The Eucharist: ceremony, doctrine, and the real presence

Following up on my previous reflection on finding Christ in the church—which is to say, in the Eucharist—I want to ask four questions in this post:

1. Is every attempt at celebrating the Eucharist valid—that is, just in virtue of making the attempt?

2. If not, then what constitutes eucharistic validity?

3. What is the relationship between the ritual ceremonial features of eucharistic celebration and a given tradition’s eucharistic doctrine?

4. Is it in any way wrong—offensive, unkind, or uncharitable—to suggest that those traditions and churches that deny the real presence in their celebrations of the Eucharist are in fact correct about their own celebrations, if not about others’?

The first question is easily answered: No. That is, merely the desire to celebrate the Eucharist is not and could never be sufficient as a criterion for valid celebration. I am not aware of any Christian tradition that says so; it is ecumenical and perhaps unanimous in church history that more is required than the sheer intention to do it right. You’ve also got to, you know, do it right.

How to do it right, though? This second question raises a whole host of further questions. I like to put these questions to my ministry majors, most of whom come from non-denominational Evangelical backgrounds. They include but are not limited to:

• Who can celebrate, that is, preside at the Supper?

• Is ordination a condition of celebrating? Is baptism? Is belief in Christ?

• What elements must be used?

• What prayers, if any, must be prayed?

• What Scriptures, if any, must be read?

• What petitions, if any, must be made?

• What invocations, if any, must be uttered?

I have students who, on first blush, are willing to say that anyone may preside, any elements may be used, and no prayers or Scriptures or other ritual prescriptions are either necessary or sufficient for the meal to be validly celebrated. I know adult Christians and pastors who agree. (Above I said I knew of no Christian traditions that claimed such a thing; I know plenty of individuals who do!) Let’s say that such a position is one pole on the continuum.

The other pole is high catholic ecclesial traditions. For these, a valid Eucharist must be celebrated by a validly ordained priest—ordained, that is, by a bishop in succession from the apostles—using only precise elements (fermented wine and either leavened or unleavened bread) and following specific liturgical ritual rubrics, which require certain Scriptures, prayers, and invocations to be performed as components of a larger ritual complex, wherein symbolic deeds are just as important as the words spoken.

Naturally, a number of approaches to eucharistic celebration lie along the spectrum between these poles. You will notice, on a moment’s reflection, that the “higher” a tradition’s doctrine of what occurs in the Eucharist, the “higher” its ritual celebration of the meal. That is, the closer you are to affirming the real presence or transubstantiation, the more likely you are to seeing ordination, liturgical rubrics, and carefully orchestrated rituals as the most fitting (and, indeed, necessary) manner of celebrating the Supper. And vice versa: the further you are from affirming the real presence, the less ceremony attending your celebration of the ritual—as well as, in literal terms, the frequency with which you celebrate it, and the amount of time you set aside in public worship in order to do so.

To my third question, then, consider the following image:

This is my rough-and-ready plot graph meant to illustrate the trend I have in mind, namely, that eucharistic doctrine and ceremony are yoked together: the more of one, the more of the other; the less of one, the less of the other.

Notice that I’ve created four quadrants, and that two of them are empty. There simply aren’t large-scale Christian denominations or ecclesial traditions marked by (#1) high eucharistic ceremony wedded to low eucharistic doctrine or (#3) high eucharistic doctrine wedded to low eucharistic ceremony. It’s easy to understand why. If you believe that in this sacramental meal the living Christ, risen from the dead and reigning from heaven, is bodily present under the sign of bread and wine, then as a matter of course you will restrict its celebration to certain people (and not others), under certain conditions (and not others), by means of certain specified rituals (and not others).

On the other hand, if you believe that nothing happens to the elements—indeed, if you believe that the meal, while instituted by Jesus and important to observe, neither communicates grace to participants nor, in terms of divine action or presence, serves as the site of anything unique by comparison to other Christian practices like prayer, singing, and reading Scripture—then you will be less anxious to prescribe the who, the what, and the how of the meal’s celebration. At the outer limits, a populist form of public worship underwritten by a democratized priesthood of all believers will ultimately result in no rituals, conditions, or criteria whatsoever for the celebration of the Supper. Not only can anyone do it; they can do it whenever and wherever and however they please.

As I wrote in my first post, this is neither caricature nor slander. I’ve known people and churches that use cupcakes and soda or Cheez-its and apple juice. As I noted in the spring of 2020, the great question facing “low” churches—not all churches, mind you, for the majority of churches require at least an ordained pastor and a gathering of believers in person—was whether to encourage or discourage believers from self-administering Communion under lockdown. Alas, nearly all such congregations not only encouraged self-administration and “private celebration” (sine populo!) but presupposed without question that to do so was both possible and salutary.

For this reason, among others, my students (including the future ministers among them) take for granted that I, a layperson alone at home, streaming Sunday worship from my couch or bed, may and ought to rummage around in my pantry for plausibly suitable elements to administer to myself while the people on my laptop screen celebrate the Supper. Perhaps this strikes you as a beautiful adaptation of God’s people to the digital age, whether in extremis (under conditions of a global pandemic) or in ordinary circumstances. Either way, that is not how it strikes me, nor how it would have struck any premodern Christian, including Protestants.

Be that as it may, the point here is that “low” eucharistic doctrine underlies this “low” approach to celebration. And that doctrine teaches: nothing happens. That is, there is no eucharistic miracle, there is no consecration, there is no real presence, there is no transubstantiation. These are symbols; not less, but also not more. God instituted these symbols and therefore they are important in the life of the church. But they are not sacramental in the superstitious sense; they are not (eyes roll, hands wave) the body and blood of Christ; they are not changed. They are food and drink and remain so. Hence the relaxed approach to their observance.

We come, then, to the last of my four questions. Is it unbecoming to agree with churches that deny the real presence that their celebrations of the Lord’s Supper are merely symbolic? I do not see how it is. It is an odd sort of imposition to inform Christian traditions that explicitly reject the doctrine of eucharistic change that God, in spite of their states belief and practice, changes the elements anyway. They don’t ask him to, and they don’t believe he does it. Even if God were willing to grant their petition, surely they have to ask?

I hope my tone doesn’t sound facetious. It’s anything but. When I talk about the theology of the Eucharist with low-church folks a few things tend to occur, usually in conjunction:

1. General reaffirmed agreement about the propriety of “low” eucharistic ceremony, i.e., approval of few or no restrictions on who can celebrate or how.

2. General openness toward a “higher” view of eucharistic doctrine, up to and including a full-bore Lutheran or Orthodox or Catholic view of the real presence. (John 6 all by itself does a lot of work here.)

3. A wary sense of unease or offense at the notion that #1 and #2 don’t or can’t go together, especially the implication (logically entailed) that churches whose teaching and practice overtly repudiate the real presence do not enjoy the real presence in their eucharistic celebrations.

4. A vague and sometimes debilitating anxiety that a believer in quadrant #4 who wants the real presence may need to join a tradition in quadrant #2 to find it.

To be clear, the first two of these come joined at the hip, and then the next two become options at a kind of ecclesial-spiritual-doctrinal fork in the road. Because the fourth option is so existentially threatening, the third is more common; but then, most people, being honest with themselves, can admit the discrepancy that lies at its heart. Which leaves them stuck if number four is a nonstarter.

The upshot of all this, for my purposes in this post, is fourfold.

First, not everyone believes in the real presence. It is therefore not an unkindness, either from a “low” or from a “high” perspective, to suggest that (at a minimum) certain attempts at celebrating the Lord’s Supper do not enjoy or realize the real presence. Once, years ago, I was attending a church in which the Supper was being celebrated. Something was said about the body and blood of Christ. A child near me (not mine) asked a minister near him whether the bread and cup really were Jesus’s body and blood. She laughed and told him, “No, it’s just crackers and grape juice.”

(Old Flannery is turning over in her grave.)

Second, doctrine and practice go together. Both theologically and practically, “high” doctrine (=real presence) requires “high” ceremony (=ordination, rubrics, prayers, etc.). Likewise “low” doctrine always and everywhere involves “low” ceremony. This is a matter of description and prescription alike: the one because the other. Christian division makes the connection here crystal clear; no one is in disagreement about the meta-point, only about which quadrant is the right one.

Third, low-church traditions cannot bootstrap themselves into “high” eucharistic doctrine. It can’t be done. To move from memorialism to real presence necessitates massive doctrinal, liturgical, pastoral, and ecclesiological transformation: in effect, a comprehensive reversal of the many Christian revolutions initiated in the sixteenth century. To do so would mean moving wholesale from quadrant #4 to quadrant #2. But that would be to “revert” from low to high, from biblicist to confessional, from congregationalist to episcopal, from evangelical to catholic. It would be to change traditions. Traditions don’t change in that way, though. Either they die or they (their members) join some other, preexisting tradition. There’s no third way here.

Fourth, subjective desire alone cannot change the elements. I’ve known more than a few folks, whether friends or students, who accept what I’ve laid out here yet who remain dissatisfied—stuck in the third “option” I outlined above. What they resolve to do is cut the Gordian knot through sheer force of will. That is, they choose to believe, in spite of their church’s teaching and practice, that the elements of the Supper in which they partake are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Even though no rituals are observed, even though relevant prayers are not offered, even though anyone at all might be presiding, even though the person presiding might say out loud that these are nothing more than symbols—nevertheless, the individual in question chooses to believe that, at least for him or her, the elements have been consecrated; that they communicate grace; that in them Christ himself is really and truly present: body, blood, soul, divinity.

There is a grave irony in this posture, understandable though it may be at the emotional level. It is a kind of private magic. It turns the old Protestant accusation against the Mass (“hocus pocus,” hoc est corpus meum) on its head. I alone, in the confines of my own skull, have the power, through nothing but mental intention, to make (an attempt at observing) the Lord’s Supper into a valid celebration of the blessed sacrament of Christ’s real presence—at least for me, the individual communicant.

Surely I am not alone in wanting to avoid this posture at all costs. No such power exists. Either God in Christ instituted the Eucharist to be the perpetual sacrament of his real presence, his body and blood, or he did not. Either the meal rightly celebrated makes Christ available in that way or it does not. Either we celebrate it accordingly or we do not.

Regardless of one’s answer (or the answer), as the illustration earlier showed, there really isn’t a middle ground. The church is the locus of this marriage of doctrine and practice, not the individual. Which is why, in my original post, I framed the whole matter with a single question phrased in two ways: Where can I find Jesus? Where can I receive the Eucharist? Each of which turns out to be synonymous and therefore convertible with a third question that, for so many pilgrims of faith, governs both: Where can I find the church, the body and bride of Christ?

As I insisted there, so I repeat now: It’s a worthwhile question, one of the most important you can ever ask in this life. Even in the confusions of ecclesial division and brokenness, it’s worth pursuing with the utmost seriousness.

Enchantment redux

Sigh—Alan has bested me. Let me try that again.

It’s true that I was conflating enchantment in general with Christian enchantment, in order to clarify and sympathetically illumine the general trend toward spiritual re-enchantment on the part of Christians (among others). Enchantment per se is not equivalent to or coterminous with a Christian doctrine of creation: stipulated.

At the same time, I don’t find it useful to say that Christianity is disenchanting, though I agree that the claim has a long and venerable pedigree, for the same reason I don’t find it useful to say that Christianity is demythologizing, though I understand why it is an attractive proposition. Christianity from the beginning is interested—discursively and performatively—not so much in disenchanting the various purported beings and rituals that populate the all too porous reality of daily human life as it is in dethroning it. Early Christian apologetics and polemics are indeed at pains to unveil the object of pagan sacrifices—as demons, though, not as fictions. The bedrock assumption of exorcism, inasmuch as exorcism encapsulates the entire problematic of enchantment, is that the pagans are absolutely right: the world is a dark and terrifying place in which humans are constantly harassed, assaulted, and tormented by numberless, nameless hostile intelligences that cannot be stopped or silenced apart from the name and the power of Jesus Christ.

I grant entirely that part of this triumphal march of dethroning ostensibly rival powers opposed to the God of the gospel is the constant exposure and ridicule of falsehoods concerning the gods, and that the accumulating effect of this rolling process could well be described as disenchantment—culminating, perhaps, in the elimination of pagan sacrifice altogether. Yet can the Middle Ages (not to mention the early modern period!) be matched in its thoroughgoing spookiness? Put differently, and more technically, I reject the view that Weber’s Entzauberung is (a) the logical cultural endpoint of Christ’s triumph over paganism, (b) necessarily materially related to the “disenchanting” effects of the church’s discursive, liturgical, and political dethronement of rival (but all too real) gods, (c) to be welcomed theologically by contemporary Christians, or (d) any combination of the above.

To be clear, I don’t see Alan as affirming any of these. Rather, it is their confluence and imposition via secularized Western culture as unimpeachable public social norms that recent movements toward a rediscovered “enchanted cosmos” are opposing and seeking to move beyond. In a word: If the world as a matter of a fact is porous, we should (a) say so, (b) live like it, and (c) adopt Christian strategies for faithful living accordingly. Whereas if the official story is true and the world is not porous—to spirits or angels or demons or heaven or fairies or magic or aliens or whatever—then likewise we should say so and (keep) living like it, etc.

Re-enchantment, by Christians but even by others, is then an attempt to move toward reality as it is, not toward reality as modernity construes it. It may well be a scarier world to inhabit, but better to know it and do something about it than to live in denial. (This is a word for the church, by the way, not just for the individual, insofar as preaching and teaching and pastoral care today tend toward the therapeutic or functionally atheistic, thus presupposing and reinforcing the tacit perspective that parishioners are already being bombarded with each and every day.)

That, at least, is my attempt at writing what I should have written the first time, namely, my sense of what the overarching re-enchantment trend is and why I think so many Christians are, reasonably enough, latching onto it.

Enchantment

I completely understand Alan’s lack of interest in and general nonchalance toward “enchantment” and “re-enchantment.” His warnings are well taken, and his ambivalence is warranted, and his charity toward those for whom the concept or phenomenon is important is appreciated.

I have a review of Rod Dreher’s new book on the same theme coming out next month in Christianity Today, so I won’t say much more here except the following.

There are many faddish, superficial, and a-Christian ways of deploying “enchantment” as a term or penumbra of loosely connected ideas, feelings, even vibes. But let me offer a modest definition of the term in the way that I use it, interpret it, and (I think) find it employed by others—from professors to pastors to laypeople.

“Disenchantment” names a false apprehension of reality. Imposed by the ambient secular culture, it proposes the world as fundamentally meaningless, chaotic, and godless, and therefore inert or plastic before the constructions and manipulations of rational man. We are alone; miracles are myths; angels and demons are fictions; dreams and visions are disclosive of nothing but our own psyches; numinous encounters are either harmless or signs of a broken or sick mind. Man is the measure of all things and the world is what we make of it. Meaning is imposed and autonomy is the first and last law of reality.

Given this stipulated definition, enchantment or re-enchantment is its inversion: a true apprehension of reality as it actually is: the fallen but good handiwork of a loving Creator; the recipient of his lasting care and unfailing providence; the medium of astonishing beauty; the impress of his grace; the theater of glory as well as of suffering; the audience of the incarnation; the vehicle for the eventual final epiphany of God become flesh. Here, in this cosmos of the Spirit, truth is discovered and disclosed, communication lies at the heart of things, and the grain of reality is compassion and mercy, not brute violence. The numinous is not psychotic, it is to be expected—if not to be sought, since this world is the haunt not only of angels but also of demons. You and I live our small and out of the way lives as bit parts in the grand drama of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, the triumph of the former secured but not yet manifest. Join which side you will.

In my experience, people talking about or yearning for enchantment feel belittled, bedeviled, and beaten down by disenchantment. They feel condescended to, coerced into pretending that life is nothing but atoms and energy, when they know in their bones the open secret that this world is charged with the grandeur of God. They don’t want to invite evil spirits into their homes. They just don’t want to be made to feel crazy for believing in what cannot be seen. And given that Christianity is by definition a faith in what cannot be seen, it seems straightforward that disenchantment is, at a minimum, non- or anti-Christian and that enchantment is apt to reality, and therefore to the gospel, in a way that disenchantment is not. Put differently, disenchantment makes believing in Christ and following him harder, because every given social norm screams that it’s irrational, insane, and masochistic. But we don’t want a social imaginary built on the lie that there is no God, that this world is all there is, that any hint or echo or sense or experience of the invisible, the mystical, the transcendent is nothing but the mind’s projection of daily life onto the screen of eternity.

Hence the turn to re-enchantment. The foregoing is by no means a full-bore apologia. But it is a sympathetic explanation and a defining of terms that, I think, makes some sense of the trend, such as it is. Where it leads, if anything, is anyone’s guess.

Some news: Calvin, Comment, & sabbatical

Some professional news to share; three items to be exact:

1. Earlier this year I was awarded a Teacher-Scholar Grant by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. The grant is called “Vital Worship, Vital Preaching” and runs from May 1, 2024, to May 1, 2025. My project is the research for my next book, Technology: For the Care of Souls. Worship is the locus and gravitational center for practical Christian questions about technology, not least what is permissible or useful in the liturgy and why. I’m grateful to be supported by Calvin as I pursue these questions.

2. Recently Comment magazine announced a slate of twelve new Contributing Editors, of whom I am one. The others are Amber Lapp, Angel Adams Parham, Brandon Vaidyanathan, Christine Emba, Daniel Bezalel Richardsen, Elizabeth Oldfield, Jennifer Banks, John Witvliet, L. M. Sacasas, Louis Kim, and Luke Bretherton. I’m honored to be counted among them. Last month we gathered at the glorious Laity Lodge (just three hours south of Abilene) together with the entire Comment editorial team, along with regular contributors, stakeholders, and Cardus folks. It was wonderful. Check out the new Manifesto guiding the vision of the magazine under editor Anne Snyder. Subscribe today!

3. I am currently on research leave at ACU. The sabbatical covers both semesters in the academic year—really, from early May 2024 through August 2025, it amounts to sixteen months outside the classroom. This was made possible by the generosity of both ACU and dozens of donors, not to mention the support of my chair, dean, and provost. I was busy with family and vacation this summer, so it hasn’t felt like the sabbatical had truly begun until the last three weeks. It’s a relief, to say the least. Teaching a 4/4 is not a death sentence, as I’ve tirelessly repeated; but it’s still taxing. As I said above, this year I’m preparing a manuscript, due to Lexham next August, on the challenges of digital technology for church leadership, pastoral ministry, and public worship. Besides my normal writing for Christianity Today and other outlets, three-fourths of my working hours are currently devoted to reading and thinking about technology and related topics.

That, and doing publicity and podcasts for my two new books coming out next month (in 23 and 45 days, respectively!). It’s a busy time, but a very, very good one. I’m thankful.

My latest: an essay and response in Restoration Quarterly

An essay of mine is featured in the latest issue of Restoration Quarterly (66:3). In fact, the entire issue is organized around it. Let me give a little back story.

Two years ago on the blog I wrote a series of reflections on the past, present, and future of churches of Christ. They got a lot of traction around this neck of the woods, and James Thompson, the editor of RQ, asked me to synthesize and elaborate the posts into a single essay. The result is called “Churches of Christ: Once Catholic, Now Evangelical” (pp. 133–44). It’s preceded by a brief reflection by Thompson on the “almost Catholic” ecclesiology of churches of Christ (pp. 129–32), then followed by three replies:

• “A Response to Brad East” by Wendell Willis (pp. 145–51)

• “Churches of Christ: Always Evangelical, Still Catholic” by John Mark Hicks (pp. 152–58)

• “A Response to Brad East” by Paul Watson (pp. 159–62)

I in turn wrote a response to the responses (pp. 163–69). All around a good time was had by all. My response is followed by a proper scholarly article on the New Testament (authored, again, by Thompson), then book reviews. As it happens, a review of my own book, The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context, is the first of this section.

It sort of feels like the Brad East Issue. I’m honored, humbled, and a little embarrassed.

Nevertheless it was a pleasure to engage such serious and pressing issues in a public forum with such thoughtful and generous thinkers and churchmen. My only regret is that while RQ does have a website it doesn’t have an obvious or convenient way to access current issues online or in digital form. Back issues are catalogued in ATLA but this one won’t be there for a while, at least from what I can tell.

I’m not in a position to share the whole issue with folks, but if you email me, I’d be willing to share a PDF of my essay and response. I’ll be curious to hear what folks make of my case, both regarding the absorption of churches of Christ by and into American Evangelicalism and regarding the precipitous institutional decline of the movement. The tone of the pieces isn’t doom and gloom, but it is quite sober and, if readers take it seriously, sobering. Which it should be, if I’m right.

My latest: on the late Albert Borgmann, in HHR

This morning The Hedgehog Review published an essay of mine called “The Gift of Reality.” It’s an extended introduction to and exposition of the life and writings of the late Albert Borgmann, including a review of his last book, published posthumously last January. Here’s a sample paragraph from the middle of the piece:

At the same time, while Borgmann may have been a critic of liberalism, he argued that “it should be corrected and completed rather than abandoned.” In this he reads as a less polemical Christopher Lasch or Wendell Berry, fellow democrats whose political vision—consisting among other things of family, fidelity, fortitude, piety, honor, honest work, local community, neighborliness, and thrift—is likewise invested in preserving and respecting reality. Such a vision is simultaneously homeless on the national stage and the richest fruit of the American political tradition.

Click here to read the whole thing.

My latest: on pastors’ reading habits, in Sapientia

I’ve got an essay in Sapientia called “The Reading Lives of Pastors.” The prompt was to reflect on Pope Francis’s “Letter on the Role of Literature in Formation” and, more broadly, on why pastors should (if they should) include fiction and poetry as part of their regular reading diet. After clarifying at the outset that literature does not per se make you a better person, I write the following:

The fact of literature is in general a human good, in the sense that it is a sign of an advanced culture: symbol, narrative, myth, technology, writing, literacy, communication—these are to be celebrated, granting their capacity to be bent to any number of ends. But the act of wide reading in literature in and of itself entails nothing at all about a person. The voracious reader may be either selfish or selfless, vain or humble, vicious or virtuous, religious or secular, joyful or melancholy, full of life or obsessed with death, a treasured friend or a despised enemy, a cosmopolitan or a provincial, a sage or a boor. Hitler and Stalin may not have been men of letters, but they had men of letters for followers and apologists. The list of wicked writers and artists—who abused women, abandoned children, and passed in silence over the suffering of countless victims—is too long to recount.

It is a difficult lesson to accept, but learning and goodness are not synonymous or coterminous. More of one does not necessarily lead to more of the other. They are neither directly nor inversely related. The desire for a cleaner, clearer correspondence between them is understandable, but utterly belied by the facts. Ordinary experience is a trustworthy teacher: Are the holiest people you know the smartest, the best educated, the most widely read?

Click here to read the whole thing.

Writing without a platform

Is it possible? That’s what I’m wondering.

I can be a moralistic scold about social media—I’m aware. I’m also aware that, for many writers, social media feels like the one and only way to reach, much less build, an audience; to make a name for oneself in a time when anyone on earth can publish millions of words and just about no one pays for the privilege to read them.

I myself, for a time, benefited from social media. I was on Twitter from 2013 to 2022, with maximal usage coming in the span of years from 2015 to 2020. (Those dates are … interesting.) As it happens, I was ABD and dissertating from fall 2014 through spring 2017, then a newly hired professor starting later that fall. In other words, my Twitter usage peaked when (a) I was spending many hours daily staring at a laptop screen and (b) I was trying to get my life as a junior scholar and public writer off the ground. I got a handful of early writing gigs through Twitter and I made many more personal contacts through it, some of whom I still count as friends, colleagues, or nodes in my professional network.

That’s a long way of saying: I don’t have the luxury of strutting around on the moral high ground, looking down at folks building their platforms through X, IG, Substack, and YouTube. I did the very same thing, albeit to a lesser degree, and it undeniably helped my career, above all my career as a writer.

Hence the question. Is it possible, today, to write, to be a writer, without a platform?

A few thoughts.

First, credentials play a role. I was just telling an editor the other day that the academy is a backdoor into publishing books. My PhD opens doors. That’s a fact. Weirdly enough, since academic books aren’t bestsellers, it’s easier for me to creep my way into popular publishing than it is for someone who only wants to write popular books, since he or she has to make good from the jump. Or before the jump, in fact, through amassing followers and fans via “socials.”

Second, gender plays a role. I’ve written about this before, but the politics of women Christian writers was already complex before the rise of the internet and social media. Now it’s positively Byzantine. If you have a PhD, that’s one thing. If you’re employed in the industry—at a magazine, say, or at a publishing house—that’s another. If you just want to be a writer, though, your options for finding an audience and outlets are limited. If, further, you do not have a clear denominational or political tribe; and if, still further, you are not a culture warrior; and if, still further, you are not willing to post pictures of and share private information about your husband and children (assuming that you have them and that they are photogenic)—the circle just keeps getting narrower and narrower. I know exactly one contemporary female Christian writer who “broke through” without credentials, institutional home, tribal affiliation, or online platform, including Twitter. Otherwise one or more of these factors invariably determine the likelihood not only of getting written work into the world but of a sufficiently large audience finding it.

Third, expectations play a role. Almost no one makes an actual full-time living as a writer. Outside of those rare authors whose names we all know and who sell millions of books, writers either have a day job, or depend on a spouse’s income, or hustle like a maniac, or fundraise/crowdfund, or hit the speaker circuit, or live hand to mouth as a starving artist. Or they did one or more of these things for many years, probably decades, before reaching a threshold to just be able to pay their bills. This is not unjust. It’s just the way it is, and ever was it thus. Anger or resentment at lack of remuneration for the writing life is both a professional nonstarter and the product of a fantasy. A writer’s first rule is to live in the real world, and the real world doesn’t care about writers or what they write. The sooner one learns that, the sooner one can get started with what matters: the writing! Isn’t that what we’d be doing anyway, even if we knew we’d never get paid a dime?

Finally, the industry plays a role. This is the part where we get to complain. It’s common knowledge that trade presses use social media metrics as a gatekeeping mechanism. In plain speech, they ask first-time authors how many followers they have. If the answer is “a few thousand,” then they say “thanks for playing” and politely shut the door. If the answer is “zilch, because I’m not on social media,” then they laugh hysterically before slamming the door. (You can still hear them on the other side, doubled over in tears.) This is, it goes without saying, a new phenomenon, since social media is a new phenomenon. And writers eager to break through have followed these incentives to their logical conclusion: drumming up an online following by every means possible: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Spotify, Substack, Threads—you name it, they’re there. Posting, re-posting, replying, commenting, replying again, sharing, re-sharing, streaming, recording in the car, recording on the run, recording with the kids, walk and talks, live tweets, and more. Always on, extremely online, creating memes, mocking memes, revising memes: keeping the content coming, letting the spice flow. And eventually, with a pinch of success come subscription deals, and after these come sponsorships, and after these come ads. And before you know it, you’re celebrating the free swag you got in the mail or reading an on-air advertisement for skin cream.

How’d you end up here?

That’s the question you should be asking. That’s the question I’m trying to pose in my repeated missives against social media. It’s why, although I’m anti-anti-Substack, and I’m no longer stridently anti-podcast, I’m still hesitant about the knock-on effects of podcasts’ ubiquity, and on certain days, if I’m honest, I’m anti-anti-anti-Substack.

What I mean is: Substack is an ecosystem, and one of the ways it forms both writers and readers is to make every writer a digital entrepreneur hawking a product. Further, it encourages a relationship between writer and readership on the model of celebrity fandom. (After all, you gotta give the people what they want.)

Put these together and the model becomes that of the influencer. The podcasting live-streaming YouTuber with a newsletter and a Patreon is a single genus—the hustling entrepreneurial influencer with fans in the hundreds, thousands, or more—of which Christians, including writers, become only one more species. They are different from Kim Kardashian and MrBeast only in degree, not in kind.

I’ve written elsewhere that there are wise, thoughtful people doing this in ways I admire, in service to the church. They’re digital lectors taking the gospel to an entire generation of (to be frank; I love them) uncatechized functional illiterates addicted to digital technology, and God be praised they’re finding a hearing. I don’t retract what I wrote. But we are fooling ourselves if we don’t step back and see clearly what is happening, what the nature of the dynamic is. Writers are being co-opted by the affordances of newsletters, social media, and audio/visual recording and streaming in ways that corrode the essence of good writing as well as the vocation of the writer itself.

A writer is not an influencer. To the extent that participating in any of these dynamics is necessary for a writer to get started or to get published, then by definition it can’t be avoided. But if it is necessary, we should see it as a necessary evil. Evil in the sense that it is a threat to the very thing one is seeking to serve, to indwell, celebrate, and dilate: the life of the mind, the reading life, the life of putting words on the page that are apt to reality and true to human nature and beautiful in their form and honoring to God. Exhaustively maintaining an online platform inhibits and enervates the attention, the focus, the literacy, the patience, the quietness, and the prayers that make the Christian writing life not only possible, but good.

In a word: If writing without a platform is impossible, then treat it like Wittgenstein’s ladder. Use it to get where you’re going, then kick it over once it’s done the job.

Links: three reviews, three podcasts

I’ve fallen behind in my link updates, partly because of busyness, partly because the Micro.blog is so much easier for such things. But! Here are three podcasts I appeared on in the last few months, followed by a round-up of three new reviews of The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context.

Podcasts:

• Holy C of E, “A Catholic View of Scripture” (July 1), available on Spotify and Apple. Lot of high Anglican content here.

• The London Lyceum, “The Doctrine of Scripture” (July 10), available on Spotify and Apple. A rich conversation about Protestant approaches to and questions about Scripture.

• Speakeasy Theology, “The Scandal of Theology” (August 12), available on Apple and Substack. A long, meandering, and wonderful chat with Chris Green about Robert Jenson, wicked theologians, and original sin. To be continued.

Reviews:

• Joel B. Green, Interpretation 78:2 (2024): 174–75. Green writes that

this book serves both as a charitable and analytical reading of three distinct approaches to the use of the Bible in theology and as a formidable proposal for the importance of one’s understanding of the church for one’s interpretation of Scripture. The result is a welcome contribution to theological hermeneutics and to ongoing discussion of theological interpretation of Scripture. For those who imagine that their theological engagement with the Bible proceeds from text to doctrine, East offers an important corrective.

• Keith Stanglin, Calvin Theological Journal 59:1 (2024): 191–93. Stanglin writes: “The excursus alone, with implications that transcend Yoder’s case, is a rather full and careful account of how” to engage work produced by Christians and other writers who, while alive, perpetrated great evil against others. Stanglin concludes: “Through it all, East effectively illuminates a significant link that sometimes remains obscure in theological discourse,” namely between ecclesiology and bibliology.

• John Kern, Restoration Quarterly 66:3 (2024): 184–85. Kern writes:

Ultimately, this book is an exemplary work in contemporary systematic theology. It is historically attuned to the nuances of the figures that it treats. Even so, it evaluates their strengths and weaknesses, all while offering clear paths for bringing the best of their proposals together for a fuller vision. East never loses his constructive edge even while simply trying to get the figures right on their own terms. Even more, he does all of this while keeping his eye on the primary objective: to account for the divisions found among practitioners of [theological interpretation of Scripture]. He accomplishes this and so much more. Even tracing the lineage of these three theologians from Karl Barth’s influence would have been contribution sufficient to warrant a monograph, but East has found multiple ways to carry this conversation forward. The book is necessary reading for theologians and biblical scholars alike for the way it shows a point at once simple and deep: how one understands the church impacts how one understands the Bible as Scripture. It might not ultimately unify the differences between the different ecclesiological paradigms for bibliology, but East has helped theology in a major way by disambiguating the conflicts, showing where they truly originate.

Where can I find Jesus? Where can I receive the Eucharist?

I take these two questions to be (a) the most urgent theological questions one can ask and (b) synonymous. They came to mind as I read Jeff Reimer’s essay published in Comment last year, titled “How Not to Be a Schismatic.”

That was more than eight months ago, and for eight months I’ve been working up the nerve to read the essay. I expected it to be painful, and it was. It was like looking in a mirror. I knew Jeff’s wilderness wanderings would be similar to my own, and I frankly didn’t want to put myself through the ringer.

I did, though, and the first thing to say is that the essay is beautiful. I can’t wait to assign it to students and share it with friends. It puts into words so much that so many people I know have gone through or are currently going through. It’s a melancholy story of genuine spiritual suffering, even if he wouldn’t want to put it that way. It is a special kind of mental and emotional torture not to know where you are meant to be and to feel ecclesially homeless as a result.

The essay is also self-critical and mordantly funny; the opening bit is pitch perfect. How many young (now approaching middle age) men with a dash of theological education does Jeff speak for? Sometimes it feels like most of us, though I know that can’t be true.

Here’s the one and only critical or unpersuaded question I want to put to the essay, sourced in the one and only unsatisfied reaction I had to it.

Jeff and I agree about the blessed sacrament. The Eucharist not only communicates grace to the baptized, it is the fount and apex of the faith. It is the heart of the liturgy. It is where Christ meets us, body and soul, in the flesh and blood of his real presence.

Jeff’s journey, like so many others, was about “finding the right church.” He ended up arriving at an uncomfortable Protestant position: in this life, there is no “right” church to find; that’s a matter of hope for the next life. So he comes round full circle, remaining in an evangelical Protestant congregation/tradition because, in the end, he just wants Jesus, and he can’t expect a historical institution run by human beings to be perfect.

Jeff is right to want Jesus. The question is where to find him. And the turn in the final part of the essay seems to me to beg the relevant question. This question is put one of two ways, as the title of this post has it: Where can I find Jesus? Where can I receive the sacrament of his body and blood? No Christian believes the answer is “anywhere you want.” Jeff doesn’t think that, nor do I. The answer also can’t be “wherever people say they have Jesus.” There are communities that truly believe they are a church but aren’t. Indeed, and by the same token, there are communities that sincerely mean to celebrate the Lord’s Supper but fail to do so.

Don’t suppose that I’m representing either sectarian or Catholic views here. This is a matter of ecumenical consensus. Ask yourself: What constitutes a faithful or successful celebration of the Eucharist? Are there any minimum conditions to be met? If there are—and it should go without saying that there are—I can point you to communities that call themselves churches that fail to meet them. Communities that celebrate without wine, or without unleavened bread, or without bread at all, or without any thought at all about the elements, or without an ordained celebrant, or without prayers, or without Scriptures, or without any ritual component whatsoever. Convert the disjunctives to conjunctions: I know of a mainstream church that invited an unbaptized non-Christian to “lead” the Supper. I’ve been present for one in which the name of Jesus wasn’t spoken, the cross went unmentioned, Scripture wasn’t read, and no prayer was offered. In all of these occasions, it hardly needs adding, the notion of the real presence was and is explicitly rejected, even laughed at and mocked.

Am I really supposed to believe that a “cupcake and Mountain Dew” Lord’s Supper, administered by oneself to oneself while home alone streaming Hillsong, is the genuine article? The question answers itself. There are failed attempts at Holy Communion. There are false churches. Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

I know that Jeff agrees with me on this. But I find that most of us—friends, colleagues, pastors, theologians—need the reminder. To say “I’ll stay where I am, because all I want is Jesus, to be fed by his body and blood” is already to presume that Jesus can be found “where I am” and that “his body and blood” are there with him, too. But for many, perhaps most, wayfarers today, that is the very question they are wondering: they don’t know the answer prior to investigating it. They aren’t trying to find the perfect church or even the “one true” church to the exclusion of all others. They just want Jesus. They therefore want to be confident that the meal they are joining is in fact the Eucharist, not a failed attempt—and since we’ve established that attempting the meal is not the same as successfully celebrating it, this is a legitimate desire that should not only be affirmed but should be able, in principle, to be fulfilled. Not with eschatological rest, but with a lack of simmering anxiety, a measure of peace that puts one’s pestering worries to bed for good.

In other words, the ecclesial journey narrated by Jeff is not an integralist fever dream, not limited to shouting commenters on Protestant apologists’ YouTube videos or to Orthodox theo bros convinced that Saint Luke was the first iconographer. Nor is it the purview merely of guys like us, theologically trained eggheads and liturgical devotees. It’s the journey of every single Christian on earth. Not to find the heavenly Jerusalem here below. Not to rest serenely in the arms of Mother Church, spotless and faultless and utterly pure and benign in all her ministrations and dogmas. Jeff is right to spurn such quests as bound to result in failure, denial, or a schismatic, sectarian spirit—wherever one lands.

No, the proper and faithful quest is to find, in one’s actual neighborhood or town, a gathering of the living body of the living Christ. You can’t have one without the other; you must have both. And since there are plenty of dead ecclesial bodies around pretending to a vitality they lack—corpses posing as Christ’s body when they have no life in them—the quest is at once necessary and universal. It belongs to all of us. Granted, it may sow doubt where there was none before: wondering, now, whether one’s church is legitimate, whether its Eucharist is valid. But it’s better than living in ignorance of the truth.

I for one want an answer to that question. I don’t expect to rest until I find it.

Catholic Jedi, Protestant Wizards

A recent visit to Orlando brought home to me how different the respective aesthetic visions of Star Wars and Harry Potter are. A thesis came to me: Jedi are Catholic and Wizards are Protestant.

By which I mean: The narrative, themes, and overall look and feel of George Lucas’s fantasy galaxy are Catholic in nature, while those of J. K. Rowling’s are Protestant. I tossed off the idea on my micro blog, but let me unfold it a bit more here.

Although Star Wars is superficially science fiction, it’s presented from the start as a fairy tale set in the distant past, featuring an orphan, a princess, and an evil empire. Everything centers around the decadence and fall of a long-regnant republic and the rise, in its place, of an empire led by a tyrant. In other words, we’re in Gibbon territory; we’re somewhere in the early medieval period. Moreover, the films are saturated with nostalgia for a lost time of peace and justice when a small religious order was allied to the republican senate. This order selected children from a young age for training and membership, required of them lifelong celibacy, and taught them an intimate relationship with an all-powerful numinous reality that binds all life together. They also gave them swords and called them knights. For a millennium they governed without serious rival, though we should assume they put down untold rebellions(!) in countless corners of the galaxy.

In a sense Lucas is merging the old Roman Republic with the Holy Roman Empire of the middle ages. A thousand years of throne and altar united in service to the common good, led by an elite of religious warriors and celibate servants who minister from a temple down the proverbial street from the senate. Jedi are Roman Catholic.

Whereas Rowling’s wizards and witches belong to the modern or even the postmodern world. Their identity and power are a secret. They, too, form a minority of elites among the wider population of muggles, but they do not rule arm in arm with parliament (even if the prime minister apparently knows about them). In brief, they choose to live anonymously in a disenchanted age, though their very existence is a living contradiction of it. Yet their invisibility cannot, by definition, rise to the level of being a sign of contradiction—except to us readers, who (like them) like disenchanted lives yet (unlike them) continue to disbelieve in magic.

It’s true that the aesthetics of Harry Potter is “high church,” but only in the way that empty cathedrals in Europe are “high church.” Oxford and Cambridge and the aura of boarding schools may feel enchanted, or perhaps enchanting, to American readers, but that says more about us than about them. Does anyone at Hogwarts pray the daily office? Is there a chapel for morning prayer? Does anyone across all seven books pray at all? (I don’t recall mention of eucharistic celebration, but I cede the question to the scholastics of fandom.)

The difference with Tolkien on this point is important: Middle-earth’s religion is everywhere and nowhere because it is another world than ours, and that was his goal—he didn’t want an ecclesiastical hierarchy as a simple mirror image of Europe. Yet Rowling’s world is ostensibly ours plus magic, while religion is nowhere to be seen. This isn’t belied by her personal faith, the theological themes of the story, or the occasional references to Scripture; these rather prove the point. She is telling a Protestant story. Her wizards are secular. No doubt some of them believe in God. But whereas magic is just there, a living and undoubted phenomenon for any student or teacher at Hogwarts, God and religion are options, presenting one among many choices, including unbelief.

Harry Potter thus lives in the wake of the Protestant revolution. He is an autonomous individual adrift in a chaotic, disenchanted, disestablished time. He must choose for himself. The robes and castles are vestiges of a world gone by, never to return. To the extent that they continue to function religiously, they bind together a literally enchanted sub-world—a magical enclave safe, for a time, from the secular world. But after seven years, he has to return to that world and live as though magic doesn’t exist. In a sense, he must live a false identity, and therefore inauthentically. (Paging existentialism.)

By contrast, the Jedi in their heyday and even in their triumphant return to glory are definitionally public figures: they live differently, they dress differently, they speak differently—they hold themselves aloof from the masses. They may occasionally produce failed recruits as well as ronin, but a Jedi in disguise is a Jedi ashamed of himself. He lives as a recluse, in exile, because of some great defeat; his proper nature is to brandish lightsaber and wield authority as if he were born for it. Which, according to the Jedi, he was.

Such, at any rate, is my half-baked theory about why Jedi are medieval Catholics and Wizards are secular Protestants. I’ll now open up the floor for questions.

It costs you nothing not to be on social media

Consider this your friendly reminder that signing up for social media is not mandatory. It costs nothing not to be on it. Life without the whole ensemble—TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and the rest—is utterly free.

In fact, it is simpler not to be on social media, inasmuch as it requires no action on your part, only inaction. If you don’t create an account, no account will be made for you. You aren’t auto-registered, the way you’re assigned a social security number or drafted in the military. You have to apply and be accepted, like a driver’s license or church membership. Fail to apply and nothing happens. And I’m here to tell you, it is a blessed nothingness.

That’s the trick with social media: nothing comes from nothing. Give it nothing and it can take nothing from you.

Supposedly, being on social media is free. But you know that’s not true. It costs you time—hours of it, in fact, each and every day. It costs you attention. It costs you the anxiety it induces. It costs you the ability to do or think about anything else when nothing exactly is demanding your focus at the moment. It costs you the ability to read for more than a few minutes at a time. It costs you the ability to write without strangers’ replies bouncing like pinballs around your head. It costs you the freedom to be ignorant and therefore free of the latest scandal, controversy, fad, meme, or figure of speech that everyone knew last week but no one will remember next week.

Thankfully, social media has no particular relationship to what is called “privilege.” It does not take money to be off social media any more than it takes money to be on it. It is not the privileged who have the freedom not to be on social media: it is everyone. Because, as I will not scruple to repeat, even at the risk of annoyance or redundancy, it costs nothing not to be on social media. And since it costs nothing for anyone, it therefore costs nothing for everyone. Unfortunately, the costs of being on social media do apply to everyone, privileged or not, which is why everyone would be better off deleting their accounts.

Imagine a world without social media. It isn’t ancient. It isn’t biblical. It’s twenty years ago. Are you old enough to remember life then? It wasn’t a hellscape, not in this respect at least. The hellscape is social media. And social media hasn’t, not yet, become a badge of “digital citizenship” required by law of every man, woman, and child, under penalty of fine or loss of employment. Until then, so long as it’s free, do the right thing and stay off—or, if you’re already on, get off first and then stay off.

Here’s the good news, but tell me if you’ve heard it before: It won’t cost you a thing.

Theological Amnesia: dreaming a book to write in my dotage

I remain enamored with Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia.

By way of reminder, it’s an 850-page encyclopedia of twentieth century European letters, life, politics, and war, with diversions into Asia and the Americas as the occasion demands. It’s organized as a series of short essays on 112 writers, artists, musicians, dancers, comedians, actors, directors, generals, and politicians, ordered alphabetically by surname. There are maybe one or two dozen figures who antedate the twentieth century, mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Tacitus is premodern; I can’t recall if there is another). James selects the names entirely by personal preference, affection, and the importance he deems their role in the times—whether or not that importance is recognized by others. Most of the chapters are love letters: he wants his readers to love what he loves. But not all of them; Mao, Hitler, and Goebbels have entries, as do Sartre, Benjamin, Brasillach, and Kollantai. He despises them all. Another goal, then, is for readers to learn to hate what he hates, and why.

The themes of the work cluster around the twin disasters of Nazism and Stalinism, which is to say, the prelude to World War II, the nightmare of the Final Solution, and their contested half-lives in the Cold War. James celebrates the fragility and triumph of liberalism over communism and fascism. For “liberalism” read “humanism.” He wants his readers, whom he imagines as students, not to succumb to the forgetfulness so common to liberal cultures. Amnesia, in his view, is the precondition for political tragedy, because it makes the poison of ideology go down less noticeably. Memory is the antidote, necessary if not sufficient.

I noted in a previous post that, if all you had was James’s book, you would think religion was a failed experiment, universally accepted and proclaimed as such by World War I at the latest. He includes no explicitly religious writers and only a handful of Christians, whose faith, as he sees it, is utterly incidental to the value of their thought or the quality of their writing.

Although not all his subjects are writers, it is writing in which he is principally interested. This is a book about style: James admires no one whose prose lacks grace or verve; a unique voice on the page covers a multitude of sins. Each entry begins with a brief autobiographical introduction, then an epigraph from the artist, then an essay to match it. The essay is free to go in any direction it pleases, which sometimes means it isn’t about the name at the head of the chapter at all. But it is never off topic and never not a pleasure to read. That’s how he gets away with it. The book is a monument to his own vanity, and yet he pulls it off anyway.

Given how deeply personal such an endeavor must have been for James, I find myself imagining, as I come to the book’s close (I have around twenty chapters to go), what another version would look like. Scratch that: I wonder what my version would look like. It goes without saying that I could never write a book one tenth as good as this one. And for erudition and scope, only someone like David Bentley Hart could manage writing the book as it exists in my imagination.

That said, I can’t stop thinking about it.

Suppose the parameters were the same: An alphabetized encyclopedia of the century just past, centered on and after World War II, featuring mini-essays on more than a hundred authors, artists, and public figures, selected by whimsy and pleasure but centered around a determinate set of themes that would emerge organically as readers moved from name to name in a kind of spiral or web. But suppose, in addition, that the goal was to highlight religion, in particular Christian life and thought, in a supposedly secular century. Suppose, too, that the center of gravity moved across the Atlantic to North America, and instead of comedy, ballet, and journalism, attention was paid to film, sports, and philosophy. James’s interest in the lost world of prewar Vienna would be transmuted into contemplating the legacy of the American West and the subsequent export of American culture to the world. Further themes would announce themselves: the problem of atheism; the boredom of secularism; the rise of Islam; the irrelevance of public theology; the return of the convert; the renewal of monasticism; and the modern martyr, in all its varieties.

The secret of James’s selectivity is that, in considering only some, he sneaks in all the rest. He has no entries on Kant, Pound, Joyce, Auden, Berlin, Eliot, Heidegger, Solzhenitsyn, Costa-Gravas, Kissinger, Einstein, Shakespeare, Dickens, Stalin, Lenin, or Orwell, but look in the Index, and you’ll see plenty of page numbers for each of them. He makes no apologies for whom he does and does not include, since a potted history is the only possibility for a personal literary breviary such as this one. He’s certainly not choosing for race, gender, nationality, or ideological bona fides. Remember: this is a catalogues of his loves, together with a few of his hatreds, presented (with a straight face and tongue in cheek, neither somehow canceling out the other) as what’s worth remembering from the most violent century in human history.

If you don’t share my reaction—that the world needs more books like this one—I don’t know what to tell you. If you do share my reaction, read on.

*

The title of my imaginary book, naturally enough, is Theological Amnesia. It’s an antidote to an antidote. James has forgotten faith: not his own, but others’. It didn’t go underground. It was never relegated to the private sphere. He and his ilk just chose to ignore it, and given the genuine changes in Western societies since the Enlightenment, they could afford to do so. They did so, however, at their peril.

Two subtitles are competing in my mind: Authors and Artists from a Long Secular Century vs. Authors and Artists from the Long American Century. The former is clearer, in its irony, about the book’s subtheme, whereas the latter foregrounds the cultural focus. (Now I’m wondering whether I should add mention of martyrs, saints, and others besides. Hm.)

Either way, that’s the pitch. Below are the names.

A few words of explanation. First, the number ballooned from 112 to 150. That was only after nixing an additional 150. I do not know how James did it. It’s an impossible choice.

Second, I justified the larger number—for, I remind myself and you, dear reader, my completely imaginary book—by recourse to James’s word count. While some essays are 4-6 pages, many are 8-12 pages, and some are much more than that. All in all, his book totals around 350,000 words. If I wrote an average 2,200 words per entry, even with 150 names that would make for a smaller book than James’s. In the alternate universe where a more learned variant of myself attempts to write this book in my 70s … a publisher definitely goes for it. Right? (Let me have this.)

Third and finally, I did my best to keep to James’s temporal center of gravity. No one on my list is born after the mid-1950s, and any of them who are still alive today (a) are approaching their ninth or tenth decade of life and (b) became famous, having done their most important and influential work, in the closing decades of the last century. Everyone else on the list lived and wrote between the Great War and the fall of the Soviet Union—except, that is, for the handful of premodern authors (five or six) and figures from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (maybe a dozen) whom I felt compelled to include.

Without further adieu, then, here is the fake table of contents for my imaginary book. If I live long enough to be an emeritus professor, full of leisure time and surrounded by scores of grandchildren, don’t be surprised when I self-publish a thousand-page version of this idea, with copies distributed to friends and family only. I’ll leave it to history to decide whether it’s an unheralded classic or a painful exercise in imitation gone awry.

Theological Amnesia: Writers and Thinkers, Saints and Martyrs from a Long Secular Century

1. Thomas J. J. Altizer

2. G. E. M. Anscombe

3. Hannah Arendt

4. W. H. Auden

5. Augustine of Hippo

6. Jane Austen

7. James Baldwin

8. J. G. Ballard

9. Hans Urs von Balthasar

10. Karl Barth

11. Saul Bellow

12. Isaiah Berlin

13. Georges Bernanos

14. Wendell Berry

15. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

16. Jorge Luis Borges

17. Peter Brown

18. Sergei Bulgakov

19. Roberto Calasso

20. John Calvin

21. Albert Camus

22. John le Carré

23. G. K. Chesterton

24. J. M. Coetzee

25. James Cone

26. Christopher Dawson

27. Dorothy Day

28. Simone de Beauvoir

29. Henri de Lubac

30. Augusto del Noce

31. Charles Dickens

32. Annie Dillard

33. Walt Disney

34. Fyodor Dostoevsky

35. Frederick Douglass

36. Clint Eastwood

37. T. S. Eliot

38. Frantz Fanon

39. Patrick Leigh Fermor

40. Ludwig Feuerbach

41. John Ford

42. Michel Foucault

43. Sigmund Freud

44. Mahātmā Gandhi

45. Billy Graham

46. Graham Greene

47. Ursula K. le Guin

48. Adolf von Harnack

49. Martin Heidegger

50. George Herbert

51. Abraham Joshua Heschel

52. Alfred Hitchcock

53. Gerard Manley Hopkins

54. Michel Houellebecq

55. Aldous Huxley

56. Ivan Illich

57. P. D. James

58. William James

59. Robert Jenson

60. Tony Judt

61. Franz Kafka

62. Søren Kierkegaard

63. Martin Luther King Jr.

64. Stephen King

65. Ronald Knox

66. Leszek Kołakowski

67. Stanley Kubrick

68. Akira Kurosawa

69. Christopher Lasch

70. Stan Lee

71. Denise Levertov

72. C. S. Lewis

73. George Lucas

74. John Lukacs

75. Martin Luther

76. Dwight Macdonald

77. Alasdair MacIntyre

78. Malcolm X

79. Terrence Malick

80. Jacques Maritain

81. François Mauriac

82. Cormac McCarthy

83. Larry McMurtry

84. Herman Melville

85. H. L. Mencken

86. Thomas Merton

87. Mary Midgley

88. Czesław Miłosz

89. Hayao Miyazaki

90. Malcolm Muggeridge

91. Albert Murray

92. Les Murray

93. John Henry Newman

94. H. Richard Niebuhr

95. Reinhold Niebuhr

96. Friedrich Nietzsche

97. Flannery O’Connor

98. Robert Oppenheimer

99. George Orwell

100. Yasujirō Ozu

101. Blaise Pascal

102. Paul of Tarsus

103. Walker Percy

104. Karl Popper

105. Neil Postman

106. Thomas Pynchon

107. Sayyid Qutb

108. Joseph Ratzinger

109. Marilynne Robinson

110. Fred Rogers

111. Franz Rosenzweig

112. Salman Rushdie

113. John Ruskin

114. Bill Russell

115. Edward Said

116. Margaret Sanger

117. Dorothy Sayers

118. Paul Schrader

119. George Scialabba

120. Martin Scorsese

121. Roger Scruton

122. Peter Singer

123. Maria Skobtsova

124. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

125. Sophrony the Athonite

126. Wole Soyinka

127. Steven Spielberg

128. Wallace Stegner

129. Edith Stein

130. Leo Strauss

131. Preston Sturges

132. Andrei Tartovsky

133. Charles Taylor

134. Mother Teresa

135. Thérèse of Lisieux

136. Thomas Aquinas

137. R. S. Thomas

138. J. R. R. Tolkien

139. John Kennedy Toole

140. Desmond Tutu

141. John Updike

142. Sigrid Undset

143. Evelyn Waugh

144. Simone Weil

145. H. G. Wells

146. Rebecca West

147. Oprah Winfrey

148. Ludwig Wittgenstein

149. Karol Wojtyła

150. Franz Wright

*

Update (8/2): I should have thought to include a list of James’s entries, so that those unfamiliar with the book could see the names he chose, as well as compare them with mine. Apparently his list comes only to 106, not 112; perhaps I came to that number by counting the introductory and concluding essays. In any case, here you go:

1. Anna Akhmatova

2. Peter Altenberg

3. Louis Armstrong

4. Raymond Aron

5. Walter Benjamin

6. Marc Bloch

7. Jorge Luis Borges

8. Robert Brasillach

9. Sir Thomas Browne

10. Albert Camus

11. Dick Cavett

12. Paul Celan

13. Chamfort

14. Coco Chanel

15. Charles Chaplin

16. Nirad C. Chaudhuri

17. G. K. Chesterton

18. Jean Cocteau

19. Gianfranco Contini

20. Benedetto Croce

21. Tony Curtis

22. Ernst Robert Curtius

23. Miles Davis

24. Sergei Diaghilev

25. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

26. Alfred Einstein

27. Duke Ellington

28. Federico Fellini

29. W. C. Fields

30. F. Scott Fitzgerald

31. Gustave Flaubert

32. Sigmund Freud

33. Egon Friedell

34. François Furet

35. Charles de Gaulle

36. Edward Gibbon

37. Terry Gilliam

38. Joseph Goebbels

39. Witold Gombrowicz

40. William Hazlitt

41. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

42. Heinrich Heine

43. Adolf Hitler

44. Ricarda Huch

45. Ernst Jünger

46. Franz Kafka

47. John Keats

48. Leszek Kołakowski

49. Alexandra Kollontai

50. Heda Margolius Kovály

51. Karl Kraus

52. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

53. Norman Mailer

54. Nadezhda Mandelstam

55. Golo Mann

56. Heinrich Mann

57. Michael Mann

58. Thomas Mann

59. Mao Zedong

60. Chris Marker

61. John McCloy

62. Zinka Milanov

63. Czesław Miłosz

64. Eugenio Montale

65. Montesquieu

66. Alan Moorehead

67. Paul Muratov

68. Lewis Namier

69. Grigory Ordzhonokidze

70. Octavio Paz

71. Alfred Polgar

72. Beatrix Potter

73. Jean Prévost

74. Marcel Proust

75. Edgar Quinet

76. Marcel Reich-Ranicki

77. Jean-François Revel

78. Richard Rhodes

79. Rainer Maria Rilke

80. Virginio Rognoni

81. Ernesto Sabato

82. Edward Said

83. Sainte-Beuve

84. José Saramago

85. Jean-Paul Sartre

86. Erik Satie

87. Arthur Schnitzler

88. Sophie Scholl

89. Wolf Jobst Siedler

90. Manès Sperber

91. Tacitus

92. Margaret Thatcher

93. Henning von Tresckow

94. Leon Trotsky

95. Karl Tschuppik

96. Dubravka Ugrešić

97. Miguel de Unamuno

98. Pedro Henríquez Ureña

99. Paul Valéry

100. Mario Vargas Llosa

101. Evelyn Waugh

102. Ludwig Wittgenstein

103. Isoroku Yamamoto

104. Aleksandr Zinoviev

105. Carl Zuckmayer

106. Stefan Zweig

My latest: on athletes and public faith, in CT

My latest column for Christianity Today is called “Penalty or No, Athletes Talk Faith.” Just in time for the Olympics! Alas, I had to cut the opening two paragraphs on the 2023–24 Boston Celtics, the recent champs who may be the most religious NBA team in years. Thankfully I did get to include this paragraph:

In Game 1 of the 2014 NBA Finals, LeBron James—at the time the best basketball player on the planet—had to leave prematurely due to cramps. Why? The stadium was slightly warmer than usual. He’d been known to request ice-cold air conditioning wherever he played, so much so that fans speculated that the opposing team, my beloved San Antonio Spurs, kept things warm for a competitive advantage. True or not, the Spurs won the game and the series both, all because the league’s MVP couldn’t keep his muscles from spasming.

I even got to mention the famous anecdote about MJ peeking at his teammates during Zen meditation. They’ll let me write anything!

What does any of that have to do with God, faith, or CT? Read on to see.

The Acolyte: mea culpa & apologia

I take it all back.

In my view, the final two episodes of The Acolyte’s first season redeemed the whole thing. It didn’t become perfect, but it did become something: an actual story, told with perspective and, by the end, with style.

From what I can tell, this is not the consensus. And I don’t deny that flaws remain. But what felt missing that felt so frustrating through five episodes made itself apparent by episodes seven and eight. Let me start with the flaws before I defend the show and issue my mea culpa.

First, Amandla Stenberg is not, at least on this show, a particularly good actress. Her range is minimal; she played both twins almost indistinguishably; and her inability fully to sell her descent to the Dark Side is an understandable hurdle for viewers disappointed with the finale.

Second, the whole idea of twin sisters played by the same actress was goofy from word go and never paid off. Alas.

Third, it’s true that we were not in need of a replay of The Last Jedi’s basic beats: revisionist Jedi deconstruction mediated by Rashomon-like competing memories of an ambiguous tragic accident whose misunderstandings turn a hero into a villain.

Fourth, I still don’t understand why the twins had to be separated at the end, nor exactly why Mae’s memory of Osha has to be erased entirely—yet with the hope that they would one day be reunited. Huh?

Fifth and finally, I grasp the seven-year long frustration with Disney seemingly trying to undermine the Jedi at every turn in the Star Wars extended canon. Once the coolest, most mysterious characters around, they’re now lying bureaucrats who can’t be trusted, and who certainly are no match for the Sith.

Let me begin in reverse.

To begin, don’t blame Disney or Rian Johnson. Blame George Lucas. He’s the one who not only told of a thousand-year Jedi reign brought down by the Dark Side and the Empire—raising the question, “Why and how did they lose?”—but also offered his own answer in the prequel trilogy. That answer was: sectarian insularity, political sclerosis, spiritual blindness, and institutional decadence. If you don’t like Jedi as weak and foolish celibate wizard cops more eager to save their own hide than to protect the weak, then blame Lucas, not the last decade of Star Wars canon. It’s his fault.

Besides, he was right. He was always telling a fall-of-Rome descent from a republic to an empire, and if it was all happening beneath the noses of the Jedi, and if a rival rose quickly enough and powerful enough to wipe them out in a flash, then doubtless they were at fault to some extent. And The Phantom Menace clinched the deal: Qui-Gon Jinn is the fly in the ointment whose death at the hands of Darth Maul simultaneously ensures (a) the defeat of the Jedi, since they will no longer have a critical voice in their midst to possibly heed, and (b) the return of the Jedi, since his dying wish was for Anakin to be trained, and Anakin proved himself the Chosen One prophesied to bring balance to the Force by destroying Palpatine. (Reminder: Episode IX never happened.)

Granted all this, it was an inspired choice by Leslye Headland to make the final image of the series the iconic head of Yoda, framed from behind. If Yoda’s life is more or less coextensive with the rule of the Jedi, then he’s got to take some blame as well. There’s no retconning of evil here. There’s the hint—and it’s only a hint for now—that Yoda may not be a blameless saint in the centuries-long march to Order 66. He may even have covered up a scandal or too in his time the way a shrewd political operator might. And why not? Surely a millennium of peace and justice is worth a few secrets between Jedi Masters.

I repeat: While Yoda presided on the Jedi Council for centuries, Darth Plagueis and his apprentices flourished, culminating in Darth Sidious, Darth Maul, and Darth Tyranus. The defections from the Jedi were accumulating one after another in the decades leading to Anakin’s training—this is canon already by Episode II, since that film reveals that Yoda trained Tyranus (i.e., Count Dooku) before he in turn trained Qui-Gon, left the Order, and joined Sidious—which raises the question: How long had such defections been occurring, and why wasn’t the alarm being sounded more widely? The fact that the Stranger turns out to have been a former Padawan of Vernestra’s, a fact known to Yoda, is neither revisionism nor deconstruction: it’s a logical deduction. It’s putting a name where a blank used to be.

True, The Acolyte is now part of a story meant to fill in the gaps between Plagueis, whom we learn about in Episode III, and the “vergence in the Force” mentioned in Episode I, namely Anakin’s miraculous birth without a human father. I suppose that makes it one more prequel connected to the Skywalker Saga. But in this case is that so bad? It makes narrative sense that Plagueis had false starts and mixed results in his attempts to create and sustain life with midi-chlorians alone. Osha and Mae appear to have been part of the run-up to Anakin. Given Palpatine and Dooku’s respective ages in the prequels, this show is only a few decades out from their births and thus only a couple more from their turning to the Dark Side. The question now is who ends up killing Plagueis: the Stranger, Osha, or Palpatine. If not Palpatine, then we might actually see it happen on screen. (It could be Osha who takes on Palpatine as an acolyte, not Plagueis—now there’s some double-barrelled retconning.)

Turning back to the show itself, let me note a few more virtues and reconsiderations, given my boredom and annoyance just a few weeks back.

First, I reiterate my affection for Lee Jung-jae as Sol. What I wasn’t prepared for was coming to appreciate Rebecca Henderson’s performance. Vernestra seemed both boring and bored in early episodes. I now see that she was meant to embody the cynical self-interest of the decadent Jedi, running in notable parallel with the nameless imperial bureaucrats scrambling for patronage, status, and safety in Andor. She’s not meant to be cool or likable. She’s the very reason the Jedi fall, and the Republic with them. I should have been more patient.

Second, I thought the finale was expertly made. I’ll even go so far as to say that the lightsaber duel between Sol and the Stranger struck me as the most creative, distinctive, unique Jedi action choreography put on film since the fight between Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon, and Maul in The Phantom Menace. That’s 25 years, y’all! (The only rival is the throne room scene in Episode VIII, but that isn’t a lightsaber duel; it’s two Force- and lightsaber-wielding fighters facing off against Snoke’s Praetorian Guard.) Too often lightsaber duels are little more than glorified sword fights. But these are wizards! Who can do magic! Who can float and fly and manipulate objects through space, including their own bodies! Where’s the creativity? We saw it on display in this episode, with more than one nod to Hong Kong action cinema. Kudos to Hanelle M. Culpepper, the director.

Kudos also to the composer, Michael Abels. The music and cinematography were finally atmospheric; they made you feel something, rather than serving as so much visual and aural wallpaper for “made-for-TV Star Wars.” Lee sells the hell out of his anguish, inner turmoil, and (even in the end) refusal to accept responsibility and insistence on his own innocence, his own righteousness. No one can doubt his good intentions, but he did in fact invade a secluded town, woo a child away from it, kill her mother, lie about it, and maintain a decade-long cover-up.

It’s for this reason, third, that I buy Osha’s turn, even if her acting doesn’t sell it the way Lee’s does. The one man she looked up to for so long not only kept the truth from her the whole time; he himself killed her mother. That shattering moment shatters her whole world. How could it not? Everything else he told her must be a lie. The Jedi rejected her, after all. The Stranger hasn’t lied once. Sol becomes collateral damage, even as his death at her hands is a point of no return. She’s committed. She’ll be trained. She’ll become an Acolyte to the Sith.

Now, do I take back what I wrote previously about the way they should have told this story? No. This was always the right story to tell, but it took them too long to get there, and they should never have told it from the vantage of the Jedi Temple and its inner workings. It should have been from Mae and Osha’s viewpoint from the start. Nor were all eight episodes of the season equally successful. Two, four, and six (if I recall) were duds. One, three, and five range from solid to good. And seven and eight were excellent. Perhaps, if there’s a second season, they can build on this momentum and keep the quality high. It doesn’t hurt that we can begin the season from Osha and Plagueis’ perspective, rather than starting all over again.

Having said all that, the fundamental question posed by my last post was this: Does The Acolyte once and for all confirm, in conjunction with other established Star Wars canon, that the Dark Side is definitively stronger than the Light? So that it remains an utter mystery how the Jedi remained in power for so long? Yes, it does. The question remains. This show won’t answer it. But perhaps another one—or a film, like James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi—will. My hope is now nonzero.

Mea culpa.

Theological amnesia

It would be an understatement to say I’m taken with Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time. I’m positively obsessed. I’ve never read anything like it. I’m smitten with the prose and gobsmacked by the coverage. The man has read everything, or at least he makes me feel like I’ve read next to nothing.

One thing he hasn’t read, though, is theology. You might even say he hasn’t read Christians. Of the more than 100 authors and artists that he canvasses, mostly from the twentieth century, maybe five are religious, and their religion is not, in his view, part of their genius. Sure, he likes Chesterton and Waugh and Kołakowski. But those exceptions prove the rule. James cares (cared—he passed away at 80 the same month the first Covid cases began appearing in Wuhan, quite a time to lose such a vital voice in politics and culture) about influence, stature, prestige, literature, artistry, and above these and all else two things: style on the page and wisdom in the world. The latter, to James, meant a rejection of ideology—in twentieth century garb, fascism and communism in equal parts—without apology or compromise. He was a pure product of the postwar period; his heroes were the post-Left French who suffered for their apostasies, like Aron and Furet and Revel. He was right to honor them.

Right, I say, in what he honored, but wrong in what he ignored. Even on his own terms, James should have read, memorialized, and found profit in Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Maritain, Eliot, Belloc, Knox, Greene, Undset, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Weil, Mauriac, Bernanos, de Lubac, Auden, Lewis, Tolkien, Fermor, Solzhenitsyn, Ratzinger, Percy, Illich, Berry, MacIntyre, Taylor, Levertov, and so many others. Instead, it’s as if religion in any form except the severely private disappears from the world by the end of the long nineteenth century. You certainly wouldn’t know that theists of any kind put pen to page in the twentieth, much less that it was good, sometimes, and that their words and deeds regularly made a difference on the public stage.

A writer like James, for all his erudition, has amnesia of his own, both in the immediate past and in the distant past. It’s a deficit common to most of his peers: highbrow journalists and elite critics who can’t bother to glance in the direction of the pious (at least, not without cringing). The deficit may be understandable, but it’s not defensible. It renders all that they write incomplete from the outset, by definition. Not just their knowledge but their love is circumscribed artificially by choice, and this alienates them from every human culture of which we have evidence. At one point James comments that humans wrote poetry before prose, spoke before they wrote, and sang before they spoke in sentences. He leaves the observation there, hanging, but he should have known better. After all, what did humans do both before and by means of song and speech and poetry and prose?

They prayed. Let the reader understand.

Sith > Jedi

Through five of eight episodes, The Acolyte is a middling failure—and a failure because it is middling. Of everything Star Wars needed, the very last was one more showdown between the Jedi and a mysterious Sith shrouded in darkness, a long drawn-out unveiling and encounter shot without beauty or grandeur or style or grandness of scope. What a bore.

Oh well. Three more thoughts before we finish the series then immediately forget it ever existed.

First: In the lead-up to the show, the buzz was that it would be a story told from the Sith’s perspective, that is, from the vantage point of powerless partisans of the Dark Side at the tail end of a millennium-long unchallenged reign by the Jedi. That’s an interesting idea! Why wasn’t this exact story told in that way? Never in the hallways of Jedi power; never looking at the Sith or his acolyte through Jedi eyes; always, instead, looking at the Jedi aslant, from an angle, burning with furious resentment. In this way the aha-reveal wouldn’t be a Sith under a mask, but the epiphany of actual Jedi in all their boring beige glory—come to steal children, enforce galactic edicts, and kill with impunity. Why did no one think this the better route?

Second: If Disney wants to make quality Star Wars (on either the big or the small screen), they have to commit to top-tier casting. Cast a show the way HBO does. Don’t cast tweens and newbies. Don’t cast on the cheap. Get the best of the best. The only way this works is if the actors on screen have gravitas. Most of the actors on this show, like Kenobi and Boba Fett before it, look like third billing in a spin-off DC comics movie. Follow Andor’s lead and make every actor who has even a single line of dialogue someone who could win an Emmy—someone who could steal the show. (Make them human, too, by the way.) As it is, we get stilted dialogue performed by teens and twentysomethings who look like it’s their big break following a string of guest appearances on the CW. And it’s Disney, I remind you, that’s footing the bill. They’ve got the cash.

Third: Does this show prove once and for all that, canonically, the Dark Side is more powerful than the Light? Ignore Episode IX, since it never happened. Across eight movies, nearly every time a Jedi fights a Sith head-to-head (or a Force-wielding opponent in touch with the Dark Side, since neither Snoke nor Kylo Ren are Sith), the Jedi loses. Darth Maul defeats Qui-Gon Jinn and, at least in terms of lightsaber combat, Obi-Wan too. Dooku defeats Anakin and Obi-Wan both before fighting Yoda to a draw. Palpatine beats Yoda. Anakin may lose to Obi-Wan, but he “wins” in Episode IV and wins again in Episode V against Luke. Luke bests Anakin only by tapping into his anger (i.e., the Dark Side); Palpatine then defeats Luke; and Anakin in turn destroys Palpatine. In other words, this particular Sith loses not to a Jedi but to a fellow Sith—his own apprentice.

It turns out that, with the exception of Obi-Wan in his prime against an Anakin lacking any training in the Sith arts—having turned to the Dark Side mere hours earlier—the Jedi are no match for the Sith. The Sith are simply too powerful. The Dark Side appears to be the stronger side of the Force, and by a wide margin, whatever its moral content. (Note further that the Jedi themselves teach, as doctrine, that the Force as such is amoral; what it seeks, and what the universe wants, is balance, not for the extinction of the Dark by the Light.)

To its credit, The Acolyte confirms and extends this canonical pattern. In doing so, it raises questions it will surely avoid, such as why the viewer should root for the Jedi; why the Light is preferable to the Dark Side; why, post-Rey, anyone should have confidence that the Dark will not return and prevail; and how, pre-Palpatine, the Sith and the Dark Side alike were dormant, or even nonexistent, for a thousand years.

Star Wars has written its canon into a corner. Leslye Headland isn’t going to write it out. That falls to someone else. I have my doubts such a person exists. And even if they did, I wouldn’t hold my breath that Disney would hire or empower them to tell the only story that needs telling.

Update (5 minutes later): I realize, upon pressing “publish,” that this post is, unwittingly but unsurprisingly, one long apologia for Rian Johnson and The Last Jedi. IYKYK.

But seriously: I forgot to mention that Rey and Ren fight to a draw; that Rey is powerless before Snoke; and that only Ren can defeat Snoke. Which only furthers the point. Not to mention that Snoke converts Ren from the Light to the Dark and that Ren rebels against Luke—a Jedi Master!—thereby casting him away into exile and self-incurred defeat, even if also (at the end, through Rey) toward a sort of self-immolating victory. Had Kathleen Kennedy permitted Rian Johnson or some equally brilliant screenwriter to follow the lines he’d drawn where they were pointing (that is, in the climactic ninth film), all this would have already been resolved, since the question at the heart of the above post is the question at the heart of Episode VIII. Asked but, on principle, unanswered by Kennedy, Abrams, et al. Oh well. Maybe that was their signal that it never would be. So it goes.

My latest: on weddings, in CT

My latest Christianity Today column is up this morning, and it’s called “Two Cheers for the Wedding Industrial Complex.” I may or may not defend ring by spring and other such sordid ideas. Enjoy!

In defense of podcasts

A few years ago some idiot on the internet wrote that he was quitting podcasts, and you should too. I can’t imagine what he was thinking. Podcasts are a pleasure.

They’re a pleasure to listen to, because they run the gamut. They’re about anything, everything, and nothing. They can be bite-size; they can appetize; they can tease. Or they can last for hours, leaving no nook or cranny unexplored. They can remain at the surface for beginners or they can dive in the deeps for experts.

Podcasts can cover philosophy, theology, history, politics, and ethics; they can also cover basketball, film, TV, music, and novels. They can pay six-figure salaries and they can sprout up tomorrow by a bro in his basement. They embody a democratic media and a free press and free speech all at the same time. What’s not to love?

They’re also a pleasure to go on. Once a month or so I get invited onto a podcast, and every single time it’s a blast. I’ve never joined a bad one! Apparently they’re all fun. We laugh, we talk theology or technology or academia; we learn something in the exchange; the recording goes up a few days later; and it’s there, more or less forever, for others to listen in on at their leisure. Just this week a shook-his-hand-once acquaintance at my (not small) congregation came up to me to tell me he enjoyed a podcast I was on. (Kudos to you, Kaitlyn; he’s a big fan.) Like so many others, this thirtysomething Christian listens to strangers talk theology for the layman while washing the dishes, or driving to work, or taking a walk. And why not?

I’m just glad these things are already so popular, or else that idiot’s rant might have made an unwelcome dent, or even popped the bubble. Life is short. Let’s enjoy its little pleasures while we can. And there can be no doubt that podcasts are among them.

The unspoken Name

In my experience, casual pronunciation of the divine Name is a telltale sign of an evangelical having attended a Protestant seminary. Sometimes it’s as minimal as having read Walter Brueggemann. (If he can do it, so can I!) Old Testament scholars in general can be the culprit, but far from always; of all Christians they’re usually the most familiar with Jewish writing and thought—with living Jews themselves and the ongoing practice of the synagogue—which means they tend to know better.

I decided a long time ago that I would forbear from enunciating the Name, if only out of respect for Jewish piety. There were always additional reasons, but I saw no excuse to transgress on thousands of years of Jewish and Christian devotional and liturgical reticence out of nothing more than an inflated sense of contemporary exegetical confidence.

In his latest book, Irrevocable: The Name of God and the Unity of the Christian Bible (2022), Kendall Soulen provides an additional reason for reverent non-vocalization of the Name, a reason so simple I can’t believe I’ve never encountered it before.

Start with why certain pastors and writers, usually but not exclusively evangelical, choose to vocalize the Name. First, because a name is meant to be spoken. God introduced himself by name to his people; shouldn’t we use it? Second, because the rabbinical practice of building fences around the Torah is not Christian; if gentile believers are not bound by ceremonial Law, much less rabbinic elaboration thereof, then they (we) have no reason to honor this convention while ignoring all others. Third and finally, the Bible itself does not forbid saying the Name. Absent explicit divine prohibition, we are free to do as we please (with sober reverence and pious speech, you’d think it would go without saying, but anecdotally that is far from the case—the hypothetical reconstruction “Y-a-h-w-e-h” becomes at once nickname and talisman, even as it signals the insider status and erudition of the speaker).

It’s worth mentioning a fourth reason that, thankfully, I’ve not seen in the wild: namely, that “YHWH” belongs to the old covenant; that it was God’s Name; that, therefore, this Name is of no lasting relevance to Christians, since it was replaced/superseded by either “Jesus” or “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” or both. Such a view would authorize merely historical reference to the Name, minus piety, faith, or reverence. Call this nominal Marcionism.

Here, in any case, is how Soulen responds: Nonpronunciation of YHWH is not unbiblical. Its chief practitioners are none other than the apostles. The New Testament is positively drenched in pious regard for the Name; you only have to read for a few verses before you discover a newly devised verbal mechanism to circumvent pronouncing the Name: the Power, the Blessed One, the Lord, He Who Sits On The Throne, the Living One, the Name That is Above Every Name—the list goes on and on.

And can you guess who is the principal model of piety regarding God’s Name?

It’s Jesus. He whose prayer begins, “Our Father,” turns first of all to God’s Name, asking that it be hallowed, consecrated, sanctified. Read the Sermon on the Mount. Read Jesus’s teachings on vows (in Matthew 6 and in Matthew 23). Read Jesus’s interrogation by the Sanhedrin (especially in Mark 14). Read Jesus’s “conversation” with God the Father in John 12 (the only such “back and forth” in any of the Gospels) about glorifying the Father’s Name and, later, Jesus’s high priestly prayer in John 17 regarding (again) the Father’s Name—which he, Jesus, says he received from the Father before he was sent into the world. That Name isn’t “Father”: Jesus is the Father’s Son. The Father’s Name is YHWH. Yet it is also Jesus’s own name, not only in this world but from all eternity. (Even at his birth his human name reveals it: Yeshua—YHWH is salvation.)

For all this, however, the Name is never spoken. Not by Jesus, not by the Twelve, not by the apostle to the gentiles. Always we find euphemism, circumlocution, indirection, silence.

Hence when Christians, like Jews, avoid verbalizing the holy Name of the Lord God of Israel—in prayer, in devotional reading of Scripture, in public worship—they are not following man-made, unbiblical tradition. They are following the New Testament’s own authoritative example. No document, ancient or modern, is so ruthlessly consistent in avoiding enunciating YHWH (aloud or in writing) as is the New Testament. The apostles are authoritative here as elsewhere. And they are only following Jesus’s own example.

Shouldn’t we?