Quitting the Big Five

In a course I teach on digital tech and Christian practice, I walk through an exercise with students. I ask them to name the Big Five (or more) Silicon Valley companies that so powerfully define and delimit our digital lives. They can also name additional apps and platforms that take up time and space in their daily habits. I then ask them:

Supposing you continued to use digital technology—supposing, that is, you did not move onto a tech-free country ranch, unplugged from the internet and every kind of screen—how many of these Big Tech companies could you extract yourself from without serious loss? Put from another angle, what is the fewest possible such companies you need to live your life?

In my own life, I try to implement a modest version of this. I like to daydream, however, about a more radical version. Let me start with the former then turn to the latter.

In my own life, here’s my current entanglement with the Big Tech firms:

Meta: None whatsoever (I don’t have a Facebook or Instagram account), with the exception of WhatsApp, which is useful for international and other types of communication. Recently, though, I’ve been nudging those I talk to on WhatsApp to move to another app, so I could quit Zuckerberg altogether.

Microsoft: I use Word (a lot) and PowerPoint (some) and Excel (a bit). Though I’m used to all three, I could live without them—though I’d have two decades’ worth of Word files I’d need to archive and/or convert.

Google: I’ve had the same Gmail account for fifteen years, so it would be a real loss to give it up. I don’t use GoogleMaps or any other of Google’s smartphone apps. I use GoogleDocs (etc.) a bit, mostly when others want to collaborate; I avoid it, though, and would not miss it.

Amazon: I’m an Amazon originalist: I use it for books. We pay for Prime. We also use it to buy needs and gifts for our kids and others. For years I threw my body in front of purchasing an Alexa until my household outvoted me just this summer. Alas.

Apple: Here’s where they get me. I have an iPhone and a MacBook, and I finally gave in and started backing up with a paid account on iCloud. I use iPhoto and Messages and FaceTime and the rest. I’m sure my household will acquire an iPad at some point. In a word, I’m Apple-integrated.

Others: I don’t have TikTok or any other social media accounts. My household has a family Spotify account. I personally use Instapaper, Freedom, and Marco Polo. I got Venmo this summer, but I lived without it for a decade, and could delete it tomorrow. I use Dropbox as well as another online storage business. We have various streaming platforms, but they’ve been dwindling of late; we could live with one or two.

Caveat: I’m aware that digital entanglement takes more than one form, i.e., whether or not I have an Amazon or Gmail or Microsoft (or IBM!) “account,” I’m invariably interacting with, using, and possibly paying for their servers and services in a variety of ways without my even knowing it. Again, that sort of entanglement is unavoidable absent the (Butlerian/Benedictine) move to the wireless ranch compound. But I wanted to acknowledge my awareness of this predicament at least.

Okay. So what would it look like to minimize my formal Big Five “footprint”?

So far as I can see it, the answer is simple: Commit exclusively to one company for as many services as possible.

Now, this may be seriously unwise. Like a portfolio, one’s digital assets and services may be safest and best utilized when highly diversified. Moreover, it’s almost literally putting one’s eggs in a single basket: what if that basket breaks? What if the one company you trust goes bust, or has its security compromised, or finds itself more loyal to another country’s interests than one’s own, so on and so forth?

All granted. This may be a foolish endeavor. That’s why I’m thinking out loud.

But supposing it’s not foolish, it seems to me that the simplest thing to do, in my case, would be to double down on Apple. Apple does hardware and software. They do online storage. They do TV and movies. They do music and podcasts. They’re interoperable. They have Maps and email and word processors and slideshows and the rest—or, if I preferred, I could always use third-party software for such needs (for example, I already use Firefox, not Safari or Chrome).

So what would it take, in my situation, to reduce my Big Tech footprint from five toes to three or two or even just one?

First, delete WhatsApp. Farewell, Meta!

Second, switch to Keynote and TextEdit (or Pages or Scrivener) and some unknown spreadsheet alternative, or whatever other programs folks prefer. Adios, Microsoft!

Third, download my Gmail archive and create a new, private, encrypted account with a trusted service. Turn to DuckDuckGo with questions. Turn to Apple for directions. Avoid YouTube like the plague. Adieu, Google!

Fourth, cancel Prime, ditch the Alexa, use local outlets for shopping, and order books from Bookshop.org or IndieBound.org or directly from publishers and authors. Get thee behind me, Bezos!

Fifth and finally, pray to the ghost of Steve Jobs for mercy and beneficence as I enter his kingdom, a humble and obedient subject—bound for life…

Whether or not it would be wise, could I seriously do this? I’m sort of amazed at how not implausible it sounds. The hardest thing would be leaving Microsoft Word behind, just because I’ve never used anything else, and I write a lot. The second hardest would be losing the speed, cheapness, and convenience of Amazon Prime for ordering books—but then, that’s the decision that would be best for my soul, and for authors, and for the publishing industry in general. As for life without Gmail, that would be good all around, which is why it’s the step I’m most likely to follow in the next few years.

In any case, it’s a useful exercise. “We” may “need” these corporations, at least if we want to keep living digital lives. But we don’t need all of them. We may even not need more than one.

Marvel on a budget

Why do Marvel’s productions look so bad? Why does Secret Invasion look like it was shot by numbers in about three weeks on an Atlanta backlot the size of a basketball court? Why are scenes so often in cars or indoors? Why are so many actors unknowns or newbies? Why does everyone seem sedated except Olivia Colman?

Likewise, why was Ant-Man 3 so aggressively ugly? Why were the graphics so poor? Is the studio on a budget? Is Disney siphoning money from Marvel to other IP? Is Disney’s current cost-cutting already evident in Marvel’s post-Endgame entries? Is Marvel’s aesthetic on purpose? Are the directors and cinematographers happy with the way the shows and movies look, or is the aesthetic imposed on them from on high?

Either way, where is all the money going? Consider the latest season of Jack Ryan on Amazon. Shot on multiple locations, regularly featuring wide-angled shots of gorgeous outdoor vistas, it looks and feels like a slick action movie with a visual language and a modicum of style. It’s never hazy or gooey the way Marvel (and, for that matters, Netflix) productions are. You can see everything. It’s high definition. Care has been put into the image. And into the acting and writing. Even if it’s just popcorn entertainment, there’s forethought and planning in evidence. Bezos is getting his money’s worth.

You can’t say the same for Marvel. It’s embarrassing. It’s beginning to feel like late 90s primetime television: same production quality, same writing exhaustion, same pseudo serialization. This, from a multibillion-dollar movie studio that conquered the globe over the last fifteen years. Does anyone know why? What’s going on?

I’ve stuck with the movies just for fun. And Guardians 3 was good. But last year I couldn’t bring myself to finish Moon Knight, much less try She-Hulk or Ms. Marvel. I don’t know anyone who did. I sampled Secret Invasion because (a) it’s summer and (b) Samuel L. Now I’m hooked just to see how the car wreck comes to an end.

After this, it’s Loki (potentially solid) followed by a run of shows and movies that are humdrum, eyerolling, or parody: The Marvels, Echo, Agatha, Captain America 4, Ironheart, Daredevil (again), and Thunderbolts. (Deadpool 3 doesn’t count; it’s inherited, won’t follow house style, won’t mess around with MCU canon, and will wrap up the trilogy.) Future Avengers movies keep getting delayed, contain no narrative momentum, and feature no names or actors normie audiences care about. Plus the one interesting thing about the multiverse, Jonathan Majors’ performance as Kang, is unlikely to continue; I assume Majors will be replaced by another actor by year’s end.

When Kevin Feige hired Ryan Coogler and Taika Waititi and James Gunn, it seemed as though Marvel’s productions would have style and panache, built on relative directorial freedom. Sometimes that came through. But in the last few years it’s become clear those were exceptions to the rule. The rule, it appears, is half-rendered sludge on a budget that will always prefer an Atlanta green screen to an actual physical location. At the very moment Tom Cruise is defying death in practical stunts on the big screen. It’s bizarre.

If there’s an explanation, I’m all ears.

Biblical critical theory

This morning Comment published my long review essay of Christopher Watkin’s new book Biblical Critical Theory. Here’s a bit about him and the book from the review:

Watkin is a scholar of modern and postmodern French and German philosophy. He has written a number of studies on major contemporary theorists like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Serres. He earned his doctorate at Cambridge and teaches in Melbourne. This is not his first book for a popular audience, but it is certainly his biggest and boldest. Running more than six hundred pages and spanning the entire biblical narrative, the book closely follows the Augustinian blueprint. Watkin wrote the work he sought but couldn’t find in the library stacks: a biblical critical theory, in careful conversation with and counterpoint to the variety of secular critical theories on offer. Each of the scholars I mentioned above (MacIntyre et al.) is catholic in one form or another. Watkin saw this gap in the literature: an evangelical Protestant meta-response to (post)modernity. So he took up the task himself.

As I explain in detail in the review, I don’t think the book succeeds. Read on to find out why.

It’s always a pleasure to write for Comment. Thanks to Brian Dijkema and Jeff Reimer for ever-reliable editorial wisdom, and to unnamed friends who made the argument stronger in the drafting stage.

Twenty texts for twenty centuries

Suppose you knew someone who wanted to read broadly in the Christian tradition. Specifically, this someone requested twenty Christian texts—no more, no less—one from each century of the church’s existence (present century excluded).

What would you assign? Who would be on your list?

For the purposes of this hypothetical, the texts are not supposed to be “the best” or the most influential or the most significant or what have you. Nor need they represent the full gamut or spectrum of Christian faith, doctrine, practice, and liturgy—as if that were possible.

At the same time, while the someone in question is a sharp reader, they are an Anglophone normie, not a polyglot scholar. You’re not, for example, going to assign the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas. You’re aiming for reasonably accessible texts by great Christian writers that, together, offer a snapshot of what it means to be Christian; what it means to live as a Christian; what it means to believe as a Christian; and so on.

You could tweak the rules as you please. These are my rules. Here are my answers.

*

First century: The Gospel According to Saint John.

Second century: Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Letters.

Third century: Origen, An Exhortation to Martyrdom.

Fourth century: Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation.

Fifth century: Saint Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ.

Sixth century: Pope Saint Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Gospels.

Seventh century: Saint Maximus Confessor, The Lord’s Prayer.

Eighth century: Saint John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith.

Ninth century: St. Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons.

Tenth century: Saint Gregory of Narek, Festal Works.

Eleventh century: Saint Anselm, Cur Deus Homo?

Twelfth century: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God.

Thirteenth century: Saint Bonaventure, Journey of the Mind Into God.

Fourteenth century: Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love.

Fifteenth century: Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ.

Sixteenth century: John Calvin, Book II of Institution of Christian Religion.

Seventeenth century: Saint Francis de Sales, An Introduction to the Devout Life.

Eighteenth century: Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits.

Nineteenth century: Saint Thérèse of Liseux, Story of a Soul.

Twentieth century: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship.

*

I will confess, I almost trolled the Prots by leaving out Calvin, Edwards, and Bonhoeffer for Saint Teresa, Saint Alphonsus Liguori, and Simone Weil. That would still be a good list! But I had to be honest. I also somewhat cheated with Julian, whose visions and writing spanned the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Were she to be moved ahead, I would remove Kempis and add Dante or Saint Catherine.

It goes without saying that, for most centuries—though curiously not for all, at least from my vantage point—you could choose a dozen or more texts. It hurts not to include Saint Augustine; but then, neither are there any Cappadocians. The fourth and fifth centuries are rich beyond compare.

It’s clear what I’m prioritizing here: brevity, clarity, piety, devotion, faith, love, prayer, discipleship. With, granted, an emphasis on the person and work of Christ. I also wanted a relative balance between East and West, Greek and Latin. It seems to me that an open-hearted reader of these twenty texts would walk away with a beautiful picture of the meaning of lived Christian faith, told from the inside. I almost envy such a person the experience.

Two reviews, a pod, and a Pole

A roundup of links…

My colleague and friend David Kneip interviewed me on the podcast Live From the Siburt Institute. We talk a lot about Christian tradition and digital technology. A bit less buttoned up than I usually am on pods, I think.

In the latest issue of Interpretation, Joshua E. Leim reviews The Doctrine of Scripture. He’s very generous. Here’s the last paragraph:

This is undoubtedly an excellent book, from which anyone hoping to reflect carefully—indeed devotionally—on the gift of Scripture will profit greatly. That is not to say that I agreed with everything in it. It seems to me, for example, that East leaves too little space for the disruptive potential of Scripture, i.e., its ability to stand over the church and rebuke it. Or, as another example, while East certainly does not reject tout court modern academic approaches to Scripture, he tends to lump together “biblical scholars” and their aims (e.g., pp. 183, 135, 137 n. 62) as problematic. Those concerns notwithstanding, this is a beautifully written, compelling theological articulation of the doctrine of Christian Scripture.

Likewise, in the latest issue of The Expository Times, Gregory Vall reviews The Church’s Book. He too is kind! Last paragraph:

This volume is a work of constructive criticism, and Brad East has mastered the genre. His critiques do not result in the denigration of the theological systems he engages. Rather, they disclose what is of true and lasting value in each of them. East’s own theological perspective proves to be broadly and deeply catholic and genuinely ecumenical. His writing is clear, precise, and refreshingly free of baroque diction and pretentious rhetoric.

Finally, Sławomir Zatwardnicki, who is part of the Pontifical Faculty of Theology in Wrocław, Poland, has taken an interest in my work. He has written not one but two articles engaging The Doctrine of Scripture, albeit in Polish—not a tongue in which I have any facility. Nevertheless, I wanted to acknowledge this gift with gratitude as well as offer links for anyone who does know Polish:

• ‘Brada Easta doktryna Pisma Świętego,’ in Biblica et Patristica Thoruniensia

• ‘Protestant krytycznie o „sola Scriptura”. Brada Easta argumenty przeciw reformacyjnemu pryncypium,’ in Teologia w Polsce

Tech bubble

Lately it’s occurred to me that I must live in an odd sort of tech bubble. It has two components.

On one hand, no one in my context (a medium-sized city in west Texas) lives in any way “free” from digital technology. Everyone has smartphones, laptops, tablets, and televisions with streaming apps. Most little kids have Kindles or iPads; most 10-12-years olds have phones; nearly every middle school has a smartphone. Women are on Instagram and TikTok, men are on Twitter and YouTube. Boys of every age play video games (Switch, XBOX, PS5), including plenty of dads. Adults and kids alike are on their phones during church, during sporting events, during choir performances. Kids watch Disney+ and PBS Kids; parents watch Max and Netflix. Screens and apps, Amazon and Spotify, phones and tablets galore: this is just daily ordinary life. There are no radicals among us. No slices of life carved out. I don’t know anyone without a TV, much less without wireless internet. I don’t know anyone without a smartphone! Life in west Texas—and everywhere else I’m aware of, at least in the Bible Belt—is just like this. No dissenting communes. No screen-free spaces. I’m the campus weirdo for not permitting devices in my classroom, and doubly so for not using a Learning Management System. Nor am I some hard-edged radical. I’m currently typing on a MacBook, and when I leave my office, I’ll listen to an audiobook via my iPhone.

In other words, whenever anyone tells me that the world I’ve just described isn’t normal, isn’t typical, isn’t entrenched and established and nigh unavoidable—I think, “Okay, we simply live in different worlds. I’d like to come tour yours. I’ve not seen it with my own eyes before.” I’m open to being wrong. But I admit to some measure of skepticism. In a nation of 330 million souls, is it meaningful to point to this or that solitary digital experimenter as a site of resistance? And won’t they capitulate eventually anyway?

But maybe not. What do I know?

Here’s the other hand, though. Everyone I know, tech-addled and tech-saturated though they be, everyone agrees that digital technology and social media are a major problem, perhaps the most significant social challenge, facing all of us and especially young people today. No one thinks it’s “no big deal.” No one argues that their kids vegging out on video games all day does nothing to their brains. No one pretends that Instagram and TikTok and Twitter are good for developing adolescents. No one supposes that more screen time is better for anyone. They—we—all know it’s a problem. They—we—just aren’t sure what to do about it. And since it seems such an enormously complex and massive overarching matrix, by definition a systemic problem calling for systemic solutions, mostly everyone just keeps on with life as it is. A few of us try to do a little better: quantifying our kids’ screen time; deleting certain apps; resisting the siren song of smartphones for 12-year-olds. But those are drops in the bucket. No one disputes the nature or extent of the problem. It’s just that no one knows how to fix it; or at least no one has the resolve to be the one person, the one household, in a city of 120,000 to say No! to the whole shebang. And even if there were such a person or household, they’d be a one of one. An extraordinary exception to the normative and unthreatened rule.

And yet. When I read online, I discover that there are people—apparently not insignificant in number?—who do not take for granted that the ubiquity and widespread use of social media, screens, and personal devices (by everyone, but certainly by young people) is a bad thing. In fact, these people rise in defense of Silicon Valley’s holy products, so much so that they accuse those of us worried about them of fostering a moral panic. Any and all evidence of the detrimental effects of teenagers being online four, six, eight hours per day is discounted in advance. It’s either bad data or bad politics. Until very recently I didn’t even realize, naive simpleton that I am, that worrying about these things was politicized. That apparently you out yourself as a reactionary if … checks notes … you aren’t perfectly aligned with the interests of trillion-dollar multinational corporations. That it’s somehow right-wing, rather than common-sense, to want children and young people to move their bodies, to be outdoors, to talk to one another face to face, to go on dates, to get driver’s licenses, to take road trips, to see concerts, to star gaze, to sneak out at night(!), to go to restaurants, to go to parks, to go on walks, to read novels they hold in their hands, to look people in the eye, to play the guitar, to go camping, to visit national parks, to play pick-up basketball, to mow the yard, to join a protest march, to tend a garden, to cook a meal, to paint, to leave the confines of their bedrooms and game rooms, to go to church, to go on a picnic, to have a first kiss—must I go on? No, because everyone knows these are reasonable things to want young people to do, and to learn to do, and even (because there is no other way) to make mistakes and take real risks in trying to learn to do. I know plenty of conservatives and plenty of progressives and all of them, not an exception among them, want their kids off social media, off streaming, off smartphones—on them, at a minimum, much less—and want them instead to do something, anything, out there in the bright blue real world we all share and live in together.

I must allow the possibility, however, that I inhabit a tech bubble. There appear to be other worlds out there. The internet says so. In some of them, I’m told, there are tech-free persons, households, and whole communities enjoying life without the tyrannous glare of the Big Five Big Brother staring back at them through their devices. And in other worlds, running parallel to these perhaps, tech is as omnipresent as it is in my neck of the woods, yet it is utterly benign, liberating, life-giving, and above all enhancing of young people’s mental health. The more screens the better, in that world. To know this is to be right-thinking, which is to say, left-thinking: enlightened and progressive and educated. To deny it is right-thinking in the wrong sense: conservative and benighted and backwards.

Oh, well. Perhaps I’ll visit one of these other worlds someday. For the time being, I’m stuck in mine.

Local church bans smartphones

Just kidding. But why not? The headline of the latest Atlantic piece by Jonathan Haidt reads: “Ban Phones From All Schools.” The updated version now says: “Get Phones Out of School Now.” (Another one, from earlier: “Phones at School Are a Disaster.” Indeed they are. But why all these different titles for the same piece?)

My question: If smartphones are so bad for school-aged kids, K–12, isn’t it likely they’re just as bad, if not worse, for kids in churches? And not only for 18-year-olds and younger, but for everyone?

What if churches took the lead here, instead of serving once again as a lagging indicator for the wider culture? What if the one place in America where screens and devices, smartphones and social media were not ubiquitous—were not even present at all—was your neighborhood congregation? Humble and out of fashion and perhaps deplorable, that congregation, but not, adamantly and openly and unapologetically not, part of the technological crisis afflicting our society?

Granted, no church is going to ask for your phone at the door. No church is going to frisk you for an iPhone. No church is going to require handing over your Android as a condition of entering the building.

Short of that, churches could do a lot to discourage parishioners from using phones in their buildings or even bringing them inside.

They could begin by not making it a requirement. For parents of young children, having a phone has become a nonnegotiable; you’re expected to be reachable at any moment, given your child’s behavior or needs during worship or Sunday school.

They could begin by not making smartphones an assumption. For example, by placing physical Bibles in (ahem) Bible classes as well as the sanctuary. By not using QR codes. By not inviting people to “get your phones and open your Bible app” in order to read along with the passage from Scripture.

They could begin by not featuring smartphones within worship. For example, by reading from physical books or programs or print-outs rather than from one’s personal device. By not texting during worship—ever, at all, for any reason. (If you’re someone who is on call, a physician or police officer or what have you, you’re an exception here; at the same time, if you get a call, then step out and take it!) By not, God help me, letting your child play games on your phone during the liturgy. By not, God grant me strength, playing them yourself.

They could begin by communicating, clearly, gently, but directly, that the church has a vision for the role of digital technology within the life of Christian discipleship and that it is the job of the church to form and educate the faithful in accordance with that vision. Not in the service of scrupulosity or works righteousness. In the service, rather, of equipping followers of Jesus to be strong and resilient believers in the face of the greatest challenge facing this generation—especially its young people. And given that vision and formation, it follows that within this community digital technology in general, and screens and smartphones in particular, are not “anything goes.” Not “no holds barred” or “live and let live.” That would be irresponsible. Instead, the church is to be on the vanguard of resisting billion- and trillion-dollar corporations’ bald-faced attempts to suck our souls, our wallets, and our attentions dry. How, after all, can we disciples be wise and patient and alert and unanxious women and men of prayer, who dwell in the word of God, who know how to be still, who listen for the voice of Christ’s Spirit—how can we be any of these things if every second of our lives is fixated on our screens, eyes scrolling indefinitely and infinitely for the latest image, the latest scandal, the latest outrage? How can we be different from anybody else if here, in the midst of God’s people, on the Lord’s Day, gathered to worship in the Spirit, we can’t let go of our digital addictions for even one hour?

Ban devices, I say, from all churches. Beat the schools to it. Show the world we see the problem. Show the world we want to fix it in ourselves before fixing it in others. Show the world we mean business. Get smartphones out of churches now. Show Prof. Haidt proof of concept. Leave Apple and Google and Meta in the car. Be blessedly free for ninety minutes (or more!). Give God your all. Model it for your kids. Demonstrate that it’s possible.

Is it? Could it happen? In your church and mine?

All I can say is, the Lord has done stranger things before…

Ranking drama series finales

The Ringer ran a fun piece this month, since revised, ranking the forty best series finales by TV shows of any kind—bar miniseries—since the turn of the century. Some of the choices were head-scratchers, though. Parks and Rec? Lost?? New Girl??? The Good Place???? They also included both comedies (Friends, 30 Rock) and reality/other (Nathan For You, The Hills). But the move to limit the options to the post-Sopranos prestige/peak TV era was smart. And they ranked a couple episodes usually overlooked in these debates (though they missed one big one). Overall it’s a solid list.

Here’s mine, following the conclusion to Succession Sunday night. Like many, I’ve soured on the TV hype over the last few years. Partly just because I want to spend my time doing things other than keeping up with the latest shows. But mostly because Peak TV was excellent at creating B-level series with A+ production and unreliable at creating A+ series of any kind—especially ones that made it to the end, rather than starting with a bang and ending with a whimper.

With the end of Better Call Saul last year and Succession this spring, I expect to limit my TV viewing going forward to occasional/pure-fun shows: basically, blockbusters or popcorn fare that involve cooking, spies, or galaxies far, far away. And any series that gets a lot of attention out of the gate, I’ll wait till the start of season 4 (I’m looking at you, Last of Us and House of the Dragon). If everyone still swears by it at that point, I’ll give it a look.

Having said that, the following is a list of shows I don’t regret watching, because each of them stuck the landing. Though first some criteria followed by honorable mentions.

First, I’m only ranking dramas.

Second, I’m only considering finales aired after the year 2000.

Third, I’m considering the finale in the context of the final season. No “good” finale of an otherwise dispensable or poor final season qualifies.

Fourth, while I’m not prioritizing unhappy endings, I am giving the nudge to conclusions that avoid the sitcom trap of giving everyone an (unrealistically) happy ending, because these are people we (and the writers room) love, and we can’t allow ourselves to imagine them unhappy once we say goodbye.

Fifth, I’m also (and therefore) giving the edge to finales that simultaneously (a) work as episodes of television, (b) conclude the overall story of the season/series, and (c) do not in any way swerve from the story the show was always telling, but are clearly an organic and fitting and thus (in the Aristotelian sense) necessary way of completing the story.

Full disclosure: I’ve seen whole seasons of Girls, Atlanta, Half & Catch Fire, and Deadwood, but not finished any of them. I’ve not seen more than a scene or an episode of Six Feet Under, Dexter, Sex & the City, Barry, and Ozark. I’ve always heard wonderful things about the SFU finale, as well as Deadwood’s. Perhaps one day I’ll make it to the latter; I doubt I’ll ever get around to the former.

Honorable mention: Battlestar Galactica (a wild ride, but a bit too hand-wavy even for this Christian Luddite), Mr. Robot (somehow successful, if dragged out there in the final episodes), The West Wing (good for CJ! But all around too much, even for this show), Parenthood (melodrama is as melodrama does), The Expanse (an action-packed blast, but too premature—given how much more story there was to tell), Boardwalk Empire (so good! Almost cracked my top 10), Breaking Bad (excellent, obviously, but still too happy and action-hero-ish for Walt), Mad Men (one or two seasons too late, and too enamored of its two leads to see them as the sad, artless, tragic souls they always were), Hannibal (off the deep end … and also in need of that Clarice sequel!)

Dishonorable mention: Lost + Game of Thrones (no comment necessary)

Now to the top ten … (Minor spoilers ahead, though I’ve tried to be vague.)

*

10. Friday Night Lights. Unlike all that follow, this one partakes of the happy tradition of TV dramas and sitcoms giving everyone the happy ending the audience wants them to have. But because that was always the nature of this show, as a high-production soap opera about high school Texas football and the perfect marriage at its heart, this was never going to be the wrong call. Our heroes ride off into the sunset—the bright lights of Philly, that is.

9. Rectify. Somehow not on The Ringer’s list! The best TV drama of the 2010s. It ended in just the way it ran from the beginning: beautiful, ethereal, contemplative, ambiguous, honest, hopeful. This is the only show I recommend to anyone without reservation. A lovely and humane work of art.

8. Justified. Like Star Trek movies, the best Justified seasons come in evens: two, four, six, followed by five, one, three. The finale hits all the beats, while providing surprising catharsis between the star-crossed hero and villain. I’m not a re-watcher of TV shows, but I look forward to going back through this one with my kids once they’re old enough.

7. The Leftovers. Had the finale of season two been all she wrote, it would have been higher on the list. As it stands, the third season is good but unnecessary. I’ve long wanted to write something about the finale, which has something to say about religion. It’s the wrong thing, but it’s something all the same. You can’t help but cry in those final moments. And it doesn’t spoil a thing in the previous seasons. It even brings a measure of closure to both leads’ stories, along with a question mark the viewer can’t answer for himself. We just have to trust Nora’s word, too. (Or not.)

6. The Wire. Dinged for the final season going a bit haywire. But still a magnificent final two episodes. A sort of sitcom finale, except without making everyone’s ending happy. Feels epic the way the whole show was epic: a story about a city and the lives and institutions that make it endure, for all its dysfunction. And that last Irish wake…

5. The Americans. They were holding out on that U2 song. When it hits, you know why they were so patient. In a sense, this finale was “happier” than expected. But not all happy. And no corners were cut getting there. And when you realize what the leads have lost, you realize it’s not happy at all. But that final confrontation! A whole series building to one single moment in a parking garage. Marvelous performances. When The Americans was on, it was the best show around.

4. The Shield. A pitch-perfect finale with so much plot, so many storylines built into it! So brutal, so devastating. And that final scene. Haunting. An underrated show.

3. Succession. Shows four through one on this list all have perfect finales, in my view. It’s only been twenty-four hours, but Succession belongs. They stuck the landing. They knew the story they were telling. They knew the characters they were crafting. They knew how it had to happen. And they twisted the plot in just the right—and sometimes unexpected—ways, to get there. (Tom!) I wonder how this show would play for someone watching it all for the first time, binged in a week or two? Viewers have been agonizing for what feels like ages to see how it all would come to an end. And people interpreting the finale as a set-up for more seasons or even a movie have utterly misunderstood both the show and the finale. It’s done, folks! They, and we with them, were stuck in interminable infernal circles for forty episodes—and they’re still stuck. They’ve just swapped spots in hell’s musical chairs. It’s never getting better. That’s the point.

2. Better Call Saul. I’ve written about the BCS finale at length. Whether I’m right or Alan Jacobs is right (or his amended take is right), the finale couldn’t have been better. Not only were they completing Jimmy McGill’s arc, they were also bringing the entire Breaking Bad universe to a close—not to mention the excellent-but-still-slightly-missed-opportunity of the BB finale. It’s true, Jimmy-Saul gets to shine. But not because the writers couldn’t bear to see him unhappy. Because he couldn’t help himself. And whether or not he’s happy where he landed, it’s not a happy place to finish one’s days.

1. The Sopranos. This one’s been written about to death. I’ve got nothing to add. It’s still on the throne. No dispute from me. Long live the king.

Decline and its possibilities

Is society in decline? Is our culture getting worse? Is the West less Christian by comparison to the past? And are these things a cause for lament?

Your answers to these questions do a lot of work in locating you in debates among Christians about the state of things today. I’m thinking in particular of anti-declinists, who resist and reject declension narratives as hysterical, overwrought, incomplete, or even unchristian. It occurred to me recently that anti-declinists confuse a number of concepts—which is not their fault, since their opponents often confuse them as well—that are distinct from one another.

First is decline. In what sense decline? In what area(s) of life? Religious in particular? Social, moral, aesthetic, political, economic? Or is the question a matter of net gain/loss? Claims about net loss are always going to be inordinately subjective. Countering a sense of loss in, say, church attendance with an equivalent gain in household wealth is a textbook instance of changing the subject. To be frank, Christians concerned about whether people have left church for good don’t care about the economy. It’s apples and oranges.

The second issue is blame. It’s often assumed that, if things have in some sense gotten worse (over the years, decades, or centuries), then those responsible are them, out there, the Bad Guys. But this doesn’t follow. It may well be the case that things have gotten worse because of us. The culprit, in other words, is Christians. Christians are on the hook for the things they bemoan. The church is culpable for social, moral, or religious decline. The proper response to recognition of genuine decline, then, is not pointing fingers at the world but donning sackcloth and ashes; fasting and prayer; contrition and repentance. (Next is figuring out a faithful path forward, but doing so is still an in-house affair.)

The third issue is judgment. Christians believe that God is Judge. And within history, God’s mysterious providence does not withhold all consequences of the actions of individuals, communities, and nations until the End, but enacts them, in part, in time, as anticipations of the Final Judgment. Our chickens do not always come home to roost. But sometimes they do. And when they do, it is the work of God. In the realm of social or cultural decline, then, Christians are inclined to see the hand of God. And often as not, it is against the church that his hand works. Judgment begins at the house of God. Nor is divine judgment a sneaky way of outsourcing blame back onto the culture. Well, this is God’s work—guess y’all will acknowledge him now! On the contrary, sometimes divine judgment works for the world to the detriment of God’s people. Assyria wins and Israel loses; Babylon wins and Judah loses. Not ultimately, but for quite a while. The gates of hell shall not prevail against the church. But Caesar made thousands of martyrs for a full three centuries before the bloodletting stopped.

The fourth issue is suffering. Not all suffering on the part of Christians is God’s judgment on our sins. But all of it is an opportunity to imitate Christ. That is, to unite out sufferings to his in patient endurance as a witness to the power of his resurrection. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Let us say, even, that the sweat of the saints—the smallest of pains in the mundane challenges of daily discipleship—is likewise the seed of God’s word scattered on the soil of our culture. It is God who gives the increase. All we can do is witness. We are not to seek after suffering. But when it comes, as it always will, in whatever form, our calling is to persevere. Not to whine. Not to complain. Not to eschew martyrdom for a martyr complex. Not, certainly, to feign bemusement at this strange disruption of how things should be, namely, life running smoothly. Life running smoothly is a blessed temporary relief from the ordinary run of things in a fallen world. So even and especially when society is in process of some kind of decline, even and especially if it is religious in nature, the task of the church is the same: faithful witness in suffering.

The fifth issue is hope. To spy decline is not to deny grounds for hope. Hope is in God alone. His promise is sure: the gates of hell will not prevail against the people whose God is the Lord. Nevertheless they will claim victories along the way: provisional victories, but victories all the same. Christian hope lies neither in the absence of decline nor in renewal following decline but in the ultimate victory of Christ above and beyond the waxing and waning of human civilizations. Behold, the nations are as a drop in a bucket. For the Lord, that is, and therefore for the church. A whole political theology is contained in that single verse. The peoples are like grass, which wither under the Lord’s breath; he makes nations rise and fall, but his word stands forever. Decline is both real and inevitable. It is also subordinate to the mission and worship of the church.

If I’ve been training my sights on the errors of the declinists, a few implications follow for anti-declinists as well.

First, decline is possible. To read some anti-declinists, you’d imagine they’ve sincerely bought into the myth of progress. They’re like film critics who tell you, every year, that the movies have never been better. Novels and music and all the other arts, too. Did I mention epic poetry and its public performance and memorization by children? Nothing ever changes, except when it does, and it’s for the better. That’s a mighty dollop of silliness no serious person should countenance. But it’s ruled out a priori for Christians. So for any Christian writer or thinker not driven by pessimism about our age, he or she must at least admit the possibility that decline may happen and perhaps even is happening.

Second, Christian decline is possible. Some anti-declinists read as though, even if a civilization might get worse, the state of the church within that civilization can never get worse. But we’ve already seen that this, also, is a red herring. I often think, in this respect, of Alan Jacobs’ marvelous review of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, which opens with a description of the extraordinary Christian culture of fifth-century Cappadocia created and fostered by saints like Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus. Yet no such culture exists there today. Here’s Alan:

If the complete destruction of a powerful and beautiful Christian culture could happen in Cappadocia, it can happen anywhere, and to acknowledge that possibility is mere realism, not a refusal of Christian hope. One refuses Christian hope by denying that Jesus Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, not by saying that Christianity can disappear from a particular place at a particular time.

Christianity can disappear from a particular place at a particular time. When I read non-declinists, I wish they would begin every paragraph with an affirmation of this possibility. Because most of the time, it sounds as though they do not believe it is possible. Yet we know it is possible, because it has happened time and again throughout history. Which means that people worried about it happening here are not fantasists; they are not hysterical just because they worry about it. Their worry may take the form of hysteria. They may be foolish in their response or ungodly in their lament or wicked in their prescriptions, not to mention their treatment of others. But the worry is valid in principle. The only question, ever, is whether it is a plausible worry given our time and place, and thence whether it is likely. It becomes a cultural question, a hermeneutical question, even in a sense an empirical question. That’s the arena for debate. Not its sheer possibility.

Third, non-declinists have to distinguish not just the mode of pessimism from its judgments but also the judgments from their implications. Bemoaning some particular religious or social loss is not ipso facto an endorsement of everything in the past (whether that past be the 1980s or ’50s or ’20s or 1770s or 1530s or 1250s or whenever the ostensible golden age is said to have occurred). Nor is it a denial that anything has improved. Declinists are on the hook for their rhetoric, which should be nuanced and accurate rather than generic and overblown. But anti-declinists are on the hook, too. They often write like to give an inch is to lose a mile. Any decline means total decline. Perhaps also despair. None of which follows.

The Christian theology of providence is an extraordinary analytical tool. It allows the soberest of diagnoses and the most confident of hopes. It’s always a delicate balancing act. Any Christian who writes about the state of society is going to fail in some way. But we can fail a little less, it seems to me, not least by being mindful of the distinctions I’ve elaborated above.

You can’t die for a question

I had some friends from quite different backgrounds do a bit of interrogation yesterday, following my post about biblicist versus catholic Christianity. Interrogation of me, that is. As is my wont, I sermonize and then qualify, or at least explain. Yesterday was the sermon. Today is the asterisk.

1. What I wrote has to do with a persistent conundrum I find myself utterly unable to solve. I cannot grasp either of two types of Christianity. The first lingers most in yesterday’s post. It is a form of the faith that never, ever grows; never, ever settles; never, ever stabilizes; never, ever knows. Its peculiar habit, rather, is always and perpetually to pull up stakes and go back to the beginning; to return to Go; to start from scratch; to question everything and, almost on purpose, to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Am I exaggerating? I’m not! Primitivist biblicism, rooted in nuda scriptura, affirms on principle that every tradition and all Christians, from the apostles to the present, not only may have gotten this or that wrong but did in fact get just about everything wrong. And this affirmation inexorably eats itself. For what the biblicist proposed yesterday is bound to be wrong tomorrow—that is, discovered by some other enterprising biblicist to belong to the catalogue of errors that is Christian history.

At the same time, this ouroborotic style of Christianity affirms a second principle: namely, the total sufficiency and perfect perspicuity of the canon. Come again? Didn’t we just say that everyone who’s ever read it got it wrong, until you/me? Indeed. Not only this, but the excavationist-reader of the clear-and-sufficient text somehow misses the fact that he is himself doing the very thing he chides the tradition for doing: namely, interpreting what requires no interpretation. The one thing we may be sure of is that his successor, following the example of his predecessor with perfect consistency, will fault him for his interpretation, while offering an alternative interpretation.

This whole dialectic makes me crazy. As evidenced by yesterday’s vim and vigor.

2. Let me put it this way. I understand that there are both people and traditions that embody this dialectic, that don’t see anything wrong with it. What I can’t understand is pastors and scholars wanting to produce such a viewpoint as a desirable consequence of ecclesial and academic formation. My goal as a teacher is to educate my students out of this way of thinking. Why would we want to educate them into it?

I will withhold comment on whether Protestantism as such is unavoidably ouroborotic. At the very least, we may say that the ouroborotic impulse is contained within it. Reformation breeds reformation; revolution begets revolution. Semper reformanda unmasks error after error, century after century, until you find yourself with the apostles, reforming them, too. And the prophets. And Jesus himself. And the texts that give you him. And the traditions underlying those texts. And the hypothetical traditions underlying those.

And all of a sudden, you find there’s nothing left.

Again, I’m not indicting Protestants per se. But there is an instinct here, a pressure, a logic that unfolds itself. And there are evangelical traditions that actively nurture it in their people. I’ve seen it my whole life. It’s not good, y’all! I, the ordinary believer, come to see myself, not as a recipient of Christian faith, but as its co-constructor, even its builder. It’s up to me:

Brad the Believer!
Can he build it?
Yes he can!
Can he fix it?
Yes he can!

And how do I do it? By reading the Bible, alone with myself, at best with a few others—albeit with final say reserved for me.

The faith here becomes a matter of arguing my way to a conclusion, rather than yielding, surrendering, and submitting to a teaching. Cartesian Christianity is DIY faith. It cannot sustain itself. It’s built for collapse. (The call is coming from inside the house.)

3. The second type of Christianity to which I alluded above, which was less visible in the post yesterday, is not so much a species of biblicism as its repudiation. In the past I’ve called it post-biblicism biblicism, though it doesn’t always entail further biblicism. A friend commented that what we need is an account of progressive biblicism, though that’s not what I have in mind either. What I have in mind is, I suppose, what I’ll call know-nothing Christianity. A Christianity of nothing but doubts. A faith reducible to questions.

I take it as given that I’m not talking about asking questions or having doubts, much less mysticism or apophatic spirituality. (Go read Denys Turner. All theology is apophatic, rightly understood.) No, I’m talking about a Christianity that has lost the confidence of the martyrs, the boldness of the apostles, the devotion of the saints.

Put it this way. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. But you can’t die for a question. Christianity is a religion of proclamation. It preaches a message. It announces tidings. It does not say, “Jesus might have been raised from the dead.” It says, “Jesus is risen.” You or I may well have intrusive mights in our struggles with faith. But the church is not a community of might and maybe. The church is a community of is, because she is a people of resurrection. What began in an empty tomb, she confesses, will be consummated before the whole world at the risen Lord’s return.

That’s something to die for. And therefore to live for. I can neither die nor live for a question mark. The church speaks with periods and exclamation points. She errs—her pastors miss the mark—when the faith is reduced to nothing but ellipses and questions.

4. It’s true that I exaggerated the catholic style of magisterial Protestantism. I also may have made it sound as though Christianity never changes; that whatever Christians have always said and done, they are bound always to say and do in the future, till kingdom come. (Though I think if you re-read what I wrote, I couched enough to give the Prots some wiggle room.)

In any case: granted. Preacher’s gonna preach. But here’s what I was getting at.

Christianity simply cannot be lived if, at any moment, any and every doctrine and belief, no matter how central or venerable, lies under constant threat of revision and removal. All the more so if the potential revision and removal are actions open to any baptized believer. Ouroborotic faith comes to seem a sort of vulgar Kantianism (or is it that Kant is vulgar Lutheranism?): heteronomy must give way to autonomy, lest the faith not be authentic, real, mine. The word from without becomes a word from within. The word of the gospel transmutes into a word I make, am responsible for making. I am a law unto myself; I am the gospel unto myself.

Who can live this way? Who can give themselves to a community for a lifetime based on a message (a book, a doctrine, an ethics) subject to continuous active reappraisal? and reappraisal precisely from below? The faith becomes a kind of democracy: a democracy of the living alone, to the exclusion of the dead. And just like any democracy, what’s voted on today will be up for debate tomorrow.

In a word: If Christianity is nothing but what we make of it—an ongoing, unfinished construction project in which nothing is fixed and everything, in principle, is subject to renovation and even demolition—then we are of all men most miserable.

To be sure, the skeptic and the atheist will see this statement as a précis of their unbelief. What beggars my belief is that, apparently, there are self-identified Christians who not only affirm it, but actively induce it in the young, in college students, in laypeople. I cannot fathom such a view.

5. A final thought. I am a student, in different ways, of two very different theologians: Robert Jenson and Kathryn Tanner. Much of what I’ve outlined here goes against what both of them teach regarding the church and tradition; or at least it seems to. Let me say something about that.

I am thinking of the opening two chapters of Jenson’s Systematics and of the whole normative case Tanner makes in Theories of Culture. In the latter, Tanner takes issue with both correlationists (to her “left”) and postliberals (to her “right”) regarding what “culture” is, how the church inhabits and engages it, and the honest picture that results for Christian tradition. There is a strong constructivist undercurrent in the book that would push back against what I’ve written here.

As for Jenson, he argues that the church is a community defined by a message. Tradition is the handing-on of the message, both in real time (from one person/community to another) and across time (from one generation to another). It is not a bug that causes the gospel to “change” in the process of being handed on. It’s a feature. We see this transmission-cum-translation project already in the New Testament. And it necessarily continues so long as the church is around, handing on the gospel anew.

Why? Because new questions arise, in the course of the church’s mission, questions that have not always been answered in advance. Sometimes it isn’t questions at all, but cultural translation itself. How should the gospel be incarnated here, in this place? Among gentiles, not Jews? Among rulers, not peasants? Among Ethiopians, not Greeks? Among polytheists, not monotheists? Among atheists, not polytheists? Among polygamists, not monogamists? Among liberals, not conservatives? Among capitalists, not socialists? Among democrats, not monarchists? In an age of CRISPR and cloning, not factories and the cotton gin? In a time when women are no longer homemakers only, but landowners, degree-holders, and professionals? When men are in offices and online and not only in fields and mines?

The gospel, Jenson says, doesn’t change in these settings. But how the church says the gospel, in and to such settings, does change. How could it not? We don’t speak the gospel in the same words as the apostles, or else we’d be speaking Aramaic and Greek; we’d be talking about idol meat and temple prostitutes and incense to Caesar and Artemis the Great. Now, we do talk about such things. But not as matters of living interest to our hearers. As, rather, samples of faithful gospel speech from the apostles, samples that call for our imitation, extension, and application. We say the selfsame gospel anew in diverse contexts, based on the apostolic example, in imitation of their model. As Barth says in the Church Dogmatics, theology is not a matter of repeating what the apostles and prophets said, but of saying what must be said here and now on the basis of what they said there and then.

In this way, “evangelical” tradition is simultaneously unchanging, fixed, stable and fluid, organic, growing. It’s why, as a friend once said after reading Theories of Culture, the church possesses a teaching office. Magisterial authority of some sort is necessary in a missionary community defined by a historical message expressed in written documents. Someone’s got to do the interpreting, not least when questions arise that the apostles neither answered nor even foresaw.

Hence my roping the magisterial Protestants into the “catholic” version of Christianity. Try as they might, they cannot deny that the doctrine of the Trinity formulated and codified by Nicaea and Constantinople is dogma for the church. It is irreversible, irrevocable, and therefore irreformable. Semper reformanda does not apply here. (And if not here, then not elsewhere, too.) Not because the Bible is crystal clear on the subject. Not because trinitarian doctrine is laid out in so many words on the sacred page. Not because no reasonable person could read the Bible differently.

No: It is because the church’s ancient teachers, faced with the question of Christ and the Spirit, read the Bible in this way, and staked the future of the faith on it; and because we, their children in the faith, receive their decision as the Spirit’s own. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us… It is thus neither your job nor mine to second guess it, to search the Bible to confirm that Saint Athanasius et al did, in fact, get the Trinity right. It’s our job to accept it; to confess it; to believe it. Any other suggestion misunderstands my, our, relationship to the church and to her tradition.

6. A final-final thought; a conclusion to my conclusion.

In my graduate studies I came to be deeply impressed by the underdetermined character of Scripture. The text can reasonably be read by equally reasonable people in equally reasonable ways. “Underdetermined” is Stephen Fowl’s word. It doesn’t mean indeterminate. But neither does it mean determinate. Christian Smith calls the result “PIP”: pervasive interpretive pluralism. Smith is right. His point is downstream from the hermeneutical, though, which is downstream in turn from the theological and ecclesiological point.

I’ve tried to unpack and to argue that point in my two books: The Doctrine of Scripture and The Church’s Book. Together they’re just short of 250,000 words. I wouldn’t force that much reading (of anyone, certainly not of me!) on anybody. Nor can I summarize here what I lay out there. I simply mean to draw attention to a fundamental premise that animates all of my thinking about the Bible and thus about the church, tradition, and dogma. That premise is a rejection of a strong account of biblical perspicuity. On its face, the Bible can be read many ways; rare is any of these ways obvious, even to the baptized. If I’m right, then either the Bible can never finally be understood with confidence (a position I reject, though I have learned much from scholars who believe this) or we ordinary Christians stand under that which has been authorized by Christ, through his Spirit, to teach the Bible’s word with confidence, indeed with divine assurance. Call the authority in question the church, tradition, ecumenical councils, bishops, magisterium—whatever—but it’s necessary for the Christian life. It’s necessary for Christianity to work. And not only necessary. But instituted by Christ himself, for our benefit. For our life among the nations. For our faith, seeking understanding as it always is. For our discipleship.

We are called to live and die for Christ. The church gives us Christ. She does not give us a question. She gives us a person. In her we find him. If we can’t trust her, we can’t have him—much less die for him. They’re a package deal. Accept both or neither. But you can’t have one without the other.

The great Christian divide

There are two kinds of Christian, by which I mean, there are two ways of being Christian nourished by two types of Christian tradition. Each is defined by its stance or posture toward the Bible and the resulting formation of ordinary believers.

You could think of many names for both. Most are biased, polemical, prejudicial. It’s hard to give a neutral name to something you believe is either absolutely right or dead wrong.

Call the first one biblicist. Sometimes this view comes wrapped in the label of sola scriptura, but nuda scriptura seems more apt. Biblicism forms its adherents to believe, at least tacitly but usually consciously, three major things.

First, nothing but the Bible’s clear, explicit teaching is authority for the church. What is not laid out verbatim, in so many words, cannot be decisive for Christian faith and morals. Second, the Bible’s clear, explicit teaching is best read without the mediation, guidance, or interposition of extra-biblical teaching. Whether you call this latter teaching “sacred tradition” or “church doctrine” or something else, it is bound to obstruct, distort, and/or mislead the reader of Scripture. Third and finally, the Bible’s clear, explicit teaching is meant to be read, understood, and put together by individual believers. The Bible, that is, should be read “alone” in more than one sense: unaccompanied by tradition or by other people. What is tradition, after all, except other people? (Sartre tells the biblicist what other people are.) More to the point, you are not supposed to be relying on or placing your trust in something or someone other than God, and God has said all that needs saying in the Bible. Biblicism isn’t per se anti-church—though it fails mightily in avoiding being anti-authority—but its ecclesiology is individualist at bottom. The Christian is a spiritual Descartes: alone in a room with a Bible, because alone in life with God. God’s relationship to each is immediate, except as mediated by faith, the presence of the Spirit, and the living word of the scriptures.

This is why, in biblicist settings, no doctrine—none whatsoever—is ever safe from challenge. If the biblicist is Descartes in practice, the ideal-type is Luther’s Here I stand, I can do no other. Every Christian and church in history may have taught and believed X, but if someone in the room believes the Bible teaches not-X, then that belief gets a hearing. Not only gets one, but is encouraged to have one. Is encouraged, spiritually and imaginatively, to suppose that Christianity is the sort of thing that an individual believer, thousands of years after the fact, might discover, or re-discover, for the first time. Christianity as such does not preexist me, the Christian. The Bible alone does.

“What the church believes” and “what tradition teaches” and “what Christians have always held” are therefore category errors on such a view. It’s not just that doctrine and tradition are secondary to Scripture. They don’t have a seat at the table. They lack any and all standing, no matter how ancient, venerable, unanimous, or important. This is simply taken for granted by the biblicist. Occasionally, when the premise must be defended, a laundry list of historic errors on the part of the church is trotted out as dispositive proof. It’s half-hearted at best, though. The biblicist premise isn’t primarily negative. It’s positive. It’s rooted in claims about what the Bible is, what it is for, and how it should be read. Those are the foundation of biblicism, not the consequent denials and prohibitions.

The second, contrary view I’ll call catholic. It encompasses far more than the Roman church. It includes also the Orthodox, global Anglicanism, and most magisterial Protestants. For the catholic position, church doctrine is of momentous significance. If X has been believed always, everywhere, and by everyone, then at a minimum X is presumed by the church to be true, and is taught as such. Sometimes X arises to the level of formal irreversibility (being, that is, beyond reform); more often it is functionally irrevocable. Either way, there is a set of teachings that are nonnegotiable for Christian faith. They aren’t up for debate. If you dispute them, you aren’t a Christian; if you accept them, you are a Christian. This is not because the faith is exclusive (though, rightly understood, it is). It is because Christianity preexists you. It isn’t plastic, ever-newly malleable to each generation that arises. If it were, Christianity wouldn’t be anything at all; wouldn’t stand for anything at all; wouldn’t be worth joining in the first place. It’s worth joining because it’s solid, stable, reliable: a something-or-other.

I don’t join the local basketball league hoping to convert it to pickleball. That’s what pickleball leagues are for. Although at least switching from one sport to another would be intelligible. More often, the objection to Christianity’s immutability assumes the only good sports league would be one that changed constantly, randomly, and according to no rhyme or reason. Such an objection does not actually like sports. Or rather, it likes one sport only: Calvinball. And every league should be Calvinball or be shut down. Mutatis mutandis for world religions and Christianity.

I don’t mean to suggest that Christianity, in its actual historical expressions, is unchanging. It’s not. Tradition, if it isn’t dead, is living. Tradition means not only preservation and conservation but adaptation, even mutation. All granted. I merely mean that, on the catholic view, Christianity does not await existence until you or I come along to build it from scratch from the blueprints of the Bible. It’s already there, before I’m born. I join it as it is or I don’t. I don’t get to make it in my image. If I do—that is, if I try—I’m doing it wrong. I’ve failed to understand the very thing I want to become a part of. And I’ve changed it beyond recognition in the process.

The catholic understanding of the Bible isn’t a denial or qualification of the Bible’s authority. On the contrary. There is no Christianity apart from the word of God. But the same Spirit that inspired the scriptures indwells God’s people. God has delegated authority to God’s people. I, the individual believer, do not presume to know—much less to decide—what Christianity is based on my private reading of the Bible. I defer to the church. The church tells me what Christianity is. The church tells me what to believe, because the church gives me the faith once for all delivered to the saints. In a catholic context, “this is what the church teaches” is a statement both (a) intelligible and (b) decisive, even as it is not (c) competitive with “this is what the Bible teaches.” For what the first means is: “this is what the church teaches the Bible teaches.” Who would imagine himself competent to discover what the Bible teaches on his own? What individual believer possesses the wherewithal, the holiness, the wisdom, the hermeneutical chops to sit down with the Bible and, all by her lonesome, figure it out? I’ve not yet met one myself.

This, it seems to me, is the great Christian divide. Not between Catholics and Protestants. Not between conservatives and liberals. Not between Western and global. But between biblicist and catholic. I can do business with catholic Christians, whatever our differences or disagreements. Whereas I increasingly find myself adrift with biblicists. I don’t mean I doubt their faith, their integrity, their commitment to Christ. I mean we find each other unintelligible. Each thinks the other is talking gibberish. It becomes clear that we lack shared first principles. The biblicist’s working premise and mine are opposed, and this make understanding difficult, not to mention collaboration or agreement. We are speaking different languages. And each of us supposes our language to be Christianese. Yet one of us is right and one of us is wrong. I doubt we can get very far without figuring that out. Until then, we’re doing little more than spinning our wheels.

Every fantasy a comedy, every comedy a theodicy

Recently I wrote about returning to Osten Ard, the fantasy world of novelist Tad Williams in his two series Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn and The Last King of Osten Ard. One of the things I’d forgotten about the first series, a trilogy written from 1988 to 1993, is its interest in theodicy. Multiple characters throughout the books wonder, both aloud and to themselves, about the existence of God (or the gods); about their power; about their goodness; about the supposed truths taught by priests and monks; about the myths of old, handed down for centuries; about whether a world such as theirs—namely, a world of unremitting pain, illness, suffering, violence, and death, all apparently senseless, random, and unrectified—is one a just God would either create or sustain. As the lead character Simon realizes at one point: he no longer feels himself capable of praying to such a God even if he does exist. Yet this very realization is itself an indication that there is no such God, since he would not correspond to “the old stories.”

I do not know whether Tad Williams, the author, believes in God, nor can I say just what his aim was in posing these theodical questions throughout his trilogy. I’ve not yet re-read the second half of the third book in the series, so my memory may be wrong, but I don’t recall him resolving these questions in a clear or satisfactory way. That’s fine. Theodicy is usually a dish best served incomplete anyway.

Here’s the thing, though. Williams’ story wraps up beautifully. Every narrative thread is woven, by story’s end, into a gorgeous tapestry clearly thought through and planned out from the beginning. This is what makes the epic tale so marvelously told. There is not a character forgotten, nor a plot device left by the wayside. By the final pages, it’s as though behind this seemingly senseless drama stands an author, an author with meaning and purpose, whose design may have been hidden before but has now been made manifest.

It seems this way, because it is this way. The author isn’t a hypothesis we are forced to postulate in order to make sense of a story we otherwise couldn’t make sense of. We know the author’s name. The story is a novel. He wrote it. He planned it. He designed it. Duh.

But there’s the rub. If, outside the text, there stands an author, then inside the text, within the story, there must likewise be an Author. The perfect pleasing blueprint of the thing works because there is an architect. The fact of there being an architect is itself an answer to the characters’ ponderings about God. The characters wonder to themselves whether they are living in a meaningful story or a meaningless chaos. Well, we know: it’s the former, not the latter. The end of the story clears that right up. More to the point, the fact that they are characters inside a story written by an author for readers’ pleasure is as direct an answer as one could have. It may not be an answer available to the characters, within the story, but it’s a meta-textual answer available to us, the readers of their story.

In this way, Williams is unable to render a negative answer to the theodicy his narrative is meant to embody, however ambivalent his own intentions may be. Merely by authoring the story and having it make some kind of sense, he answers his own question: Yes, there is a God. In a word, it’s him. He’s the deus ex machina. He’s the one behind the curtain. There’s someone pulling the strings. It’s him. And if he exists, then the existence of God (or the gods) within the world he’s created is a given. Of course he (they) exist. Otherwise the story wouldn’t unfold the way it does; wouldn’t be orchestrated and choreographed in such a supremely fitting and satisfying manner.

This, in turn, becomes an extra-textual answer about our world, not just Osten Ard. There is a God in our world just as there is in that world, as evidenced by the fact that we make worlds like Osten Ard. Human sub-creation imitates and exemplifies divine creation. In the words of poet Franz Wright:

…And the way, always, being 
a maker 
reminds:

you were made. 

What I mean is this. Insofar as a fantasy is a comedy, it is also a theodicy: it poses and answers whether there is a God and, if he exists, whether he is both all-good and all-powerful. There is and he is, fantasy replies. For in a comedy, the Good triumphs in the end—ultimately, in some way, to some degree. This is why Dante’s masterpiece is called, simply, La Commedia. It’s the comedy, and therefore the divine comedy. This world is a comedy, for all its evil and suffering. It is not a tragedy.

For modern fantasy to avoid theodicy, it would have to embrace tragedy. Not darkness, not “grittiness,” not violence and sadism and gratuitous sex and playing footsie with nihilism. Actual, bona fide tragedy. I’ve not encountered fantasy that does that. And even then, if there’s a human author doing the tragedy-writing, there’s a case to be made that it can’t fully escape the pull of theodicy. It seems to me you’d have to go full Sartre and write a fantasy akin to La Nausée. But what world-building fantasist wants to do that? Is even capable of stomaching it?

We write because we are written. We make because we are made. We work providence in our stories because providence works in ours. We give the final word to the Good because the Good has the final word in our world—or will, at least; we hope, at least.

This is why every fantasy is a theodicy. Because every fantasy is a comedy. And comedy is a witness to our trust, howsoever we deny it or mask it, of our trust that God is, that God is good, and that God will right all wrongs in the End.

A.I. fallacies, academic edition

ChatGPT is here to stay. We should get used to it.

Why? I’m not used to it, and I don’t plan on getting used to it.

ChatGPT is a tool. The only thing to do with a tool is learn how to use it well.

False. There are all kinds of tools I don’t know how to use, never plan on using, and never plan to learn to use.

But this is an academic tool. We—

No, it isn’t. It’s no more an academic tool than a smart phone. It’s utterly open-ended in its potential uses.

Our students are using it. We should too.

No, we shouldn’t. My students do all kinds of things I don’t do and would never do.

But we should know what they’re up to.

I do know what they’re up to. They’re using ChatGPT to write their papers.

Perhaps it’s useful!

I’m sure it is. To plagiarize.

Not just to plagiarize. To iterate. To bounce ideas off of. To outline.

As I said.

That’s not plagiarism! The same thing happens with a roommate, or a writing center, or a tutor—or a professor.

False.

Because it’s an algorithm?

Correct.

What makes an algorithm different from a person?

You said it. Do I have to dignify it with an answer?

Humor me.

Among other things: Because a human person—friend, teacher, tutor—does not instantaneously provide paragraphs of script to copy and paste into a paper. Because a human person asks questions in reply. Because a human person prompts further thought, which takes time. ChatGPT doesn’t take time. It’s the negation of temporality in human inquiry.

I’d call that efficiency.

Efficiency is not the end-all, be-all.

It’s good, though.

That depends. I’d say efficiency is a neutral description. Like “innovation” and “creativity.” Sometimes what it describes is good; sometimes what it describes is bad. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which, at least at first.

Give me a break. When is efficiency a bad thing?

Are you serious?

Yes.

Okay. A nuclear weapon is efficient at killing, as is nerve gas.

Give me another break. We’re not talking about murder!

I am. You asked me about cases when efficiency isn’t desirable.

Fine. Non-killing examples, please.

Okay. Driving 100 miles per hour in a school zone. Gets you where you want to go faster.

That’s breaking the law, though.

So? It’s more efficient.

I can see this isn’t going anywhere.

I don’t see why it’s so hard to understand. Efficiency is not good in itself. Cheating on an exam is an “efficient” use of time, if studying would have taken fifteen hours you’d rather have spent doing something else. Fast food is more efficient than cooking your own food, if you have the money. Using Google Translate is more efficient than becoming fluent in a foreign language. Listening to an author on a podcast is more efficient than reading her book cover to cover. Listening to it on 2X is even more efficient.

And?

And: In none of these cases is it self-evident that greater efficiency is actually good or preferable. Even when ethics is not involved—as in killing or breaking the law—efficiency is merely one among many factors to consider in a given action, undertaking, or (in this case) technological invention. The mere fact that X is efficient tells us nothing whatsoever about its goodness, and thus nothing whatsoever about whether we should endorse it, bless it, or incorporate it into our lives.

Your solution, then, is ignorance.

I don’t take your meaning.

You want to be ignorant about ChatGPT, language models, and artificial intelligence.

Not at all. What would make you think that?

Because you refuse to use it.

I don’t own or use guns. But I’m not ignorant about them.

Back to killing.

Sure. But your arguments keep failing. I’m not ignorant about A.I. I just don’t spend my time submitting questions to it or having “conversations” with it. I have better things to do.

Like what?

Like pretty much anything.

But you’re an academic! We academics should be knowledgeable about such things!

There you go again. I am knowledgeable. My not wasting time on ChatGPT has nothing to do with knowledge or lack thereof.

But shouldn’t your knowledge be more than theoretical? Shouldn’t you learn to use it well?

What does “well” mean? I’m unpersuaded that modifier applies.

How could you know?

By thinking! By reading and thinking. Try it sometime.

That’s uncalled for.

You’re right. I take it back.

What if there are in fact ways to use AI well?

I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?

You’re being glib again.

This time I’m not. You’re acting like the aim of life, including academic life, is to be on the cutting edge. But it’s not. Besides, the cutting edge is always changing. It’s a moving target. I’m an academic because I’m a dinosaur. My days are spent doing things Plato and Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas and John Calvin spend their days doing. Reading, writing, teaching. I don’t use digital technology in the first or the third. I use it in the second for typing. That’s it. I don’t live life on the edge. I live life moving backwards. The older, the better. If, by some miracle, the latest greatest tech gadgetry not only makes itself ubiquitous and unavoidable in scholarly life but also materially and undeniably improves it, without serious tradeoffs—well, then I’ll find out eventually. But I’m not holding my breath.

Whether or not you stick your head in the sand, your students are using ChatGPT and its competitors. Along with your colleagues, your friends, your pastors, your children.

That may well be true. I don’t deny it. If it is true, it’s cause for lament, not capitulation.

What?

I mean: Just because others are using it doesn’t mean I should join them. (If all your friends jumped off a bridge…)

But you’re an educator! How am I not getting through to you?

I’m as clueless as you are.

If everyone’s using it anyway, and it’s already being incorporated into the way writers compose their essays and professors create their assignments and students compose their papers and pastors compose their sermons and—

I. Don’t. Care. You have yet to show me why I should.

Okay. Let me be practical. Your students’ papers are already using ChatGPT.

Yes, I’m aware.

So how are you going to show them how to use it well in future papers?

I’m not.

What about their papers?

They won’t be writing them.

Come again?

No more computer-drafted papers written from home in my classes. I’m reverting to in-class handwritten essay exams. No prompts in advance. Come prepared, having done the reading. Those, plus the usual weekly reading quizzes.

You can’t be serious.

Why not?

Because that’s backwards.

Exactly! Now you’re getting it.

No, I mean: You’re moving backwards. That’s not the way of the future.

What is this “future” you speak of? I’m not acquainted.

That’s not the way society is heading. Not the way the academy is heading.

So?

So … you’ll be left behind.

No doubt!

Shouldn’t you care about that?

Why would I?

It makes you redundant.

I fail to see how.

Your teaching isn’t best practices!

Best practices? What does that mean? If my pedagogy, ancient and unsexy though it may be, results in greater learning for my students, then by definition it is the best practice possible. Or at least better practice by comparison.

But we’re past all that. That’s the way we used to do things.

Some things we used to do were better than the way we do them now.

That’s what reactionaries say.

That’s what progressives say.

Exactly.

Come on. You’re the one resorting to slogans. I’m the one joking. Quality pedagogy isn’t political in this sense. Are you really wanting to align yourself with Silicon Valley trillionaires? With money-grubbing corporations? With ed-tech snake-oil salesmen? Join the rebels! Join the dissidents! Join the Butlerian Jihad!

Who’s resorting to rhetoric now?

Mine’s in earnest though. I mean it. And I’m putting my money where my mouth is. By not going with the flow. By not doing what I’m told. By resisting every inch the tech overloads want to colonize in my classroom.

Okay. But seriously. You think you can win this fight?

Not at all.

Wait. What?

…

You don’t think you can win?

Of course not. Who said anything about winning?

Why fight then?

Likelihood of winning is not the deciding factor. This is the long defeat, remember. The measure of action is not success but goodness. The question for my classroom is therefore quite simple. Does it enrich teaching and learning, or does it not? Will my students’ ability to read, think, and speak with wisdom, insight, and intellectual depth increase as a result, or not? I have not seen a single argument that suggests using, incorporating, or otherwise introducing my students to ChatGPT will accomplish any of these pedagogical goals. So long as that is the case, I will not let propaganda, money, paralysis, confusion, or pressure of any kind—cultural, social, moral, administrative—persuade me to do what I believe to be a detriment to my students.

You must realize it’s inevitable.

What’s “it”?

You know.

I do. But I reject the premise. As I already said, I’m not going to win. But my classroom is not the world. It’s a microcosm of a different world. That’s the vision of the university I’m willing to defend, to go to the mat for. Screens rule in the world, but not in my little world. We open physical books. I write real words on a physical board. We speak to one another face to face, about what matters most. No laptops open. No smartphones out. No PowerPoint slides. Just words, words, words; texts, texts, texts; minds, minds, minds. I admit that’s not the only good way to teach. But it is a good way. And I protect it with all my might. I’m going to keep protecting it, as long as I’m able.

So you’re not a reactionary. You’re a fanatic.

Names again!

This time I’m the one kidding. I get it. But you’re something of a Luddite.

I don’t reject technology. I reject the assumption that technology created this morning should ipso facto be adopted this evening as self-evidently essential to human flourishing, without question or interrogation or skepticism or sheer time. Give me a hundred years, or better yet, five hundred. By then I’ll get back to you on whether A.I. is good for us. Not to mention good for education and scholarship.

You don’t have that kind of time.

Precisely. That’s why Silicon Valley boosterism is so foolish and anti-intellectual. It’s a cause for know-nothings. It presumes what it cannot know. It endorses what it cannot perceive. It disseminates what it cannot take sufficient time to test. It simply hands out digital grenades at random, hoping no one pulls the pin. No wonder it always blows up in their face.

We’ve gotten off track, and you’ve started sermonizing.

I’m known to do that.

Should we stop?

I think so. You don’t want to see me when I really get going. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

A blurb, a reply, a review

A quick link round-up.

First, I neglected to mention the publication, earlier this spring, of a posthumous work by Robert Jenson titled The Trinity and the Spirit: Two Essays from Christian Dogmatics. Almost forty years ago Jenson collaborated on a remarkable multivolume work called Christian Dogmatics, coauthored with his fellow Lutherans Carl Braaten, Gerhard Forde, Philip Hefner, Paul Sponheim, and Hans Schwartz. The folks at Fortress pulled out Jenson’s contributions to that work and made a book out of them. My endorsement is on the back cover (alongside Bruce Marshall’s); here’s the full blurb:

Robert Jenson's contribution to the multi-authored Christian Dogmatics in the early 1980s has always been the most underrated part of his corpus, for the simple reason that few readers ever happened upon it. This stand-alone republication is therefore a gift to all readers of Jenson, whether seasoned veterans or those new to this great American theologian. The whole work is worthy of one's attention, but the section on the Holy Spirit is alone worth the price of the book. The ongoing reception of Jenson's thought will be bolstered by having his full pneumatology ready to hand, and the church will be edified once more by a pastor, scholar, and doctor of the sacred page whose love for the Lord and for his bride suffused all that he said and did, to the very end of his life.

What are you waiting for? Go buy the book!

Second: In the latest issue of First Things, both Ephraim Radner and Carl Trueman have written letters responding to my essay two issues ago on “Theology in Division.” The letters are generous and thoughtful. I do my best to reply in kind.

Third: My review of R. B. Jamieson and Tyler R. Wittman’s Biblical Reasoning: Christological and Trinitarian Rules for Exegesis in the International Journal of Systematic Theology is available to read in an early online version. Here’s the money graf:

The book is a triumph. It is a work of rich scholarship that remains accessible, stylishly written, spiritually nourishing, even devotional, while offering useful practical guidance for serious readers to avoid error and seek the living God in Holy Scripture. It does so not only by talking about the text but by exegeting it, with attentive care, on just about every page. One can only hope this book will become assigned reading in seminaries until such time as historical criticism releases its chokehold on the hermeneutical imaginations of pastors and scholars alike.

That comes about halfway through the review. I do raise some critical questions later, but this summary judgment is the relevant takeaway. Another book for you to buy.

Speaking of which. A friend alerted me to the fact that my second book—The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context—is available on Amazon for under $17. It’s usually $50! Nab a copy while it’s cheap, y’all! Bundle it with Wittman/Jamieson and Jenson. Come to think of it, that trifecta wouldn’t be unfitting…

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.