cultures today. Does Christian witness look the same in Riyadh, Nairobi, Beijing, St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, Miami, Milan? Does it look the same in 2022, 1722, 1422, 1122, 822, 522, 222? Surely not. And surely all Christians would agree that differences of context in each time and place call for different forms of response to those differences? Such that the specific contours of Christian witness actually and rightly look different based on when and where one lives, and how a culture or society in question responds to—welcomes, rejects, shrugs, punishes—public identification as Christian?

Perhaps, again, Alan would agree with this. Let me try to say a bit more, then, to get enough meat on these bones to prompt a meaningful disagreement.

Consider the difference between life under Diocletian, about half a century before St. Augustine’s birth, and life under Honorius, when Augustine was bishop of Hippo. The former was a time when the imperial authorities were your enemy, if you were known as a Christian; the latter was a time when claiming to be a Nicene Christian might enhance one’s political or financial prospects (though not necessarily). How should the church navigate each setting? This was a real question faced by bishops, monks, priests, and laypersons around the Mediterranean. The first was, in Renn’s language, a “negative world”; the second, a (more) “positive world.” I see no reason to declare a priori that such labels, and the analysis underlying and following from them, an inadmissible distraction.

Now for an example closer to home. I teach undergraduate students of all kinds, but every semester I have a class all to myself composed only of Bible and ministry majors: i.e., young persons preparing for a life of formal service to the church in the form of teaching, preaching, pastoring, and so on. These students largely come from the Bible Belt, and many of them come from big churches in big cities where being Christian and attending such churches doesn’t feel abnormal. This experience in turn nurtures in a good number of them a sense of their context, present and future, as either neutrally or favorably disposed toward Christianity. A world of megachurches and popular pastors and celebrity Christians and spiritual influencers is just “the world”: yesterday, today, and forever. The churches they one day will lead will be large, healthy, full, and financially stable. The folks in the pews will lead lives as middle-class American Christians long have (so they imagine): unthreatened and tacitly buoyed by the surrounding culture.

Not for all of them, but for quite a few, it is something of a shock to learn about the declining rates of identification as Christian in America; about the decades-long decreasing numbers of church attendance; about how many churches are closing their doors each month; about some of the modest but real social, political, and professional challenges facing folks known to be Christian in what once were considered mainstream careers and institutions in this country.

In a word, most of my students believe they live in Renn’s Positive World. They really do. Others suppose it’s a Neutral World for Christians. Few to none see it as a Negative World. And I’m telling you, it makes a difference for how they understand their faith, their future, and their eventual ministry in the church.

This is one reason, in my view, why we keep seeing so many pastors quitting formal ministry in their 20s and 30s. It’s hard out there. And many of them are unprepared for what’s awaiting them. As I see it, part of that lack of preparation is a gap between the “World” they expect to inhabit as ministers and the actual “World” they find. And the gap is perpetuated if and when professors and writers like me fail to help them see—clearly, soberly, and accurately. I want them to see the world as it is. Not to scare them. Not to lament the supposed loss of a prior world. Not to remake the world in our desired image, in the image of what it “should” be. Not to be fatalist about the future or to forsake the challenge of persuasion or to give up on faithful witness until the world is nicer to us. By no means. The world owes us nothing, and as the apostle teaches, friendship with the world is enmity toward God.

What I want, rather, is for them to be equipped to minister in the real world, not the cloistered world of their childhoods, or the 1990s/2000s, or a fictional 1950s, or any other time and place. In that sense and to that extent, I find the “Three Worlds” heuristic to be useful. As a starting point. As a conversation starter. As an initial sociological, historical, and missiological framework, by which to help normie Christians and ministers to begin thinking about the particular challenges facing the mission of the church today—here and now, in our setting, not our parents’, not someone else’s: ours.

Maybe Renn’s “Three Worlds” comes with social or political baggage not worth onboarding in this particular conversation. Maybe it’s overdetermined by the uses to which various of its adherents want to put it. Maybe it’s wrong in certain key details, not least its laser focus on the last few decades and specific public events that occurred during them; a myopic legal and juridical cultural frame. Maybe its examples are wrong, such as offering the rhetorical style of Tim Keller as an artifact of a now-past “World,” no longer relevant. Maybe the “pre-1994” timeframe of “Positive World” is far too open-ended, and needs bracketing closer to the World Wars than to the Founding Fathers. Maybe the emphasis on elite institutions combined with a blurring of the lines between “public profession of Christian faith” and “actual discipleship to Christ” renders the framework finally useless at the practical level.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. With the qualifications I make above, I find it useful enough. More broadly, analysis like it seems to me self-evidently helpful, even needful. Not because Alan is wrong, but because he is right: The content of Christian witness is always and without exception the same: the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. But what does imitation of and conformity to those life and teachings require in this time, in this place, by comparison to other times, other places?

That’s the question I want to answer. And I’ll take all the help I can get.

A double review of my books in The Christian Century

A few days ago a co-authored review of both my books on the Bible—The Doctrine of Scripture (2021) and The Church’s Book (2022)—appeared in The Christian Century. It was written by Zen Hess and Chris Palmer. The title is “We Do Not Read Alone.” Here’s a taste, from about a third of the way through:

East writes with engaging confidence as he moves through the writings of Webster, Jenson, and Yoder. It is no small contribution to offer charitable and careful interpretations of these three men’s doctrines of scripture. But East goes beyond the descriptive. The Church’s Book begins to lay the groundwork for an account of what scripture is. He gestures toward this in the final two chapters of The Church’s Book and turns to it more fully in The Doctrine of Scripture.

The latter book feels like it’s written to a more immediate audience: his students. East teaches at Abilene Christian University, in the heartland of American evangelicalism. If you live in Texas, like we do, it’s not hard to imagine him strolling through coffee shops filled with young Christians, their note-scribbled Bibles open, wondering how their underlined words will reveal God’s presence to them. East, we imagine, invites these students to deepen their reading practices and to move from the individual toward the communal, showing how scripture can be more fully understood within the economy of salvation and the historic faith of all God’s people. East’s basic word to his students is this: scripture needs the church as much as the church needs scripture.

They’re not wrong. It almost feels like they’ve been following me around, or interviewing my students. It’s eerie.

Go read the whole thing. It is generous, gracious, perceptive, and thoughtful. (Is this what being reviewed is always like?) I’m gratified and grateful. Thanks to the authors and to the editors at the magazine.

Well-adjusted

C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960):

Medicine labors to restore “natural” structure or “normal” function. But greed, egoism, self-deception, and self-pity are not abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney. For who, in Heaven's name, would describe as natural or normal any man from whom these failings were wholly absent? “Natural,” if you like, in a quite different sense; archnatural, unfallen. We have only seen one such Man. And he was not at all like the psychologist's picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can't really be “well adjusted” to your world if it says “you have a devil” and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.

Stanley Hauerwas, “Being with the Wounded: Pastoral Care Within the Life of the Church” (2019):

I have little sympathy for clergy who think their ministry of pastoral care to be the expression of a more general stance identified as a helping profession. Admittedly those who so understand their ministry may often manifest pious pretensions necessary to justify their self-proclaimed identity as someone who responds to a crisis “pastorally,” but I do not think such piety is sufficient to justify describing what they do as a church practice.

There is the problem, moreover, when the ministry becomes just another helping profession, and those who occupy that office discover they have no protection from those they are supposed to help. People think they can ask those who identify as “helpers” to do anything because those committed to be a “helper” do not work for a living. As a result, it does not take long before those in the ministry who identify as “helpers” soon discover they feel like they have been nibbled to death by ducks. A little bite here and a little bite there, and before they know it they have lost an arm. Hence, those that started out wanting to be “of help” often end up violently disliking those they are allegedly helping.

Insofar as the ministry is understood as a helping profession, it is difficult to avoid an alienation between those who help and those that need help. One of the great gifts of being in the ministry is the permission it gives to be present to people in crisis when they are often at their most vulnerable point in their life. They are often appreciative that you are present during the crisis, but after the crisis is over they prefer that you be kept at a distance. They excommunicate those who have been present during the crisis because they fear those that have seen them when they were so vulnerable. That they do so makes the up building of the community difficult, to say the least. . . .

I think we get some idea of the character of contemporary understandings of pastoral care by attending to the account that Alasdair MacIntyre provides in After Virtue of the main characters that have authority in modernity ― that is, the rich aesthete, the manager and the therapist. Each, in their own way, is an expression of a culture of emotivism which is based on the presumption that, insofar as our lives makes sense, they do so only by the imposition of our arbitrary wilfulness. Such wilfulness is required because it is assumed that our lives have no end other than what we can create and impose by the sheer force of our arbitrary desires. As a consequence, it becomes impossible to avoid the reality that all our interactions are manipulative.

In such a context, the task of the therapist, as MacIntyre puts it, is to “transform neurotic symptoms into directed energy, maladjusted individuals into well-adjusted ones.” The therapist must do so, moreover, assuming that there is no normative framework other than respect for their clients' autonomy that can shape their interactions.

To be a moral agent in such a culture entails that we can never be fully present in our actions because if we are to be free we must always be able to stand back from our actions, as if someone other than ourselves did what was done. Such a perspective is the only way to avoid being determined by particularistic narratives that would constrain our choices. The therapist cannot avoid reflecting these conditions because the therapist cannot assume a narrative that can help us make sense of the moral incoherence of our lives. Thus MacIntyre's claim, in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, that any challenge to these modern habits of thought faces the difficulty of only being able to think about our lives in terms that exclude those concepts needed for any radical critique.

What MacIntyre helps us see is how the eclectic character of the various psychological theories that so often inform pastoral care reflects liberal political theory and practice. That many people in advanced industrial societies suffer from a sense that they are alone because no one — including themselves — understand who they are is expected result of living in a time when freedom is assumed to be found in having a unimpeded choice. . . .

The account of the development of pastoral care I have just given does not do justice to the complexity of much of the work done under the headings of “pastoral care” and “pastoral theology.” I am not apologizing because I think, as Stephen Pattison has argued, that the pastoral care movement, particularly in America, has ignored the theological tradition that makes the care given through the church Christian. It is not at all clear that Christians are called to be mature or well-adjusted, but it is surely the case that the care Christians give one another ― and particularly the care that is thought to be the province of those that occupy the pastoral office ― will and should depend on being an expression of the fundamental convictions that make Christians Christian.