hermits

The idea of the hermit’s life—simplicity, devotion, closeness to nature—lurks somewhere on the periphery of most people’s consciousness, a way glimpsed, oddly familiar, not taken. It is like one of those tracks you sometimes see as you drive along a country road, a path leading up a hill and disappearing into a wood, almost painfully inviting, so that you long to stop the car and follow it, and perhaps you take your foot off the accelerator for a couple of seconds, no more. Most of us wouldn’t like it if we did walk up the hill, we’d become bored, depressed, uncomfortable, take to drink. But the idea is still there: the path we didn’t take.

That’s from Isabel Colegate’s A Pelican in the Wilderness. My friend Luke once played up a phrase I used in the subject line of an email, saying it was a good title for a future blog site, and also a proper summation of our history of conversations: “rambling and inconcise.” Well, if you haven’t already expected it, consider this essay at least potentially … uh, maundering and incompendious.

I have one friend from an old college writing class with whom I exchange written letters. After a heart attack, one of her wishes was to send and receive more hand-written letters. Of course, it was impossible to start writing letters without both of us lamenting the lack, and praising the existence, of that simple and old and neglected medium of pen and paper. I like to think of (personal) emails as being moderately capable of resembling letters, and representing an example of at least a moderately good use of technology. The funny part is that, while I have one friend who writes letters, I have … [checks figures] … zero friends who write emails, at least with any regularity. It’s a lonely world, and for me text messages, while great for quick shares, can often make me feel even lonelier. Kind of like how sleeping on an airplane can have the reverse effect and make you feel more tired, getting a text from a friend who I rarely see makes me feel even less connected. Maybe that’s a bad analogy. But the point is that texting is an inherently lazy and poor form of communication. For some things, that’s perfectly fine. But I think it should always be treated as an inherently lazy and poor form of communication. (I fully admit, if you are not someone I text with regularly, and you randomly send me a text message, there is, without any malice, a very high likelihood I will not reply.) With a COVID epidemic having only compounded a loneliness epidemic, why in shit’s paddleless creek are we not at least writing more email-letters to each other? Of course, I have no idea how many letters or emails anyone actually writes in a given week, nor how anyone regularly communicates with the people they love but don’t see. So, while I have not (yet) had any heart attacks, maybe this is just my own way of asking for more emails.

But the goal here is not to lament the displacement of more thoughtful and thorough forms of communication.

I have a lot of opinions about the church culture in which I grew up, at least half of them quite critical. The problem is that I simply hate being someone who laments the status of “the Church” while not being someone who is even attending the gathering of one. I have been to … [checks figures] … exactly one church service in the last three years. (It was an episcopal church in Idaho Falls. The voice of the woman leading the church was so shrill that it made me ashamed to wonder, but no less actually wonder, how on earth she could have chosen the right profession. I am still ashamed of this, but still admit it.) I was not in regular attendance in Maine even before the pandemic. And while working night shifts and finishing a baccalaureate were certainly factors, they were also excuses I was all too content with.

I read something recently that said some version of a very common refrain, about how the church is a motley crew with all kinds of differences, but we meet because we know that we agree on this ultimate thing: praising God in Christ Jesus. I deeply want to say yes and amen, and I want to say something about how the church has never been perfect but has always been a wayward group needing encouragement and correction just like everybody else. But however true those things are, the first phrasing especially feels too cliché, too dismissive. It does not help with how not-at-home I feel with the Republican Conservative Evangelical church that I have known most of my life. Yes, for over 30 years I’ve heard that we are Christian first and everything else long after, but words are one thing and fruit another. And of course, as a necessary caveat, I am grateful for all the teaching and training and wisdom and love I have received. It is that same Evangelical church that is somehow responsible for forming me and also responsible for my rejection of it. (I think it was Tim Keller who pointed out that the problem with Christians is that they aren’t Christian enough. To me, it is an internal inconsistency that seems always redirected toward an external enemy; or, as I have quoted Garry Wills a thousand times, the church which systematically rejects its own sources of wisdom “cannot contribute what it no longer possesses.”)

Where does all this leave me? I have no idea. Rambling and inconcise, I suppose. But the goal of writing should be openness and honesty leading to discovery, no? I certainly hope that’s what this space is for.

I am, have always been, and will probably always be, a skeptical believer. But while I have watched a few people give up on faith entirely, I have never felt that deep faith itself shake. Question? Yes. Despise? Yes. But always there. I had lunch with my friend Marilyn at Fajita Grill shortly before I left Maine. I remember being more than a little offended when she told me that, after our previous meeting, she thought that maybe I had also given up altogether on faith. I’m still a little baffled as to how I could have conveyed that. Exactly what I believe about the Christian faith and how I believe it—how could that not change over the years? But that small Reformed remnant in me does still wake up and say, “Thank you.” (“Oh, the twisted roads I walked! Woe to my outrageous soul,” wrote St. Augustine. “But look, you’re here, freeing us from our unhappy wandering, setting us firmly on your track, comforting us and saying, ‘Run the race! I’ll carry you! I’ll carry you clear to the end, and even at the end, I’ll carry you.’”)

I suppose it’s obvious how all this might be derived from a quote about recluses and hermits. But another quote from one of Colegate’s following chapters might make it more obvious still:

We think we might be [like the contented hermit] ourselves if some things were different . . . forgetting of course that the condition of complete simplicity costs, as Eliot said, not less than everything. Hermits can achieve that state, some of the time or all of the time. There are also restless hermits, ecstatic hermits and madmen. There is hallucination and there is fraud. Too much physical darkness and emptiness result in sensory deprivation in which the brain, finding nothing solid to work on, malfunctions frantically among phantasmagoria.

Colgate goes on to quote Richard Rolle (italics added):

It behoves him then who would sing of his love for God and rejoice fervently in such singing, to pass his days in solitude. Yet the abstinence in which he lives should not be excessive . . . I myself have eaten and drunk things that are considered delicacies . . . in order to sustain my being in the service of God . . . For his sake I conformed quite properly with those with whom I was living lest I should invent a sanctity where none existed, lest men should praise me where I was less worthy of praise.

She closes that chapter with this counsel:

Melancholy and morbid fantasy do assail the hermit. He remembers Ecclesiastes: ‘Woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.’ A solitary may take leave of his senses, misinterpret messages or invent them, diminish, despair, die. ‘Be not solitary, be not idle,’ remains then the best advice, until such time as the branch grows green again.

While I could spend any number of consecutive days tucked away with a few good books in the corner of the house or in a small coffee shop, I would very much like not to be solitary, not to be idle. For an introvert like me, that can take work. It does take work and, I promise, I’m still working on it.

It may not seem as obvious, but the hermit thing is relevant not only for my individual self, as it relates to the church or elsewise, but also for the church as it relates to the world. I hear over and over again about how “set apart” and “otherworldly” the church must be. And surely this is true in some sense, to some degree. But surely there is a touch (if not a zeitgeist!) of docetism in there. Surely the desire to be set apart undoes something crucial in the message of the incarnating, suffering, reviving God.

I shared a short article from Wesley Hill not long ago, where he points out that the original language in Philippians 2 is a bit ambiguous on a point we often take for granted, since there’s a connector often present in English in vs. 6 that is not present in the Greek. “Though he existed in the form of God” could just as easily be translated as “because he existed in the form of God”: because he is God, therefore he emptied himself. Now, there are a lot of reasons for the first understanding, and I’m not saying that it’s necessarily better translated the second way, and I don’t think Hill is either. But, if God is triune, self-giving love, doesn’t it seem like a textual ambiguity worth appreciating?

Here’s part of a quote from Arthur Michael Ramsey (at short but greater length here):

The self-giving love of Calvary discloses not the abolition of deity but the essence of deity in its eternity and perfection. God is Christlike, and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all, and the glory of God in all eternity is that ceaseless self-giving love of which Calvary is the measure. God’s impassibility means that God is not thwarted or frustrated or ever to be an object of pity, for when he suffers with his suffering creation it is the suffering of a love which through suffering can conquer and reign. Love and omnipotence are one.

Ramsey goes on to quote David Jenkins:

In relation to the practical problem of evil, God is neither indifferent, incompetent nor defeated. He is involved, identified and inevitably triumphant.

There is perhaps nothing that makes me more deeply joyful than what Ramsey and Jenkins describe. Those words “involved,” “identified”—they are the heart of existence for me.

Though I have quoted it before, perhaps just as importantly and well stated is Karl Barth, from his Church Dogmatics IV/3:

The solidarity of the community with the world consists quite simply in the active recognition that it, too, since Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the world, can exist in worldly fashion, not unwillingly nor with bad conscience, but willingly and with good conscience. It consists in the recognition that its members also bear in themselves and in some way actualize all human possibilities. Hence it does not consist in a cunning masquerade, but rather in an unmasking in which it makes itself known to others as akin to them, rejoicing with them that do rejoice and weeping with them that weep (Rom. 12:15), not confirming and strengthening them in evil nor betraying and surrendering them for its own good, but confessing for its own good, and thereby contending against the evil of others, by accepting the fact that it must be honestly and unreservedly among them and with them, on the same level and footing, in the same boat and within the same limits as any or all of them. How can it boast of and rejoice in the Saviour of the world and men, or how can it win them—to use another Pauline expression—to know Him and to believe in Him, if it is not prepared first to be human and worldly like them and with them?

What Barth says next I first read quoted from George Hunsinger, and it’s something that has stuck with me ever since I read it six years ago:

[The church] manifests a remarkable conformity to the world if concern for its purity and reputation forbid it to compromise itself with it. The world only too easily sees itself as a community which has no care but for its own life and rights and manner and which thus tries to separate itself from those around. The world itself constantly divides into individual cliques, interested groups, cultural movements, nations, religions, parties and sects of all kinds, each of which is sure of the goodness of its own cause and each anxious within the limits to maintain and assert itself in face of all the rest. . . . 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 table with the rest, with all sinners.

Which brings me back to Colgate and hermits and life outside of church attendance. “For his sake I conformed quite properly with those with whom I was living lest I should invent a sanctity where none existed.”

I wrote to a traveling nurse friend a few years ago who encouraged me to read Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. Here’s what I wrote:

I told you in Liberia that I’ve never been a big fan of The Message [translation], or at least that it’s never done anything for me. That’s still true, really, but every once in a while I find something in it that is very helpful. In this case, I really liked his translation of Philippians 4:5. NKJV says, “Let your gentleness be known to all men.” NASB uses gentle spirit. ESV, for some unknown purpose, uses reasonableness. 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 reading an ESV, I wondered how he got from “reasonableness” to 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.

I think the NKJV comes closest with “gentleness,” but it seems like that one little Greek word needs a lot of English words to do it justice. We exist apart from the world only insofar as we exist for it. To quote Barth again: the church does not/can not seek to exist “in a cunning masquerade, but rather in an unmasking in which it makes itself known to others as akin to them.” If that is not epieikés, I don’t know what is. It’s a taking down of walls and refusing to build them up. More than that, it’s walking unarmed away from the city with nothing more than what God has given you.

As difficult as things have been in recent years, as much as I often feel like a hermit in exile, I do think that I have felt more for the world than ever before.

Tim Keller

It’s strange how the death of someone you took to be a deeply good man can both sadden and encourage you. I was, I think, a very stereotypical evangelical follower of Tim Keller in my 20s. In the hundreds of hours of commuting in a 2008 Toyota Yaris, I listened to dozens of his sermons downloaded on my iPod, many on repeat. I wanted his insight in my head, so that I could stand as confidently and gently as he did.

I saw him preach once, about a decade ago, at Redeemer’s downtown location, when I was in New York City volunteering with some friends at the Bowery Mission. Unsurprisingly, I remember nothing from that sermon, but I do remember how excited I was to be there. In the age of celebrity pastors and YouTube sermons, it’s rare to sit in the same room with the people who seemingly affect you the most. But actually attending Keller’s church was, for me, very unlike seeing a famous person or musician “live.” It was in this city, on this street, in this church, that he lived and dedicated so much of his life to. It’s a different feeling and one that I still remember.

I was profoundly shaped by two of Keller’s books: The Prodigal God and Generous Justice. Both books turned very central ideas of Christianity around for me—changed the outlook, the responsibility, and the experience of being a Christian in fundamental ways. And both are books I would still highly recommend.

In more recent years, I didn’t follow much of what he said or did, though I heard and read his name mentioned from time to time. Sadly, those mentions often came in a negative light. Culture warriors don’t have time for Tim Kellers. (Though they have the deepest possible need for them, whether they know it or not.) The funny thing is just how telling it was every time, how easily and automatically every criticism of him (that I read) failed its own test the moment I started reading it. In an essentially not-so-strange way, he became something of a litmus test: If your “Christian” politics requires that you take down Tim Keller, it’s a sign, to me at least, that you are basically full of ~~shit~~ flim-flam and doing something very much other than Christian politics.

Though I have no idea what one word is best, if I could pin down one characteristic of Keller’s, it would be his calm and sympathizing largesse. Nothing was too ancient or too backward to be given our modern attention. There was nothing that couldn’t be seen in some better light, a light which he modestly and tirelessly worked to shine everywhere. In approaching the world he lived in—approaching the history of it, life in it, or preaching about it—he was not abrasive or even defensive but essentially optimistic, embracing and celebratory of that world. And he managed to do this with rare skill and dedicated orthodoxy.

As a self-described exvangelical, I may have moved on in many ways from that time in my life, but it is a wonderful thing to look back with fondness at the inspiration and the example of a central figure like Tim Keller. I may no longer fit as comfortably as I once did in Keller’s theological shoes, but one of the greatest gifts in life is to know this sort of difference or separation and to know it, not only without animosity or pride, but with absolute love and respect and humility. And this status-of-peace was infinitely emanated in, through, and around Keller’s life.

The last time I read anything from Keller was, oddly enough, just last December, in a small basement-turned-medical-unit in eastern Ukraine. Though we had no cell phones or individual internet access, every few days we did receive, along with letters from home, a pdf of headlines from The New York Times that we could browse. Just headlines, no articles. But there was one exception that came through early in December: Tim Keller’s article in the Times on forgiveness. I remember reading it with a sort of nostalgia and affection.

And that seems fitting to me. The tensions that existed in that basement are difficult to define, but what better thing to be reading there? In a world defined by difference, fueled by outrage, plagued by war—what more significant quality could be called forth, pleaded and prayed for, than forgiveness? And I can think of few modern pastors who have championed this attitude better than Keller did.

It fits, it all fits. You couldn’t be this confident and accepting of the world if you hadn’t already forgiven everyone and everything in it. Or, more to the point in Keller’s case—it is The Point in Keller’s case—it would mean that you really do trust and love the knowledge that God has done this already.

When you embrace the idea that Jesus’ self-sacrifice was done for you, the Crucifixion becomes an act of surpassing beauty that, when brought into the center of your being, gives you both the profound humility and towering happiness, even joy, needed to forgive others.

Tim Keller really believed and embraced it to the end. So should we.

dimly, always dimly

Samuel D. James:

There is always an intrinsic danger to telling one’s story. We are all fallible narrators. Even the purest intentions cannot cure a mistaken memory or a misunderstood moment. These things do not make our self-histories worthless; they simply make them human.

Yet telling our stories of theological, political, or intellectual transformation carries a distinct risk: that our gratitude for where we are now lures us into ignoring or distorting the grace that met us at a much different place. This isn’t just a factual problem. It’s a spiritual one as well.

Many of us raised in evangelical subcultures must admit that we are very different people today than we were while living with our parents, attending this Sunday school class, or sitting under that youth pastor. Many of us will look back at the things we were taught and see problems—some minor, others serious.

Yet this transformation shouldn’t leave us with contempt for the people and places of our past. When we’re honest with ourselves, we should acknowledge that even the ways we change are deeply rooted in the things that were poured into us when we were too young to refuse them. […]

… Indeed, this is the peril of all our testimonies[:] We see even our own lives only as through a mirror dimly.

I have not read Jon Ward’s new book, Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation, which James is reviewing. And I’m not sure I will or need to read it. The title resonates, but my experience so far with these kinds of narratives has remained a bit standoffish. When it comes to evangelicals and deconstruction and all that, there are levels both of offensiveness and defensiveness that I have not been able to get on board with.

In Ward’s defense, there’s plenty, plenty more that should be fleshed out regarding generations of evangelical failure. I also take Ward at his word (in this interview) when he says he acribes no malice to the evangelicals his book is directed at. And James’s defensiveness (and anger?) toward the book is much more evident in this follow-up post to the CT article. However, the above excerpt/warning from James is spot-on.

(Also, just to get this off my chest, this interview with Jon Ward on MSNBC’s Morning Joe is unwatchable. I could not finish it. It’s like Ward was brought on to the show to watch Joe Scarborough interview himself on his own high-flying opinion of the topic of Ward’s book. After all the Morning Joe SNL skits, you would think they would have caught on at least a little.)

“empty altars everywhere”

I like Diana Butler Bass’s Lenten theme of “empty altars.” It’s a helpful way to think of the practice of Lent, to think about all the things that we put our hearts, minds, and bodies into that will ultimately wear away or be torn down. Things, but also people. Mostly, though, I like the way that she transitions into the theme of “searching for saints.”

It should go without saying (though it’s probably worth saying) that this is not a search for the ultra-pious but for the honest, down-to-earth faithful. One of the things I have enjoyed most about reading over the years, whether books or blogs or Substack subscriptions, is not the ideas or stories that are so valuable and encouraging, but simply finding people who I trust, who I think highly of. As I’ve mentioned before, while there are a few very important ones in my life, most of them are people I have never even met. But I love finding them. Searching for saints is a fun and active project; it is not, as Bass rightly points out, “a deconstruction project.”

Here, Bass says that this is because the deconstructing has already been done. Maybe her readers are already on board with it, but I think this assumes a lot. For some people, deconstruction might look like a view of life and the world that one day just, poof, disappears. For others, it might look like (I’m sure I can’t be the first to use this) a Jenga set, removing things piece by piece and seeing if it (faith) still stands, or whether the removal of some final building block brings the whole thing down—and with a boom rather than a poof. Or, it might be that, however you have or have not understood something called “deconstruction”—whether you had even thought of it or heard of it at all—you did realize at some point that there was work to be done to (re)construct your faith in a way that seems consistent and truthful, to yourself and to others.

Every generation has to ask and answer certain questions for and of itself, and deconstruction might just be the buzz word for this generation’s self-interrogation. I have not spent enough time thinking or writing about it to know exactly where I fit in to the whole thing. Sometimes I read something about deconstruction and I deeply relate. Other times, I hear the word used in someone’s story and I am completely put off by it. With the way that Bass uses it, it’s a mix, but I think I can say that I find at least enough value in it to keep reading.

Take the statues, for instance. This is not a topic that I have ever felt the need to write about, but it’s a good example of these mixed feelings. Bass seems to speak unequivocally about the good of taking down statues, but I’m less sure. I wouldn’t darken the doors of Fox News to save my life, but I liked Charles Krauthammer’s thoughtful take on the statue debate in 2017 (even if it aired on what might be the most thoughtless host-show ever to appear on television). Krauthammer mentions the varying motives behind Civil War statues and monuments, varying motives which he says calls for varying responses. And he goes straight to one that he says might be the most sacred, The Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, which bears this inscription:

– NOT-FOR-FAME-OR-REWARD –
– NOT-FOR-PLACE-OR-FOR-RANK –
– NOT-LURED-BY-AMBITION-
-OR-GOADED-BY-NECESSITY-
-BUT-IN-SIMPLE-
-OBEDIENCE-TO-DUTY-
-AS-THEY-UNDERSTOOD-IT-
-THESE-MEN-SUFFERED-ALL-
-SACRIFICED-ALL-
-DARED ALL ~ AND-DIED-

Should many statues and monuments be torn down? Yes. Is the taking down of Confederate monuments de facto a helpful example of the stripping down of “cultural altars”? Surely not. But the point is not to talk about Confederate statues. The point is that the attempt to strip away everything that I view as wrong might itself be just as problematic.

As Bass puts it, “Ash Wednesday invites us to accept this truth of human existence—we are dust, what we build is dust, and sometimes you have to clean out the attic.” She goes on to say that there is a “concurrent truth” to this: “dust matters because it is the very stuff of creation.”

Dust matters. Sometimes I think the act of “deconstructing” forgets this, or loses sight of it. Bass rightly moves straight from the “empty altars” of Lent to asking the question, “What do we do now? What will we fill these empty spaces with?” But I can’t help lamenting just how empty all those spaces are. Surely some of us could wake up and find that we didn’t leave enough dust to work with at all.

There is a very important and concurrent truth to the idea that “dust matters.” Since we are made of dust, we have to remember that dust will never be gone. It’s where we come from and it’s where we go. So eventually, for creatures made of dust, “cleaning” can become deeply ironic and self-defeating. (And of course, an obsession with “stripping the altars” can quickly set up an altar of its own.)

Bass says, “The deconstruction has been done, these shifts in church and community are well underway.” True enough, in some cultural sense, but on the whole I think—I hope—that it assumes too much. The whole of history—world, state, human, church—is dust. Glorious, gritty, gory, gorgeous dust, from one end to the other. Sometimes, I think the altars and the attics are empty enough, and we might all do better to simply search for saints. Let the altars empty and deconstruct and return to dust as they will.

no other line to follow

A friend recently sent me a link to Kevin DeYoung’s review of Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism. I read the review on a flight from Krakow to Amsterdam last week—and I had most of a reply written before I hit the ground. So I have some thoughts, though they are not likely to be very comprehensive. In short, I appreciate that DeYoung is trying to point people away from Christian nationalism, but his review itself still worries me.

The first thing that caught my attention is DeYoung’s critique of those who “seem to prefer a society hostile to Christianity.” He says, “I’ve seen pastors in my own denomination look wistfully at Christians losing power and becoming a minority in the country, as if Constantine ruined everything and our influence would be so much greater if we only we [sic] could lose power and become more marginalized.”

I think DeYoung is right to be wary of a kind of attitude like the one he’s describing, but I don’t like the way he has phrased it. It would probably be better described as an attitude that fails to appreciate the good things “Christendom” has produced—the things that some us (myself included) might often take for granted. That’s a true and noteworthy warning. (As Nathan warns Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter: To wish away all the things that have made you could be a more dreadful thing than we can know.) But the description he uses is far from helpful, since I don’t know anyone who would describe the decline of Christian culture—if such a thing is even occurring (more on that below)—as a means of increasing our “influence.” The closest thing might be the hope that a decline of influence—or, better, a decline of desire for influence—would result in a stronger Christian life/community. Less focus on influence should lead to better, more authentic practice. To the degree that the people DeYoung has in mind believe a more authentic Christian community would also have more influence, then sure, he could put it in those terms. But that would simply be to describe the paradox of Christian life and practice, and the paradox of Christ’s death on the cross. Again, the way DeYoung is framing his criticism seems very unhelpful to me, since I am sure that most of the people he’s speaking of, like myself, have little or no interest in making decisions about Christian life based on what might be most effective; we simply believe that it is not the role of Christianity—or any religion—to claim state power for itself.

(I think DeYoung is similarly unfair in his criticism of Russel Moore. I think Moore has been more thorough in his critique of Christian culture than either Wolfe or DeYoung give him credit for, at least in this article.)

DeYoung goes on to give a summary of a “mini-speech” which he says he has used often. In that argument he says “people are drawn to [popular defenders of Christian morality in the culture war] because they offer a confident assertion of truth. Our people can see the world being overrun by moral chaos, and they want help in mounting a courageous resistance; instead, they are getting a respectable retreat.” He has a point about sympathizing with the attraction to strong voices in the culture war, and I think that learning to first sympathize is crucial for all of us, no matter where you find yourself on any given divide. But, for me, everything in DeYoung’s mini-speech is useless unless we’ve answered a couple questions: What do we think constitutes a “courageous resistance”? And how exactly are we describing a “respectable retreat”? We only need “courageous resistance” over “respectable retreat” if those terms are properly defined, and for the Christ-follower, they will be particularly difficult and counterintuitive. The fact that those tempted by Christian nationalism continue to seek out the leaders that they do, whether they be politicians or the popular writers and speakers DeYoung mentions, suggests that many of us who grew up in the Evangelical world were not given good definitions—or were not shown a life consistent with the definitions we were given. (Is it not also a problem that, if I didn’t know any better, DeYoung’s mini-speech could just as easily be describing how the disciples of Jesus felt when their leader failed to mount a “courageous resistance” and instead chose a “respectable retreat” to a cross?)

Granted, as DeYoung says, “many Christians are tired of always being on the defensive,” and I truly, truly want to sympathize as much as I can. But, speaking very personally, as long as I have known anything of the evangelical community, local and national, that raised me and thrust me out into the world, being defensive in politics is almost all they have ever known or been taught how to do—whether they needed to or not. I am not saying that Christian concerns for the culture and its direction are never valid, nor am I denying that many of the Evangelicals I know live wonderfully praise-worthy lives, but their engagement in American politics is characteristically inflammatory and insecure. A Christianity that calls for boycotts of businesses that don’t sufficiently support their favorite religious holiday and then complains of being tired of always having to defend itself is a Christianity that is asking to be taken less seriously. Likewise, a Christianity that will not take the time to count their many and compiling legal victories, for themselves and for their Black brothers and sisters, is a Christianity that will and can never be anything but defensive in all the ways that it says it does not want to be.

Most of these things are critiques of Christian culture that I have held in general, and increasingly, for the last seven(ish) years, and even of DeYoung himself, at least ever since he threw his hat into the David Frenshism ring. The main feature of this Christian culture, the central problem as I see it, is the ability to make excuses for itself—or, rather, an inability to not make excuses for itself. As DeYoung himself admits in the review, for all our faults in the U.S., “you’d be hard-pressed to find a country where orthodox Protestants wield more political power, have more cultural influence, and have more freedom to practice their faith according to the dictates of their conscience.” And yet, he still goes on to praise Aaron Renn’s “negative world” thesis and to say that “a big sort is underway” to determine “which Christian institutions and individuals will remain faithful.” I won’t go down the rabbit hole of Renn’s negative world thesis (about which I have my doubts/completely disagree), but, as I’ve said before, maybe there is some big cosmic sorting going on in the culture wars of America in which God is seeking to prove his true church, and maybe there isn’t. But I sincerely doubt whether our Christian legitimacy will be based on our commitment to being strong, mighty, powerful cultural warriors—nor on our commitment to finding a warrior who will do the fighting for us. More likely, our faithfulness will be found in our ability to accept that true courageous resistance will often look like respectable retreat—and in learning not to mind that this is The Way.

While I have listened to Wolfe explain and defend his book, I have only read the introduction to it (and have no plans to read further, for now), and I’m not even a good layman historian, so it’s hard to know what to do with the references to early Protestant political thought. Assuming that DeYoung is correct that Wolfe has been faithful in his retrieval of that thought—so what? The argument being made by Wolfe (and others) is that a nation such as ours can and should be “Christianized”—he wants what he calls “nationalism modified by Christianity.” This way, all the people who call themselves Christians can have good and trustworthy neighbors, because of course it’s good that we should always prefer to be around others that are just like us. Is this not clearly, based on his own descriptions, a movement in the other direction: a Christianity that itself becomes nationalized (and ethnicized—he uses the terms “almost synonymously”). Honestly, I cannot see how Wolfe’s book is anything other than self-defeating. He can pull from early Protestant sources all he likes, history will only prove the point: it was a bad and bloody idea then and it is the same today. Besides what should be the obvious terror in Wolfe’s idea of state-sponsored religion and ethnicity, the reason this seems worth pointing out is that, behind the question of whether Christian nationalism is a good idea, there is a more essential question: is Christian nationalism, as a practice or even as an idea, anything other than a contradiction in terms? Is it even possible? I think not. And I think that something-called-Christianity has to be significantly distorted to even begin to go down that road. No matter how faithfully Wolfe has treated his 16th and 17th century sources (which I am sure is debatable), the fact that many early Protestants distorted the faith in exactly the same way is not a moving argument to me.

(It’s interesting that the topic of early Protestant support for state power also came up in the one book that I had with me while I was travelling for the last month, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. I could not summarize it well, but suffice to say, I did not expect to find it there. DeYoung touches on Wolfe’s treatment of the subject, and while he happily points to the development of Protestant political thought away from state control, he does not offer a helpful critique of Wolfe’s reference to earlier practices. Of the horrors involved in Martin Luther’s support for merchant princes and the suppression of the Peasants’ rebellion, and much more, DeYoung only shrugs. Wolfe is apparently to be commended for having the courage of his convictions. Needless to say, Wolfe’s entire approach bothers me, and the fact that The Gospel Coalition is publishing a review that seems modestly to conclude “this is not the best way” is more worrisome still.)

I want to be grateful for DeYoung’s critique, since he is, ultimately, saying “no” to Wolfe’s argument. “‘The world is out to get you, and people out there hate you’ is not a message that will ultimately help white men or any other group that considers themselves oppressed.” This is exactly right, and I hope that DeYoung and others repeat it often and widely. Equally to the point, DeYoung says “we should hold to our political blueprints . . . loosely and charitably. I fear the practical payoff from this discussion will be very small, but the potential for division in the church will be great.” I hope I am wrong about this, but I am guessing that the only result will be more division. And I also worry that DeYoung’s (in my opinion) charitable review itself will only add to it.

Again, I do want to cheer on many things DeYoung preaches, particularly in his closing paragraphs, but I can’t get very far without tripping. Just when I think I’m reading a paragraph I can agree with wholeheartedly, he drops back again to “lament that America is much less Christian than it used to be.” Really? Whose America is “much less Christian” and in what way? There may be understandable reasons why many Christians feel this way, but, as a statement of historical fact, I would be hard-pressed to defend it as much more than a slightly subtler declaration of victimhood, which DeYoung has tried to denounce.

As I mentioned before, sympathy is crucial, absolutely crucial. To quote a very often used line from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an un-uprooted small corner of evil.”

More than anything else this passage should move us to have all the sympathy toward other people that we can muster and then some, and it is a sympathy that we should want from others, one that we should, in fact, be very afraid to live without.

That said, I want to point to a few things from the bookshelf that seem relevant and worth considering.

The first comes from one I’ve been picking at called Balkan Contextual Theology. In it, one of the authors quotes Branko Sekulić, who says, quite harshly, of “ethnoreligiosity” that it is a “cardinal facet of confessional desertion and perpetual treason, entrenched in the incessant denial of Jesus’ life and martyrdom, for the satisfying of superficial interests and worldly needs.” (Yikes.) Granted, not every proponent, or temptee, of Christian nationalism is deserving of quite so harsh a response, but, to his point, I have never heard a description of anything even close to Christian nationalism that did not seem entirely antithetical to the gospel of the crucified God. But, equally importantly but more practically, the author also goes on to describe the collection of essays that Sekulić was contributing to: “What emerged from this first step towards a ‘Balkan Theology’ was a prophetic type of judgement, a theology aware of and very critical towards the ‘sins’ of the church, as well as those in the church who are responsible for those transgressions.” If there is one thing that Christian nationalism, by any definition that I have ever heard, will certainly not produce, it is a confessional and sacrificial church which takes its own sins more seriously than the sins of others. What it will produce is pharisaical purification of the church in conjunction with strong and perpetual condemnation of the church’s many (perceived) enemies.

Second, both DeYoung and Wolfe would benefit from a piece of advice from the prelude of Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnnally-Linz’s recent book, The Home of God:

Narratives of crisis and decline do offer their own sickly sort of comfort, but pseudo-romantic nostalgia is a Siren’s song. Many things have always been amiss, and we gain nothing from a quantitative accounting of the degrees of amiss-ness at various times and places. In an important sense, everything is awry and has been awry, the primordial and indestructible goodness of the creation notwithstanding. There is an abiding out-of-jointness to things, witnessed (but not exhausted) by the abiding disquietude of human hearts. The pressing need isn’t that we accurately divine the overall trend line in the course of history but that we carefully discern how things are in fact awry—the texture of our dislocation—her and now.

Beneath or alongside or mingled with the disquietude, perhaps you have felt an amorphous but insistent longing—a yearning for truer modes of belonging, for fulsome forms of resonance that do not depend for their depth of intensity on the thrill of novelty, fascination with the forbidden, or the gravity of violence. In a word, a longing for home.

This is the message that those tempted by something-called-Christian-nationalism need to hear. DeYoung sometimes seems to get this, but what he gives with one hand he takes away with the other. To Wolfe and to those drawn to his argument, the desire for home, even a national home, is normal, but the means of finding or establishing it that they are seeking is not just wrong—it is historically naïve and it is entirely antithetical to Christianity itself.

Lastly, I’ll end with a quote from Karl Barth, which I consider one of the closest descriptions of my own theology:

“When he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion” (Mt. 9:36). And the fact that He was moved with compassion means originally that He could not and would not close His mind to the existence and situation of the multitude, nor hold Himself aloof from it, but that it affected Him, that it went right to His heart, that He made it His own, that He could not but identify Himself with them. Only He could do this with the breadth with which He did so. But His community cannot follow any other line. Solidarity with the world means that those who are genuinely pious approach the children of the world as such, that those who are genuinely righteous are not ashamed to sit down with the unrighteous as friends, that those who are genuinely wise do not hesitate to seem to be fools among fools, and that those who are genuinely holy are not too good or irreproachable to go down “into hell” in a very secular fashion.

The solidarity of the community with the world consists quite simply in the active recognition that it, too, since Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the world, can exist in worldly fashion, not unwillingly nor with bad conscience, but willingly and with good conscience. It consists in the recognition that its members also bear in themselves and in some way actualize all human possibilities. Hence it does not consist in a cunning masquerade, but rather in an unmasking in which it makes itself known to others as akin to them, rejoicing with them that do rejoice and weeping with them that weep (Rom. 12:15), not confirming and strengthening them in evil nor betraying and surrendering them for its own good, but confessing for its own good, and thereby contending against the evil of others, by accepting the fact that it must be honestly and unreservedly among them and with them, on the same level and footing, in the same boat and within the same limits as any or all of them. How can it boast of and rejoice in the Saviour of the world and men, or how can it win them—to use another Pauline expression—to know Him and to believe in Him, if it is not prepared first to be human and worldly like them and with them?

[The church] manifests a remarkable conformity to the world if concern for its purity and reputation forbid it to compromise itself with it. The world only too easily sees itself as a community which has no care but for its own life and rights and manner and which thus tries to separate itself from those around. The world itself constantly divides into individual cliques, interested groups, cultural movements, nations, religions, parties and sects of all kinds, each of which is sure of the goodness of its own cause and each anxious within the limits to maintain and assert itself in face of all the rest…. 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 table with the rest, with all sinners.

Not a cunning masquerade, but an incarnational unmasking in which we make ourselves known to others as akin to them, rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep. Truly, there is no other line for us to follow, no other kind of Christianity—no matter if it uses the name or not.

a cynic’s take on orthodoxy

I highlighted this from David French’s The Third Rail newsletter last week:

I can name many people who know who Jesus is and embody those virtues as well as imperfect people can.

But when the Church leads with its moral code—and elevates that moral code over even the most basic understandings of Jesus Christ himself—the effect isn’t humility and hope; it’s pride and division. When the Church chooses a particular sin as its defining apostasy (why sex more than racism, or greed, or gluttony, or cruelty?), it perversely lowers the standards of holy living by narrowing the Christian moral vision.

The result is a weaker religion, one that is less demanding for the believer while granting those who uphold the narrow moral code a sense of unjustified pride. Yet pride separates Christians from each other, and separates Christians from their neighbors.

Millions of Christians are humble and hopeful. Millions are also prideful and divisive. Why? One answer is found in the LifeWay-Ligonier survey. In the quest for morality, they’ve lost sight of Jesus—but it is Jesus who truly defines the Christian faith.

Along with Alan Jacobs and I’m sure many others, I say a hearty “yes and amen!”

Buuut…

It’s fitting that Jacobs decided to quote French and the survey on his blog, since Jacobs is the first person I thought of when I read it.

Maybe this is a stretch, but I would be very curious to see Jacobs do something similar with the data from the Lifeway-Ligonier survey as he has done with the romanticized ideas of lost literacy and readership. He says, in nuce, that we don’t know enough about the history of literacy at any given point in any given society to make any meaningful comparisons, and therefore there is no point in making comparative judgments between us and our ancestors. And, perhaps even more relevantly, he adds another point:

I will just say this: I think the hidden assumption in essays like Harrington’s and Garfinkle’s [on the subject of Literacy Lost] is that if people weren’t on social media and staring at their iPhones they’d be reading books instead. And I don’t believe for one second that that’s a safe assumption.

Again, it might be a stretch, but I think that very similar questions can be asked, and criticisms made, of this new survey on “orthodoxy.” Maybe there are other studies to compare here, but I would very much like to know: When exactly in the past did we, as Christians (self-identified or otherwise), have a clear grasp on orthodoxy?

That seems like a question worth asking. But the main point I would like to make is this: I would not be the least bit surprised if there is absolutely no significant correlation between “orthodoxy” and genuine Christlike conduct.

A few years ago, while I was finishing my bachelor’s degree, I took a history class called “Genocide in Our Time.” One of the assignments each week was to respond to a given question in our own journal-essays. One week’s question was on the topic of “raising awareness” and its effectiveness.

I don’t remember the exact question that was asked, but here is my response, titled “A Cynic’s Take on Awarenesss”:

I’m no scholar of the Protestant Reformation, but I grew up being taught that the reformers believed in three distinct but related elements of conversion: notitia, assensus, and fiducia. A person could hear all the details (notitia) and agree that they are true (assensus), but it was not until people actually placed their confidence in that truth—had “cast themselves upon it”—that they could be said to have faith (fiducia). I’ve never heard them used outside of the Reformation, but those three little Latin words seem to me to have significance far beyond the ecclesia.

I mentioned in the discussion this week that I’m a bit of a cynic when it comes to the topic of “raising awareness.” If I was being truly honest (and more willing to risk offense) I would have said that “raising awareness” is almost an entirely meaningless phrase to me. Even now I’m a little hesitant to admit this, partly because I’m afraid that what someone will hear is that I am somehow against truth or justice, or that anyone who operates under the task of raising awareness is doing meaningless work. This is certainly not what I mean. I think one way to say what I mean is this: in the same way that the reformers believed that notitia and assensus were nothing if they did not include the commitment of fiducia, hearing the details about genocide and believing them to be true are (almost) meaningless acts if they do not include the “faithfulness” required to prevent or respond to them. That in no way means that awareness doesn’t matter. Sticking with the analogy: if raising awareness amounts more or less to the notitia and assensus of the truth of genocide, someone need not fear that I’m in any way calling that task meaningless, since the reformers also believed that one couldn’t have fiducia without first having the awareness.

Here, however, just when I think I’m starting to clarify myself, is where I make a slight turn.

In some ways I’m not entirely faithful to my reformed roots. Without getting into too many of the details, I am (these days) inclined to reverse the above formulation—much to the chagrin of my own father, Reformation man that he is. Though it seems at times very counterintuitive, I think that fiducia almost always comes first, and that you can have it without—strictly speaking—having the other two. Put simply: if one doesn’t have the character of commitment (fiducia), then notitia and assensus won’t really matter. Character is infinitely more important than any amount of knowledge or awareness. T.S. Eliot asked, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Somehow we have learned—though this is not a new problem—to speak about the truth without becoming wise. Or, more to the point, we often act as though getting all the facts straight will somehow make us wise, but ages upon ages of humanity tell us that this is simply not true.

I believe as much as anyone in the importance of calling a thing by its true name, especially when it comes to genocide, but the question is not so much about how we can get more people to admit of atrocities or to acknowledge the word “genocide.” Instead we would do better to ask how we might, each and all, be and become a people who are, in the words of Albert Camus, “resolved to speak out clearly and to pay up personally.” Forget those who consider themselves “aware.” Give me ten men and women who know nothing about the history of genocide but who live truthfully and sacrificially today, and I think it will be those faithful (fiducia-filled) people who prevent the next genocide long before anyone else. A people who live in this way will know what to do with the truth when they find it. For those who do not, the truth may not matter at all. As Norton Juster’s character Canby laments in Phantom Tollbooth, “You can swim all day in the sea of knowledge and still come out completely dry. Most people do.”

As mentioned before, I am not saying that spreading the truth about genocide awareness is unimportant; indeed, I think it is massively important. But no matter how important it is, I do think that the truth about genocide at least can be meaningless. We must speak the truth, but if we don’t do more than that, all the awareness in the world will not help the Rohingyas of today or the Yazidis of tomorrow. And in that way, unless some sense of fiducia is central, no awareness project will be, in any meaningful sense, successful.

While in this case I was borrowing an idea to answer a question about genocide prevention, I think, for obvious reasons, that every single word I wrote in that short essay could be said about “orthodoxy” among the “faithful.” In fact, it seems to me that this is one of the core elements that make up the stories and teachings of the Bible, and particularly every encounter with Jesus: Your ability to pass the test—on sexual morality or on theology—is irrelevant.

Again, there could be some more informative data out there that I’m not aware of, so I say this as humbly as possible. Maybe there was a time, in the near or distant past, when a majority of proclaiming Christians had there theological i’s and t’s dotted and crossed and italicized. And maybe these orthodox practitioners were the ones most likely to be sacrificing life and limb for the glory of God and the love of neighbor. But I don’t believe for one second that that’s a safe assumption.

“not of reciprocity but of nested dependencies”

Leah Libresco Sargeant, in a wonderfully written tribute to, and call for support for, “caring work”:

In [Eva Feder] Kittay’s view, care is never a private matter, something that can be contained in a single dyad or family. Dependency creates a chain of need, which extends out into the wider world. She takes the relationship of mother and child as paradigmatic: “The relation between a needy child and the mother who tends to those needs is analogous to the mother’s own neediness and those who are in a position to meet those needs.” Caring for a child makes the mother more dependent, and gives her a just claim on others, just as the baby has a claim on her.

Kittay terms this framework doulia. She adapts doulia from doula, a person who offers care to a laboring mother. In her broader term, she encompasses “a concept of interdependence that recognizes a relation — not precisely of reciprocity but of nested dependencies — linking those who help and those who require help to give aid to those who cannot help themselves.”

Governmental support can be a response to the claims of doulia. A public, universal benefit recognizes that need is universal and that it does not obey a law of reciprocity. A baby cannot pay back the time and attention he needs from his mother; a mother does not need to earn or recompense the care she receives from others. Instead of clean-cut transactions, there is a circulatory system of care and need, where each gives to the one they can, and receives from the person who cares for them, without concern for balancing the books.

This is the spendthrift logic of the communion of the saints, who know that “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matt 25:40). It is the action of the woman with the alabaster jar, who pours out perfumed oil over the feet of the Lord without calculation. But the economy of grace, drawing on the inexhaustible power and love of God, doesn’t map neatly into the economy of appropriations, bills, and state-run welfare programs. […]

[The current Medicaid] framework of careworker compensation sees payment through a market lens — what would it cost to change someone’s mind about providing care? What does it cost to get them to sell their services to this particular client? The programs are worried about fraud, auditing timesheets, requiring licensing and certifications. These programs are built as though the primary risk is giving money to someone who may not have earned it.

But, in Kittay’s model of doulia, the reason for payment isn’t to persuade a caregiver to provide care. It is to enable them to offer the care they frequently already wish to provide. Compensation is often framed as wiping out altruism. If money changes hands, then the caring doesn’t count the same way it would if it were offered for free, or even at considerable cost.

In his prayer for generosity, St. Ignatius of Loyola asks the Lord to teach him, “to give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds; to toil, and not to seek for rest; to labor, and not to ask for reward.” The labor of uncompensated caregivers, caregivers who are strained past exhaustion, who are consumed and eaten up by their work, can sound like the fruit of this prayer. But St. Ignatius concludes his prayer by specifying the one reward he hopes for, “to know that I am doing your will.”

Although it is admirable when someone makes tremendous sacrifices to care for others, there is always something tragic about it, too. We see the saintly person at the center of the story, disregarding their own needs for the sake of another, but, at the peripheries of the story, there are others passing by, like the priest and the Levite who hurry by the man left broken and bleeding on the side of the road. The Catholic Church recognizes certain lives as embodying “white martyrdom” — the laying down of one’s life not in a single moment of death, but denial of self through poverty or celibacy. The martyr’s witness is always a testimony to God’s goodness, but, as with the “red martyrdom” of those killed for the faith, the actions of the person demanding the sacrifice can be wicked. It is good to serve the poor, it is sinful to impoverish. It is not God’s will for anyone to be neglected or left for dead, whether they are the initial victim of misfortune or someone who, in giving all they have, is newly vulnerable as a result.

We are not called to stand by and admire the white martyrdom of hard charities. We are called to answer need with our own gifts. But too often, our systems of care work presume that they can wring more and more work out of the families of the vulnerable, trusting that they will sacrifice themselves if we hold back our own help.

Sargeant goes on to tell the story of Tina, a 40-year-old teacher who was essentially required by her hospital and insurance company to coordinate the care for her brother with leukemia after his bone marrow transplant—even if she had to quit her job to do it. “Her work was admirable,” Sargeant writes, “as was that of her friends and relatives, but it is hollow to praise her without condemning the hard-hearted system that handed her this cross to carry, and then abandoned her.”

Here’s how she closes:

There is no sacrifice we make out of love for another that God disdains. But when we leave caregivers and their charges without support, we are like the Pharisees, who, Jesus says, “tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them” (Matt 23:4). From the beginning of the Church, the martyrs gave testimony of the depth of their love for God in their willingness to die rather than to renounce Him. We benefit from their witness, but we have no reason to be grateful to their persecutors. Paul addresses this question in his letter to the Romans, “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means!” (Rom 6:1-2).

Persecution can make visible the love that might have otherwise expressed itself in more hidden ways, but we must learn to see the quiet virtues, rather than rely on sin and suffering to expose these loves to light. In answering the needs of caregivers, in living out Kittay’s vision of doulia, we respond rightly to others’ willingness to become lowly out of love. We honor the willingness to suffer by not demanding sacrifice. Love answers love, and our strengths are given to us only that we might be good stewards in spending them.

an ennobling invitation

How can it be that believers called to radical inclusion are the most hostile to refugees of any group in the United States? How can anyone who serves God’s boundless kingdom of love and generosity ever rally to the political banner “America First”?

That question comes from Michael Gerson at the Washington Post, in an article that almost everyone I respect would like to (and many could) have written. It is the common, basic Christian grievance that cannot be said too many times or in too many ways.

In the present day, the frightening fervor of our politics makes it resemble, and sometimes supplant, the role of religion. And a good portion of Americans have a fatal attraction to the oddest of political messiahs — one whose deception, brutality, lawlessness and bullying were rewarded with the presidency. But so it is, to some extent, with all political messiahs who make their gains by imposing losses on others and measure their influence in increments of domination.

Jesus consciously and constantly rejected this view of power. While accepting the title “Messiah,” He sought to transform its meaning. He gathered no army. He skillfully avoided a political confrontation with Rome. He said little about history’s inevitably decomposing dynasties. He declared instead a struggle of the human heart — and a populist uprising, not in the sense of modern politics, but against established religious authorities. […]

Jesus rejected the role of a political messiah. In the present age, He insisted, the Kingdom of God would not be the product of Jewish nationalism. It would not arrive through militancy and violence, tactics that would contribute only to a cycle of suffering. Instead, God’s kingdom would grow silently, soul by soul, “among you” and “within you,” across every barrier of nation or race — in acts of justice, peacemaking, love, inclusion, meekness, humility and gentleness.

Gerson asks “why so many American evangelicals have rejected the splendor and romance of their calling and settled for the cultural and political resentments.” One answer, as he goes on to point out, is that this rejection of the flow of political tides can be difficult and lonely. But, while it certainly is difficult and lonely, faith isn’t only or even mainly those things. And all of us, whether stuck in the tide or tired of resisting it, can at any moment find in Jesus a better way:

What I am describing, however, is not a chain or a chore. When we are caked with the mud of political struggle, and tired of Pyrrhic victories that seed new hatreds, and frightened by our own capacity for contempt, the way of life set out by Jesus comes like a clear bell that rings above our strife. It defies cynicism, apathy, despair and all ideologies that dream of dominance. It promises that every day, if we choose, can be the first day of a new and noble manner of living. Its most difficult duties can feel much like purpose and joy. And even our halting, halfhearted attempts at faithfulness are counted by God as victories.

God’s call to us — while not simplifying our existence — does ennoble it. It is the invitation to a life marked by meaning. And even when, as mortality dictates, we walk the path we had feared to tread, it can be a pilgrimage, in which all is lost, and all is found.

Before such a consummation, Christians seeking social influence should do so not by joining interest groups that fight for their narrow rights — and certainly not those animated by hatred, fear, phobias, vengeance or violence. Rather, they should seek to be ambassadors of a kingdom of hope, mercy, justice and grace. This is a high calling — and a test that most of us (myself included) are always finding new ways to fail. But it is the revolutionary ideal set by Jesus of Nazareth, who still speaks across the sea of years.

fidelity as hope

Phil Christman, with a passing view of David Bentley Hart’s new book:

Another thing that Hart’s system can’t give us is “an unimpeachable claim to Christian orthodoxy as many people define it.” His new Tradition and Apocalypse answers this charge the only way one can: By saying, in effect, “Well, so’s your mother.” No religious tradition is particularly stable. No version of Christianity doesn’t reject a whole lot of other ones. Our record of the early church’s beliefs and behavior, even if we just confine ourselves to what we find in the New Testament, shows a group of people whose opinions sit at every point on every chart, about very important things. … What else would one expect? These people had just watched history get invaded by God. He unfurled himself around it … and … died. Then he came back, ate fish, and flew away.
The attempt to keep fidelity with such a bizarre event will surely involve as much disagreement and confusion as unity “Faith,” [Hart] writes, “is not the assurance that one possesses the fullness of truth, but is rather a fidelity to the future disclosure of the full meaning of what little one already knows.” Efforts to reach “back through the welter of contingent events to some initial and pure impulse whose subsequent unfolding could then be followed” are doomed to failure, however interesting they may be. We are looking forward to love’s full disclosure, at the end of time, and for now we know love only – how else? – as through a glass darkly.

I would only clarify, for my own sake, at least, that those efforts to “reach back and follow” are doomed not to failure but to strife, friction. Understanding them this way can produce much harmony and joy in the midst of the strife—in the midst of the friction-that-is-not-failure.

a thousand little coercions

Marilynne Robinson, in 1998:

Trivial failures of courage may seem minor enough in any particular instance, and yet they change history and society. They also change culture.

To illustrate this point, I will make a shocking statement: I am a Christian. This ought not to startle anyone. It is likely to be at least demographically true of an American of European ancestry. I have a strong attachment to the Scriptures, and to the theology, music, and art Christianity has inspired. My most inward thoughts and ponderings are formed by the narratives and traditions of Christianity. I expect them to engage me on my deathbed.

Over the years many a good soul has let me know by one means or another that this living out of the religious/ethical/aesthetic/intellectual tradition that is so essentially compelling to me is not, shall we say, cool. There are little jokes about being born again. There are little lectures about religion as a cheap cure for existential anxiety. Now, I do feel fairly confident that I know what religion is. I have spent decades informing myself about it, an advantage I can claim over any of my would-be rescuers. I am a mainline Protestant, a.k.a. a liberal Protestant, as these same people know. I do not by any means wear my religion on my sleeve. I am extremely reluctant to talk about it at all, chiefly because my belief does not readily reduce itself to simple statements.

Nevertheless, I experience these little coercions. Am I the last one to get the news that this religion that has so profoundly influenced world civilization over centuries has been ceded to the clods and the obscurantists? Don’t I know that J. S. Bach and Martin Luther King have been entirely eclipsed by Jerry Falwell? The question has been put to me very directly: Am I not afraid to be associated with religious people? These nudges would have their coercive effect precisely because those who want to put me right know that I am not a fundamentalist. That is, I am to avoid association with religion completely or else be embarrassed by punitive association with beliefs I do not hold. What sense does that make? What good does it serve? I suspect it demonstrates the existence of a human herding instinct. After all, “egregious” means at root “outside the flock.” There are always a great many people who are confident that they recognize deviation from group mores, and so they police the boundaries and round up the strays.

This is only one instance of a very pervasive phenomenon, a pressure toward concessions no one has a right to ask. These are concessions courage would refuse if it were once acknowledged that a minor and insidious fear is the prod that coaxes us toward conforming our lives, and even our thoughts, to norms that are effective markers of group identity precisely because they are shibboleths, a contemporary equivalent of using the correct fork. These signals of inclusion and exclusion, minor as they seem, have huge consequences historically because they are used to apportion the benefits and the burdens of collective life. The example of coercion I have offered, the standing invitation to sacrifice one’s metaphysics to one’s sense of comme il faut, has had the effect of marginalizing the liberal churches and elevating fundamentalism to the status of essential Christianity. The consequences of handing over the whole of Christianity to one momentarily influential fringe is clearly borne out in the silencing of social criticism and the collapse of social reform, both traditionally championed by American mainline churches, as no one seems any longer to remember.

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The present dominance of aspersion and ridicule in American public life is a reflex of the fact that we are assumed to want, and in many cases perhaps do want, attitude much more than information. If an unhealthy percentage of the population gets its news from Jay Leno or Rush Limbaugh, it is because they are arbiters of attitude. They instruct viewers as to what, within their affinity groups, it is safe to say and cool to think. That is, they short-circuit the functions of individual judgment and obviate the exercise of individual conscience. So it is to a greater or lesser degree with the media in general. It is painful to watch decent and distinguished people struggle to function politically in this non-rational and valueless environment. …

Cultures commonly employ the methods of cults, making their members subject and dependent. And nations at intervals march lockstep to enormity and disaster. A successful autocracy rests on the universal failure of individual courage. In a democracy, abdications of conscience are never trivial. They demoralize politics, debilitate candor, and disrupt thought.