The Velvet Reformation

Paul Elie’s article on Rowan Williams in this month’s Atlantic is a welcome exception to much of conflict-hungry headlines surrounding the appointment of the openly gay and non-celibate Gene Robinson to bishop of New Hampshire, and the ensuing escalation of tensions between conservatives and progressives in the Anglican Communion.

Elie, while he claims to have read Williams’ works, does not pursue his biographical piece on the Archbishop from the perspective of his theology, which I think is a mistake if the intention is to understand him as a person and in how his theological convictions demand he handle the conflict as he has. (The one exception to this is a fine insight from The Truce of God).  Nevertheless, it is a fine piece of journalism, which expresses Elie’s genuine admiration for a man who seems to have few admirers outside of the academy lately.

Elie is particularly fascinated and frustrated by Williams’ refusal to take stands and lay down ultimatums on the issue.  Whereas the less-enthralled, whether conservative to liberal, move from Williams deference to castigate him as weak, cowardly, or just bumbling, Elie’s endearment for the Archbishop allows him no such easy dismissal, forcing him rather to seek some coherent explanation for why Williams has handle the issue as he has.  The answer he receives from Williams, to me, points to some very profound, and perhaps courageous, convictions on the relation between the offices of theologian and priest, and on a deeper level the nature of the process of communal decision making in the church:

“Never in my career did 5,000 words make such a tempest,” he said, and went on to distance himself from the essay—but not really. “I wrote it as a professor of theology contributing to an increasingly tense debate in the Church of England. I didn’t think, I’d better be careful what I say, in case I become a bishop one day. When people ask have I changed my mind, I can only answer, ‘Well, the questions I raised there are still on the table. They’re still questions. And I still think they’re worth addressing.’ That essay is my contribution, made in good faith at that time. Now my responsibilities are different. The responsibility is not to argue a case from the top or cast the chairman’s vote. It’s to hold the reins for a sensible debate—and that’s a lot harder than I thought it would be.”

Couldn’t it be that all the questions having to do with homosexuality were actually being pushed off the table—pushed by him?

“They’re not going to go away, and we shouldn’t pretend that they are,” Williams said. “But my question as archbishop of Canterbury is: How do we address this as a church, not just a group of local religious enthusiasts here and there? The ordination of Gene Robinson had effects that were extremely divisive because people elsewhere felt it committed them to a position they had not arrived at themselves. So part of my job becomes to ask: If there is to be any change, how do you decide what change is appropriate? And that leads to the characterization of being indecisive and all the other things that everybody always says.”

Henri Bergson on Posing the Problem

I call him an amateur in philosophy who acceptsjust as they come the terms of a given problem, believes it definitely posed, and limits himself to choosing between the patent solutions which necessarily exist previous to his choice.  But to philosophize in earnest would here consist in creating the formulation of the problem as well as creating its solution.  How could it be otherwise? Is it not evident that if the problem has long since been posed, and is not yet resolved, that is because it embraces, in the form in which it is framed, two or more solutions equally possible, which are mutually exclusive? The true philosopher cannot, must not, rest there.  Hence I call him an amateur who chooses between solutions already reached, as one chooses the political party in which he wishes to enroll.  And I call him philosopher who creates the solution , in this event necessarily unique, of the problem which he has posed anew by the very fact that he has attempted to resolve it.  There is thus between the two a radical difference, but one which will escape readers of both if they do not penetrate, by an exertion which necessarily demands an effort analogous to the philosopher’s, to the new sense which the words take on in the new conception of the problem.

I came across this quote of Henri Bergson’s, oddly enough, as a quoation in Perry Miller’s biography of Jonathan Edwards.  The allusion there is to Edward’s reformulations of certain notions such as freedom, the will, and sovereignty, in the context of the static dogmatism of 18th century New England Federal theology.

The quote is a brilliant summation of what it is to be capable of independent thinking.  It recalls an essay I read a long time ago by Neil Postman – “Defending Against the Indefensible,” which is basically a delineation of the dangers of reification, which he – I think correctly – isolates as the central project of the writing of George Orwell.

It is that capacity to put the tools of existing vocabulary into the service of describing a reality that had been previously obscured behind a veil of lazy talk and credulous reading.  It is, in other words the prophetic role of the intellectual, who, if she is to be of any value, must serve to clarify for us the true nature of the problems we face.  (To charge them with providing the answers may be asking too much.)

D.A. Carson on What Needs Saving

As Halden and James K.A. Smith have noted, it is hard to take seriously a book on Christ and Culture from a guy who doesn’t really believe in the significance of cultural forms larger than the individual.  I haven’t read his Christ and Culture Revisited, and don’t plan to.  But an old book of his, A Call to Spiritual Reformation came through the bookstore recently, and flipping through it, I stumbled on this highly illustrative quote:

If God had perceived that our greatest need was economic, he would have sent an economist.  If he had perceived that our greatest need was entertainment, he would have snet us a comedian or an artist.  If God had perceived that our greatest need was political stability, he would have sent us a politician.  If he had perceived that our greatest need was health, he would have sent us a doctor.  But he perceived that our greatest need involved our sin, our alienation from him, our profound rebellion, our death; and he sent us a Savior.

Let us all thank Dr. Carson from taking the church’s focus off starvation, disease, and war, and placing it back where it should be: sin!

Giving Up

There’s all kinds of talk on Ash Wednesday about what you’re going to give up for lent.  Coffee, meat, sweets, cigarettes, beer, sex, what have you.  Generally, this doing without is undertaken with a view towards putting off distractions, entering into purer states of contemplation, and in general getting your head right so you can pay better attention to Jesus.  I myself have committed to the classic task not drinking or smoking.  What I am trying to bear in mind this year, though, is not just what I am giving up, but that I am giving up, period.

While I certainly affirm the general benefits of fasting for your mental and spiritual well-being, I think that the real point of Lent cuts much deeper that a temporary shelving of some of the little day-to-day pleasures of life.  Lent is traditionally a season of following Jesus to the cross.  It is our response to Jesus’ command to “pick up your cross, and follow me.”  So we shouldn’t treat our abstentions like strategies for improving our mental our spiritual health (even though they may do this for us), but as symbolic of our abandonment of everything that Jesus abandoned when he embraced the cross: self-interest, self-protection, self-love.  So we aren’t  giving things up, but about giving up the self that wants those things.

Jesus tells us that “whoever wants to save her life will lose it, but whoever loses her life for my sake will save it.” All radical Christian spirituality has this paradox of self-abandonment at its center – it simply comes to the fore during Lent.  I can’t imagine that this would be an easy thing to accept in any setting, but modern American culture provides a particularly hostile environment to the idea that we do not find ourselves by looking for ourselves.  For we stand as the recipients of 300 years of accumulated wisdom of democracy, capitalism, transcendentalism, pioneering, evangelicalism, and therapeutic psychology, which all amount to an individualistic view of the self as the ultimate reality in life.  The American self is the seat of desires to be fulfilled, the bulb waiting to bloom, the ground and goal of all reality.

The Christian view of the self, though, sees us as a completely contingent reality.  “Contingent” is shorthand for the notion that before the grace of God giving us life, we did not exist, and would not exist, were that grace ever to be withdrawn.  We did not create ourselves and we cannot sustain ourselves – life is completely out of our hands.  Lent is a school for educating us around that reality, that “from dust we were taken, and unto dust we shall return” (Ecclesiastes 3.20).  Ecclesiastes as a whole would be a good book to keep in mind this month, because its message is basically that we were born (regrettably), we will die soon, and what we do in between will be forgotten shortly after that.   There is nothing we can do to give ourselves life.  And all of these things we occupy ourselves with – making enough money to get a new car or pair of jeans, drinking Double Mountain IPAs, trying to convince people to like us – aren’t they attempts to make ourselves feel alive? Life is good, don’t mistake me, but life is not ours, it is a gift, and we cannot have it until we let it be nothing.

One of my favorite expressions of this idea is from St. Antony.  His friend Athanasius tells us that once when some monks went to visit him at his hut out in the Egyptian desert, what he told them was that

when we wake each day, we should think we shall not live till evening; and again when we go to sleep we should think we shall not wake, for our life is of its nature uncertain, and is measured out to us daily by Providence.  So thinking and so living from day to day, we shall not sin, nor cherish any longing for anything, nor lay up treasure on earth; but as men who each day expect to die, we shall be poor, we shall forgive everything to all men.

Since uncertainty is what life is, then to try to take the risk and precariousness out of life is to cease to truly live.  To put it more strongly, if we do not embrace death in the middle of life, we do not embrace life.

This attempt to make life secure is an idolatry that we Americans are particularly drawn to.  We are plagued by a fear of death that runs far deeper than our fear of Islamic terrorists.  What we don’t spend on national defense (stockpiling nuclear weapons which by definition we cannot use without destroying the world, and thus serve only to give us the illusion of safety) we spend on self defense.  We defend ourselves against all appearances of death – old age, balding and graying, boredom, isolation – by spending money on the illusions of their opposites – plastic surgery, Rogaine and hair dye, entertainment centers, pornography and facebook.

Yet regardless of how successful we are at implementing our cures, they are all illusions because death is coming for all of us.  Martin Luther once preached a very blunt sermon (as was his style) on death which he aptly titled “A Sermon on Preparing to Die.”  He says that

the Devil fills our foolish human nature with the dread of death while cultivating a love and concern for life, so that burdened by such thoughts man forgets God, flees and abhors death, and thus, in the end, is and remains disobedient to God.  What we ought to do, though, is familiarize ourselves with death during our lifetime, inviting death into our presence when it is still at a distance and not on the move.

What I think he’s getting at here is that to begin with the desire for security (“Whoever seeks to gain his life…”) is to be unable to give the sort of reckless obedience to God that is the only real life.  But to begin with obedience to Christ is to find him where he went – at the cross, the place of death, failure, and abandonment.  Yet since it is Jesus that we find there, we are set free to live without fear of death, to not have to pretend that death is not already everywhere in the midst of our lives.

What’s more is that Jesus’ embrace of death was just his own, but the death that all of us are living in.  He joined us in our hopelessness and abandonment.  We, then, should be aware that while death is assured for all of us, the death that is assured for many of our brothers and sisters around the world will be a violent and degrading one, whether at the hands of violent men (as was Jesus’) or on account of malnutrition or disease.  Now, as we give up some aspect of consumption for a month, we should be more aware that all of the West’s greatest efforts in combatting those evils are funded by the exploitation that causes them in the first place.  No buying campaign will cure what buying caused in the first place.  What is a start though, is to stop trying to escape poverty and humility by buying things that make us feel good, and embrace that poverty instead

The prophet Isaiah asks us, “Why do you buy what is not bread?” Why do you look for life in movies, music, sex, food, and alcohol, all of which, in themselves, are only emptiness in a wrapper?  All of them are gifts from God, but they are not life.  If all of this seems morbid and hopeless, well, it would be if it weren’t for the fact that Jesus walked this path before us, and walks with us now.  But we know that because we “do not live by bread alone” there is a power of life at work beyond us, a power which cannot be at work in us until we give up our own feeble powers.  It is this power that is confronting us in our life – but it is no other life than this one, full of death and fear and unfulfilled longing, that is being redeemed.  So if we are going to expect resurrection, we must await it here, in the grave with Jesus.

Rorschach and Dylan

Consider this a formal declaration of my suspicion that Alan Moore based his Watchmen character Rorschach on Jesus Bob:

Counterfeit philosophies have polluted all of your thoughts.
Karl Marx has got ya by the throat, Henry Kissinger’s got you tied up in knots.

…You got innocent men in jail, your insane asylums are filled,
You got unrighteous doctors dealing drugs that’ll never cure your ills.

…You got men who can’t hold their peace and women who can’t control their tongues,
The rich seduce the poor and the old are seduced by the young.

…Adulterers in churches and pornography in the schools,
You got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making rules.

…Spiritual advisors and gurus to guide your every move,
Instant inner peace and every step you take has got to be approved.

When you gonna wake up, when you gonna wake up
When you gonna wake up and strengthen the things that remain?

Dog Carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout ‘Save us!’ And I’ll look down, and whisper ‘no.’ They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of good men like my father, or President Truman. Decent men, who believed in a day’s work for a day’s pay. Instead they followed the droppings of lechers and communists and didn’t realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don’t tell me they didn’t have a choice. Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers, and all of a sudden nobody can think of anything to say.

Molly Worthen Has Never Read Calvin

About a month ago there was an article by Molly Worthen in the NY Times Magazine on Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill, and the new wave of Calvinism that is enjoying a great deal of popularity among young evangelicals in recent times.  Although I am inclined to appreciate any criticism of such an enormous clown as Driscoll, the faux-objectivity of Ms. Worthen’s piece is too frustrating to let pass without comment.  Ultimately, the article does nothing to help the reader understand Calvinism, Evangelicalism, or the nature of Driscoll’s appeal.  Rather, it serves basic function of most NYT interest articles: to make the reader feel good about being a liberal, enlightened reader of the New York Times.

Worthen makes short work of Driscoll, who has become such an over-stretched caricature of himself that the reporter need exert little effort in order to make him look ridiculous.  What with his designer-distressed jeans, occassional cuss-word, and did-I-mention-I-beat-up-people-in-bar-fights-before-I-was-a-Christian-so-watch-out-I’m-a-tough-guy image.

The troubling thing about the article is how Worthen makes a hardly subtle attempt to trace the genesis of Driscoll’s assholery to his embrace of Calvinism, rather than the many other possible explanations, like the cultural type of the machismoed fundamentalist Billy Sunday and the like.  Here she makes the connection clear:

Nowhere is the connection between Driscoll’s hypermasculinity and his Calvinist theology clearer than in his refusal to tolerate opposition at Mars Hill. The Reformed tradition’s resistance to compromise and emphasis on the purity of the worshipping community has always contained the seeds of authoritarianism: John Calvin had heretics burned at the stake and made a man who casually criticized him at a dinner party march through the streets of Geneva, kneeling at every intersection to beg forgiveness. Mars Hill is not 16th-century Geneva, but Driscoll has little patience for dissent. In 2007, two elders protested a plan to reorganize the church that, according to critics, consolidated power in the hands of Driscoll and his closest aides. Driscoll told the congregation that he asked advice on how to handle stubborn subordinates from a “mixed martial artist and Ultimate Fighter, good guy” who attends Mars Hill. “His answer was brilliant,” Driscoll reported. “He said, ‘I break their nose.’ ” When one of the renegade elders refused to repent, the church leadership ordered members to shun him. One member complained on an online message board and instantly found his membership privileges suspended. “They are sinning through questioning,” Driscoll preached. John Calvin couldn’t have said it better himself.

As if Calvin invented the hierarchical authority structure!  The problem with this is threefold:

1. Worthen is mistaken about the facts of Calvin’s treatment of heretics.  In fact, there was only one, not many, heretic hanged on his watch.  His name was Michael Servetus, whose crime, in short, was advocating and non-trinitarian doctrine of God.  Calvin did not hunt down Servetus out of the blue: Servetus was, in fact, an escaped prisoner from France, having been sentenced to execution by the Catholic Inquisition (an institution which must certainly have learned its authoritarianism from Calvin!).  He foolishly made a stop in Geneva on his way to Italy, and hearing of it, Calvin did notify the Genevan authorities to have them arrest him, but the sentencing and execution of Servetus had nothing to do with Calvin.

2. Worthen’s understanding of Calvinism is historically naîve.  If it is the case that western social structures were universally authoritarian (which they were), then it cannot be said that Calvin’s authoritarianism (which was hardly notable, given the context) derived in any sense from the particularities of his doctrine.  You cannot blame a 16th century man for being authoritarian.  (You can only credit a 16th century man for being an Anabaptist!)

3. Worthen commits a horrendous fallacy by deducing that since (a) Driscoll is a Calvinist and (b) Driscoll is authoritarian, therefore (c) Calvinism must necessarily engender authoritarianism.  It’s hardly necessary to point out that this syllogism depends on factors that Worthen does not, and I suspect cannot prove: first that what theology Driscoll is influenced by is actually a faithful interpretation of Calvin (for this she would need to know something about Calvin), and second, that there are not other factors contributing to Driscoll’s authoritarianism (which, clearly, there are, making Worthen’s blindness to them rather inexplicable).  In regards to the first point, even a brief perusal of Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Ordinances would make it clear that Driscoll’s mode of church governance is not influenced by Calvin’s in the slightest.

Ultimately, Worthen is simply a shining example of what Marilynne Robinson lampooned so cogently in her essay on Calvinism in The Death of Adam:

The way we speak and think of the Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism. Very simply, it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.

Top Ten Oregon Breweries

Among the many other things that it is best at, Oregon exceeds all other states in beer excellence – both in quality and quantity (at least breweries per capita).  Here are my favorite breweries in our fair state.  

10. Bridgeport (Portland)

9.  Full Sail (Hood River)

8. Deschutes (Bend)

7. Hopworks (Portland)

6. Lompoc (Portland)

5. Amnesia (Portland)

4. Caldera (Ashland)

3. Ninkasi (Eugene)

2.  Rogue (Newport)

1.  Double Mountain (Hood River)

What’s your top ten?  And, if you’re feeling foolish enough to try to represent another state, what are its top ten?

Why You Should Still Read Reinhold Niebuhr

You’d probably be safe in dismissing his younger brother, H. Richard, whose work was learned and heartfelt, but is by now mostly either outdated or discredited.  But any Christian with interest in the issues of ethics and politics will still learn a great deal form Reinhold.  If nothing else, his work is full of aphorisms and zingers that will be useful to have in your Moleskine.  Since I first read him, I have always maintained that Reinhold Niebuhr is absolutely brilliant.  In spite of the fact that I am in fundamental disagreement with him about the possibilities of Christian faithfulness in the world, he is, for my money, better than anyone in describing the world in which that faithfulness must take place.  He is a genius in the peculiarly American sort, of the same sort as Mark Twain: a man who never earned more than a bachelor’s degree, notorious for not citing sources, and who was as popular with the American reading public as he was fiercely critical of it.

For all those who have learned at the feet of John Yoder, Niebur’s lack of any real ecclessiology will disqualify him from being a credible source for a constructive social ethic.  Yet like Hauerwas, those who disagree with him should not fail to do so through thorough engagement with him.  He is absolutely essential for understanding anything about American ethical thought in the 20th century.  The sources of M.L.K. Jr.’s strategies for engaging injustice in American society, for instance, stem directly from Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society.  His call for a leader after the fashion of Ghandi to rise up from among the Black American community is downright prophetic, and pretty accurately predicts the tone and trajectory of the civil-rights movement.  Read:

Non-violence is a particularly strategic instrument for an oppressed group which is hopelessly in the minority and has no possibility of developing sufficient power to set against its oppressors.

The emancipation of the Negro race in america probably waits upon the adequate development of this kind of social and political strategy.  It is hopeless for the Negro to expect complete emancipation from the menial social and economic position into which the white man has forced him, merely by trusting in the moral sense of the white race.  It is equally hopeless to attempt emancipation through violent rebellion.

…[Liberals] have the usuall faith in the power of education and moral suasion to soften the heart of the white man.  This faith is filled with as many illusions as such expectations always are….The white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so. Upon that point one may speak with a dodmatism which all history justifies. (Moral Man and Immoral Society, 252-3)

One of the greatest strengths of Niebuhr is his ability to cut through the optimimistic anthropology of liberalism.  What Hauerwas calls his “no bullshit style” comes through in the way that he cuts through classical liberal pacifist sentiments, pointing out that non-violent social strategies are no less coercive just for their not involving what we might call subjective violence. With our ears still ringing with chants of “Yes, we can,” I can’t think of a better check on the present wave  of idealism sweeping over the country than the following passage, which, every bit as cogently as Zizek in his recent book, identifies the coercion and violence that are inherent in every system:

[The moralist] believes…that nothing but an extension of social intelligence and an increase in moral goodwill can offer society a permanent solution for its social problems.  Yet the moralist may be as dangerous a guide as the political realist.  He usually fails to recognize the elements of injustice and coercion which are present in any contemporary social peace.  The coercive elements are covert, because dominant groups are able to avail themselves of the use of economic power, propaganda, the traditional processes of government, and other types of non-violent power.  By failing to recognise the real character of these forms of coercion, the moralit places an unjustified moral onus upon advancing groups which use violent methods to disturb a peace maintaned by subtler types of coercion….A too uncritical glorification of co-operation and mutuality therefore results in the acceptance of traditional injustices and the preference of the subtler types of coercion to the more overt types. (Moral Man and Immoral Society, 233)

In short, you are not exempt from implication in the violence that upholds the position of America in the world simply because you have an Endthisless War sticker on your Volvo.

Worship and Doctrine

I’m taking a great class from Jon Robertson this semester on Patristic and Medieval theology.  Our text for the class is the first three volumes of Jaroslav Pelikan’s The Christian Tradition. One of the greatest things about this series, aside from its dizzyingly deft marshalling of source material, is the way it takes account of the liturgical influence on the development of doctrine.

Just like with scripture and tradition, the relation between liturgy and doctrine was the opposite of how we often think of it as Protestants.  We like to think of the scripture defining for us what can and cannot be accepted in the tradition, but in the early church it was the deposit of apostolic faith that allowed them to sort out what should and should not be canonized as scripture.

It seems the same switch has occured for us with regards to worship in relation to doctrine.  In the early church, it was what was believed as defined by the liturgy of the church that worked as a norm against the development of doctrine.  In Irenaeus’ polemics against Gnosticism, for instance, or in the christological debates surrounding Chalcedon, the conversation often returned to the liturgy – how can we say that God did not assume flesh when we call Mary theotokos, the “mother of God” in our hymns?

I wonder if today the fact that Evangelicals think of doctrine as a codified, static set of propositions allows us to get away with such shallowness in our worship.  If we actually thought that the very shape of our faith was at stake every time we sang and prayed, I doubt we would lend our voices to the lyrics we do.

Beyond doctrine, there have been times when our existence as a people has depended on the songs we sing.  Our worship songs today, with a few exceptions, are full of inane “Jesus is my boyfriend” lyrics about how happy he makes us.  Think of the black church under slavery in America, though.  They would not have survived (I mean in any vital, coherent sense as a people and a culture) if it weren’t for the fact that they brought up their experience into a liturgy that at once united their situation with the Christ who had borne it all and would carry them through it.  Would our songs have been any help to them?  Would our songs be of any help to the church under persecution throughout the world?  More to the point, are our songs of any help for the American church in its struggle against the temptations of capitalism and militarism?  Are our songs even aware of that struggle?

So here’s a call for songwriters in the church to write songs that matter, to ask themselves, would I sing this song to a church facing persecution?  Would it be of any help to a church threatened with compromise, or is it just empty phrases that can be filled with anything from any direction?

What about the exceptions, though?  Are there any decent songs being written for the church lately?

John Winthrop on Economics

From the founder of American exceptionalism, some timely words on lending:

Question: What rule must we observe in lending?

Answer: Thou must observe whether thy brother hath present or probable or possible means of repaying thee, if there be none of those, thou must give him according to his necessity, rather then lend him as he requires (requests). If he hath present means of repaying thee, thou art to look at him not as an act of mercy, but by way of commerce, wherein thou art to walk by the rule of justice; but if his means of repaying thee be only probable or possible, then he is an object of thy mercy, thou must lend him, though there be danger of losing it. (Deut. 15:7-8): “If any of thy brethren be poor … thou shalt lend him sufficient.” That men might not shift off this duty by the apparent hazard, He tells them that though the year of Jubilee were at hand (when he must remit it, if he were not able to repay it before), yet he must lend him, and that cheerfully. It may not grieve thee to give him, saith He. And because some might object, why so I should soon impoverish myself and my family, he adds, with all thy work, etc., for our Savior said (Matt. 5:42), “From him that would borrow of thee turn not away.”