Young Christians (not) reading, 2

I received some really useful feedback in response to my previous post about the reading habits, such as they are, of high school and college Christians today. By way of reminder, the group I’m thinking about consists of (a) Christians who are (b) spiritually committed and (c) intellectually serious (d) between the ages of 15 and 25. In other words, in terms of GPA or intelligence or aptitude or career prospects, the top 5-10% Christian students in high school and college. Future professionals, even elites, who are likely to pursue graduate degrees in top-100 schools followed by jobs in law, medicine, journalism, the arts, academia, and politics. What are they reading right now—if anything?

(I trust my qualifiers and modifiers ensure in advance that I’m not equating spiritual maturity with intellectual aptitude, on one hand, or intellectual aptitude with careerist elitism, on the other.)

Here are some responses I received as well as a bunch of further reflections on my part.

1. One comment across the board: None of these kids are reading anything, whether they are cream of the crop or nothing of the kind. And they’re certainly not reading bona fide theology or intellectually demanding spiritual writing. All of them, including the smartest and most ambitious, are online, all the time, full stop. What “content” they get is found there: podcasts, videos, bloggers, and influencers, plus pastors with a “brand” and an extensive online presence (which, these days, amount to the same thing). To be fair, some of these online sources aren’t half bad. Some are substantive. Some have expertise or credentials or wide learning (if, often, of the autodidact sort). But to whatever extent any of these kids are acquiring knowledge, it’s not literate knowledge. It’s mediated by the internet, not by books.

2. If someone in this age range is reading a living Christian author, then I was right to think of John Mark Comer. A few more names mentioned: David Platt, Francis Chan, Dane Ortlund, Timothy Keller. I also had The Gospel Coalition mentioned as a group of authors read by some of these folks. In terms of dead authors, in addition to what I called “the usual suspects” (Lewis, Chesterton, Bonhoeffer, et al), I also heard Eugene Peterson, Dallas Willard, and Henri Nouwen. Which makes sense, since all of them have passed in recent memory, and professors as well as youth pastors would be likely to recommend their work. (I’m going to go ahead and assume John Piper is among those names, too, though he is still with us.)

3. An addendum: Some young believers are reading books, but the books they’re reading are mostly fiction. Typically YA fare; sometimes older stuff, like Tolkien or Jane Austen; occasionally scattered past or present highbrow fiction like Donna Tartt or Cormac McCarthy or Susanna Clarke. But still, not a lot of fiction reading overall, and the majority is page-turning lowbrow stuff, with occasional English-major nerdballs (hello) opting for the top-rack vintage.

4. A second addendum: It isn’t clear to me how to count or to contextualize kids who are home-schooled or taught in classical Christian academies. What percentage of the total student population are they? And what percentage of this small sub-population is being taught Homer and Virgil and Saint Augustine and Calvin and so on? Or, if we’re thinking of living authors, which if any of them are they reading? I simply have no idea what the answer is to any of these questions. Nor do I know what the difference is between such students being assigned these texts and their actual personal reading habits outside of class.

5. Back to the brief list of living authors above: Comer, Platt, Chan, Ortlund, Keller, et al. The question arises: Are young Christians who report these names in fact reading their books? Or are they “digesting” their message via sermons, podcasts, and video recordings available on the internet? The same goes for megachurch pastors with an online audience, like Jonathan Pokluda, who preaches outside of Waco; or Andy Stanley in Atlanta, or Matt Chandler in Dallas. There’s a lot of daylight between reading an author’s books and knowing the basic gist of a public figure.

6. To be even more granular: If a young Christian says that she has read Comer’s latest book, what is likeliest? That she used her eyes to scan a codex whose pages she turned with her hands? or that she read it on an e-reader/tablet? or that she listened to the audio version? After all, Comer—like other popular nonfiction authors today—reads his books himself for the audio edition. And since he’s a preacher for a living, it’s very effective, not to mention personalizing; which is part of the appeal for so many young people today.

7. In a word, is it true to say that even the readers among young believers today are often not “reading” in the classical manner many of us presuppose? So that, whether it’s a podcast or a TikTok or an IG Reel or a YouTube channel or a “book,” the manner of reception/intake/ingestion is more or less the same? So that “reading” names not an alternative mode of acquiring knowledge or engaging a source but simply a difference in type of source? In which case, it seems to me, young people formed in this way will not, would not, think of “books” as different in kind from other social media that make for their daily digital diet, but merely a difference in degree. Books being one point on a spectrum that includes pods, videos, and the like.

8. So much for technologies of knowledge production and consumption. Another question: What counts as a “serious” Christian author? That was part of my original question, recall. Not just intellectually serious young Christian readers, but serious Christian books by serious Christian authors. Not fluff. Not spiritual candy bars. Not the ghost-written memoirs of influencers. Not, in short, the “inspirational” shelf at Barnes & Noble. If one-half of the presenting question of the original post concerned a certain type of young Christian reader, the other half concerns a certain type of Christian author. Here’s what I have in mind, at least. The author doesn’t have to meet a credentials requirement; doesn’t have to have a doctorate. Nor does he have to write in an academic, jargon-laden, or impenetrable style. That would defeat the point. To be popular, you have to be readable. And “being popular” can’t be a defeater here, or else no one, however rich or good in substance, could ever sell books: they’d be disqualified by their own success.

As I’ve said, Lewis and Chesterton are the gold standard. Other names that come to mind from the twentieth century (beyond Bonhoeffer, Nouwen, Peterson, and Willard) include Karl Barth, Dorothy Sayers, Francis Schaeffer, Os Guinness, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Madeleine L’Engle, John Stott, J. I. Packer, Robert Farrar Capon, Frederick Buechner, Wendell Berry, Stanley Hauerwas, and Marilynne Robinson. That’s a very short list; it could be doubled or tripled quickly. As it stands, what do the names on it have in common?

Here’s how I’d put it. Each author’s writing draws from a rich, clear, and deep reservoir of knowledge and wisdom, a reservoir that funds their work but does not overwhelm it. Put differently, what a normie reader encounters is the tip of the iceberg. If that’s all she can handle, so be it. But to anyone in the know, it’s as clear as day that there’s a mountain of ice beneath the surface.

Furthermore, one of the consistent effects of reading any of these authors is not only sticking with them but moving beyond them into the vast tradition that so evidently informs their writing. This could be the Thomistic tradition, or the patristic, or the Homeric, or the Antiochene, or the Kantian, or the Reformed, or whatever—but what the author offers the reader is so beautiful that the reader wants more of whatever it is. And so she moves from Piper to Edwards to Calvin to Augustine in the course of weeks, months, and years. From there, who knows what will be next?

That is the kind of book, the sort of author, I have in mind. My original interlocutor was asking about such work in the present tense. Who fits the bill? And who are young people reading? I’m willing to say that Keller fits the bill. Comer does too, in my judgment, though that is a status he graduated into with his last two books. His earlier work was far too primitivist-evangelical, far too dismissive of tradition, to qualify. But to his credit, he has clearly read himself into the tradition and now invites his readers to do the same.

I can certainly name others, like Tish Harrison Warren, who are doing the work and who are selling books. But are they having a widespread discernible influence across a vast slice of 15-25-year olds today? It’s probably too early to tell.

9. Let me think about my own trajectory for a moment. Here are authors whose books I read cover-to-cover across three different age ranges:

• 15-18: Lewis, Chesterton, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, Tolkien

• 18-22: Lee Camp, Douglas John Hall, Richard Foster, Nouwen, John Howard Yoder, Hauerwas, Berry, Walter Brueggemann, N. T. Wright, Ben Witherington

• 22-25: William Cavanaugh, Terry Eagleton, Robert Bellah, Augustine, Charles Taylor, Barth, Robert Jenson, John Webster, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Walzer, Kathryn Tanner

These aren’t all the authors I was reading at these ages, but rather the kinds of names I was introduced to that made an impact on me—so much so that I remember, in most cases, the first book I read by each, and when and where I was, and what my first impression of them was.

I’m sure I’m leaving off some important names. But the list is representative. I was a precocious, brainy young Christian who loved talking about God and reading the Bible, and these were the authors that youth ministers, mentors, and professors put in my hands. Not a bad list! Pretty much all living authors, or from the previous century, so not a lot of historical or cultural diversity on offer. But substantive, provocative, stimulating, and accessible nonetheless. The kinds of authors who might change your life. The kind who might convert you, or de-convert you. Who might shadow you for years to come.

And so, once again, the question is: Is the 2023 version of me (a) reading at all and, if so, (b) which authors, living or dead, is he reading? which is he being poked and prodded by? which stimulated and provoked by? Inquiring minds want to know!

10. This exercise has made me take a second look at my own teaching. Which authors do I assign? If you are a student who enrolls in my class, who will you read? A rough summary off the top of my head:

• Dead: Barth, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Saint Athanasius, Saint Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Saint Augustine, Saint Oscar Romero, Pope St. John Paul II, Pope Paul VI, Henri Nouwen, James Cone, Gerhard Lohfink, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

• Alive: Tish Harrison Warren, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Joseph White, N. T. Wright, Beth Felker Jones, Martin Mosebach, Tara Isabella Burton, Ross Douthat, Andy Crouch, Andrew Davison, Andrew Wilson, Peter Leithart, Jemar Tisby, Victor Lee Austin, Michael Banner, James Mumford

Those are just authors of books I’ve assigned (and do assign). The list would be far larger if I included authors of chapters and articles and online essays. In any case, I’m pretty happy with this list, granting that I teach upper-level gen-ed elective courses to undergraduate students who have never taken theology before.

11. What lessons do I draw from all of the above? First, that people like me have a lot of power and influence and therefore enormous responsibility toward the young people who enter our classrooms. I cannot control whether my students fall in love with the books I assign them. But if I choose wisely, I make it far more likely that they might fall in love. That might in turn set off a chain reaction of reading and learning that lasts a lifetime.

12. Second lesson: Don’t assign “textbooks.” That is, don’t assign purely academic or fake authors. Don’t assign books dumbed down for teenagers. Avoid books that do not look like any sane person would ever cozy up with them in a comfy chair and read leisurely for a whole afternoon. Instead, assign books whose authors are known for befriending their readers. Assign authors who have fanatical followings. Assign authors who have the power to convert readers to their cause. Assign poets and rhetors and masters of the word. Assign stylish writing. Assign passionate writing, writing with stakes. Assign texts with teeth. Don’t be surprised when they bite students. That’s the point.

13. Third, the express aim of Christian liberal arts education and certainly of every humanities class within such institutions ought to be for students to learn to read, thence to learn to love to read, thence to learn to desire to be (that is, to become) a lifelong reader. Every assignment should be measured by whether it conduces to this end. If it does not, it should be scrapped.

14. It follows, fourth, that professors should shy away from assigning online content, whether that be links, videos, podcasts, or even texts on e-readers. That’s not quite an outright ban, but it is a strong nudge against the inclination. Give your students books: physical books they can hold in their hands. Reading a book is an activity different from scrolling a website, watching a video, or listening to a podcast. Young people already know how to do those things. They do not know how to sit still for ninety minutes without a screen in sight, in utter silence, and turn pages, lost in a book, for pure pleasure or simple edification. They have to be taught how to do that. And it takes time. What better time than college?

15. All this applies twice-over for seminaries. What is a pastor who cannot read? The principal job of a pastor, alongside administering the sacraments, is to teach and preach God’s word, which means to interpret the scriptures for God’s people. You cannot interpret without reading, which means you cannot teach and preach without being able to read. Are we raising a generation of illiterate ministers? Is the time already upon us? Are our seminaries aiding and abetting this process, or actively opposing and redirecting it?

16. If professors have some measure of influence, youth pastors (in person) and pastors with a public platform (online) have much greater influence. What we need, then, is for pastors to see it as part of their job description to find ways to encourage and induce literacy in the young people at their churches and, further, to suggest authors and books that are more than candy bars and happy meals, spiritually speaking. For this to happen—allow me to repeat myself—pastors must themselves be readers. They must be voracious bookworms who understand that their vocation necessarily and essentially entails wide and deep and sustained reading. Their churches (above all their elders and vestries and bishops) must understand this, too. If you walk into a pastor’s office and he is reading, he is doing his job. If you never see him reading, something’s amiss. The same is true, by the way, if you do see him reading, but he’s only ever reading a book written in the last five years.

17. Returning to the academy, what happens in the classroom is not all that happens on a college campus. Much, perhaps most, learning happens elsewhere. To be sure, it happens in library stacks and dorm rooms and coffee shops and Bible studies. But it also happens at Christian study centers. The importance of these cannot be overstated. Their presence on public and non-religious campuses is a refuge and a haven for young believers. They can’t be only that, however. They have to be the kind of place that fosters learning, reflection, discussion, and—yes—reading. Reading groups on the church fathers, or the magisterial reformers, or the Lutheran scholastics, or the ecumenical councils: these should be the bread and butter of Christian study centers. Hubs of vibrant intellectual life woven into and inseparable from the spiritual.

18. I’ll go one step further (borrowing the tongue-in-cheek suggestion from a friend): What we need is Christian study centers on Christian college campuses. Sad to say, far too many Christian universities today have bought into credentialing, gate-keeping, and careerism. They do not exist to further the Christian vision of the liberal arts. They exist to stay alive by selling students a product that will in turn secure them a job. None of these things is bad in themselves—enduring institutions, diplomas, gainful employment—but they are not the reason why Christian higher education exists. The presence of Christian study centers on Christian campuses would signal a commitment to the telos of such institutions by carving out space for the kinds of activity that students and professors are, lamentably, sometimes kept from devoting themselves to within the classroom itself. Perhaps this could be done explicitly on some campuses, whereas on others you would have to do it on the sly. Either way, it’s a worthy endeavor.

19. Let me close on two notes, one negative and one positive. The negative: As I have written about before, we have entered a time of double literacy loss in the church. Christians, especially the young, are at once biblically illiterate and literally illiterate. They do not read or know the Bible, and this is of a piece with their larger habits, for they do not read anything much at all. That is a fact. It would be foolish to deny it and naive to pretend it will change in some seismic shift in the span of a few years.

The period in which we find ourselves, then, is a sort of return to premodern times: Granting a kind of minimal mass literacy, in terms of widespread active reading habits, there is now (or will soon be) a very small minority of readers—and everyone else. What will this mean for the church? For daily spirituality and personal devotion? For catechesis, Sunday school, and preaching? For lay and voluntary leaders in the church? For ordained ministers themselves? We shall see.

20. I am biased, obviously, in favor of literacy and habits of reading. I want my students to be readers. I want pastors to be readers. I want more, not less, reading; and better, not worse, reading. But not everyone is meant to be a reader. Not everyone should major in English. Not everyone’s evenings are best spent with Proust in the French and a glass of wine. God forgive me for implying so, if I have.

Here’s the upshot. If young people (and, as they age, all people) are going to learn about the Christian faith through means other than reading, and for the time being those means will largely be mediated by the internet, then what we need is (a) high-quality content (b) accessible to normies (c) funded by a reservoir of knowledge rooted in the great tradition, together with (d) ease of access and widespread knowledge of how to get it. We need, in other words, networks of writers, pastors, teachers, scholars, speakers, podcasters, and others who have resources, audiences, support, technology, and platforms by which and through which to communicate the gospel, build up God’s people, and educate the faithful in ways the latter can access and understand, with content we would call “meat,” not “milk.”

I know one such endeavor. There are others. I don’t want to give up on literacy. I never will. But we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Time and past time to get moving on these projects. I’m entirely in favor of them, so long as we do not see them as a substitute but instead as a supplement to the habits of reading they thereby encourage rather than block. What we need, though, is the right people, adequately resourced, finding the young, hungry and seeking Christ and open to learning as they are. If this is the way to reach them, and it can be done well, count me in.

Who are young Christians reading today?

The question above was posed to me recently. What the speaker meant was: What living authors are brainy/serious/mature 15-25-year olds reading today?

I’m not sure I have an answer.

My first answer: They aren’t reading. At least, most Christians in this age range aren’t reading anything at all, much less thoughtful theology or rich spiritual writing.

My second answer: They aren’t reading, because if they are “consuming content” along these lines, it’s via YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Spotify. They’re listening, watching, and scrolling, no doubt. The question then becomes: To whom? To what? Is any of it good? Or is it all drivel? But that’s a question for another day.

My third answer: A few of them—the ones actually reading real books, good books, cover to cover—are just reading the old classics many of us were fed at the same age: Lewis, Chesterton, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, Barth. Maybe Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas or Saint Athanasius or Julian of Norwich. Maybe, at the outer limits, Simone Weil or Saint John Henry Newman or Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Maybe Ratzinger! Or John Stott or J. I. Packer. Not sure, to be honest. But those of my students who do walk in the door having read something have usually read Lewis or one of the other usual suspects.

Having said all this, the original question remains unanswered. Are there living authors that have genuine influence on this crowd, minute and dwindling as the crowd may be?

The only name that came to mind as a surefire answer was John Mark Comer. Beyond him, I’m simply not sure. It seems to me there is not a John Piper of this generation (granting that Piper is still with us, and still exerting some measure of influence)—someone who is read widely, loved and hated, discussed constantly, an ever-present “voice” mediating a determine set of doctrines or ideas or practices or what have you.

Maybe Tim Keller. But the pastors and laity I know who read Keller are all my age or (typically) older. I don’t know if his name makes waves among the youth; maybe, but I doubt it.

So who else? Note that I’m not asking about which “names” make waves—there are plenty of popular influencers and pastors and speakers and YouTubers and podcasters. I’m talking about authors whose books are read by 15-25-year old American Christians with a head on their shoulders, who are serious about their faith in an intellectually curious way.

Other names: Tish Harrison Warren? Esau McCaulley? Dane Ortlund? Robert Barron? Jemar Tisby? Nadia Bolz-Weber? Carl Trueman? Peter Leithart?

I don’t know, y’all. I should add, I suppose, that I don’t mean which books have sold the most from the “Christian inspirational” genre. I’m talking about heady, demanding, theologically rigorous works addressed to a popular audience but not silly, superficial, or dumbed down.

I’m open to the answer being that what I have in mind—namely, books written by bona fide authors possessed of expertise, style, and substance—is not how Christian high schoolers and college students today are being reached or even growing in their faith. Though I will admit to my skepticism that it is possible for us to raise a generation of intellectually, spiritually, and theologically mature Christians who do not, at some point, deepen their faith and understanding in this way.

Time will tell, I suppose. But I do invite additional suggestions. I teach college students, after all, but the sample size is small; I only have one classroom for anecdotal observation, and the students who walk in don’t represent everyone. What are others seeing?

Defining “culture”

I’ve been grateful for the responses I’ve seen to my Mere O essay “Once More, Church and Culture.” Andrew Wilson was particularly kind in a post about the piece.

I’ve especially appreciated folks understanding what I was (and was not) trying to do in it. Not to suggest Hunter’s typology is bad or discreditable. Certainly not to suggest an alternative singular image or approach. Rather, to suggest that the very search for one dominant or defining posture is a fool’s errand, not to mention historically and culturally parochial. I was worried the length and wending nature of the essay would mislead readers. I was wrong!

Alan Jacobs also liked the essay, but was left with one big question: What is “culture,” and why did I—why does anyone, in writing on the topic—leave it undefined? More to the point, “there is no form of Christian belief or practice that is not cultural through-and-through.” In which case it sounds rather odd to pit the church against something the church herself includes and which, in turn, includes the church.

Alan’s criticism is a legitimate one, and I don’t have any full-bodied defense of my unspecified use of the term. I do have a few quick thoughts about what I had in mind and why folks use the word generically in essays like this one.

First, “culture” is one of those words (as Alan agrees) that is nigh impossible to pin down. You know it when you see it. You discover the sense of what a person is referring to through their use. The term itself could call forth an entire lifetime’s worth of study (and has done so). In that case, it’s reasonable simply to get on with the discussion and trust we’ll figure out what we’re saying in the process.

And yet—this intuition may well be wrong, and its wrongness may be evidenced in the very interminability of the post-Niebuhrian conversation. Granted! I’m honestly having trouble, however, imagining everyone offering a hyper-specific definition of “culture” or avoiding the term altogether.

In any case, second, it may be true that Niebuhr made various errors in his lectures that became Christ and Culture, but I’m surprised that Alan thinks—if his tongue is not too far in cheek—that the book should be dismissed. My surprise notwithstanding, I engage Niebuhr in the essay not to defend him but to take up the ideas he put into circulation through his typology; or rather, to display the pattern in his approach, which became the template for so many who followed him.

Third, I would like to point out how I actually use the word “culture” in the essay. I do in fact mention it in the opening sentence, along with similar items in a grab-bag list meant to suggest a kind of comprehensive civic repertoire: “Christendom is the name we give to Christian civilization, when society, culture, law, art, family, politics, and worship are saturated by the church’s influence and informed by its authority.” After that, I use the term exclusively in four ways: in scare quotes, in actual quotations, in paraphrase of an author’s thought, or in generic reference to “church and culture” writing—until the final few paragraphs. Here they are:

• “…Niebuhr, Hunter, and Jenson are right to see a dialectic at work in the church’s encounter with various cultures.”

• “As I see it, there is no one ‘correct’ type, posture, or model. Instead, the church has four primary modes of faithful engagement with culture.”

• “God is the universal Creator; the world he created is good; and he alone is Lord of all peoples and thus of all cultures.”

• “When and where the time is right, when and where the Spirit moves, the proclamation of the gospel cuts a culture to the bone, and the culture is never the same.”

• “…[my approach] does not prioritize work as the primary sphere in which the church encounters a culture or makes its presence known.”

• “The mission of the church is one and the same wherever the church finds itself; the same goes for its engagement with culture.”

• “Sometimes … the Spirit beckons believers, like the Macedonian man in the vision of St. Paul, to cross over, to enter in, to settle down, to build houses and plant vineyards. In other words, to inhabit a culture from the inside. Sometimes, however, the Spirit issues a different call…”

In my humble opinion, these uses of the term are clear. Either they are callbacks to the genre of “church and culture”/“engage the culture”/“church–culture encounter” writing, which I am in turn riffing on or deploying for rhetorical purposes (without any need for a determinate sense of the word). Or they are referring to a society or civilization in all its discrete particularity, as distinct from some other society or civilization.

Had Alan been the last editorial eye to read my essay before I handed it in, I would have cut “culture” from the first sentence and replaced most or all of these final mentions with “society” or “civilization.” I don’t think I would have defined “culture” from the outset, though I might have included a line about the term being at once inevitably underdetermined and unavoidable in writing on the topic, that is, on the church’s presence within and mission to the nations.

At the very least, I’ll be mindful of future uses of the term. It’s a slippery one, “culture” is, and I’m grateful to Alan for reminding me of the fact.

I’m in Mere O on church and culture

I’ve got an essay in the latest issue of the print edition of Mere Orthodoxy, and Jake has just posted it online this morning. It’s titled “Once More, Church and Culture.” Here’s the opening paragraph:

Christendom is the name we give to Christian civilization, when society, culture, law, art, family, politics, and worship are saturated by the church’s influence and informed by its authority. Christendom traces its beginnings to the fourth century after Christ; it began to ebb, in fits and starts, sometime during the transition from the late middle ages to the early modern period. It is tempting to plot its demise with the American and French revolutions, though in truth it outlasted both in many places. It came to a more or less definitive end with the world wars (in Europe) and the Cold War (in America). Even those who lament Christendom’s passing and hope for its reestablishment have no doubt that the West is post-Christian in this sense. The West will always carry within it its Christian past — whether as a living wellspring, a lingering shadow, a haunting ghost, or an exorcised demon — but it is indisputable that whatever the West has become, it is not what it once was. Christendom is no more.

Re-reading what I’ve written there (drafted last summer, I think), I’m inclined to say the opening seven paragraphs make for some of my better writing. It’s a potted history of Christendom before and in America, and how it continues to haunt Protestant reflection about “church and culture.” Part two of the essay takes up H. Richard Niebuhr’s typology and James Davison Hunter’s “faithful presence.” Part three takes a stab at an alternative framework—but not one more single-label option that captures all contexts and circumstances. Read on to see more.

And once you’ve read it, go subscribe to the Mere O print magazine. It’s great!

Two further thoughts. First, some version of this essay has been rattling around in the back of my mind since January 2017, when I first taught a week-long intensive course called “Christianity and Culture.” I’ve taught it now every single January since. That’s seven total! Didn’t even miss for Covid. The texts have varied, but I’ve consistently had students read Hauerwas, Jenson, JDH (excerpts), JKAS (You Are What You Love), THW (Liturgy of the Ordinary), TIB (Strange Rites), Douthat (Bad Religion), Dreher (the old pre-book FAQ), Wilkinson/Joustra, Tisby, Cone, and Crouch. It always goes so well. And every Friday of the course, I conclude with, basically, what I’ve written in this essay: a set of typologies; a critique of them; and my own proposal. I’m grateful to Jake for letting me finally put it down in black and white.

Second, this essay has brought home to me how much this topic has dominated my thoughts, and therefore my writing, since I finished my dissertation six years ago. Specifically, the topic of the church in relation to society, which brings in its wake questions about Christendom, America, liberalism, and integralism, not to mention missiology, culture, technology, liturgy, and even anti-Judaism. Everything, in other words! For those who may be interested, here is an incomplete list of publications that bear on these matters and thus supplement this particular essay:

• Theologians Were Arguing About the Benedict Options 35 Years Ago” Mere Orthodoxy | 13 March 2017

• Public Theology in Retreat Los Angeles Review of Books | 20 September 2017

• Holy Ambivalence Los Angeles Review of Books | 1 March 2018

• The Church and the Common Good Comment | 17 January 2019

• The Specter of Marcion Commonweal | 13 February 2019

• A Better Country Plough | 4 August 2019

• Sacraments, Technology, and Streaming Worship in a Pandemic Mere Orthodoxy | 2 April 2020

• The Circumcision of Abraham’s God First Things | 1 January 2021

• When Losing Is Likely The Point | 18 June 2021

• Market Apocalypse Mere Orthodoxy | 25 August 2021

• Statistics as Storytelling The New Atlantis | 1 October 2021

• Still Supersessionist? Commonweal | 29 October 2021

• Jewish Jesus, Black Christ The Christian Century | 25 January 2022

• Unlearning Machines Comment | 24 March 2022

• Can We Be Human in Meatspace? The New Atlantis | 2 May 2022

• Another Option for Christian Politics, Front Porch Republic | 4 July 2022

• The Ruins of Christendom, Los Angeles Review of Books | 10 July 2022

• The Church in the Immanent Frame First Things | 14 July 2022

• The Bible in America (forthcoming in The Christian Century)

Mapping academic theology

Academic theology is a tangled web of influences and institutions. Happily, John Shelton has done us all a favor by untangling some of the thornier knots in a convenient and accessible way.

How? By creating a single image that traces lines of influence, whether direct (via graduate teaching or serving as a doctoral advisor) or indirect (via published work or working as colleagues in the same school), between and among some of the most prominent scholars of Christian theology and ethics since the 1960s. These scholars, to be clear, do not form an exhaustive list; they are Anglo-American mainline Protestants, for the most part, inhabiting (by training or employment) elite Anglo-American mainline Protestant institutions. Theologians, whether systematic or moral, from outside the Anglophone world, not to mention Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and evangelicals, are almost entirely unrepresented; as are historical and patristic and medieval and pastoral and practical and all other theological disciplines.

Nevertheless, given the institutional prestige and influence of American mainline institutions, programs, and professors, the result is both impressive and illuminating. Behold:

(You can view/download the image here.)

Some initial reactions and reflections:

• Lotta dudes! To be expected, but still.

• If I said this image tracks Anglo-American mainline Protestants, what I meant was: this is a web of Ivy League WASP Theologians. Which, again, is to be expected: they’re the ones with postwar clout and influence. But it’s one thing to know that, another to see it laid out this way. So few institutions producing so many students, who then become major scholars in their own right, double back, get hired by the same institution that trained them (or a sister school), and start advising students themselves. So the wheel keeps spinning.

• Based on this image, it was the later boomers who began to break the all-male rule in academic theology: Tanner, Jones, Kilby, Sonderegger, Coakley, Herdt.

• Cone and Carter and Katongole are here. I imagine Willie James Jennings, like Paul Griffiths, is not here because he’d be a circle unto himself, rather than participating in these lines of descent. But to complete the web (which I could, I guess, but my facility with this sort of software is less advanced than a child’s) I’d probably want to add a womanist segment that touches Cone and King and Tillich and Carter but also branches off on its own: Williams, Cannon, Townes, Floyd-Thomas, and Marshall Turman.

• Not everyone on this list would fit the bill of “orthodox,” but there’s a general family resemblance that makes sense of most of the names. The same goes for the style of theology being practiced: either moral or systematic. I suspect that’s why, on one hand, someone like Catherine Keller isn’t found here; and, on the other, why we don’t see prominent Christian philosophers and analytic thinkers like Nicholas Wolterstorff, William Abraham, John Hare, Richard Swinburne, Eleonore Stump, Robert Adams, and Marilyn McCord Adams. Not to mention MacIntyre! Though he probably belongs on here in terms of influence, a la Wittgenstein and Troeltsch and the Niebuhrs.

• Both Reno and Marshall converted to Catholicism after they earned their doctorates, unless I’m mistaken. Kilby has always been Catholic, I believe. Same for Cavanaugh. And Lash and Katongole. Am I missing any others? Hart is the only Orthodox theologian I spy.

• There needs to be an “influenced” line running from Troeltsch to Coakley.

• If the Boomers continue to sit on the academic throne, their most prominent successors, peers, and competitors are all Gen X. Which makes sense, given the trajectory of a scholar’s career: PhD in one’s 30s, emergence in one’s 40s, major contribution in one’s 50s. It seems that, as each generation comes out of doctoral programs, it takes about two decades for the field to sort itself. The upshot, from my vantage point, is that my own generation won’t know which of our peers will rise to the top for another 15 years or so.

• But that’s putting the cart before the horse. The real lesson I draw from this image, granting all its omissions and incompleteness, is how diffuse and disunified the “field” of Christian theology and ethics is today by comparison to the previous three generations. As Chuck Mathewes wrote a few years ago, in a review essay of Oliver O’Donovan’s career-capping trilogy in Christian ethics, the latter works should have been a “big event”—and yet they seemed to pass by without significant comment from (again) “the field.” Mathewes observes that this would not have happened in the 1970s and ’80s, when a few figures dominated the field and their publications and reviews invariably made a splash. What we have now is many fields, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not even touching, each and all of which make some claim to Christian theology and/or Christian ethics and/or philosophy of religion and/or religious epistemology and/or comparative religion and/or critical theory and/or etc., etc. That’s just the way it is today, for better or worse.

• Another thought: This is not a list of “the best” theological writers/thinkers over the last half century. One of my favorites, for example—Nicholas Healy—isn’t represented. I could always add him (he studied under Kathryn Tanner, I believe), just as many others could be added. But this web is using something of a “name-brand recognition” test. Quality and renown are not unrelated, but neither are they identical.

• I haven’t even mentioned that this set of interlocking genealogies doesn’t include (which it couldn’t) biblical scholars. Where would Brevard Childs or Stephen Fowl or Richard Hays or Ellen Davis fit, much less von Rad and other peers of and successors to Barth? Contrary to popular belief, historical critics read theologians and vice versa. The lines of influence just keep expanding…

• I’ve buried another lede. The unsurprising spider at the top of this web is Barth. The more surprising is Niebuhr—H. Richard, not Reinhold. Reinhold’s influence on twentieth century thought, including academic theology and ethics, was great and lasting. But H. Richard always had more theological influence (or so I think), and this map captures that nicely. Niebuhr the younger was an institutionalist, and there is a sense in which his legacy stretches longer and wider than his brother’s.

• I had forgotten just how prominent Gustafson was, both as a writer and as a Doktorvater, but wow, his students make for some impressive names in Christian ethics. I’m glad to see Ramsey, too, alongside Outka, who likewise had a hand in training a number of major figures. There’s a whole Princeton–Virginia thing going on here that should be mentioned alongside Yale–Chicago and Notre Dame–Duke.

• Hauerwas’s imprint on theology and ethics is probably not quite as evident from this genealogy as it should be … but then again, perhaps the proportion is good as is. From the early ’80s through the Iraq War, Hauerwas was hands down the Christian theologian, ethicist, and public intellectual on the American scene. His students flooded the job market. His books (and his students’) were everywhere, as were his big ideas—including downstream from the academy, in popular press and sermons and the like. Yet that omnipresence has subsided somewhat, certainly among scholars. Hauerwas is no longer the only game in town (not that he ever was; I’m talking felt impressions). Ethicists like Herdt and Bowlin and McKenny and Bretherton and Gregory and Mathewes and Tran (the last, Hauerwas’s student) all learned a thing or two from Hauerwas, but their project is not his. If Stout was worried twenty years ago about the American theological academy retreating into a Hauerwasian sectarian hideout, he can rest assured it hasn’t happened. In truth it was never going to happen. The worry was always overstated, even if it was responding to a real phenomenon.

• If I were a whiz with Adobe I would want to color code this map and create more complicated lines of relation. For example, Tanner and Volf have now been colleagues at Yale for more than a decade, and many students have had and continue to have both of them on their dissertation committee (I speak from experience!). Or think of McFarland and Jackson at Emory, or Stout and Gregory at Princeton, or Jones and Mathewes at UVA, so on and so forth. Sometimes an advisor is a hegemon; sometimes a committee is a genuine group effort. It would be useful, therefore, to be able to track who was colleagues with whom, and when, and for how long, and which students they co-advised or co-taught.

• I thought of another A+ theologian not on this list, akin to Healy: Paul DeHart, who studied under Tanner at Chicago and has taught at Vanderbilt for years.

• I don’t see anyone born in the 1980s (or later). Are Tran and Tonstad the lone “young guns” on this list? I imagine I’m overlooking or forgetting someone.

• Just as this image is not per se about quality, it also doesn’t give an accurate perception of a given theologian’s influence or readership simply through his or her writing. I’m thinking of Jenson, Webster, Volf, and Vanhoozer. A stranger to the guild would suppose them on the margins, either in terms of their training or in terms of their reception, when the truth is the opposite. The same goes for names I’ve already mentioned, like Willie Jennings, Paul Griffiths, and Delores Williams.

• Ah, I see that Bruce McCormack is not on here. He obviously fits, given Barth, Jüngel, Jenson, Hunsinger, Hector, et al.

• In one of his books criticizing the Jesus Seminar, Luke Timothy Johnson adds up the total number of doctoral programs represented by participants in the Seminar in order to show the lack of professional, disciplinary, and ideological diversity represented. Academic theology is no different. In one sense that’s perfectly fine: great programs house great teachers who train great students. But it’s important to remember just how small and incestuous this world is. And thus it’s good to get outside of it once in a while. And to listen to voices who never belonged to it. The autodidacts and polymaths and fundies have a thing or two to teach elites, easy though it is to forget that.

• I said the world portrayed on this map has fractured and split and multiplied. Is it also dying? The reputational prestige of liberal mainline theology and its institutions was always a corollary of the numerical quantity, sociopolitical influence, and sheer existence of liberal mainline churches. But as those have died off or entered hospice care, what of their institutions, their seminaries, their endowed chairs, their theological scholars? We’re living in the midst of a shift. The money is still there. Does the funding have a constituency? Do these institutions create a new constituency out of whole cloth? Or is their waning, absorption, and disappearance a fait accompli? I think we’re about to see. Two or three generations from now we’ll know the answers to those questions.

• I’m going to need someone to make similar versions of this web for Catholic theologians (centered on Notre Dame?) as well as adjacent fields like patristics and biblical studies and analytic philosophy. I lack the knowledge and time. But it would be fascinating to see them, not to mention to see if someone could somehow combine them with one another and with this image. Perhaps an interactive 3-D model housed online? Get on it, youngsters!

• I had one last thing to add—a bright clear thought in my mind, something significant—but it vanished when I came to a new bullet point. I’ll update this post if I remember. For now I welcome any and all thoughts, additions, corrections, and other feedback. Send it my way or Shelton’s. He’s the instigator and author here. I’m just using his work to think out loud. Kudos to him for some stimulating off-hours labor, just for fun.

Updates:

• Vincent Lloyd. Another name that should be added. Turns out there’s a whole Union thing going on, too…

• I remembered the comment that slipped my mind. In my imaginary color-coded update, figures would be denominated not only by their institutions, colleagues, teachers, and students, but by the nature of their contributions. In other words, everyone on this map has made some sort of scholarly contribution. Not everyone, though, has ventured into the world of magazines, essays, podcasts, and public speaking. Not everyone, that is, writes for a popular audience or attempts the “public intellectual” thing. But some of them do. Some of them, perhaps, do as much of that as they do the academic thing; occasionally some do more of the one than of the other. It’s a delicate balancing act, after all. You could even mark the careers of some as a kind of “before” and “after.” Think of Tony Judt, as an example outside the guild. He became a public intellectual after his major contributions added up to something so impressive the editors and readers of (e.g.) the NYRB and NYT had to sit up and pay attention. He began to write for them, and all of a sudden his scholarship had a “public.” I’m wondering the same thing about some of the folks on this micro-genealogy.

To Osten Ard

I first journeyed to Osten Ard in the summer of 2019. Osten Ard is the fictional world of Tad Williams’ fantasy trilogy Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. It came out about thirty years ago and comprises three books: The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Stone of Farewell (1990), and To Green Angel Tower (1993). The last book, if I’m not mistaken, is one of the largest novels ever to top the New York Times bestseller list. At more than half a million words, it is so big they had to split it in two volumes for the paperback edition.

I enjoy fantasy, but I’m no purist. I’ve not read every big name, every big series. Nevertheless, not only is MST my favorite fantasy series. It’s the most purely pleasurable and satisfying reading experience I’ve ever had.

I remember wanting, at the time, to write up why I loved it so much. I had a whole post scribbled out in my head. Alas, I never got around to it. But I’ve finally decided to revisit Osten Ard, so I’m taking the chance now.

The reason? A full three decades after the publication of The Dragonbone Chair, Williams decided to write a sequel trilogy. That trilogy has expanded into a tetralogy, accompanied by three different smaller novels: one that bridges the two series (The Heart of What Was Lost [2017]), plus two distinct prequels set thousands of years in the past (Brothers of the Wind [2021] and The Splintered Sun [2024]). As for the tetralogy, it’s titled The Last King of Osten Ard, and includes The Witchwood Crown (2017), Empire of Grass (2019), Into the Narrowdark (2022), and The Navigator’s Children (2023). That last novel is finished and due to be released this November.

Since first reading MST in 2019 I’d been waiting for a definitive publication date for the final book of the sequel series before plunging in. Now that it’s here, I’m ready to go. But in order to prepare, I’m rereading the original trilogy via audio. It’s even better the second time round. Narrator Andrew Wincott is pitch perfect. The total number of hours across all three books is about 125—but already the time spent listening has been a delight. And then, once I’m done, I’ll open the bridge novel and the final four books that bring the whole 10-book saga to a close.

I’ve buried the lede, though. What makes these books so wonderful?

In a word: Everything.

Plot, prose, character, world-building—it’s all magnificent and then some.

1. Plot reigns in fantasy. Without a good plot, there’s no story worth telling. And what a story MST tells. It’s a slow burn in the first book. The first quarter sets a lot of tables before any food is served. I’ve had multiple friends begin the book and not make it past the halfway point for this reason. I get it. But I don’t mind the pace. All the pieces on the board have to be in the right place before the action begins. Besides, Williams’ leisurely pace is a welcome break from needing to Begin The Adventure! on page one.

Williams plots out everything in advance, and it shows. He also clearly loves four-part stories over three-parters. Every other series he’s written besides MST has entailed four books—and the third book in this trilogy is the size of the first two books put together! In any case, Williams always knows where he’s going, and he’s going to earn every step of the way. He never cheats. Never. That’s what makes To Green Angel Tower so extraordinary. Every single thread finds its way woven into the tapestry, always at just the right moment, when you least expected it. By novel’s end, the final achievement is a marvel to behold.

And even granting the slow burn of the first novel, by two-thirds of the way through, it’s off to the races, and you never look back or slow down.

2. The prose is delightful. Not showy, but not inert either. Williams has style. Above all, it’s not a failed attempt at Tolkienese. It’s “modern,” if by that one means tonally consistent, character-specific, emotionally and psychologically rich, morally complex, and written for adults. But not “adult.” Williams comes before George R. R. Martin—many of whose themes and even plot devices are lifted right off the page of MST—and beats him to the post-Tolkien punch, without any of the lurid, gratuitous nonsense. There’s neither sadism nor titillation on display here. Neither is it for kids, however. My 9-year old is reading Lord of the Rings at the moment. He won’t be ready for Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn until he’s in high school.

All that to say: For my money, granting that the genre is not known for its master stylists, Tad Williams writes the best prose in all contemporary fantasy. You’re always in good hands when you’re reading him.

3. The characters! Oh, the characters. Just wait till you meet them, till you’ve met them. Binabik, Isgrimnur, Morgenes, Jiriki, Tiamak, Josua, Miriamele, Pryrates … and so many more. One of the delights of rereading (=listening to) the trilogy is spending time with these old friends (and not a few enemies) once more.

And again, thankfully, we don’t have a Fellowship redux. There is a wizard-like character, but he plays a minor role and is nothing like Gandalf. There is more than one “good king,” in this or that kind of exile, but not only are our expectations of their “return” turned upside down; they aren’t cast in the mold of Aragorn (or David or Arthur or Richard the Lionheart or whomever). Likewise there are elf-like creatures, but they aren’t patterned on Legolas or Galadriel or the other elves of Middle-Earth. So on and so forth.

Two further comments on this point.

First, speaking of LOTR, here’s one way to understand what Williams is up to in the series. Tolkien famously ends his story with Aragorn’s accession to the throne and his long future reign and happy marriage. Williams begins his story where Aragorn’s ends: after 80 years of a happy, just, and celebrated royal reign. I.e., with the death of a universally beloved “good king.” In a sense, his story poses the question: Okay, suppose an Aragorn really did rule with peace and justice for as long as he lived. What happened next?

And then he asks: And what if this Aragorn had demons in his past, skeletons in his closet, bodies buried where no one thought to look? What if he had secrets? And what if those secrets, once brought to light, had costs?

To be clear, Williams is neither a cynic nor (like GRRM on his lesser days) a nihilist. But he wants to tell a full-bodied story about three-dimensional characters. No one’s a cardboard cutout; nobody’s perfect. That’s his way of honoring Tolkien without aping him.

Second, the protagonist of MST is a boy named Simon (Seoman) who, for much of the story, has a lot of growing up to do. He’s an orphan scullion in his mid-teens, as the story begins, and the truth is he’s petty, immature, self-regarding, self-pitying, and annoying. A real whiner, to be honest. And some folks I’ve known who gave Dragonbone Chair a chance finally put it down because they simply didn’t like Simon.

I get it. He’s not likable. He’s Luke from A New Hope, only if Luke was the same restless spoiled brat for multiple movies, not just the opening hour. Who wants to watch that?

Stick with it, is all I have to say. Williams doesn’t cheat here either. His depiction of Simon is honest and unflinching. Who wouldn’t be self-pitying and immature growing up in the kitchens of a castle without mother or father, aching for glory but ignorant of the world? Williams won’t let him grow up too fast, either. It takes time. But the growth is real, if incremental. And by the time he fully and finally grows into himself, you realize the journey was worth it. You learn to love the ragamuffin.

4. What fantasy is worth its salt without world-building? Middle-earth, Narnia, Westeros, Hogwarts, Earthsea, the Six Duchies … it either works or it doesn’t. When it works, it’s not only real, not only lived in, not only mapped and named and historied in painstaking detail. It’s appealing. It’s beautiful. It draws you in. It’s a world that, however dangerous, you want to live in too, or at least visit from time to time.

Osten Ard fits the bill in spades. It’s got all the trappings of the alt-medieval world universally conjured by the fantasy genre—fit with pagans and a church hierarchy, castles and knights, fiery dragons and friendly trolls, magical forests and mysterious prophecies—but somehow without staleness or stereotype. The world is alive. You can breathe the air. You can, once you master the map, move around in it, trace your steps or others’. It’s a world that makes sense. There’s not a stone out of place.

It’s a world with real darkness in it, too. Not the threat of it. The genuine article. Pain and suffering, remorse and lament, even sin find their way into the characters’ lives. As he wrote To Green Angel Tower, Williams was going through some real-life heartache, and you can feel it in every word on the page. But it’s not for its own sake. It serves the story, and it’s headed somewhere. If I said above that I’ve never been more satisfied by a reading experience, then I’ll gloss that here by saying that I’ve never had the level of catharsis that Williams provides the reader—finally—in the final two hundred pages of this trilogy.

And yet, apparently, that isn’t the end of the story! Williams is a master of endings, and I can call to mind immediately the closing scene, even the final sentence, of each of the three books. The first is haunting and sad; the second is mournful though tinged with hope; the third is full of joy, so much so it makes me smile just thinking about it.

But there are four more books to go! Another million (or more) words to read! A good friend whom I introduced to the original trilogy says the new series is even better than the first. Hard to believe, but I do. Between now and November—or should I say Novander?—I’m making my return to Osten Ard. Like Simon Pilgrim, I’m starting at the end, or perhaps in the middle. Usires Aedon willing, I’ll see you on the other side.

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.