What is the Gospel?

What is the gospel? I'm not sure I know. And though I ask as an individual, I but form my lips around the question of others before me. And their answers and insights are offered back again.

We pick out constellations in the stars and name them. But astronomy tells us those shapes represent no actual relations. The stars of Orion's belt are separated by light years of empty space. And a September moon to us is far bigger and brighter than the Andromeda galaxy behind it.

When we decide to look beyond the constellations of the way we define the gospel and begin trying to see it as it is in the universe of scripture, the change is no less drastic. I expect we will end up knowing far more than we did. But the gospel we started with may look far, far different in the end. That is what is happening to me.[1]

These were my astronomers. I took a course in the minor prophets from Walter Kaiser and was changed by the encounter. I studied Galatians under T. David Gordon. Gordon was the first professor I ever met who embraced the New Perspective on Paul. Greg Beale introduced me to the profound and intimate relationship between the New Testament and the Old. N. T. Wright helped those seeds grow, as did Michael Heiser and Carmen Imes. And Juergen Moltmann and Johannes Metz made me see that eschatology is fundamentally political and the gospel is fundamentally political theology. The gospel is a political theology if nothing else. And if it is not political theology, it is not the gospel. Political theology is thinking about scripture that begins, is shaped by, and is applied to communities of purpose. I specify purpose because these communities are working together to achieve real ends, and this means that there is a need for theology, there is a need for the gospel. Perhaps it is impossible to have a community without some sort of purpose. (I do not call crowds communities, but mobs rudely are.)

It is not American Individualism

I used to understand the gospel as an appeal to the individual to "Save yourself from this corrupt generation" (Acts 2:40 NRSV). You confessed, believed, and were baptized. You got saved and belonged thereafter to God. This is not untrue, but it is uncontextual.

When a collection of beliefs is lifted out of actual human ways of being, they cannot be lived or practiced but only assented to. Such a cerebral anthropology has little of incarnational, communal Christianity in it.~ C. Humphry

It is not Classic Liberalism

Theologian Roger Olson defines classic liberal theology as "theology centered around symbolic realism-—Christianity mostly cut off from history except for transforming symbols such as the cross and resurrection and Parousia. . . Christianity is largely reduced to spiritual formation and social transformation."[2]

Note this bit from a recent piece about conservative psychologist Jordan Peterson in the New Statesman, "Peterson said to me that religion is a feeling or experience rather than a statement about the existence of God. Religion manifests in the deep sense of awe and the infinite one might experience when reading literature or gazing upon a sunset, he said. He thought that technically there was no difference between great literature and religious experience. If religion is about deep biological experience, couldn’t you say that sex is religious, too? 'It should be, but it depends on how well it’s done,' he said."[3]

So What is It?

The gospel is necessarily political faith, hope, and love

Amos 5

Part of the original Christian message was a radical revaluation of Israel’s legal and prophetic tradition and a thoroughgoing denunciation of the power of Rome and all other empires. Flat things exist on two dimensions. And I, too, am learning to think differently in two ways. One is to fix New Testament language about salvation deeply into its Old Testament context. The other is to understand it in its ecclesial setting and not through the lense of American individualism. I started with a pseudo-Reformational framework sucked through the straw of a me-and-Jesus vertical whose horizontal was only transactional: save the lost. This cannot be correct. The New Testament does not alter so greatly that one cannot talk about an Old Testament church. If anything, the social ethics central to Old Testament piety are not erased by the New but highlighted with eschatological fire.

It is necessary to understand New Testament things within their Old Testament wineskins. So, for example, baptism is circumcision. Missions is the regathering of the lost ten tribes back to the mountain of God. Good works is Torah keeping. Christians are renewed priests in Jesus's living temple. What is salvation, then? Is it an ethical change, like repentance; a change of direction toward the right way? Is it an ontological change from one kind of being into another kind of being? Or is it a covenant marker: one goes from being a pagan outside of the covenant community to which God has made promises to being a member in that community. That community has always been there. Its covenant markers have simply enlarged to include Gentiles. The promise to this community is the eternal, living Spirit. The fire of Sinai only descended on the mountain and on Moses. At Pentecost, each believer became a little Sinai upon whom the glory came to rest. The fire burned inside the living tree of the people of God, and they did not burn up.

The gospel is necessarily good news for matter and our bodies

In an October 27, 2020, podcast of "OnScript," Dr. Esau McCaulley, being interviewed about his book Reading While Black (IVP Academic, 2020), concluded his interview with a discussion about the misshapen priorities which govern the fields of New Testament and Pauline Studies. The emphases of the Protestant Reformation dictate what is considered of primary importance in these fields. This means that a brilliant book on, say, Paul's pneumatology will not be considered a brilliant book on Paul in the same way that a book on grace will, such as John Barclay's Paul and the Gift (Eerdmans 2015). Similarly, the best book on Hebrews ever written will not be called the best New Testament book. The academy privileges certain topics and downplays others. Works on community, eschatology, the Trinity, etc. just cannot be valued in the same way by the academy as, say, a work on Galatians.[4] McCaulley continues:

"Here's a question, Biblical scholars: How do we never talk about policing in our scholarship, when black people have been talking about policing for a hundred fifty years! Why don't we talk about it? What I'm saying is that we have to do better in the things that we center. And there's a reason why this is all masculine, right? It is all masculine in the sense that when you look at the kinds of things that our female scholars--and I'm not saying that female scholars do not write about grace--but look at their interests and look at the things that they write about, and do we consider those things worthy in their own right? . . . [Interviewer Dru Johnson: "You can argue infinitely about it in etheral space, and it never has to get grounded in a body. You can talk about how it comes down to a body--"] See. And this is the question . . . we are talking about New Testament scholarship more broadly. It is a manifestation of privilege to argue for over two hundred years about how we should think about something and not, while at the same time, ignoring so many issues in the Biblical text that touches on the lived experience of oppressed peoples. . . . [Is justification] the only thing?"[5]

The gospel is necessarily good news for the bodies of others, individually and corporately, human and otherwise.

I think of Howard Thurman's poem, "The Work of Christmas"--

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.

Or consider the Christology of John Keble's hymn "Blessed Are the Pure in Heart"
The Lord, who left the sky
our life and peace to bring
to dwell in lowliness with us,
our pattern and our king.

The gospel will simultaneously and necessarily include the horizontal and the vertical

The gospel is how Jesus is

More later

1. To see the extent of this change, let me copy here a note I made a few months ago in response to a question from one of my kids: "What is God doing now?" I told them, "God is holding the cosmos in being and directing it toward his desired purpose: to bring all things under the rule of Jesus. Therefore, having installed Jesus on the everlasting throne of David, the Father has sent the Spirit who, through the church, his priestly nation, is regathering the ten lost tribes from the nations (which is the mission work of the New Testament.) This regathering will reach its climax in the return of Jesus. Meanwhile, the preaching of the church is putting the Principalities and Powers on notice that their pagan tyranny is over. And the reborn people of the church are displaying the image of God to all creation. The Spirit sanctifies the church and gifts it for participation in the regathering and for displaying to all who God is. The church prays by the Spirit for God to hallow his name, bring in his kingdom, and enact his will in its worldwide situation, and it cooperates with him by grace in the doing of it.

[2] Roger Olson, "What is 'Progressive Christianity" https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2021/11/what-is-progressive-christianity/ accessed 11/19/2021.

[3] Freddie Hayward, "Why do students still want Jordan Peterson to tell them how to live?" The New Statesman. UK ed. 1 December 2021. https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2021/12/why-do-students-still-want-jordan-peterson-to-tell-them-how-to-live accessed 12/3/2021.

[4] This is Thomas Kuhn's paradigmatic framework from the Structure of Scientific Revolutions applied in the humanities. Just as science operates within sets of beliefs called paradigms which are passively enforced by a system of social and financial rewards and punishments. Scientific research, then, is "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education" (UCP. 1962, 5).)

[5] OnScript podcast "Esau McCaulley -- Reading While Black" aired October 27, 2020. Accessed November 30, 2021. https://onscript.study/podcast/esau-mccaulley-reading-while-black/.

On Bonhoeffer's world come of age

Today I finished Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison (MacMillan 1967 rev. ed.) and read for myself those oft-quoted passages of a world come of age and of Christian faith beyond religion. How many dozens of times have I thought about these words Bonhoeffer wrote from Tegel prison to his friend Eberhard Bethge? How many dozens of books and articles have I read from people also struggling to understand Bonhoeffer's pastoral vision?

Bonhoeffer observes that the people of his day are immunized by modernity against religious impulses. "Man," he writes (Mensch), "has learnt to deal with himself in all questions of importance without recourse to the 'working hypothesis' called 'God' . . . "Everything gets along without 'God'--and, in fact, just as well as before" (168).[1] And he wants to know how Christian preaching and the church should best address this.

What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience--and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving toward a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as "religious" do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different. . . What kind of situation emerges emerges for us, for the church? . . . What is a religionless Christianity? (141)

At the same time, he finds the general theological response to modernity, namely the retreat to the subjective and psychological interior life, inadequate. He is no fan of a psychological flight into the inner life, which is taken up by, he says, existentialist philosophy, psychotherapy [psychologism], and methodism (which I take to mean Pietist, individualist brands of Christianity). Bonhoeffer hates their appeal to an emotional God of the Gaps that approaches a human being only "after his weaknesses and meannesses have been spied out [and in] those secret human places that God is to have his domain" (183). "The secrets known to a man's valet--that is, to put it crudely, the range of his intimate life, from prayer to his sexual life--have become the hunting-ground of modern pastoral workers" (181). "If [someone] cannot be brought to see and admit that his happiness is really an evil, his health sickness, and his vigour despair, the theologian is at his wits' end" (179). Such is not the way of Jesus for Bonhoeffer. I like this characteristic of Bonhoeffer's thought: it is muscular and energetic--courageous. "When Jesus blessed sinners, they were real sinners, but Jesus did not make everyone a sinner first" (Ibid). Such acts attempt to reduce a come-of-age humanity to an adolescent, "to make him dependent on things on which he is, in fact, no longer dependent, and thrusting him into problems that are, in fact, no longer problems for him" (169).

I therefore want to start from the premise that God should not be smuggled into some last secret place, but that we should frankly recognize that the world, and people, have come of age, that we should not run man down in his worldliness, but confront him with God at his strongest point, that we should give up all our clerical tricks, and not regard psychotherapy and existentialist philosophy as God's pioneers. . . . The Word of God is far removed from this revolt of mistrust, this revolt from below. On the contrary, it reigns. (184)

Bonhoeffer's way forward is a developing hypothesis. He knew the feel of his insight, but blurred and without edges. He eschewed what he calls a salto mortale, a death-leap back to the Middle Ages. (Here he quotes a song "Oh if only I knew the way back, the long way back to the land of childhood.")[2] And he embraced a way forward without religion, without the "religious a priori" of mankind. Bonhoeffer claimed that Karl Barth had here shown the way by means of the critique of religion Barth discussed in his commentary on Romans (Der Römerbrief, 2nd ed). Taking up the scalpel of penultimate-versus-ultimate that Bonhoeffer discusses in, for example, Act and Being, Bonhoeffer looked for a Christ outside of religion, "really the Lord of the world" (141). He would find Jesus at the center of life, not at the end of it. He would find Jesus not in the clouds, but in the concrete and everyday world. "Jesus claims for himself and the Kingdom of God the whole of human life in all its manifestations" (180).

It is not with the beyond that we are concerned, but with this world as created and preserved, subjected to laws, reconciled, and restored. What is above this world is, in the gospel, intended to exist for this world; I mean that, not in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystic, pietistic, ethical theology, but in the biblical sense of the creation and of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

For Bonhoeffer, this new form of faith would use a new language "perhaps quite non-religious, but liberating and redeeming--as was Jesus's language" (161). It would speak from the courageous openness of the gospel, calling things what they are and not winking at the godlessness of the world (Luther). And it would not require, citing Paul's teaching about circumcision, people to become religious before they could be disciples. It would take "hold of a man at the centre of his life" and send "a man back to his life on earth in a wholly new way" (176).

Similarly, its god would not have his domain in the secret places of the inner world--the Bible doesn't separate the inner and outer. "It is always concerned with anthropos teleios, the whole man" (183). Its god summons his people to a maturity that means "we must live as men who manage our lives without him" (188), etsi deus non daretur (even if God did not exist).[3] Not that God is absent, but that he has "let himself be pushed out of the world and on to the cross.

The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34) . . . He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering. . . . the world's coming of age outlined above which has done away with a false conception of God, opens up a way of seeing the God of the Bible, who wins power and space in the world by his weakness. (188)

Bonhoeffer, following Martin Luther, bends to his work holding a theology of the cross. We know God best as he reveals himself in Christ crucified for sinners. And, indeed, the kenotic direction of his thought--where kenotic means "self-emptying" after the Christ hymn of Philippians chapter two--is what electrified the English west when Bonhoeffer's works were translated after the Second World War. This kenotic theology has since been well-worked-out in many directions: in the liberalism of John A. T. Robinson's popular book Honest to God and in Western liberalism (Spong etc.) and in the liberationist theologies heralded by Jürgen Moltmann, whose first published work was an essay on Bonhoeffer, and from there in Gustavo Guitterez and, after him, in a million splintered shards: womanist theologies, queer theologies, theologies of film, aesthetic theology, etc.

Finally, for I had not meant this summary of Bonhoeffer's response to modernity to go on for this length, he describes in two letters written March 19 and July 18, 1944 (within a year of his execution), his worldly Christian. It amazes me that these portrait miniatures are passed over in the literature; I see the same quotes pulled again and again (an epigraphic example of the word-thing fallacy).

In his letter of March 19, Bonhoeffer talks about maturity, about what it means to be a grown up.

Is it not characteristic of a man, in contrast to an immature person, that his centre of gravity is always where he actually is, and that the longing for the fulfillment of his wishes cannot prevent him from being his whole self, wherever he happens to be? The adolescent is never wholly in one place; that is one of his essential characteristics . . . There is a wholeness about the fully grown man which enables him to face an existing situation squarely. He may have his longings, but he keeps them out of sight, and somehow masters them; and the more he has to overcome in order to live fully in the present, the more he will have the respect and confidence of his fellows, especially the younger ones who are still on the road that he has already traveled. Desires to which we cling closely can easily prevent us from being what we ought to be and can be; and on the other hand, desires repeatedly mastered for the sake of duty make us richer. Lack of desire is poverty. Almost all the people that I find in my present surroundings cling to their own desires, and so have no interest in others; they no longer listen, and they are incapable of loving their neighbor. I think that even in this place we ought to live as if we had no wishes and no future, and just be our true selves. It is remarkable then how others come to rely on us, confide in us, and let us talk to them. . . . We can have an abundant life, even though many wishes remain unfulfilled--that is what I have really been trying to say. (127-128)

It is tempting to say that Bonhoeffer is but describing a socially respected, middle-class, German man in a society that values reticence, a man such as his father. However, such a conclusion is undone by the details. The "centre of gravity" by which Bonhoeffer's man lives is conceptually close to Bonhoeffer's emphasis throughout his writings, including those on the world come of age, on keeping ultimate things (Jesus's reign) ultimate . Bonhoeffer's Christian is not a stoic without desires but a person who values his desires, if only because they pave the road to riches of character. Desires frame the doorway toward the love of neighbor, a key Christian virtue--but as they are mastered. Those who do not master their desires, who cling to them, do not cultivate virtue and Christian character. Indeed, it is in his desires that Bonhoeffer's man becomes present: not dispassionate, but present for others who "come to rely on us." This is an abundant life, he says, even if desires go unfulfilled.[4] In summary, the Christian in a world come of age resists his desires for others and is fulfilled in each moment, even though his life may be fragmented. Such a man cannot help but become morally attractive. He attracts the nations, so to speak, and they come to hear his wisdom.

In the letter of July 18, Bonhoeffer talks about suffering. The Christian in the world come of age lives a secular life, he says, which means sharing in God's sufferings. He can do that because he is a free man, free to live "unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities" (193). He need not be religious in any particular way. Instead, he accepts himself as created by Christ. Living in the world is a metanoia, a repentance, "not thinking about one's own needs, problems, sins, and fears, but allowing oneself to be caught up into the way of Jesus Christ," which he later describes as being "caught up into the messianic suffering of God in Jesus Christ" (190). Jesus calls his people to live powerless and yet available to the world, as he did and does yet. Jesus is, as Bonhoeffer says elsewhere, "a man for others." This is to live as a blessing. "We have received God's blessing in happiness and in suffering. Yet those who have been blessed can do nothing but pass on this blessing; indeed, they must be a blessing wherever they are."

I hope this post has made a good outline of Bonhoeffer's cultural diagnosis of Western culture, his world come of age. And I hope it has suggested the kind of people and church that Bonhoeffer believes must live in such a world if they would be Christ's. I had hoped to make comments about how Bonhoeffer's points inform my own project and suggest themes that Bonhoeffer may have continued to develop had he lived. This will have to wait.

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[1] Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls this state which is impervious to religious appeal the "buffered self."

[2] Analogous to discussions of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment, or the loss of an enchanted universe. On this blog, note the following blog posts: (1) Charles Taylor's ideological diagnosis of modernity, and (2) my description of the enchanted and disenchanted universe.

[3] Pope Benedict's used this Latin clause in an address to the Pontifical Council on Culture: "New information technologies [and] globalization has [sic] often also resulted in disseminating in all cultures many of the materialistic and individualistic elements of the West. The formula "Etsi Deus non daretur" is increasingly becoming a way of living that originates in a sort of “arrogance” of reason – a reality nonetheless created and loved by God – that deems itself self-sufficient and closes itself to contemplation and the quest for a superior Truth."

[4] In an earlier letter, Bonhoeffer compared human lives to Bach fuges whose motives are fragmentary but, in God's providence, are made into a whole.

Give up the myth of human progress?

“Clearly science and technology have put extraordinary knowledge and power at the command of beings who come into the world with the same brains and mental faculties as humans born 5,000 years ago. Any victory over our species’ destructive tendencies will likewise have to come from institutional and cultural development. We know what humans are capable of: in the wrong circumstances and with the wrong formation, they can behave monstrously. The hope for progress can consist only in the belief that there is some form of collective human life in which the capacity for barbarism will rarely find expression, and in which humans’ creative and cooperative potential can be realized without hindrance. [John] Gray regards such hope as utopian, but it can be supported both by experience and by reflection. Moral and political progress is inevitably more difficult than scientific progress, since it cannot occur in the minds of a few experts but must be realized in the collective lives of millions; but it does happen. Experience shows that some societies are much more decent than others, and that in fits and starts, cruelty, oppression and discrimination have become on balance less acceptable over time.” Thomas Nagel. NYT. 7/5/13.

In this quote, Thomas Nagel defends the myth of human progress. And I wonder, reading it, whether the holocaust is not made more horrible by its deep challenge to this myth. The German people were (and still are) shining examples of the best of Western civilization--and evil still took and used them without interference to accomplish in reality the things that only exist in our unspoken nightmares.

I've been thinking off and on about this myth of human progress. I love this myth. Believing it gives my life and my own civilization meaning and purpose. I am at the crest of thousands of years of progress. I am better than my forebears. And those who come after will be better, happier, and healthier than me. Their children would be geniuses to my age. And yet, lets face it, this is a thoroughly secular eschatology bound on a highly selective reading of the facts.

In short, the Judeo-Christian worldview should have none of it. It is a kind of antichrist. One of those lies that hold down the truth.

On the other hand, can someone just give up the myth of human progress? Can someone simply rewire the operating system they imbibed with their mother's milk?

Revival or the saints?

On Friday, December 17, 2010, Pope Benedict XVI addressed students throughout the United Kingdom during his apostolic visit. He could have spoken apologetically or enumerated the evils of modernity. He could have sounded a prophetic warning, or he could have just said something politically winning and nice. He certainly started that way: "First of all, I want to say how glad I am to be here with you today." No doubt not a few expected the rest to follow along in the same manner--but it didn't. The Pope had scarcely finished thanking everyone when, to my astonishment, he began talking about saints. "I hope that among those of you listening to me today there are some of the future saints of the twenty-first century." My astonishment was (and is) not that he talked about saints, but that he was inviting the students who heard him to become saints. He wasn't talking St. Catherina of Siena (1347-1380), daughter of an Italian cloth dyer, but appealing to a would-be St. Ashley Butler of Leeds (1992-20??), marketing major and a soccer enthusiast and daughter of a network administrator.

"Perhaps some of you have never thought about this before," he continued. "Perhaps some of you think being a saint is not for you. . . . When I invite you to become saints, I am asking you not to be content with second best. I am asking you not to pursue one limited goal and ignore all the others. [I am asking you to put those other goals in the context of true happiness, which ] is to be found in God.

"We need to have the courage to place our deepest hopes in God alone, not in money, in a career, in worldly success, or in our relationships with others, but in God. Only he can satisfy the deepest needs of our hearts. . . . God wants your friendship. And once you enter into friendship with God, everything in your life begins to change. As you come to know him better, you find you want to reflect something of his infinite goodness in your own life. You are attracted to the practice of virtue. You begin to see greed and selfishness and all the other sins for what they really are, destructive and dangerous tendencies that cause deep suffering and do great damage, and you want to avoid falling into that trap yourselves. You begin to feel compassion for people in difficulties and you are eager to do something to help them. You want to come to the aid of the poor and the hungry, you want to comfort the sorrowful, you want to be kind and generous. And once these things begin to matter to you, you are well on the way to becoming saints."

It is well known that Benedict XVI has dedicated his pontificate to combating the secularism of the West and the spiritual indifference of its people. His life has been a long exposure to modernity in all its forms. As a young man, he was well-equated with Nazism, having nearly been a Hitler Youth but later drafted into the military. After the war, he became a student at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. There he studied Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers and became a fan of the Roman Catholic neo-Kantian theologian Karl Rahner. He witnessed the social turmoil and youth uprisings of the 1960s as a professor at Freising College. He would later teach at the universities of Bonn, Tübingen, and Regensburg.

So given his exposure to modernity and the overtly stated agenda of his pontificate, Benedict XVI chose to talk to the youth of the West about sainthood.

Contrast this with another doctrine aimed at spiritual indifference and even secularism. Contrast it with the doctrine of spontaneous, regional, and supernatural revival developed best in the United States by Reformed theologian Jonathan Edwards. A New England Puritan, Edwards witnessed the First Great Awakening of 1733-35 from his post as minister in Northhampton Massachusetts. The First Great Awakening extended from Great Britain to the American Colonies during the 1730s and 40s. It was the result of dynamic preaching that urged hearers to repentance and personal renewal. It turned the face of frontier Protestant Christianity inward away from corporate liturgy and doctrine and toward private emotion and personal response. People were encouraged to examine their lives, to repent from sin and commit themselves to moral living. Edwards wrote a book based on his experience of the Awakening. It was called A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections and was published in 1746.

In Religious Affections, Edwards constructs a method of self-examination for separating true religious experience from its counterfeit. New faith, he says, must be tested to see if it is genuine. Good works in themselves mean little. Edwards concludes that the twelve fruits of the Spirit are the true signs, and of them, love is the chief. "Love is the chief of the affections, and as it were the fountain of them." And, he continues, only spiritual men, that is human beings awakened by the Holy Spirit, exhibit its fruits.

Since the First Great Awakening, evangelical churches have prayed for revival in the face of growing secular indifference. With Edwards they have understood revival to be a changing of the mind and emotions of each human being toward repentance and amendment of life. With Edwards they have understood this to be completely a work of the Holy Spirit. And, keeping the First and subsequent Awakenings in mind, they have understood the phenomenon of Spirit revival to be pneumatic, unexpected, and in some way geographically located. The revival tradition has taken on other characteristics since Edwards as well, especially under the influences of charismatic preachers like Billy Sunday and Billy Graham and the pentecostal movements of the twentieth century.

My experience of revival as it is practiced in evangelical churches today is pedestrian. Revival announced in an American church today means a jejune week of long evening Sunday services. There will be jeremiads against the evils of the culture and full-throated appeals toward repentance--hear the echoes of the tent-meetings of Methodist perfectionism, of "praying through" to the "second blessing", of tongue-speaking and people slain in the Spirit. There will be prayer, fervent and pious prayer. And there will be appeals for revival made to God--where revival is like a spiritual thunderhead and the praying congregation Elijah kneeling on the dry mountain.

This post has gone much longer than expected, but here are two responses to the challenge posed by Western secularism: popular Protestant revivalism and Roman Catholic sainthood. There is room here, I think, for a compare and contrast that would lead to interesting conclusions. I hope I have laid a very little of the groundwork here--and a general work it has been. For myself I think that the revival tradition makes little sense in its expectation for a falling of "latter rain" upon the citizens of [insert town, city, state, or country.] But there are commonalities between Benedict's challenge and the challenge made by Edwards and picked up in the evening preaching from revival pulpits, save Protestant recoil from the papist grammar of "sainthood" even as they (we) pray for private sanctification and public rejuvenation.

Channeling Napoleon Hill

What follows is a comment made to a post that my pastor, Father Jody Howard, made following an article in the Living Church about the challenges facing the Episcopal Church. At the end of the article, Rev. Dr. Neal Michell, canon for strategic development in the Diocese of Dallas, writes, “The problems facing our church are spiritual in nature. We have not been faithful enough disciples of Jesus Christ. We have not reached out to those around us with the Good News of Jesus Christ.” My response is as follows:

Brueggemann's call for a return to personal discipleship is definitely part of the solution; however, that is simply not enough. That may become a vibrant monasticism or fundamentalism, (which may be the option that best exemplifies God's design for the church in the world. For me, the jury is still out on that one. And if it does come down here, I choose monasticism over fundamentalism.) but it will not solve the puzzle of why there simply isn't traction in the culture. In my mind, this is a problem with language and with anthropology. Language because there is simply no longer a common linguistic "game" that allows people to talk about religious ideas. (And, one might say, this is part of a broader problem: that the public square has so collapsed that even talking about ideas of public consequence has been reduced to grandstanding, party politics, and the manipulation of conspiracy theories.) Anthropology because the formula for a whole human being living a human life no longer includes the habits and practices of faith as a necessity but has relegated it to, at best, an app that can be downloaded and run on the software of the self if one so chooses, for reasons that are highly personable but lend themselves to the psychotic, the aesthetic, the social/political, or even the pragmatic--but certainly not the necessary. Western human beings are practical atheists, one and all, and it is a struggle even to be religious for the religious. The church catholic in the West has ignored these extremely thorny philosophical problems and applied, instead, Western and especially American ideas of individualism and success-through-right-action (channeling Napoleon Hill).

theological anthropology; Walter Brueggemann; missions; culture; atheism; modernity

Sorting some of this out

There is a need to restate the problem, or at least one of the problems, which Charles Taylor is dealing with in The Malaise of Modernity.

His primary bogey so far has been the cultural slide into soft relativism, a personal and political narcissism which erodes all motivation for personal and political involvement and leads potentially to soft despotism. Why, if self-fulfillment is my goal, should I stay in long term relationships after they have ceased to be fun? Why should I learn the art of political involvement, the give and take of promotion and compromise? Why shouldn't the circle of responsibility be drawn skin-tight around my own changing desires and choices? Aren't I pursuing the authentic life? Isn't the best life that in which I come to realize and maximize myself?

The religious and the secular can make different but parallel arguments. For the secular, I offer Baruch Spinoza: "To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life." And here is Carl Jung, "Fidelity to the law of your own being is an act of high courage flung in the face of life." Is there any need to raise the specter of Emerson: "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist," "what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men," or Thoreau or Whitman? Here’s John Stuart Mill:

“If a person possesses any tolerable amount of common sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode” (Three Essays. Oxford University Press, 1975), 83.)

The religious have their own anecdotes as well. A prioress at a Benedictine convent describes her philosophy of life this way, "I try to live my life in such a way that when I die and my Maker asks, 'Did you live the life I gave you?' I can honestly answer yes." Add to this the usual reading of Jesus's parable of the talents.

Wherever you go in the West, the impulse to excavate and assume a larger self, or to release or augment the self and its experiences by means of commerce, is all pervasive--and this is as true in religious literature as secular. We are all caught up in it, e pluribus unum.

But it doesn't have to be this way. The slide into soft relativism by those who value individualism needn't occur. Taylor says that soft relativism is simply the product of a shallow understanding, and he argues for a better one: the ethic or ideal of authenticity.

A major pillar of his argument rests in the importance of a background of intelligibility which he calls "horizons of significance." The argument, see, is between what is valued. Soft relativism values anything it perceives as contributing to self realization, but its basis for argument is in the power of choice. Choice, personal or cultural, bestows value. It is a commercial statement, forever subject to fetishism according to the invisible hand of--we aren't quite sure, are we? I suppose we may have discovered the Powers themselves. At any rate, I want to see explicitly how his argument for these horizons of significance goes, because, again, it is part of the backbone of his argument.

(1) Authenticity requires definition over-and-against, it requires contextual field of differences that matter

"However one feels about it," he writes, "the making and sustaining of our identity, in the absence of a heroic effort to break out of ordinary existence, remains dialogical throughout our lives." (35) Taylor asserts that the creation of identity does not occur in monologue, but in dialogue, in agreement or struggle. Difference is a big part of this. "Defining myself means finding what is significant in my difference from others." (36) But what are real and meaningful differences, and what are not? Is being taller a better goal than, say, carrying on a tribal tradition? How do we know.

We know, says Taylor, because every option comes to us against a background (horizon) of significance. Taylor is pretty pragmatic here, he doesn't say how this horizon came to be, simply that it is, and that it is determined largely by what is sacred. He also says we can't just ignore this horizon.

Soft relativists want to do just that. They argue that choice is what makes an option significant. Again reflecting an instrumental, or commercial, free-market sensibility, choice is the arbiter of all horizons; whether a choice is arrived on the basis of reason or feeling doesn't matter. Any other horizon is dismissed.

The problem with this is that choice alone is cheap. If gold grew on every tree, it would lose its value. That's what choice does. By removing any common horizon and making significance absolutely subjective, everything and every option or possibility becomes as easily obtained and easily discarded as any other. If the goal was to become more authentic by choice, then every option can get one nowhere.

Indeed, by exalting choice, soft relativists undermine their own position. "Unless some options are more significant than others, the very idea of self-choice falls into triviality and hence incoherence." (38) There is no longer a way of telling what is more or less good. The value of an option has to come from without, independent of my will, and that applies even to the value of choice: "Self-choice as an ideal makes sense only because some issues (I have also called the options, potentials, variables, etc.) are more significant than others." (Ibid.)

The choices required for authenticity require options that have real substance against a horizon of significance.

"The ideal of self-choice supposes that there are other issues of significance beyond self-choice. . . . It requires a horizon of issues of importance which help define the respects in which self-making is significant. The agent seeking significance in life, trying to define him- or herself meaningfully, has to exist in a horizon of important questions. I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter. [Therefore, unlike soft relativism,] authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands" (39-41).

(2) Authenticity requires a way of recognizing differences without flattening them

The above argument means that simply making the choice to value others, simply asserting that a multicultural society is a good thing, does not proscribe value. The ability for those statements to have meaning requires that some common horizon be found for differences which make them valuable. "Mere difference can't itself be the ground of equal value." (51) "There must be some substantitive agreement on value, or else the formal principle of equality will be empty and a sham." Taylor turns to politics.

A political definition will not do it. Definitions of themselves exclude some differences even as they draw a wall of commonality around other differences. This is nothing but choice put in the hands of the polis, and the argument goes the same way as it did for individual choice as a ground for meaning. So what horizon of value does make sense?

Taylor doesn't answer the question definitively. Rather, he encourages his reader to begin to find "commonalities of value," and labels the most crucial of these "sharing a participatory political life." It is a necessary point on the way. Taylor has certainly gone further than narcissism, but it isn't enough in my opinion. What a commonality of value is, Taylor doesn't say. His result is shallow. Offering a political becoming--finding the answer in the process--though culturally a winner, is, in my mind, unsatisfactory.

Taylor's plea not to notice that man behind the curtain suggests a way for theology to provide a better answer. There is more to Taylor than soft relativism, but he does not arrive at a true and satisfactory Truth which would, by its very assertion, provide a touchstone, a north star, a schema of meaning in relation to all other suggested values. Interesting, too, that Taylor suggests a fundamental anthropology during his argument, writing, "There is a picture here of what human beings are like." He may not be sure what this anthropology is--perhaps it is a topic that will come up later in his book--but it is certain that the matrix formed between the relationship of God and humankind is a horizon of value that theology has long understood.

Previous entries in this series are:
The Need for Recognition.

Charles Taylor; individualism; social theory; modernity.

Baudelaire is Melting

This post continues a series summarizing Marshall Berman’s thought-provoking book, All That is Solid Melts into Air (Penguin, 1988 rev ed.). In this book, Berman explores the phenomenon of modernity, highlighting its characteristics across multiple disciplines and through the eyes of many different participating figures.

Baudelaire: Pastoral, Counter-Pastoral and What?

Berman begins his chapter on Baudelaire with a couple of important descriptions of where he is going both in the book and in his underlying sociology. He writes:

Our vision of modern life tends to split into material and spiritual planes: some people devote themselves to "modernism," which they see as a species of pure spirit, evolving in accord with its autonomous artistic and intellectual imperatives; other people work within the orbit of "modernization," a complex of material structures and processes -- political, economic, social -- which, supposedly, once it has got under way, runs on its own momentum with little or no input from human minds or souls. This dualism, pervasive in contemporary culture, cuts us all off from one of the pervasive facts of modern life: the interfusion of its material and spiritual forces, the intimate unity of the modern self and the modern environment. But the first great wave of writings and thinkers about modernity ... had an instinctive feeling for this unity; it gave their visions a richness and depth that contemporary writing about modernity sadly lacks.

Baudelaire, he says, is one of these first writers.

By examining Baudelaire, Bergman hopes to get at some of the aesthetic, the emotive, the psychological side of modernity. "[Baudelaire's critiques] contain several distinctive visions of modernity," he says. First, celebration, or as he calls it, pastoral modernism or modernolatry; then denunciation, counter-pastoral and cultural despair; and, finally . . . well, Marshall doesn't give this one away quite yet.

At any rate, the first vision of modernity to be explored is pastoral modernism. This perspective is represented in Baudelaire's earliest works. In them, Baudelaire paeans the bourgeois. Theirs is not a backward-looking stagnation, but a realization of the idea of the future in all its diverse forms: political, industrial, artistic. The fundamental motive is the desire for infinite human progress in every sphere, including the arts. "It would be unworthy of their dignity to stand still and accept stagnation in art." "Baudelaire's faith in the bourgeoisie neglects all the darker potentialities of its economic and political drives--that is why I call it a pastoral vision." This pastoral vision "proclaims a natural affinity between material and spiritual modernization; it holds that the groups that are most dynamic and innovative in economic and political life will be most open to intellectual and artistic creativity --'to realize the idea of the future in all its diverse forms'!" This is a grand adventure, sparkling, dazzling, youthful, glittering and triumphant, "a harmony in the turmoil of human freedom." Pastoral modernism, not only in Baudelaire but among many of his contemporaries, "sees the whole spiritual adventure of modernity incarnated in the latest fashion, the latest machine, or--and here it gets sinister--the latest model [military] regiment."

Here, modernity is naive, taking the glitter of sharpened swords for the glow of hope and human betterment; "modernity without tears." Marshall points out the irony that Baudelaire misses his own erasure. This beautiful modernity gets rid of dissonance. It cleans up "the street"--that environment which nurtures Baudelaire's artists and Baudelaire himself. It attempts to gets rid of the darker side of human nature, its social and spiritual turbulence, with the blinding dazzle of an outward show.

Baudelaire's counter-pastoral notes are sounded even in the middle of his pastoral ones. Baudelaire didn't seem to notice the change, even as he began to discern a hegemony of beauty. Where beauty is static and enforces its aesthetic like a spiritual policeman, there can be no alternative visions. There is a confusion of material order with spiritual order, a confusion spread by the romantic story-utopia of Progress. The development of better technology is mistaken for the deepening of human moral and spiritual life.

Unfortunately, instead of resisting this trend and re-asserting the artist's place in the whirl of the modern world, Baudelaire disconnects him. "He disconnects his artist not only from the material world of steam, electricity and gas, but even from the whole past and future history of art." The artist derives his art, now, from himself, a walking Ding-an-sich, dualistically floating freely above it all. [How different is this from Schleiermacher’s use of theology?] Baudelaire divorced discussions of beauty from discussions of truth, finding in truth that modern reality which is "utterly loathsome, empty not only of beauty but of even the potential for beauty." Art divorced from reality is "pure." Along with it goes a contempt for modern human beings and their lives, a contempt which, as Marshall says, cripples Baudelaire's aesthetic. Marshall writes, "what makes this pastoral, and uncritical, is the radical dualism, and the utter lack of awareness that there can be rich and complex relations, mutual influences and interfusions, between what an artist (or anyone else) dreams and what he sees." Baudelaire doesn't begin to suspect that the artists whom he lifts above the earth to the clouds are in actuality human and as deeply implicated in la vie moderne as anyone else. Ironically again, Marshall points out that Baudelaire himself could not follow his artistic prescriptions. His own art was too bound up with the everyday life of the Paris streets, its confluences of people and its night life, its cellars, pubs, cafes and the concrete of its time and place. [This is why I like to write and work in public.] "Baudelaire must have known this, at least unconsciously; whenever he is in the midst of sealing off modern art from modern life, he keeps reaching out to trip himself up and bring the two together again." Marshall concludes: "The lesson for Baudelaire ... is that modern life has a distinctive and authentic beauty, which, however, is inseparable from its innate misery and anxiety, from the bills that modern man has to pay."

Previous entries in this series are:
All that is Solid Melts into Summary
All That is Solid Continues to Melt

This entire series can also be read as a single document.

Charles Baudelaire; Marshall Berman; modernity; aesthetics; modernization; the myth of progress.

All That is Solid Melts into Summary

Summary quotes & thoughts per Marshall Berman All That is Solid Melts into Air (Penguin, 1988 rev ed.)

In All That is Solid Melts into Air, I define modernism as any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it. . . . They are moved at once by a will to change--to transform both themselves and their world--and by a terror of disorientation and disintegration, of life falling apart. To be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction, a life characterized by the uninterrupted disturbances of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation which have been part of modernity for two hundred years.

If we think of modernism as a struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world, we will realize that no mode of modernism can ever be definitive.

I believe that communication and dialogue have taken on a new specific weight and urgency in modern times, because subjectivity and inwardness have become at once richer and more intensely developed, and more lonely and entrapped, than they ever were before. In such a context, communication and dialogue become both a desperate need and a primary source of delight. In a world where meanings melt into air, these experiences are among the few solid sources of meaning we can count on. One of the things that can make modern life worth living is the enhanced opportunities it offers us--and sometimes even forces on us--to talk together, to reach and understand each other.

[In response to postmodernism's absolute dismissal of all grand narratives.] Have we really outgrown the dilemmas that arise when "all that is solid melts into air," or the dream of a life in which "the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all"? I do not think so.

[There is] a widespread and often desperate fear of the freedom that modernity opens up for every individual, and the desire to escape from freedom [Erich Fromm] by any means possible.

There is a mode of vital experience--experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life's possibilities and perils--that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience "modernity."

Berman goes on to say that his desire in this book is to recover the history of modernity so that our own contemporary experience will be enriched and perhaps guided into the future. The experience of previous generations with modernity, both positive and negative, has been far richer than our own, he argues. We need to re-examine our situation and come up with better, more hopeful solutions. For example, in the past people understood the danger of being circumscribed by technology and the overwhelming power of social forces of organization, "but they all believed that modern individuals had the capacity both to understand this fate and, once they understood it, to fight it. Hence, even in the midst of a wretched present, they could imagine an open future. Twentieth-century critics of modernity almost entirely lack this empathy with, and faith in, their fellow men and women. . . . Modern man as a subject--as a living being capable of response, judgment, and action in and on the world--has disappeared. In the opinion of the modern intelligensia:

The masses have no egos, no ids, their souls are devoid of inner tension or dynamism: their ideas, their needs, even their dreams, are 'not their own'; their inner lives are 'totally administered,' programmed to produce exactly those desires that the social system can satisfy, and no more. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobiles, hi-fi sets, split-level homes, kitchen equipment.

Berman sees this opinion as a rejection of earlier visions of history as restless activity, dynamic contradiction, dialectical struggle and progress. The responses tended to simply into three groups based on attitudes toward modern life as a whole: affirmative, negative, and withdrawn.

All these visions and revisions of modernity were active orientations toward history, attempts to connect the turbulent present with a past and a future, to help men and women all over the contemporary world to make themselves at home in this world. Virtually no one today seems to want to make the large, human connections that the idea of modernity entails. Hence, discourse and controversy over the meaning of modernity, so lively a few decades ago, has virtually ceased today.

The modernisms of the past can give us back a sense of our own roots. They can:

(1) Help us connect our lives with people throughout the rest of the world who are living through the trauma of modernization.

(2) Illuminate the contradictory forces which inspire and torment us, such as

(a) our desire to be rooted in a stable and coherent person and social past which conflicts with our desire for limitless growth (economically, socially, psychologically, etc.) a growth which enriches the future while destroying the solidities of the past.

(b) our desire for clear and solid values to live by which conflicts with our desire to embrace the limitless possibilites of modern life and experience which often call such values into question, producing a constant negotiation of personal and political allegiances and hostilities.

This entire series can also be read as a single document.

Marshall Berman; modernity; Erich Fromm; freedom.

the wave that has us all

Marshall Berman in his book All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Penguine 1982) describes modernity as a dynamo, building, destroying and then re-building with unchecked insatiability.

The innate dynamism of the modern economy, and of the culture that grows from this economy, annihilates everything that it creates--physical environments, social institutions, metaphysics ideas, artistic visions, moral values--in order to create more, to go on endlessly creating the world anew. This drive draws all modern men and women into its orbit, and forces us all to grapple with the question of what is essential, what is meaningful, what is real in the maelstrom in which we move and live.

Berman goes on to describe his own experience of modernity growing up the Bronx in the late-40’s. Overnight, from out of nowhere, the idyllic Jewish & Irish neighborhoods of his youth were torn apart by “an immense expressway, unprecedented in scale, expense and difficulty of construction.” Worse, he continues, this was done on the back of the very values of the dispossessed. To oppose the destruction of their homes was to oppose “progress.” To oppose “bridges, tunnels, expressways, housing developments, power dams, stadia, cultural centers . . . few people, especially in New York [are] prepared to do that.” New Yorkers identify themselves and their city with progress, and so the world beloved by Berman’s family and tens of thousands of their neighbors was destroyed “in the name of values that we ourselves embraced.”

This, friends, is the wave that has us all. This is the overwhelming cultural current in which we all live. From the latest rise of Islamic terrorism from eastern Mosques to the malaise and alienation we feel in our Western churches: this is the riptide that joins us both. And it is disorienting. One may experience it as “alienation” one moment and as “freedom” the next.

It's effect is omnipresent. I hear it in the guitar stylings of Jimi Hendrix--the way he sweeps effortlessly along the frets, touching his figertips down lightly here or there just long enough to tap on or half bend a note which races off again--and in the anthropology of psychologist and one-time-cofounder of the Frankfurt School, Erich Fromm.

In Fromm's last book, To Have or to Be (Abacus 1976), he argues that two ways of existence are competing for "the spirit of mankind": having and being. The having mode looks to things and material possessions and is based on aggression and greed. The being mode is rooted in love and is concerned with shared experience and productive activity. The book ends by asking about the new man and the new society.

So then, have we come any further than the 1960’s? Is John’s apocalpytic city of the world, Babylon, really so apocalyptic, or is it the air we breathe, the way we dress and the political discourse of our nations? Fundamentalism is not an option; the church can’t hide from this. Some meaningful response has to be spoken into the gale, some way of properly saying “Kingdom” into the podcasts & videophones of the world. Some way of making words meaningful again, when we ourselves hardly find them so.

This entire series can also be read as a single document.

modernity; Erich Fromm; Marshall Berman; All That Is Solid Melts Into Air; Jimi Hendrix; progress.

modernity is not continuity but change

I am scratching at something in the following three quotations: modernity; change, both social and existential; the phenomenological point called "the present."

Pierra Nora “The Tidal Wave of Memory”
“…the key feature of modernity is not continuity but change – an accelerated precipitation of all things into a swiftly retreating past. This change shattered the unity of historical time, that straightforward linearity which traditionally bound the present and the future to the past. For the way in which a society, nation, group or family envisaged its future traditionally determined what it needed to remember of the past. This gave meaning to the present, which linked the two. Broadly speaking, the future could be envisaged in one of three ways: as a form of restoration, as a form of progress, or as a form of revolution.

Friedrich Engels, “Socialism”
For everyday purposes we know and can say, e.g., whether an animal is alive or not. But, upon closer inquiry, we find that this is, in many cases, a very complex question, as the jurists know very well. They have cudgelled their brains in vain to discover a rational limit beyond which the killing of the child in its mother’s womb is murder. It is just as impossible to determine absolutely the moment of death, for physiology proves that death is not an instantaneous, momentary phenomenon, but a very protracted process.

In like manner, every organic being is every moment the same and not the same; every moment it assimilates matter supplied from without, and gets rid of other matter; every moment some cells of its body die and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time the matter of its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by other molecules of matter, so that every organic being is always itself, and yet something other than itself.

Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of an antithesis, positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they are opposed, and that despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate. And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.

Leo Charney, Empty Moments
In 1915, Alfred Wegener put forward the first version of what he called “drift theory” and what has come to be known as the theory of continental drift. “This is the starting point of displacement or drift theory,” wrote Wegener in the fourth edition of The Origin of Continents and Oceans. "The basic "obvious" presupposition common to permanence theory--that the relative position of the continents has never altered--must be wrong. The continents must have shifted.” In the words appropriated by Marshall Berman for the title of his seminal book on modernity, "Karl Marx defined modernity as 'all that is solid melts into air.' " Wegener sends us down a different but related path where we might say that in modernity all that is stable drifts into motion. Like Einstein’s image of elastic and relative time, Wegener’s vision of continental drift magnified in global terms the destabilizing of simple, stationary presence that marked modernity. (9)

modernity; time; memory; the present; phenomenology; Friedrich Engels; Alfred Wegener; Marshall Bermen; causality.