"Speed Racer," Common Grace, and "Progress"

Last night my boys and I watched the Wachowski brothers' latest offering, Speed Racer. I quite enjoyed their (perhaps indulgent?) visual forays, variously hovering between surreal and camp. (I confess to also kind of enjoying the cheap chimpanzee comedy shtick.) But I also found myself strangely intrigued by a melodramatic, almost cliche line uttered by Racer X to Speed:

"It doesn't matter if racing never changes. What matters is if racing changes us."

The context is the corporate corruption of the WRL, which is rife and systemic. It has always been this way, and Speed despairs that it might always be. And it's not clear that winning within the system will really change the system. But at the same time, X and Speed both have a compulsion to race, and that compulsion can only work itself out within the system. (One might say that the corrupt system owns all the tracks.) So given that context and compulsion, the question becomes an issue of assimmilation: "What matters is if racing changes us." Now, granted, this could sound like a kind of Stoicism. But I don't think it is, because Speed and the entire family are trying to imagine racing otherwise--and are trying to embody a different kind of team, and different kind of racing, and different kind of practice within the corporate system. But if Racer X is right, one doesn't necessarily work out this impulsion in order to "transform" the system ("It doesn't matter if racing never changes.").

So this got me thinking a bit (and I'm very much thinking out loud here): How much of the Reformed agenda of "transforming" culture is secretly--and perhaps essentially--informed by a kind of myth of progress? To what extent does the "transforming culture" agenda have to assume that "racing can change," so to speak? And is that warranted?

In re-reading Kuyper recently, I was astonished (one might say appalled) to see his shameless 19th-century progressive confidence in "the West" (all thanks to Calvinism, of course). (How much of this is due to an implicit post-millenialism of some sort?) In general, I think Reformed "transformers" assume both the "racing can change" and "racing will change," to stick with the filmic metaphor.

But I just wonder: is that warranted? On what grounds? (I should note that even if it's not warranted, that doesn't thereby entail the truth of some dispensationalist pessimism about creation and culture per se, as if everything but the soul is just destined to "burn up.") What can we expect from "the earthly city?" (Nota bene: Augustine's "earthly city" is not synonymous with creation or temporality; it's origin is the Fall.) I suppose I find myself with little confidence in any "progress" in the earthly city apart from eschatological renewal and transformation. And within such a system, what matters is that "racing" not change us.

New Book: The Logic of Incarnation

Some Fors Clavigera readers might be interested in a new book that has just appeared from Wipf & Stock: The Logic of Incarnation: James K.A. Smith's Critique of Postmodern Religion, edited by Neal DeRoo and Brian Lightbody. This grew out of a conference that engaged my work at Brock University in St. Catherine's, Ontario. Drawing together philosophers, theologians, campus ministers, and other practitioners, the took takes up various facets of my engagement with postmodernism and religion, including my critique of the "religion without religion" school of Caputo (on the theoretical side) or Pete Rollins (on the practitioner side, so to speak). I contribute a long first chapter ("The Logic of Incarnation: Towards a Catholic Postmodernism") that sort of provides an overview of this critique of Derrida & Co.'s "logic of determination" and the alternative I describe as the "logic of incarnation." I also contribute an Afterword that responds to each of the chapters.

The original conference was great fun, and this book was a way to revisit those conversations--as well as an opportunity for me to clarify some issues, respond to some criticisms, and get to say some things I haven't elsewhere. (It's also a treat for me to see Neal, my former student, bringing this to fruition. Thanks, Neal!)

Poetic Musings at AAR

I usually enjoy the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, the yearly gathering of scholars in religious studies and theology. But this year I found it a slog. I'm not sure if this is a reflection of the meeting or of my own personal ambivalence about the very project. But the drone of papers occasioned in me a kind of ennui I've not experienced there before (the book exhibit was a bit of a tonic). In fact, during one very-long paper I was so bored and disheartened that I took up poetic doodling. I hope this was only a phase, or the bad fish talking--otherwise, I've got serious professional issues on the horizon!

A poem inspired by a theological presentation at AAR:

Babel's babbling and confusion
comes home to roost in
the many gurgling tongues of the
theologians,
chattering self-importantly,
most sincerely,
with an idolatrous cleverness.

Serious and sober,
yea "evangelical,"
conservative
but really just a DJ--
riffing and mixing,
generating a cacaphony of theologemes
that dance and dangle
between piled names.
A show of erudition,
gesticulating about 'communicative action'
and saying...what?

Nothing.


For which I give thanks.

For never has the vocation--
or is it just my desire?--
of the poet felt more clear.

For I am befuddled by this Babel,
foreign tongues of barbarians.

From its rambling , "rigorous" confusion
I want only to fall into the
clarity of Franz Wright,
the lucidity of Anne Sexton,
the bumpkin simplicity of young Donald Hall.

Compared with the muffled but incessant
utterances of the theologian,
poetry rings with the clarity of
crunchy leaves in the quiet of a
frost-covered autumn morning.


God, of course, is no theologian.
He is a poet hidden and violated,
muzzled by the theologians.
As long as there are theologians,
God's existence will remain in question.

How long, O Lord?
When O When will you silence the theologians--
Silence my theologizing--
And sing to us, your poiema,
in the poems of your strange saints.

The Radicality of Marriage

I have been hoping for several years to develop a course that I'd love to teach at Calvin--on marriage, family, and sex from a philosophical and theological perspective (drawing on Aristotle, Aquinas, Hauerwas, David Matzko McCarthy, and others), but also utilizing literary and poetic sources. I think it will be a hard sell for me because it will be perceived as a "conservative" course so I expect opposition from certain quarters. But, in fact, I think the course would be radically counter-cultural. As Slavoj Zizek provocatively asks:

What if, in our postmodern world of ordained transgression, in which the marital commitment is perceived as ridiculously out of time, those who cling to it are the true subversives? What if, today, straight marriage is 'the most dark and daring of all transgressions?'" -Zizek, "The Thrilling Romance of Orthodoxy," in Theology and the Political: The New Debate

This doesn't mean I would have any truck with the rabid Constantinianism (and hypocrisy) of evangelical anti-gay marriage campaigns . Indeed, a radical theology of marriage would also be subversive for a church which has also pretty much accommodated itself to serial monogamy.

Adam Smith on Taxation

A little tidbit from Steve Coll's New Yorker piece, "Overtaxed," reflecting on Joe the Plumber and the specter of socialism:

The principle that Obama evinced, which most economists would regard as unexceptionable, can be traced to Adam Smith. In “The Wealth of Nations” (1776), his seminal treatise on capitalism, Smith wrote:

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. . . . The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. . . . It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

Just Charity: A Follow-up to some Questions

I've received a few questions and some criticism regarding my previous post on "Just Charity." Admittedly, within the 500 words of a newspaper column, it's difficult to be nuanced. So let me follow up here by responding to two sorts of questions.

Objection 1: Your reading of Acts 5 seems to miss two crucial points: (a) Ananias and Sapphira's sin was lying, not refusal to share their possessions; and (b) the text seems to clearly say that the property "belonged" to them both before and after the sale, and hence it was sort of "voluntary" on their part.

I might say a few things in reply:

First, our artificial chapter divisions are unhelpful here. What we now have as "chapter 4" ends by emphasizing that there "wasn't a needy person among them" because the owners among them were selling what they had in order to share (re-distribute) the resources. So coming off chapter 4, Ananias and Sapphira stand in contrast to Barnabas, who laid everything at the apostles' feet (4:37).

Second, Acts 5:3 seems to indicate that there sin was two-fold: (1) lying AND (2) "keeping back" some for themselves. The deed they "conceived" (5:4) seems to have been their shared plan to hold some back. The act itself was the lie: what they laid at the apostles' feet was not what they were de facto claiming--it also wasn't what was expected (given the patterns established in chapter 4).

Regarding "ownership," it is an interesting claim. After it was sold, it was still "under their control." I don't think this works well with Lockean models of property and ownership. But it does bring to mind the compassionate father's response to the elder brother in Luke 15: "All that is mine is yours" (Luke 15:31). I think it's very easy to be anachronistic and read our post-Lockean conceptions of "private" property and ownership back into a world that pretty much couldn't imagine what "private" means. As part of a community, who share "all things in common," of course they also remains 'owners,' in a sense--stakeholders in the common purse.

Finally, we'd have to again nuance just what "voluntary" means. Did Peter put a gun to their head to get them to give all that they had? No (guns not yet being invented ;-). Were they "coerced" by threats of torture? No. But was it expected of them as an act of gratitude? Yes. Was giving all considered a particularly benevolent "charitable" act, above and beyond the call of duty? No.

Objection 2: Let's say you're right that the early church was committed to a practice of redistribution of wealth and resources as a spiritual discipline--an alternative economy that testifies to the economy of shalom in the coming kingdom, and thus is a foretaste of the eschatological reordering of the economic. Why should anyone think that this translates into a program for the state? Isn't there a huge difference between an ecclesial socialism and a state-based socialism? In fact, shouldn't we be libertarians with respect to the economics of the state even if we might be ecclesial socialists, so to speak?

Again, several things come to mind in reply, on the fly:

Part of me can appreciate how one might come to something like this libertarian conclusion. I'm no advocate of state-based socialism. But on that point, let's be clear about something given the context in which these discussions are happening: Barack Obama is no socialist! Believe me, I'm a Canadian, and nothing close to socialism will ever be policy in this country. (Our conservative party in Canada is still to the left of the Democrats here.) So I feel like the "socialism" talk in the current milieu is a complete red herring.

Anyway, I agree that authentic 'socialism' (to use an ill-fitting word) would have to be (and could only be) ecclesial--a "socialism by grace," since it requires not only rightly ordered systems but also rightly ordered agents who inhabit those systems (I refuse to choose between the two). However, that said, I think we should also be seeking to enact a kind of "spill-over" of redemption in our culture as much as or wherever that is possible. So, for instance, all things considered, even if we think racism can only be effectively undone within communion in Christ, I hope it's obvious that we ought to also work to end lynchings, Jim Crow laws, school segregation, unjust school funding policies that privilege the wealthy, etc. The criteria here is admittedly ad hoc but still critical: we can evaluate what policies and systems look more like the kingdom than others (I'm leaning here on Augustine's City of God and Oliver O'Donovan's Desire of the Nations). And on that ad hoc basis, some policies are much more "kingdom-looking" than others. That would be my way of considering income redistribution that happens through taxation (along with universal healthcare, etc.). We look at the Scriptural hints of what a flourishing society looks like, and that picture becomes a criterion for measuring the relative justice and injustice of policies here-and-now.

(Admittedly, if you're a dispensationalist, you won't have any reason to think that there's any continuity between the now and the not-yet. I'm not going to argue the insufficiency of dispensationalism here; I'll just say it has not been the Catholic faith.)

Finally, I'd be very curious to know whether those who offer such a "baptized" libertarianism would really be willing to sign up for an ecclesial socialism. In my experience, they are also libertarians about the church (which is why many of them are also Protestants). I'd be much more willing to hear this line of critique if I thought the "Christians" offering it were living out economic redistribution within their ecclesial communities. But I don't think that is happening. I think the supposed "theological" arguments for libertarianism are a bit of a ruse--a cover for what, at the end of the day, is a political ideology that is drastically modern, individualist, and selfish.

Just Charity: "Charity" and "Compulsory Income Redistribution"

If anyone would like a peek into the inanities we have to endure here in West Michigan, just consider a recent guest commentary in the Religion section of our local paper, The Grand Rapids Press. In it the author excoriates the "compulsory income redistribution" that he believes stands in contrast to "true Christian charity." (As further evidence of the ludicrosity (?) we have to live with in West Michigan: the same paper endorsed McCain for President.)

I just sent off the following to the Press for consideration to be published next Saturday, but I'm not sanguine it will be published, so I'll post it here:

Just Charity

By James K.A. Smith

Some very important things can be lost in translation. Paul Rhoda’s recent commentary on Christian “charity” is a clear reminder of this. Having filtered the notion of “charity” through the libertarianism of Lord Acton (with a little help, I suspect, from his ideological heirs at the Acton Institute), Rhoda ends up with a very strange version of the Bible. Let’s call it the PRV, the Paul Rhoda Version.

If his commentary is any indicator, the PRV is a peculiar book. It’s not even really a translation; it’s an anthology—a Reader’s Digest compression with some heavy edits and omissions. The result is a different book.

Let’s consider just one of his claims: according to Rhoda, “Christian compassion is voluntary.” But such language of “voluntariness” is a modern invention. Our notion of something being “voluntary” implies that it is optional and un-coerced. In fact, we might even deserve some praise for doing what’s only “voluntary,” as if this was going above and beyond the call of duty.

But did the early church see compassion and charity as “voluntary?” Or, to take up Rhoda’s specific case, did the early church see “income redistribution” as “voluntary?”

The short and easy answer is, “No.” We can note at least three reasons.

First, such a conception of “voluntary” charity assumes a notion of freedom and autonomy that would have been utterly foreign to the Hebrews and to first-century Christians. According to the biblical picture, to be “free” is not to be autonomous or un-coerced. We are free when we are empowered to do the good. The strangeness of the biblical picture is that true freedom comes in subjection to the risen Lord. It is slaves of Christ who are truly free.

Second, the biblical narrative makes no dichotomy between love and justice. The biblical word sometimes translated as “charity”—the Greek word agape—does not refer to something that is optional for Christians. If it were, how could it be commanded throughout the New Testament?

Finally, the PRV seems to just leave out those cases that contradict Rhoda’s claims. For instance, Ananias and Sapphira seemed to have worked with something like Rhoda’s conception of “charity.” According to Acts 5, they were generous and charitable. Having sold a piece of property, they came to the apostles and made a big show of their charitable “donation.” What was the result? Peter renounced the couple’s selfishness! They were holding back. In fact, they both immediately died under judgment (Acts 5:1-11). Is this any way to treat charitable donors? What was the problem?

Well, they must have been reading the PRV. They mistakenly assumed that the redistribution of their income was a “voluntary” matter. But the early church had a clear and established practice of compulsory property redistribution. They sold what they had, pooled their resources, and had all things in common (Acts 2:44-45; 4:34-37). The church was living out an alternative economy—one compelled by gratitude and constrained by love. This wasn’t optional or voluntary, but was the reflection of a people serving a gift-giving King.

Snyder on Many Modes of "Understanding": More on Poetry

As you might gather from the synergy between Fors Clavigera and What I'm Reading, poetry's been on my mind alot lately. Building on an emerging theme I noted elsewhere, Dana Goodyear's recent New Yorker piece on sometime "Beat" poet Gary Snyder offers another catalyst for thinking about "poetic" truth, or poetic understanding (see "Zen Master" in the October 20 New Yorker).

The circle that included Snyder, Ginsberg and others were oral poets. This doesn't mean that they subscribed to any "phonocentric" conception of poetry, as if spoken poetry was "truer" or "purer" than written poetry. It simply means that theirs were poems meant to be spoken and heard--they were created with the cadences of speech and orality in mind. When they were written, they were akin to musical scores. Nobody would confuse the score of Mahler's Symphony No. 2 with its performance; and the score is meant to serve the performance. So too with oral poetry. Other (what--literate? textual?) poetry is meant to be read; it lives off the visuality of the graphemes, the marks and spaces on the page which often can't be reproduced in recitation. In contrast, Snyder struggles to find a syntax for writing his oral poems; he has to stretch the forms in order to create a "score." As Goodyear observes,

"on the page their forms are fluid, loose, irregular. Blocks of indented lines indicate a shift in voice, and often a slight conceptual change. [...] White space in the middle of the lines is for a caesura more substantial than a comma or a semicolon; white space between stanzas allows time to elapse."

This slippage between the written and the performed--and the irreducibility of the one to the other--also hints at different modes of understanding. As Snyder himself puts it,

"When people tell me they don't understand a poem, I say, 'Fine, just listen to it. The exposure to its is part of its power. Don't vex yourself with an intellectual understanding of it.' We don't expect to understand graphic art that way."

Notice that "understanding" is qualified: "intellectual" understanding is a particular "way" to understand. But there are also others. Hearing and absorbing the performed poem constitutes its own sort of visceral understanding--a mode of understanding which has its own integrity. This is not "implicit" understanding to just then be "made explicit" by "intellectual" understanding. It is understanding of a different order, and any attempt to translate it into another order will also occasion some loss. There are many ways to "understand."

The Church as Poetry?

Denis Donoghue's recent review of Jay Parini's book, Why Poetry Matters, got me to (analogical) thinking: might the situation of poetry in late modern American culture be akin to the situation of the church? Here's how this connection got swirling around in my head:

As Donoghue opens,

If you were to write a book called Why Poetry Matters, you would be wise to concede, as Jay Parini does, that “to most people” it doesn’t. “That is, most people don’t write it, don’t read it, and don’t have any idea why anybody would spend valuable time doing such a thing.”

Despite screeds and jeremiads about the MTVization of mass culture, and even a proliferation of magazines and collections, "the practice of poetry is still a subculture; it does not matter in any public sense." And yet...

...both Donoghue and Parini mount a sort of defense of poetry in spite of its being a "subculture," even recognizing that it could perhaps only be a "subculture." The logic seems to be that something's being a subculture does not entail that it doesn't matter; in fact, a subculture could be a subculture for the common good. As Donoghue concludes,

Reading a poem entails, to a special degree, the act of paying attention; we are required to concentrate our minds, not only to the extent we do habitually on words as they pass in ordinary life but as we are impelled to do on words in the intricacies, frictions, and evasions of lyric form. That so much in contemporary life encourages us to do otherwise—to accept things as they are, whether for the sake of ignorance or convenience—suggests, finally, why it is that poetry matters.

The poets, and the world of poetry, constitute a sort of faithful remnant that bears witness to how we might inhabit the world otherwise. It devotes itself to cutting against the grain of the linguistic practices into which we are habituated by a "barbarian" culture. (On this last point, see James Wood's skewering of the "Republican war on words" in a recent New Yorker.) This subcultural labor might look like a withdrawal into private irrelevance and complacency, but in fact it is a concentration of energies for the sake of the world.

So let me make the analogical leap (this might only makes sense in my own head): What if we thought of the church as poetry--as this sort of subcultural project that is undertaken for the common good, as a witness to how "the common" could be otherwise? One will rightly hear in this suggestion a kind of oblique response to Jeffrey Stout's criticism of Hauerwas and MacIntyre. On Stout's critique, the conception of the church as a unique polis--the center of gravity for our "political" endeavors--is an irresponsible retreat from the "public" sphere and the common good.

Would Stout want to offer the same critique of poetry? Doesn't poetry represent a subculture that's content to hang out in neglected corners, fostering a conversation and way of life to which "mainstream" culture is not privy? Aren't poets "irresponsible" for devoting themselves to such a subcultural project? By drawing this analogy, I do not mean to suggest--a la Rorty--that the church is (or ought to be) a collection of "private ironists"--an assortment of dandy aesthetes for whom the church is akin to "the club," into which they retreat from 'worldly' affairs. I don't think that's how Donoghue or Parini view poets either.

Rather, the point is that subcultural labor can be for the world, a labor undertaken in hope and witness, and in a spirit of hospitality, hoping for the growth and expansion of the 'subculture' into culture as such--the church as the poetry of the world. It brings to mind my favorite line from Dutch theologian Klaas Schlider:

“Blessed is my wise ward-elder who does his home visiting in the right way. He is a cultural force, although he may not be aware of it.”

What's in a name? Adieu, Work Research Foundation

I'm a big fan of Comment magazine, which I regularly press into the hands of students. It's engaging, accessible, intentionally Christian, deals with things that really matter, and is theoretically rigorous without having to wear its theory on its sleeve--which is just to say that it is thoughtful without being plagued by 'academese.' If you haven't subscribed, do so today.

Comment is one of the many fruits of what was the "Work Research Foundation" of Canada. Today they announced a new name, Cardus, which they explain as follows:

WHY CARDUS?
The Cardus was an ancient north-south road that connected the people of Roman cities to their major public spaces. On the Cardus Maximus governments, markets, temples and more lived and worked to build a common life for the good of the city.

Today’s North American cities are connected by high speed highways, and asphalt roadways, bringing their occupants in encased metal bodies from point A to point B. Global culture generates a huge amount of data, but it is segmented, disconnected and isolated. Our think tanks have concentrated on politics, but forgotten the importance of culture. Professors and policy advocates are world leaders in minute areas—but who paints the bigger picture? Our institutions, like our people, function in a new kind of social and intellectual isolation. Policy is made without a place for religion, religion is practiced with little thought to the common good, and work is done without connecting the "why" to the "how".

WHAT IS CARDUS?
Enter Cardus. We believe that economic, social and religious patterns have a deep influence on each other, and that we ignore these to the peril of each. These forces do not operate independent of each other, and neither do their institutions. Public life is sustained not just by social or political effort, but by a plurality of institutional cooperation.

Thus—this is the moment for a think tank to bridge politics and culture, to rethink, research and rebuild an integrative vision of North American social architecture. And Cardus isn't merely rethinking and researching an alternative vision for public life—we're actively working to renew and rebuild. Cardus is a North American public policy think tank, equipping change agents with a strategic public theology to renew North American social architecture.

Fair enough, and makes sense. But I'm going to miss "the Work Research Foundation." And I hope it's not churlish to say that I have my doubts or reservations--that this feels like a bit of an "upwardly mobile" move, a move from a focus on labor to a concern with more bourgeois structures. I don't think that's really the case, but I do think that what began as the sort of organization that found its roots or antecedents in Christian labor unions has found itself more comfortable with bankers and entrepreneurs. This is just the sort of trend which has made me skittish about the Kuyperian project in North America. But these are just the mild laments of a friend who will miss the solid blue-collar reminder I always heard embedded in the "Work Research Foundation."

Joe Six-Pack called...

...and he's mad as hell. He thought the McCain-Palin camp were in his corner (stacked as it is with crushed Budweiser cans), fighting for him. But it turns out all McCain cares about these days is poor Joe the Plumber--whose raking in over $250,000 a year and is still griping about paying taxes.

Average Joe is a little miffed at both and is pretty sure he'll vote for Obama.

Update: Turns out Joe the Plumber is not actually licensed as a plumber, and hasn't even been paying what taxes he already owes. Hmmmm...any chance Joe Six-Pack made a little anonymous call to the IRS?

Evangelicals and Empire

I just received my copy of Evangelicals and Empire: Christian Alternatives to the Political Status Quo, edited by Bruce Benson and Peter Heltzel (with a Foreword by Nicholas Wolterstorff and an Afterword by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri). It's an eclectic, big tent collection, since it includes an essay like Jim Wallis' "Dangerous Religion: George W. Bush's Theology of Empire" (ch. 1) and my own, "The Gospel of Freedom, or Another Gospel? Theology, Empire, and American Foreign Policy," which would be critical of Wallis' habit of continuing to connect "empire"-talk to a particular nation-state. Other contributors include John Milbank, Gail Hamner, Corey Walker, Amos Yong, Michael Horton, and many others.

Kudos to Bruce and Peter for managing to get Hardt & Negri to provide some (albeit brief) feedback on the collection.

Christ and Culture Revisited

Christianity Today has finally posted my brief review of D.A. Carson's latest book, Christ and Culture Revisited. They asked me to be charitable and constructive; this was the best I could do I'm afraid.

I also managed to exercise some self-discipline and not say a word about Carson's critique of me in the book. I'm saving that up for a more substantial piece that I hope to float as a draft over at The Church and Postmodern Culture. I actually think there's some potential for us to make some headway together on these matters and hope to be able to clarify some elements of Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? that Carson rightly questions. For now...

Read "Christ and Culture and Church and Creation"

Brooks on the Decline of the Republican Party

I never have been, and never could be, a fan of the Republican Party. However, I have become very sympathetic to elements of a classic conservatism that one finds, say, in Edmund Burke. I've been pressed there by a sense of the need to submit to Catholicity. Where I continue to demur concerns whether a catholic conservatism--which prizes the importance of tradition, character formation, and a sort communitarianism that trumps individualism--has any relevance or hope of viability in the federal politics of a pluralist nation-state (I think not). On top of that, the nationalist Republican version of conservatism has persistently (and paradoxically) tried to wed such a Burkean disposition to a trenchant liberalism when it comes to markets and consumption (what's more liberal than laissez-faire economics?). Hence my fundamental cynicism about partisan politics.

However, my ambivalence about the Republican party doesn't mean I don't lament its further demise in its most recent cynical incarnation. A Republican party that could nominate Sarah Palin has pretty much proved John Stuart Mill's aphorism correct when he described Conservatives as "necessarily the stupidest Party." David Brooks laments the same in today's column in which he chronicles the demise of a party which has sold its electoral soul to the wide swaths of anti-intellectualism that are alive and well in this country, fostered and fueled by the inanities of talk radio and cable news networks. As he notes:

Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals. Richard Weaver wrote a book called, “Ideas Have Consequences.” Russell Kirk placed Edmund Burke in an American context. William F. Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. But he didn’t believe those were the only two options. His entire life was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect.

Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.

Ronald Reagan was no intellectual, but he had an earnest faith in ideas and he spent decades working through them. He was rooted in the Midwest, but he also loved Hollywood. And for a time, it seemed the Republican Party would be a broad coalition — small-town values with coastal reach.

In 1976, in a close election, Gerald Ford won the entire West Coast along with northeastern states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine. In 1984, Reagan won every state but Minnesota.

But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

The federal electoral game has come down to a tribalism. The presidential debates have amounted to little more than another opportunity for the candidates to preach to their respective choirs. And thus campaigns come down to little more than a bet on who has the bigger choir, and who can motivate their choir to come out and vote. Since the elite choir that the Republican party really serves is so small, they had to look for a cagey way to find another choir. Their bet--embodied in Palin--is that there is a massive, perhaps largely quiet, choir composed of Joe Sixpacks in the middle of the country--a choir whose anthem is a long disdain for complexity and "learning."

But that's not "conservatism." It is a wanton disdain for the wisdom of the past that has spiraled into a reverie of ignorance cloaked as "common sense." That such people get a vote is exactly why conservatism has always had an uneasy relationship with democracy.

"Thinking in Tongues" from First Things

[This article appeared in the April 2008 issue of First Things; since it takes a few months for articles to become available for free online, I thought I'd here point to it.]

Over the past decade, Pentecostalism has become something of an academic darling for historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars of religious studies. Researchers ensconced in the secularized environs of the university have produced a flood of books and studies about the fantastic worlds of global Pentecostalism. And yet, while sometimes sympathetic and irenic, the academic interest in Pentecostalism has had the curious backhanded effect of disenchantment. The sociological fascination proves a cover for condescending incredulity, with Pentecostalism reduced to a sort of global snake-handling.

This reduction of Pentecostalism to a specimen shuts down the articulation of Pentecostalism as any kind of theological voice. Indeed, the sociological account of Pentecostalism implies that “Pentecostal theology” is an oxymoron. Which is a shame because, over the last century, an interesting theology has been developing in such classical Pentecostal traditions as the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ, as well as in charismatic movements within the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion. (The shared sensibility of Pentecostal and charismatic traditions is often described under the umbrella of small -p pentecostalism.)

At the heart of this Pentecostal theology is an ontological claim: that the same Spirit who animated the apostles at Pentecost continues to be actively, dynamically, and miraculously present both in the ecclesial community and in creation. Pentecostal theology is a theology of the Creed’s third article and is predicated on the belief that the Spirit is a spirit who surprises us by continuing to speak, heal, and manifest God’s presence in ways that counter the shut-down naturalism of modernity. As a result, following in the wake of the Spirit, it is a nimble theology that seeks to explicate and understand the controlled chaos of charismatic worship—a faith seeking understanding of the experience of the Spirit’s surprising ways.

Although Pentecostalism sometimes gets a space on the table as a subject of study, it rarely gets a seat at the theological table as a contributor to the conversation, even among serious theologians. On one level, this is not surprising. The Pentecostal movement emerged largely from an underclass with little access to formal education. In an often-told story, one of its saints embodied this marginalization: Willie J. Seymour—the preacher at the center of the Azusa Street revival in 1906, a son of former slaves—received his theological education in Texas while listening in a hall outside the classroom that white students alone could enter. Pentecostalism is a tradition of preachers and evangelists, not scholars and doctors.

Continue reading "Thinking in Tongues" at First Things

Federal Elections the Canadian Way: Give me 5 Weeks

As a Canadian living the States for a dozen years now, I have found that I've never quite shaken the Canadian penchant for understatement--which is just a backhanded way of saying I've never warmed up the to gargantuan hype that characterizes so many facets of American life, which all look "Texan" from a Canadian perspective. So much of American culture and politics is characterized by a mammoth "spectrality." From kindergarten "graduations" to the recent national party conventions, to Canadian eyes all of these things look big and garish. In this respect, I think Canada remains a cultural colony of Britain. (These same tensions can be found in my denomination, the Christian Reformed Church or North America, which comprises both American and Canadian congregations. For instance, as my friend Peter Schuurman will point out, when synod meets and our college president is bragging about the successes of a multi-multi-million dollar campaign to build yet another flashy building on campus, the Canadians--their voices still tinged with more recent immigration--will quietly say, "Vell, OK...but of course vat's important is that vee remain faithful to the Lort." American Christians tend to be interested in big shows of cultural powers; Canadian Christians tend to be suspicious of anything that's big.)

Take, for instance, the shape of federal politics: an American presidential campaign is basically 2 years long. In short, an elected president is just barely halfway through his term before he needs to begin campaigning for re-election, kicking into gear a massive PR machine that will run for two years, eating up unbelievable amounts of time and money. In contrast, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper just announced that Canada will have a federal election this fall--October 14, as a matter of fact. While the American press is focused on the "60-day homestretch" of the years-long American presidential campaign, the Canadian federal election will be announced, contested, and resolved in 38 days--total! And, of course, as a parliamentary system, the election is not so completely fixated on the election of a chief executive. In fact, Canadians can't select who will be Prime Minister; instead, they vote for members of parliament whose party they believe will best lead the country. (In fact, if the party leader--say, Harper--fails to win the seat in his riding, he can't be prime minister.)

I don't have any illusions that Canadian politics is any more pure or just than American politics. But it does seem to me that the "smallness" of Canadian politics--including the brevity of a federal election campaign--has a number of virtues vis-a-vis the mammoth political machines that churn up public discourse in multi-year American system of campaigning.

What I'm Reading: Wood, Flaubert, Mailer, etc.

Someone had told me that they thought the feed for my other blog, What I'm Reading, was not working properly. I hope that's now been corrected, but just in case, I'll here post periodic updates to point those who might be interested over there. Recent reviews include James Wood, How Fiction Works, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Norman Mailer's account of the 1968 Republic and Democratic National Conventions in Miami and the Siege of Chicago.

A New Kind of Politics? Or the Same Old "Religion?"

Barack Obama's acceptance speech was historic, forthright, even "specific" at points. And as expected, it exhibited his rhetorical gifts, echoing the cadences of MLK's preaching.

That said, what purports to be a "new kind of politics" sure sounds pretty familiar. In particular, the following stood out to me:

• Though Hillary didn't get the nomination, and despite all the blather that this is no longer the party of the Clintons, surely the fact that a big promise of tax cuts was central to his speech is a clear sign that this is a post-Clinton Democratic party which amounts to little more than Republican Lite. Coupled with a focus on family prosperity and an (albeit tempered) reliance on "the market," this continues to show that what passes for "the left" in this country is almost laughable.
• More significantly, despite all the talk of newness and change, the rhetoric and religion of Americanism still sounds the same from where I sit. In language that could have just as easily appeared in Bush's second inaugural or the National Security Strategy of the Bush administration, Obama promised to "restore our moral standing, so that America is once again that last, best hope for all who are called to the cause of freedom, who long for lives of peace and who yearn for a better future." And immediately following this, he ramps it up a notch, associating America with the proverbial "ultimate sacrifice," spilling blood for the flag:
  

  I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America - they have served the United States of America.
  
  So I've got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first.

  Ah, yes, that last point recalls something I noted two years ago in Obama's widely praised "Call to Renewal" speech: that Obama exhibits the same sort of politics as Jim Wallis who, at the end of the day, claims the religion must be "disciplined" by democracy. To put the question starkly: Can any Christian really say that they put their "country" first? Both Republican-speak and Democrat-speak remain committed to the god of Americanism.
• Finally, Obama's speech draws on the borrowed capital of Scripture in exactly the same way as the Religious Right: it invokes powerful, symbolic language of Scripture which refers to the church and transposes it to the United States of America. For instance: the speech closed with a veritable benediction: "Let us keep that promise - that American promise - and in the words of scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess." The allusion is to Hebrews 10:23: "Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised if faithful." The context makes it clear that this is the church's hope in Christ, but here Obama idolatrously transposes that to the "American promise." This is a "new kind of politics?" Sounds like the same old sort of civil religion we've heard from the Religious Right for years--the same (idolatrous) civil religion of Americanism.
  

Is "the American Dream" a Christian Dream?

I have been--and will remain--relatively quiet about the presidential campaign. (I can muster enthusiasm for municipal politics, and perhaps even state politics, but remain completely cynical about federal politics.) However, my patience for leftish evangelical infatuation with Obama is spilling over a bit this morning (almost equal to my cynicism for an evangelical right that could get behind McCain).

I'll just register one question, given the fact that even Stanley Hauerwas has said, "I'll probably vote for Obama." It seems that the thrust of this week's Democratic Convention--presaged in Michelle Obama's speech last night--will be to emphasize that Barack Obama is a "mainstream American" who has benefited from and lived out "the American dream."

But is the American dream a Christian dream?

The Orwell Diaries

The Orwell Trust, administrators of the Orwell Prize, have created a blog publication of George Orwell's diaries from 1938-1942. They describe the project:

The Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing, is publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog. From 9th August 2008, Orwell’s domestic and political diaries (from 9th August 1938 until October 1942) will be posted in real-time, exactly 70 years after the entries were written.

Orwell’s ‘domestic’ diaries begin on 9th August 1938/2008; his ‘political’ diaries (which are further categorised as ‘Morocco’, ‘Pre-war’ and ‘Wartime’) begin on 7th September 1938/2008.

The diaries are exactly as Orwell wrote them. Where there are original spelling errors, they are indicated by a ° following the offending word.

An intriguing way into the mind of one of the century's best writers ("political" or otherwise).

On Evangelicalism at Immanent Frame

The Social Science Research Council's blog, The Immanent Frame, has become the arena for discussion of issues related to religion, civil society, and public life, with a particular focus on issues of (post)secularity. They are now hosting an ongoing conversation about evangelicals and evangelicalism, somewhat in light of the shifting political climate in this year of an American presidential election. They recently included a post from my colleague Joel Carpenter on the global complexion of evangelicalism, and today they've posted my own contribution, "Who's Afraid of Sociology?," which makes a theological case for affirming sociological definitions of "evangelical." The conversation will continue with posts from many others.

"Desiring the Kingdom" is Finished!

A big part of my blog silence over this summer stems from the fact that I've been holed up, hermit-like, trying to finish my next book, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation. Today I'm rewarding myself with a day off because, thanks be to God, it's done! I submitted the manuscript to my patient and gracious editor this past week. I've been so mired in this for so long, my initial response was "good riddance!" But I hope that when I get the galleys back, I'll have gained sufficient critical distance to make some further improvements. I have an overwhelming sense of the inadequacies of the book; but at other times, when I've gotten feedback from others, I also have a bit of hope that it might be helpful. (This is the first volume of a trilogy, so I have two follow-up volumes to fill in some gaps. This first volume is meant to be an overview of the argument accessible to students and practitioners; the follow-up volumes will be more scholarly monographs.)

The animating impetus of the book is rethinking the shape and practices of Christian education, particularly in Christian colleges and universities in North America (I recognize that these are strange beasts to those in Europe and elsewhere). In particular, I'm pressing the limits, even distortions, that attend "worldview"-talk which tends to now dominate Christian higher education. Such worldviewism, I suggest, continues to reduce Christianity to an intellectual system that can be grapsed apart from the church and is then "taught" as information to be merely transferred from one head to another. In contrast, I argue that Christian discipleship is a matter of formation, not mere information--and that "Christian" education should be fundamentally a matter of shaping our love, our desire, to be oriented to the shape of the kingdom of God. And such formation happens not primarily via the heady, cognitive "lectures" (whether in our Protestant sermon factories or our Christian college classrooms) but through embodied practices that seep into our imagination and get hold of our gut, our heart, our kardia.

In short, I'm suggesting that before we can ever articulate a Christian "worldview," we are engaged in the practices of Christian worship. Drawing on Charles Taylor, I argue that the practices of Christian worship "carry" within them an "understanding" of the world that is better described as a "Christian social imaginary." Thus Christian education needs to be more integrally and intimately connected to the church and her worship then has generally been the case in North American Christian higher education.

There's also a correlate to this analysis: that cultural practices and institutions are not just venues for conveying "messages" or "abstract values;" rather, they constitute liturgies which function as pedagogies of desire bent on getting us to love rival kingdoms, visions of human flourishing that are antithetical to the biblical vision of shalom.

I paste here the Table of Contents which provides a bit of a map of the book, which should appear in the late spring of 2009 from Baker Academic:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements
Preface

Introduction
Beyond “Perspectives”: Faith and Learning Take Practice

Making the Familiar Strange: A Phenomenology of Cultural Liturgies
The End of Christian Education: From Worldview to Worship (and Back Again)
Picturing Education as Formation in Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier
Elements of a Theology of Culture: Pedagogy, Liturgy, and the Church

PART I. DESIRING, IMAGINATIVE ANIMALS: WE ARE WHAT WE LOVE

Chapter 1
Homo Liturgicus: The Human Person as Lover

From Thinking Things to Liturgical Animals
From Worldviews to Social Imaginaries
From Spheres to Aims: Liturgical Institutions

Chapter 2
Love Takes Practice: Liturgy, Formation, and Counter-Formation

Why Victoria’s In on the Secret: Picturing Discipleship at the Moulin Rouge
“Thick” and “Thin” Practices: Ritual Forces of Cultural Formation
Formation, Mis-Formation, and Counter-Formation: Liturgies Secular and Christian

Chapter 3
Lovers in a Dangerous Time: Cultural Exegesis of “Secular” Liturgies

“Reading” Culture Through the Lens of Worship
Consuming Transcendence: Worship at the Mall
Marketing (as) Evangelism: Picturing the Liturgy of Consumerism in The Persuaders
Sacrificial Violence: The “Military-Entertainment” Complex
Cathedrals of Learning: Liturgies of the University
Picturing the University’s Liturgies in Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons
Apologetic Excursus: The Persisting Witness of Idolatry
Picturing Resistance in 1984

PART II. DESIRING THE KINGDOM: THE PRACTICED SHAPE OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

Chapter 4
From Worship to Worldview: Christian Worship and the Formation of Desire

The Primacy of Worship to Worldview
The Sacramental Imagination: Resisting Naturalism and Supernaturalism
Picturing the Sacramental Imagination in Graham Greene and Anne Sexton
Excursus: The Shape of Christian Worship

Chapter 5
Practicing (for) the Kingdom: An Exegesis of the Social Imaginary Embedded in Christian Worship

Liturgical Time: Rhythms and Cadences of Hope
Call to Worship: An Invitation to Be Human
God’s Greeting: Hospitality, Community, and Graced Dependence
Baptism: Initiation into a Royal Priesthood/Constitution of a New People
Song: Hymning the Language of the Kingdom
Confession: Brokenness, Grace, Hope
Law: Order, Norms, and Freedom for the Good
The Creed: Situating Belief
Prayer: Vocalizing Desire
Scripture and Sermon: Re-narrating the World
Eucharist: Supper with the King
Offering: Kingdom Economics
Sending: The Great Commission as Cultural Mandate
Worship, Discipleship and Discipline: Practices Beyond Sunday

Chapter 6
A Christian University is for Lovers: The Education of Desire

A New Monasticism for the University: Why Christian Colleges Should Corrupt the Youth
Christian Education Takes Practice: Three Monastic Opportunities
Excursus: Christian Worship as Faculty Development: From Christian Scholars to “Ecclesial” Scholars

Azusa Street as Postmodern Revival @ Azusa Remixed

The Azusa Remixed collaborative blog is now up-and-running with some interesting first posts dealing with global issues, Alister McGrath's take on Pentecostalism, and postmodernism from a pastoral perspective. The blog will be a mix of popular and academic discourse, though all aimed at being thoughtful and reflective. I hope it will become a clearinghouse for engaged discussions of global pentecostalism.

My own initial contribution has just been posted: "Azusa Street as Postmodern Revival." This will be the first of two parts. The second will focus more specifically on pentecostal concerns.

Update: Part 2 is now available.

The Who, Augustine, and American Beauty

In my freshman philosophy course, right after we read Augustine's Confessions, we watch and dissect one of my favorite films of all time: American Beauty. Having read Augustine's Confessions as a proto-existentialist text (I've tried to make this case here [Part I]and here [Part II]), we then read the film as Lester Burnham's "Confessions" of a sort. I have found that if the Confessions remained fuzzy for students, after "reading" it through the lens of American Beauty it often "clicks."

One semester I had a student with hearing impairment, so we watched the film with its subtitles. This turned out to be a revelation since the subtitles also reproduced the lyrics of the eclectic soundtrack for the film, all of which is just bang on for the characters and scenes--and unappreciated if you don't listen closely.

Perhaps my favorite is the song that accompanies Lester Burnham on his final jog, "The Seeker," by the Who. Released in the year of my birth (1970), the song is a quasi-Augustinian anthem and I've found myself hooked on it of late. (OK, OK: Guitar Hero did bring it back to mind.) Here's a decent reproduction available for free on YouTube:

Salman Rushdie in The Guardian

One of our very favourite routines in England was heading out Saturday morning to get "the papers," and returning to curl up with a coffee and the Books section of the Saturday Guardian. Now back in the States, I'm reduced to reading it online (which is a pretty sorry substitute, but I'll take what I can get). A feature this week is an interview with Salman Rushdie. Commenting on fellow novelists like Martin Amis and Ian McEwan who, Hitchens-like, have been ranting about Islam, Rushdie protests:

"I thought the attack on Martin in the Guardian by Ronan Bennett [in an article published last November and condemned by McEwan] was out of order. To say he is racist because of that is wrong. I may not like the things you believe and, by the way, the fact that you believe them makes me think less of you as a person. I may despise you personally for what you believe, but I should be able to say it. Everybody needs to get thicker skins. There is this culture of offence, as though offending someone is the worst thing anyone can do. Again, there is an assumption that our first duty is to be respectful. But what would a respectful cartoon look like? Really boring! You wouldn't publish it. The nature of the form is irreverence and disrespect.

"What pleases me, though, is that at least in Britain there is still the possibility of literary people writing on current affairs. Here [in the US], that's much less true. Who wouldn't have wanted to read Joan Didion's take on Hillary Clinton, or Don DeLillo writing about the US election? In the past, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal could be public intellectuals, but there is much less scope for that now."

Farewell to Generous Orthodoxy's "Think Tank"

Though signs of its demise have been evident for about a year, I'm sad to say goodbye to one of the better blog experiments I've been part of: the Generous Orthodoxy "Think Tank." Launched by some bright and enterprising graduate students--Steve Bush, Keith Johnson, and Myles Werntz, as I recall--the goal of the blog was to encourage conversation amongst (progressive) evangelicals in theology and ministry. Though many of those who committed to be contributors never did so, those who did participate were thoughtful, creative, and forthright. I found the site to be home to some excellent theological conversations that were generally quite accessible to those outside the narrow realm of theological academe. When it was at its best, I thought Think Tank was a great example of how the blogosphere could really be a space for constructive theological debate that moved the conversation forward. I learned much from it and I'll miss it. Thanks, guys, for all your good work.

(While most readers of Generous Orthodoxy "Think Tank" will already know about it, I would highly recommend Ben Myers' "Faith and Theology" blog as an alternative. It is, hands-down, the best theology blog out there.)

While I'll no longer be able to post at Think Tank, I will be part of a new blog venture being launched by Brian LePort: "Azusa Remixed" will bring together a cadre of pentecostal scholars and practitioners to provide "a compendium of global pentecostal theology, praxis, and history." The site officially launches on July 14, 2008.

The End of Death's Reign? Morning Musings on Coldplay

I've been enjoying Coldplay's latest offering, Viva la Vida or Death and All of his Friends. But the lyrics of "Viva la Vida" have been a thorn in my side, mainly because I just haven't been able to determine the referent (not that I think there need to be ONE, ULTIMATE referent--indeed, I'm not entirely sure that Martin knows what the song is referring to). A quick internet skim seems to indicate that this has been a matter of discussion. Here are the lyrics (though they really need to be listened to, not just read):

I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning I sleep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own

I used to roll the dice
Feel the fear in my enemy's eyes
Listen as the crowd would sing
"Now the old king is dead, long live the king"

One minute I held the key
Next the walls were closed on me
And I discovered that my castles stand
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand

I hear Jerusalem bells a-ringing
Roman cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror, my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can't explain
Once you'd gone there was never
Never an honest word
That was when I ruled the world

It was a wicked and wild wind
Blew down the doors to let me in
Shattered windows and the sound of drums
People couldn't believe what I'd become

Revolutionaries wait
For my head on a silver plate
Just a puppet on a lonely string
Oh, who would ever want to be king?

I hear Jerusalem bells a-ringing
Roman cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror, my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can't explain
I know St. Peter won't call my name
Never an honest word
But that was when I ruled the world

Ohh...

Hear Jerusalem bells a-ringing
Roman cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror, my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can't explain
I know St. Peter won't call my name
Never an honest word
But that was when I ruled the world

But then yesterday I had a bit of an interpretive inspiration from a sermon on the resurrection (focusing on the Creed's affirmation, "...the third day he rose again from the dead"). This took me to the end of 1 Corinthians 15 where Paul makes a confident, triumphant, albeit eschatological announcement about something "to come": "When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: ' Death has been swallowed up in victory.' 'Where, O Death, is your victory? Where, O Death, is your sting?'"

Paul notes that this victory is, in an important sense, still to come: when that transformation (resurrection) takes place, then we will almost be able to taunt death as he does here: "Where, O Death, is your victory now?" But given the resurrection of Christ, there is also a sense in which that eschatological reality--that reality to come--has already broken in upon the world. The first victory has been won. Death's reign has been deposed, though we live in a (horribly long) interim where death is a kind of lame duck king. Thus John Owen, the great Puritan divine, penned a masterful treatise on The Death of Death in the Death of Christ.

This got me thinking: could it be that the track "Viva la Vida" is an anthem in this tradition? That is, could it be that the subject or referent of the song is actually "Death and all of his friends?" Is death perhaps this deposed king who once ruled the world? Granted, it requires a radical faith to not think that death still rules the world. But could "Viva la Vida" be an eschatological hymn, sung in hope, with some intimation that death has been deposed? Indeed, could we hear Coldplay's catchy little tune as a popular, 21st-century rendition of John Donne's great metaphysical poem:

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

I hope so. I hope as such.

Orwell: On the Invisible Underbelly of our Consumption

I'm currently finishing a book project in which I briefly discuss the way in which the liturgies of consumerism also feed off the invisible--vast networks of production and distribution which are almost entirely hidden from view, and about which we rarely ask. This brought to mind Orwell's straight-shooting analysis of Western (especially British) culture's dependence upon coal, which also seemed to "magically" appear in the grate of the homes of the middle class. Here are two exemplary passages from The Road to Wigan Pier:

Watching coal-miners at work, you realise momentarily what different universes different people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug it is a sort of world apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing about. Probably a majority of people would even prefer not to hear about it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world above. Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal, directly or indirectly. For all the arts of peace coal is needed; if war breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of revolution the miner must go on working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as much as reaction needs coal. Whatever may be happening on the surface, the hacking and shovelling have got to continue without a pause, or at any rate without pausing for more than a few weeks at most. In order that Hitler may march the goose-step, that the Pope may denounce Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lord’s, that the Nancy poets may scratch one another’s backs, coal has got to be forthcoming. But on the whole we are not aware of it; we all know that we ‘must have coal,’ but we seldom or never remember what coal-getting involves. Here am I, sitting writing in front of my comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is only very rarely, when I make a definite mental effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines. [...] You could quite easily drive a car right across the north of England and never once remember that hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners are hacking at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are diving your car forward (pp. 29-30).

In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Literary Sup., and the Nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comerade X, author of Marxism for Infants–all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel (pp. 30-31).

Teaching a Calvinist to Dance

Some folks might be interested in my recent article in Christianity Today, "Teaching a Calvinist to Dance," which has just been made available online. (I absolute love Polly Becker's art for the piece, which features a dancing Kuyper!) The gist of this short, non-scholarly little piece is to simply explore how being Reformed and being "pentecostal" are not as antithetical as one might think. In fact, I have always sensed that they can actually fuel one another.

I've already received a number of encouraging emails from folks who've been eager to share that I'm not alone in sensing this confluence. Good to know the tribe is larger than I might have thought!

Criticisms so far have tended to either fault the article for not providing a full dissertation on either the Reformed tradition or Pentecostalism (um...there's only so much you can do in 1500 words, folks), or they have assumed that I'm saying Reformed worship, by being "pentecostalized," should therefore be non-liturgical. Let me just clarify a couple of things:

1. In the space of the CT article, I simply use "Pentecostal" and "charismatic" synonymously since the focus was on the sort of embodied, spontaneous worship that characterizes them. This is not to say that these are simply the same theologically; indeed, I prefer to use the small-p "pentecostal" to describe what is shared by both, and save capital-P "Pentecostalism" for the theological distinctions of classical Pentecostal denominations like the Assemblies of God. I work out this distinction in my "Thinking in Tongues" article in the April issue of First Things, but couldn't get that detailed in the CT piece.

2. Critics seem to work with a binary imagination which assumes that worship must be either rigid liturgical forms or ecstatic emotionalist chaos--and they then assume that I'm some sort of apologist for a worship free-for-all (an assumption hard to maintain for anyone who has read my last couple of books). So I politely refuse the dichotomy. For me, the kingdom of God looks like charismatic Catholic worship, where the Eucharist issues in protestation and ecstatic praise, where historic liturgy makes space for the surprising voice of prophecy, and where This is because I think pentecostal worship is, in its essence, sacramental. And I have long been suggesting that on just this point, the Reformed tradition would do well to remember it is Catholic. (For a high-powered argument along the same lines, see Todd Billings' important book, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift.)

3. Finally, I now realize that what we mean by "Reformed" at Calvin College is quite different than what is meant by the term when it's emphasized by alot of the "young, restless Reformed"-types of which Colin Hansen writes, who seem to me to have a very modernist fixation on doctrine, scholastic debates about TULIP, and a creeping pride about being "intellectuals." (And I gather that many of them are former charismatics who disdain the anti-intellecutalism of their former selves, which they see as inherent to the charismatic tradition. A false assumption.) The funny thing is that I think both the holism of the continental Reformed tradition (Kuyper, Dooyeweerd) and the holism of pentecostal/charismatic experience counter the false intellectualISM of such scholastic versions of being Reformed. But being anti-intellectualIST is not the same as being anti-intellectual.

These matters and more will be more fully developed in the book I'll complete this summer, Thinking in Tongues: Elements of a Pentecostal Worldview, which will appear next year from Eerdmans.

Remember Burma

If you are looking for a way to give to cyclone relief in Burma(Myanmar), I would encourage you to consider giving through the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee, which has excellent local contacts in the country and neighboring Thailand. Monies are channeled to trusted local sources who then feed that money into local economies in order to purchase supplies. A trusted place to give. Just FYI.

Neoconservatives, New Conservatives, and Old Tories

David Brooks notes that last week's elections here in England--which included Tory Boris Johnson being elected as Mayor of London--signals a shift in global conservatism. Britain, he suggests, is home to a new breed of conservative which has left Thatcherite econo-centrism behind, while American neoconservatism keeps looking for another Reagan. As he puts it:

That means, first, moving beyond the Thatcherite tendency to put economics first. As Oliver Letwin, one of the leading Tory strategists put it: “Politics, once econo-centric, must now become socio-centric.” David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader, makes it clear that his primary focus is sociological. Last year he declared: “The great challenge of the 1970s and 1980s was economic revival. The great challenge in this decade and the next is social revival.” In another speech, he argued: “We used to stand for the individual. We still do. But individual freedoms count for little if society is disintegrating. Now we stand for the family, for the neighborhood — in a word, for society.”

It's true that British Tories are "social" conservatives, without that spiralling into the narrow, single-issue politics it does in the States, fixated on abortion or gay marriage. But embedded here is an interesting point--which gets to the heart of what I think is wrong even with "new" conservatism, or at least what I think signals a fundamental tension for any Christian who would entertain conservativism. Listen to how Brooks continues:

This has led to a lot of talk about community, relationships, civic engagement and social responsibility. Danny Kruger, a special adviser to Cameron, wrote a much-discussed pamphlet, “On Fraternity.” These conservatives are not trying to improve the souls of citizens. They’re trying to use government to foster dense social bonds. (emphasis added)

These conservatives "are not trying to improve the souls of citizens." Why that proviso? Behind that qualification is the assumption that it would be problematic if they were trying to "improve souls." In other words, it sounds like not even these "new" conservatives will entertain a program of character formation. That would be anathema. Why? Because if you scratch even these new conservatives deep enough, you find a classical liberal underneath--an heir of Locke who thinks each of us is the master of our own fate, captain of our own souls, autonomous lords of our own realm of freedom--so anybody else better keep their hands off.

Or, to put it otherwise, neither neoconservatives nor Cameron's "new" conservatives are willing to be "Old Tories" of the sort Ruskin extolled, who were precisely concerned with the formation of character, the improvement of souls. Indeed, it's precisely what he decried in the industrialized wastelands of his own time, easily transposed to the commercialized wastelands of our own:

Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished,--sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is—we should think there might be some loss in it also. And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this,--that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages ("The Nature of the Gothic," in Stones of Venice).

But then my discomfort is not with formation per se--that is, it's not that I have some liberal worry about others imposing on my autonomy. Rather, I admit that I'm not certain I want to trust the task of formation to the state. And thus, once again, the uneasy relationship of conservativism and Christianity.

An Evangelical Manifesto?

[I'm here just mirroring my original post at Generous Orthodoxy.]

So what do folks make of the recently unveiled "Evangelical Manifesto" (download the pdf)? On the one hand, I think it is in the spirit of a "generous" orthodoxy of the sort that motivated this blog from its inception. In general, I think it rightly criticizes trends on both left and right, and problems both internal to evangelicalism as well as external challenges (e.g., the public policy impact if the "new atheism" gained a foothold). Most of the time, I thought it sounds like David Wells or Don Carson--that is, sort of a grumpy Reformed take on evangelical "therapies" of various persuasions--but this certainly isn't the only voice.

On the other hand, I find it a strange document. Now, some of the steering committee and charter signatories include some of my friends, whom I respect a great deal. So I'm not registering any radical dissent. But I found myself struck by several things while reading it:

1. Well, there's that whole problem of knowing just what "evangelical" means (or, as they insist in the only footnote, Evangelical--as if evangelicalism has the weight of Catholicism, Anglicanism, or Orthodoxy). I have to confess that I find the term less and less helpful. And while this document demands that it be defined "theologically" (and not "sociologically"), I find the defintions offered here (e.g., believing in Jesus) a bit fuzzy. In short, I'm not sure why the authors are so convinced that "the term is important" (p. 2). For who? For what?

2. Related to (1), I always get a bit nervous when folks begin emphasizing evangelical "identity" (and this document explicitly takes up such identity politics, despite the "grave danger" [p. 4]). Why does the concern to assert "evangelical" (sorry, Evangelical) identity always feel like an exercise in boundary-drawing with an ominous sense that Catholic-bashing is just around the corner? Now, I'm not saying that this document does this--and many of these signatories are, in fact, involved in Catholic-evangelical dialogues. But you can see that this issue is always lurking around such projects when they assert, "Our purpose is not to attack or to exclude" (p. 5). Hmmm...methinks thou doth protest too much? I guess my question is: what does the term "Evangelical" get you that the term "Catholic" doesn't? When folks give me answers to that question, I find they either offer me something I don't want, or proffer some caricatured understanding of the Catholic tradition. Or, to put it otherwise, when they list the "distinctives" of evangelicalism (pp. 5-6), is there anything on there that Catholics wouldn't endorse? If someone says "sola Scriptura," then we've got other problems (see [3] below).

3. I guess what I was most surprised to see--given the theological heavyweights behind this--is what I can only describe as a rather naive hermeneutic. Take two examples: First, after affirming that "Evangelicals adhere fully to the Christian faith expressed in the historic creeds of the great ecumenical councils" (though--dirty little secret--vast swaths of evangelicals are rabidly anti-creedal), the Manifesto then asserts: "We have no supreme leader [why does this sound like some B-grade martian movie?], and neither creeds nor tradition are ultimately decisive for us. Jesus Christ and his written word, the Holy Scriptures, are our supreme authority" (p. 7). Seriously? Are we really entertaining a notion that Evangelicals are those Christians who have some sort of pristine, tradition-free access to "what Jesus really said"? I thought F.F. Bruce had debunked this sort of naive Scripture/tradition distinction for evangelicals years ago. As if there isn't a massive and complex evangelical tradition of reading Scripture (for more on this, see chapter 5 of my Fall of Interpretation). Second, in the same vein, the Manifesto claims that "Evangelicalism goes back directly to Jesus and the Scriptures." Really? C'mon.

4. I think the Manifesto is at its best when its critical finger points backwards at evangelicalism itself (pp. 11ff), for instance when it chides evangelicals who have "become cheerleaders for those in power and the naive sycophants of the powerful and the rich" (p. 13). So, too, when it points beyond single-platform politics of abortion or marriage and raises the issue of "conflict" (why not just say "war?"), racism, corruption, poverty," and more (p. 14). It is interesting to note what's not named in here though: e.g., militarism? capitalism? nationalism?

5. The document sort of goes "Greg Boyd" in a final section where it laments the error of "politicizing" faith, either on the right or the left. This, of course, sounds clear enough, until you start to ask just what "politicize" means--indeed, what does "politics" and "the political" refer to here? Just the machinations of the state? When they say that "Evangelicals see it as our duty to engage with politics" (p. 15--really, by the way? A duty? Of what sort? On what basis?), it seems to me that they mean evangelicals have a duty to participate in the machinations of the given state. Maybe. But I would just register that it's not quite that easy; that's not the only way to "be political." I always find evangelical discussions on these matters are quite content to let "politics" function as a black box. It seems to me that they might mean a "party-izing" of the faith. But I'm worried that lurking in there is actually some sense that "politics" is "outside" faith, and then we have to figure out how to get "faith" into connection with politics. And that would seem to assume that the faith is not "political" in itself, which I think would be another naive assumption.

6. Finally, when I got to the end, I kept hoping that I would figure out just why this Manifesto was released. Why now? What's the hook? On this point, I remain a bit befuddled.

Do we need an "Evangelical" Manifesto? Is it "important" to "keep the term?" I remain unconvinced, particularly if keeping the "distinctives" of "Evangelical" means buying into some rather simplistic hermeneutical moves. And at the end of the day, I would rather be part of a Manifesto that can be affirmed by "mere" Nicene Christians rather than "Evangelicals" alone.

Your turn.