It is true that [in her Long Text] the Lord rebukes Julian for her anxieties about sin, but what she thereupon corrects herself for having thought is not that God could have created a world of free human agents who did not sin. Instead, she corrects herself for assuming that all would have been well only in such a sinless world. Her inclinations on that subject, until corrected by the Lord, were the same as Hume’s. They were also the same as those of the biblical Job. What the Lord tells her is that all is well in just this sinful world, and that puzzles her all the more. . . .
It is the “not yet” that matters here, the provisional. What is provisional is Julian’s theological refusal of both the logical completeness of Plantinga, which would purport to demonstrate the formal consistency of an infinite love’s creating just this sinful world, and the narrative completeness claimed by Milton, which would purport to finish the story that “justifies the wayes of God to men.” For all her doubts about how it could be true, Julian accepts that “sin is behovely.” But I think she knows enough about how the logic of the behovely works—as narratives do—to understand that we could see how sin is behovely only if we were in possession of the complete narrative that makes sense of it, and we are not. All we possess is but a narrative fragment, a torn-off corner of the manuscript of salvation history, and it tells Julian of nothing but the paradox of an innocent man judicially executed for a reason he too begs to know of, though he dies, as we will, the reason why denied us all. Somehow, Julian knows that the meaning of sin, its character as behovely, lies in that incomplete narrative of the Cross that is at the heart of her showings, a narrative whose incompleteness is necessary, for “not yet” belongs to the nature of human existence in time. . . .
In the meantime, there is but the meantime, the “not yet.” And Julian does her theology obedient to the temporality in which neither understanding nor living can yet be “completed.” Julian is the theologian she is because she knows that all theological writing submits to a necessary condition of incompleteness, and like Hume she refuses an easygoing and peremptory ultimacy. For writing that is pretentiously “finished” is not theological; it is parody.
“permissioning”
As with O’Connor, I had to think and write circumspectly around Faulkner, because he loomed so oppressively large in my consciousness. Some great writers are permissioning—that is, the more time you spend with them, the more permitted you feel to speak, to respond, to participate. But other great writers, whom one can read and return to with just as much or even greater pleasure, have the opposite effect. When I read Faulkner I find myself slipping into Faulknerian pastiche in my own writing and then going silent. So I must ration my reconnaissances.
I think the real legacy Faulkner left with me, which I dimly apprehended even before I wrote poetry, was mystagogy, that leading through mystery and revelation. Not an explanation—and therefore an exorcism or dispelling—of mystery and revelation: rather a leading-through. Faulkner performed that for me, at the time, in terms of a shared southern past, in ways no other writer did or could.
Julian Barnes, on Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels:
Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successfully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route maps. Instead of a journey through a city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way. . . . Nor do such novels move mechanically; they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does, except with greater purpose and hidden structure. A priest in The Beginnings of Spring, seeking to assert the legibility of God’s purpose in the world, says, ‘There are no accidental meetings.’ The same is true of the best fiction. Such novels are not difficult to read, since they are so filled with detail and incident and movement of life, but they are sometimes difficult to work out. This is because the absentee author has the confidence to presume that the reader might be as subtle and intelligent as she is.
Philosophy in general knows two styles, the contemplative and the didactic, although there are many writers to whom neither belongs to the complete exclusion of the other. Those who practice the first let us into the secret workings of their minds and are less careful to send us away with a precisely formulated doctrine. Philosophy for them is a conversation, and, whether or not they write it as a dialogue, their style reflects their conception. Hobbes’s way of writing is an example of the second style. What he says is already entirely freed from the doubts and hesitancies of the process of thought. It is only a residue, a distillate that is offered to the reader. The defect of such a style is that the reader must either accept or reject; if it inspires to fresh thought, it does so only by opposition. And Hobbes’s style is imaginative, not merely on account of the subtle imagery that fills his pages, nor only because it requires imagination to make a system. His imagination appears also as the power to create a myth.
My impression is that most people would probably consider [C.S.] Lewis’ theological works to belong to the didactic rather than the contemplative style. Yet, in the course of studying his thought I have come to believe that this is far from true. If his fiction can be didactic as well as imaginative, his “standard” theology does far more than argue for certain propositions believed to be true. He is serious of course; for he has read his Plato well and knows that discussion of how a man ought to live is not trivial subject. And, indeed, he strives to present his theology consistently. But it is, he thinks, a consistent picture of an untidy world. The world as Lewis experiences it resists systematization—which is what we should expect from one who knows himself to be a pilgrim. (emphasis added)
“affirmation [for] antithesis”
From George Hunsinger’s 1980 essay, “Karl Barth and the Politics of Protestant Sectarianism” (emphasis added):
There is an important sense for Barth in which the church is not to be seen as more sanctified than the world, nor the world as less sanctified than the church. The church shares with the world a solidarity in both sin and grace. This inclusive solidarity meant that Barth found what the church had in common with the world to be always more fundamental than any polarity which might arise on the basis of the church’s human response to Jesus Christ.
Or, as Hunsinger quotes it in Barth’s own words:
[The church] manifests a remarkable conformity to the world if concern for its purity and reputation forbid it to compromise itself with it. . . . As distinct from all other circles and groups, the community of Jesus Christ cannot possibly allow itself to exist in this pharisaical conformity to the world. Coming from the table of the Lord, it cannot fail to follow his example and to sit down at the table with the rest, with all sinners.
sometimes, just use more words
An interesting note for a “roof nail,” from an old email to a friend who was also at the time reading Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction that year:
I told you in Liberia that I’ve never been a big fan of The Message version of the Bible, or at least that it’s never done anything for me. That’s still true, mostly, but every once in a while I find something in The Message that’s very helpful. In this case, I really liked his translation of Philippians 4:5. The NKJV says, “Let your gentleness be known to all men.” The NASB uses “gentle spirit.” The ESV, for some unknown purpose, uses reasonableness. However, for The Message, Peterson paraphrases it like this: “Make it clear to all you meet that you’re on their side, working with them and not against them.” Naturally, since I’m often (and for unknown reasons) an ESV guy, I wondered how he got from “reasonableness” to, well, all that. Turns out, most of the verse spins on one word: epieikés. Here’s the definition I found: “properly, equitable, gentle in the sense of truly fair by relaxing overly strict standards in order to keep the spirit of the law.” Long story short, I like Peterson’s translation better.
The moral of the story is: practice epieikés.
But also: Sometimes, just use more words.
gritty resurrections
This outstanding essay from Alana Newhouse is…well, outstanding.
…our aim should be to take the central, unavoidable and potentially beneficent parts of the Flatness Aesthetic (including speed, accessibility; portability) while discarding the poisonous parts (frictionlessness; surveilled conformism; the allergy to excellence). We should seek out friction and thorniness, hunt for complexity and delight in unpredictability. Our lives should be marked not by “comps” and metrics and filters and proofs of concept and virality but by tight circles and improvisation and adventure and lots and lots of creative waste.
And it bears more than a passing resemblance and complement to Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto”:
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed….Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
Newhouse ends by recounting a rabbi’s words upon hearing that her son’s name is Elijah.
“Ah, the prophet of unlikely redemption,” he said, smiling. “With them, the good news is almost as hard as the bad.”
It took me a while, but I eventually figured out what he meant. Sometimes the task of rebuilding—of accepting what has been broken and making things anew—is so daunting that it can almost feel easier to believe it can’t be done.
But it can.
That is hopeful, good news. Of course, even better news is remembering that unlikely redemption is almost the only kind there is.
hupomoné
to change the world
I often ask myself why a “Christian instinct” often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious, by which I don’t in the least mean with any evangelizing intention, but, I might almost say, “in brotherhood.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer –
Something I intend to reread this year is James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World. I was very late in reading it, but few books have more perfectly and fairly summarized—by the second chapter alone—my entire experience of “evangelical” political engagement. And Hunter’s early description of evangelical politics could not have closed with a more simple, accurate critique: “This account is almost wholly mistaken.”
This has been the ever-increasing sense for me over the past 10 years (again, late to the party): that what I have usually been shown/sold as Christian civic duty is almost entirely a sham.
Hunter:
Though the tactics have expanded to include worldview and culture more broadly, the logic at work—that America has been taken over by secularists, causing harm to America and harm to the church, that it is time to “take back the culture” for Christ through a strategy of acquiring and using power is identical to the longstanding approach of the established Christian Right. The leading edge of such initiatives is still one of negation. To use words and phrases like “enemy,” “attack,” “drive out,” “overthrow,” “eradicate the Other,” “reclaim their nations for Christ,” “take back” influence, “compel, “occupying and influencing [spheres] of power in our nations,” “advancing the kingdom of God,” and so on, continues to reflect the same language of loss, disappointment, anger, antipathy, resentment, and desire for conquest. This is because the underlying myth that defines their identity, their goals, and their strategy of action has not changed. The myth continues to shape the language, the logic, and script for their engagement with culture. Circumstances might change as might the players, but if the myth that underwrites the ideal of Christian engagement does not change, then very little has changed at all.
Probably no question than this is more prescient for “evangelicals” right now: How do we change the myth?
For Christian believers, the call to faithfulness is a call to live in fellowship and integrity with the person and witness of Jesus Christ. There is a timeless character to this all that evokes qualities of life and spirit that are recognizable throughout history and across cultural boundaries. But this does not mean that faithfulness is a state of abstract piety floating above the multifaceted and compromising realities of daily life in actual situations. St. Paul, in Acts 13:36, refers King David having “served God’s purposes in his own generation.” This suggests, of course, that faithfulness works itself out in the context of complex social, political, economic, and cultural forces that prevail at a particular time and place.
To that effect, Michael Gerson recently offered a brief analysis, lament, and general way forward, one that seems to me both timeless and, to some extent, specific to our own generation. And it’s one that fits well into what Hunter calls “affirmation and antithesis” (or what I call incarnation and cultivation qua witness):
There is a perfectly good set of Christian tools to deal with situations such as these: remorse, repentance, forgiveness, reformation.
The collapse of one disastrous form of Christian social engagement should be an opportunity for the emergence of a more faithful one. And here there are plenty of potent, hopeful Christian principles lying around unused by most evangelicals: A consistent and comprehensive concern for the weak and vulnerable in our society, including the poor, immigrants and refugees. A passion for racial reconciliation and criminal justice reform, rooted in the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity. A deep commitment to public and global health, reflecting the priorities of Christ’s healing ministry. An embrace of political civility as a civilizing norm. A commitment to the liberty of other people’s religions, not just our own. An insistence on public honesty and a belief in the transforming power of unarmed truth.
This seems quite obviously right to me, and it seems very closely related to Hunter’s “theology of faithful presence.” But there is one problem with it. Hunter points out in his book what Peter Berger calls “plausibility structures”: the social conditions that make certain beliefs credible and intelligible to a person who holds them.
Right now the bulk of the evangelical vox populi, at least among white evangelicals, is dominated by a plausibility structure that bears very little if any resemblance to a Christ-like social/political engagement. Put simply: remorse, repentance, forgiveness, and reformation are not its hallmarks, if they even make the fine print anymore. Shamelessness, self-assurance, retribution, subversion—these seem to make up the new quadrilateral for “evangelicals.”
I truly do not know a way to change this, and if I’m being honest, I’ve given up trying to find it. My own plausibility structure for Christian faith consists, in part, of a small handful of friends, a list of which I could count on one hand. The rest is almost entirely made up of books by authors who, if they’re even still alive, I have never met or spoken with and who almost no one else I know reads. (These include George Hunsinger, Mark Noll, Gilbert Meilaender, Miroslav Volf, Marilynne Robinson, Frederick Buechner, Flannery O’Connor, Christian Wiman, Alan Jacobs, and David French to name a few.)
More than anything, these folks seem to me to see their role as Christians not as promoting some ethic or denouncing another, but as primarily seeking to display God’s faithful presence in Jesus. As Hunter describes it:
Pursuit [of], identification [with], the offer of life through sacrificial love—this is what God’s faithful presence means. It is a quality of commitment that is active, not passive; intentional, not accidental; covenantal, not contractual.
Hunter also points out, in at least a partial echo of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, that “we must be fully present to each other within the community of faith and fully present to those who are not.” I’m no expert on Bonhoeffer, but it seems like in his later years he was more focused on the second half of that objective.
If the “community of faith” seems more intent on loving itself—while, of course, it fights valiantly against its (often self-created) enemies in the (often self-created) culture war—then are Christians justified in, to some extent, turning their backs on the church—or, less dramatically, turning their attention from it— in order to live among and love those “outside” the community of faith—to “affirm” their neighbors while living out the “antithesis”?
I don’t know the answer to that question, but it’s where I’m at.
empty
Garry Wills in 1990 (first three lines are from Milton’s “Lycidas”):
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But, swoll’n with wind and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread…
The problem with evangelical religion is not (so much) that it encroaches on politics, but that it has so carelessly neglected its own sources of wisdom. It cannot contribute what it no longer possesses.
if thine eye be single
Basically, the understanding is that whoever can paint the darkest possible portrait of the status quo is the one who is showing the most commitment to the cause. And you see this norm at work across climate change, health care, criminal justice reform, the economy, and everything else. If you’re not saying the sky is falling, that shows you don’t really care. A true comrade in the struggle would deny that any progress has been made or insist that any good news is trivial. . . .
…it doesn’t make sense to do politics this way. One reason is because the model where you sketch out an idealized policy endpoint, then wage political combat, then win, then implement your vision just isn’t how anything actually happens. . . .
The point is that politics is a process, and that’s especially true in a country like the United States that has a lot of institutional veto points. . . .the idea that past victories were single decisive battles won at unique moments in time is an illusion.
In short, there is way too much talk—analogical, metaphorical, or otherwise—about political warfare. “The Work” we should all be about is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. In analysis, it is realistic; in prognosis, it is hopeful; in all things it seeks the conveyance of blessing and the image of truthful witness.
Or, as Wendell Berry put it:
Good work finds the way between pride and despair.
It graces with health. It heals with grace.
no gold without dross
Vincen Cunningham at The New Yorker:
Jefferson’s Jesus is an admirable sage, fit bedtime reading for seekers of wisdom. But those who were weak, or suffering, or in urgent trouble, would have to look elsewhere. “The masses of men live with their backs constantly against the wall,” Thurman wrote. “What does our religion say to them?”
Thurman’s Jesus was a genius of love—a love so complete and intimate that it suggested a nearby God, who had grown up in a forgotten town and was now renting the run-down house across the street. That same humble deity, in the course of putting on humanity, had obtained a glimpse of the conditions on earth—poverty, needless estrangement, a stubborn pattern of rich ruling over poor—and decided to incite a revolution that would harrow Hell. “The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed,” Thurman wrote. This is a Jesus that Jefferson could never understand.