Closing Lines: Eliot's Middlemarch

The inestimable Byron Borger pointed to a recent feature in The Guardian: "The 10 best...closing lines of books."  All of them are a treat, but the closing line from Eliot's Middlemarch (a book, incidentally, that I think is instructive for contemporary discussions about science and religion) deserves to be highlighted (and is too long to be tweeted!):

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." 

Why Weigel's Wrong: On Liturgy and the Olympic Opening Ceremonies

As someone who has written extensively about the formative power of "secular liturgies," you might think I'd be primed to analyze the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics as an example of just such a "secular" liturgy.  In other words, you might think I'd be sympathetic to George Weigel's critical analysis of the opening ceremonies as "The Liturgy of the World State."

But you'd be wrong.  Indeed, I think Weigel's account of the opening ceremony as a "liturgy" betrays a pre-Vatican II notion of the liturgy as spectacle, as something to be observed (rather than something inviting "full, conscious, active participation" as the reforms of Sacrosanctum Concilium emphasized).  

Liturgies should not be confused with "ceremonies."  Liturgies are not "events"--one-off bedazzling spectacles rife with ritualistic symbol.  I don't deny that the Olympic opening ceremonies were an affective, symbolic enactment of a story.  But while that is a necessary aspect of a "liturgy," it's not a sufficient criterion.  Liturgies are not just symbolic and ritualistic; they are enacted stories that are (1) repeated and (2) participatory.  The Olympic opening ceremonies--while spectacular and ritualistic and, without question, infused with a story--do not function liturgically because they lack these other aspects.  There is no repetition of any version of the opening ceremonies (indeed, novelty is THE defining goal).

But that's not to say that there aren't plenty of secular liturgies in our culture that do inscribe in us the story that Weigel is worried about.  But Weigel seems to miss their liturgical nature because he confuses liturgy with spectacle--just the notion that both Protestants and Catholics agree needs to be reformed.

Detroit Free Press Op-Ed: Further Thoughts on Penn State and "Cultural Change"

I've expanded my first ruminations on the NCAA's sanctions against Penn State's football program in an op-ed for the Detroit Free Press, now available online.

Musings on Penn State, the NCAA sanctions, and "Cultural Change"

I was struck by the goal of the NCAA sanctions, which was described several times (in the recent press conference) as "cultural change" within the football program at Penn State.  I think that goal is exactly right (if it's sincere) and necessary.  But this raises the question: how do you change the "culture" of an institution?  How do you transform the ethos of an organization?  Which in turn raises the obvious question: are sanctions a way to generate cultural change?  (While posed in a very different context for very different reasons, I think James Davison Hunter's account of "cultural change" in the first part of To Change the World is actually quite relevant here.)

I don't have a clear answer to these questions.  To consider this, we need to carefully hear the mix of sanctions imposed. I have no expectation that a massive fine, erasing wins, or diminishing the number of scholarships will have an impact on the ethos of an organization.  However, note that the sanctions also include new structures of accountability, compliance officers, and more pro-active strategies to effect change.  The punishments will feel the most striking and get the most press; it's the fine print that's at issue when it comes to actually effecting "cultural change."

Even so, questions remain.  We enter here the dialectical dance between virtue and ethos: on the one hand, an ethos can foster virtue.  On the other hand, I think you need agents characterized by rightly-ordered desire to cultivate a virtue-forming ethos.  What's needed here is a conversion of the imagination, a complete re-narration of what the organization and institution is about.  I'm not too sanguine that sanctions can bring this about.  The institution needs not just new rules, but a new story.

A Symposium on "The Fall of Interpretation" @ ChurchandPomo

Over at "The Church and Postmodern Culture," our fearless coordinator, Chad Lakies, has organized an extended online engagement with my latest book, the second edition of The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic (Baker Academic, 2012).  Over the next few weeks, there will be contributions from Mark Bowald (Redeemer University College), Neal DeRoo (Dordt College), and Crystal Downing (Messiah), and each week I'll respond to their constructive, critical engagements.  

You can read Chad's overview of the symposium and check out the first installment from Mark Bowald, "Redeeming Interpretation: An Interlocution on Sin and Hermeneutics."  My response, "Sins of Omission," will appear on Thursday.

"Practically Human": An Invitation to the Liberal Arts

A collection of my colleagues have produced a wonderful little book entitled, Practically Human: College Professors Speak from the Heart of Humanities Education, published by the new Calvin College Press (who've produced a very handsome text).  It's an engaging, accessible manifesto of sorts, articulating the unique strengths of a liberal arts education that values the humanities at the core of its educational vision.

But what's unique about the book is that it is written for high school students and parents who are thinking about college choices.  It would be a great resource for high school juniors and seniors, their parents, high school guidance counselors, and youth pastors.

Here's a peek at the Table of Contents:

Introduction: Two Farms Gary Schmidt and Matthew Walhout 

Greater Than Gold: The Humanities and the Human Things Lee Hardy, Philosophy 

“The Ducks Are Hazards in the Classroom”: Learning to Listen with Perception and Grace Benita Wolters-Fredlund, Music 

Who Wants to Live in the “Real” World? Will Katerberg, History 

Getting Engaged: The Joys of Studying History Karin Maag, History 

Good Looking Henry Luttikhuizen, Art and Art History 

Science in a Human Matrix Matthew Walhout, Interdisciplinary Studies of Science 

Ruining the Movies? Carl Plantinga, Film and Media Studies 

Why Stories Matter More Than Ever: A Letter to a Friend Just Beginning College Jennifer Holberg, Literature 

Why Come to College to Study Writing? Gary Schmidt, Writing 

How a Speech Can Change an Audience: Why Studying Public Address Is ImportantKathi Groenendyk, Rhetorical Studies 

Shouting at Your Neighbor: Why We Bother with Other Peoples’ LanguagesDavid I. Smith, Foreign Languages 

New Life from Ancient TextsDavid Noe, Classics 

An Invitation Won Lee, Biblical Studies

Teaching & Christian Practices: A Substantive Engagement

When David Smith and I convened the working group that would eventually lead to the publication of Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith & Learning, our goal was to start a conversation, not issue an edict.  We always had the sense that we were tentatively exploring new ground, raising new questions, experimenting with some hypotheses.  So we didn't see the book as the definitive statement; to the contrary, we published the book just hoping to find some folks who were willing to ask the questions with us.

So the engagement with the book that is found in the recent review in Books & Culture is just the sort of thing we had hoped for.  In "Habits of the Heart & Mind," four professors from Westmont College--Jesse Covington, Maurice Lee, Sarah L. Skripsky, and Lesa Stern--report from a year of wrestling with the proposals and experiments that are collected in Teaching and Christian Practices.  They raise four questions that we were also asking, even after we finished the book:

• What is "Christian" about these practices?
• How do people change?
• What does Teaching and Christian Practices teach us about pedagogy?
• What might have to be sacrificed in order to create space for such practices?

All good questions.  Even within our working group, we couldn't come to consensus on some of these matters, so we tried to create a "big tent" that provided room for different answers and approaches.  But what's great is that these questions represent a new conversation in Christian higher education--a new trajectory that is really beginning to think about pedagogy, formation, and the mission of the Christian university.

Interestingly, when they helpfully ask what makes "Christian practices" Christian, I'm reminded of conversations we had in our working group in which my own inclination to a liturgical "center" and criterion for Christian practices was met with some reservation--which is why the book's definition is wider (this is where I demur from Volf, for instance).  I think the reviewers are right to press this question.  In concert with them, I might suggest that Christian practices will be those practices that intentionally "carry" the Christian story--so they are teleologically defined.  Much more would needs to be said, but on this point I'm hopeful that some of what I'll say in Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works might actually address this question by thinking through the "narrative logic" of Christian practices (with a little help from Bourdieu).  Imagining the Kingdom will also clarify how I understand the constructive relationship between practice and reflection (though I still think there is a primacy to practice--I'll marshall Merleau-Ponty to make further refine and defend this claim).  

But mostly I just want to express my appreciation to the reviewers for a substantive, charitable, critical, constructive review that truly advances the conversation we had hoped to begin.  I hope others who join the conversation will also read "Habits of the Heart & Mind."

Hegel on Education

From Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. Nisbett (Cambridge UP, 1991), 196:

"When a father asked him for the best advice about the best way of educating his son in ethical matters, a Pythagorean replied: 'Make him a citizen of a state with good laws.'"

Draw your own analogies.

The Drama of Belief: Tony Kushner on Theatre

Last spring when I was in New York I had really hoped I could score tickets to Tony Kushner's play, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism, but didn't.  (Most will know Kushner from Angels in America.) Especially for someone like me, who's sympathetic to voices like Ross Douthat and Charles Taylor and John Milbank, it's important to hear a very different sort of critique of our present--the sort of diagnosis of modernity that ripples across Kushner's oeuvre.

The interview with Kushner in the latest issue of The Paris Review only confirmed this sense for me.  It is a conversation sparkling with insight, sounding existential depths.

Indeed, one of the things that struck me is how often Kushner's take on drama echoes Augustine's account of drama (which I've discussed elsewhere)--except that they have very different evaluations of what's at issue.  Consider, for instance, Kushner's reflection on how writing differs from acting:

When I'm writing a new play, there's a period where I know I shouldn't be out in public much. I imagine most people who create go through something like this. You will fully loosen some of the inner straps that hold your core together. You become more porous and multivalent and multivocal, so that the multitudes you have inside yourself can start to get up and walk around and emerge. Then, hopefully, you put them back into the cave.  But to really play Linda Loman, you have to go there every night.  So you live in a state, I would imagine, of permanent looseness in the core, which I find frankly terrifying (pp. 116-117).

That's exactly what terrifies Augustine about the stage in Book III of the Confessions: the actor so regularly divests the self of a center and identify--so regularly fragments and dissipates the self (the chief effect of sin, for Augustine)--that Augustine worries there's no return.  This is the great danger for actors.  And Kushner recognizes the danger. He's not willing to go there himself, but also thinks that actors are those brave souls who have the courage to risk themselves in this way.

But then, interestingly, Kushner unwittingly hits on Augustine's concern for theatre-goers.  Kushner again:

Sometimes a phony-baloney actor will hoodwink the public for decades, but the actors we really rever aren't kidding around when they act. They suffer. PArt of what we are paying to see when we go to the theater is suffering. We want to see actual suffering. There's a certain Christ-like thing going on--the actors are suffering so we don't have to (p. 117).

I'm not interested in the "Christ-figure" bit; I'm intrigued by Kushner's claim about theatre-goers: we don't suffer; we merely observe suffering.  Once again, this is one of Augustine's central concerns in Book III: the play engenders emotion in us, but not real suffering (it's not happening to us), and not sympathy other (we know they're acting). So we go to enjoy suffering (and if you know anything of Augustine's use/enjoyment distinction, you can imagine how perverted he thinks this is.  I'm not saying he's right, just that there are these intriguing parallels with Kushner's take).

This leads Kushner into a nuanced, philosophical discussion of the productive tensions between realism and fantasy on the stage.  Drama, he contends, remains that unique genre where the audience has to be in on the joke--we have to wink in return when we see the director wink at us off-stage, because you can't hide the curtain and you can't not hear the stage crew moving props around and you can't get lost in a totalized fantasy world like you can in the cinema. (Kushner launches into a fascinating critique of our erotic relationship to technology on this point insofar as technology tries to hide its human origins, the fact that it's made.)

Kushner points to one of his key influences on this point:

Brecht says the point of theater is, among other things, to make you conscious of this disappearing trick.  That's why he used a half-curtain in his productions, with the audience watching one scene being played out in front of the curtain and, behind it, the next scene being prepared.  As he wrote in one of his theater poems, let people "see that this is not magic, but work, my friends." His most famous, and most misunderstood, idea about staging is what he calls the distanciation effect--he wants theater to enable you to see the familiar as strange and the strange as familiar, so that you greet reality with an appetite to interpret it (pp. 118-119).  

This is why Kushner thinks drama can have such a critical function in society, without devolving into mere tracts and propoganda.  It gets us to question our reality.  "The incomplete, imperfect illusion will never be unnecessary for human beings," he concludes, "and its home will always be in the theater, where everything, including death, is simultaneously thoroughly and yet not entirely convincing."

"The Devil Has All the Best Stories": JKAS on ABC's "Encounter"

While I was in Australia I was interviewed by David Rutledge for "Encounter," a program on ABC's Radio National (think of it as the Australian equivalent of the BBC).  Rutledge was engaged and curious, so the interview was really just a ranging conversation.

They've now edited that interview, along with snippets from my New College Lectures, to produce the 1-hour program of Encounter for July 7.  However, you can already listen to the program, "The Devil Has All the Best Stories," online.

I'm not sure that the in-person, informal, conversational mode of my presentation necessarily translates into "good radio," but you'll find the program offers a preview of my new book, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (appearing in January 2013).

The Colossian Forum Blog

The Colossian Forum is launching a new blog that should get some more energy in the coming months thanks to their recruitment of Matt Dodrill as a Junior Fellow.

Truth in advertising: Matt is one of my former students, just graduated from Calvin College, and is now headed to Duke Divinity School.  One of the rare students at Calvin from south of the Mason-Dixon line, Matt has been one of the bright lights for us over the past few years--part of a crew of bright students working at the intersection of philosophy and theology.  We'll miss him, but I'm glad to see he'll be involved in the work of The Colossian Forum.  (To learn more about Matt and other folks involved with TCF, visit Faces of the Forum.)

In fact, Matt's first post is a nice encapsulation of the mission and vision of TCF--an invitation to a new kind of conversation.  (And despite the title, you'll quickly see that this is not a covert emergent/McLaren project: the "new" conversation is actually an invitation into a "old" conversation which is the Chalcedonian tradition.  

Check it out.

Tradition FOR Innovation

The good folks at Duke's "Faith and Leadership" magazine have just posted an article they invited me to write on the dynamic interplay between tradition and innovation.  A snippet from the conclusion of my talk at the 2012 Q conference, the article focuses on how and why liturgical tradition can foster cultural innovation.  

Read "Tradition for Innovation" at Faith and Leadership.

Picturing "Church" & "State": Crayer's "Benedict receiving Totila"

Last week our family enjoyed an evening at the Art Gallery of Ontario here in Toronto.  (Note to large families: the museum is free on Wednesday's from 6:00-8:30pm.)

Earlier that day I had led a seminar on William Cavanaugh's classic essay, "'A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House': The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the Nation State."  In this 1995 article, reproduced in the Radical Orthodoxy Reader, Cavanaugh documents that the so-called Wars of Religion were not actually driven by theological and religious difference but rather by the consolidation of nation-states after the demise of feudal arrangements.  While the modern, liberal, democratic stated claims the status of "savior" who delivers us from the violence of religion, in fact it was the rise of the nation-state that engendered these wars.  The state gets to play "rescue hero" fireman because it was also the arsonist.

In the course of the analysis, Cavanaugh debunks the myth of secular neutrality that undergirds the modern state.  The nation-state doesn't deliver us from theology; it delivers us over to a different (covert) theology.  Indeed, in the words of Hobbes, Leviathan doesn't deliver us from the ecclesia; Leviathan swallows the church and functions as a parody of the ecclesia.

How striking, then, to run into this gigantic canvas later that afternoon at AGO:

The work, by Flemish painter Gaspar de Crayer (1584-1669), is entitled "Saint Benedict Receiving Totila, King of the Ostrogoths, 1633."  The huge canvas (it must be 8' x 12') hung in a Benedictine Abbey in Flanders.  It portrays the repentance of Totila for having previously deceived Benedict (by sending a servant dressed in his armor).

It might be easy to think that this painting depicts the inverse of what Cavanaugh notes, namely, the church ruling over the state.  But of course that's not the case: Benedict is not the Holy Roman Emperor, he is an abbot. Totila is being received at an abbey, not submitting to a rival king.  And yet Benedict does not shrink for prophetically denouncing Totila's violent rule.  Retreat into the abbey was not a withdrawal from worldly concern; it is a retreat to contemplative work for the world.  The painting itself depicts what we might call the "porosity" of the abbey.  It also illustrates that the abbot is not indifferent to the shape of worldly rule, even if he might be characterized by a sort of holy ambivalence.

A Photographic Allegory

I absolutely love this Nicholas Nixon photograph from MOMA's collection.  Entitled simply, "Covington, Kentucky," it's a picture you can look at for hours and still feel something new and different.  The composition is exquisite: those horizontal lines and shadows backing the smooth, light skin of innocent childhood in summertime; the young girl looking longingly at his repose; the others glaring at us behind the camera...

But when you look at it alongside the commentary in MOMA Highlights, the art of the photograph can take on a suggestive, almost allegorical vibe that resonates, I think, with the situation of the church in our postmodern age.  Consider this commentary and see if you don't sense a kind of "ancient-future" sensibility that might illustrate postmodern retrievals of ancient, catholic practices.

The taut clapboards zip across the open middle of the picture as if to measure the outward stretch of the boy's arms, while he blissfully tilts his head skyward. A photograph can only describe what the camera sees, but this one also shows how a body can feel. There is something else, which the reproduction cannot fully capture. The print was made from a negative as large as itself—eight by ten inches. To make the negative, Nixon used a big camera on a tripod and put his head under a black cloth to focus the image. All of that old-fashioned effort was worthwhile because the richness of detail in the negative yielded a print that is at once sharp as a pin and smooth as a child's skin and the light that falls upon it.

By the 1970s the artistic traditions of photography were old enough for abandoned styles and techniques to serve as fresh points of departure. After photographers had been in love with the ease and quickness of hand-held cameras for two generations, the cumbersome cameras of the past presented a new challenge. For Nixon, the challenge was to make the old box responsive to unfolding experience: to marry the ancient precision of photography with its modern agility.

Scholarship as a Way of Life

[On April 14 I was asked to give a brief opening address to the West Michigan Honors Conference hosted by our own Honors Program here at Calvin College.  The conference was an opportunity for students from several colleges and universities to share the fruits of undergraduate research. These are my notes for the talk which might be of interest to others. (The talk was more conversational, so these points were more developed in the oral version.) I hope this might also address the misguided but persistent impression that somehow my recent work is "anti-intellectual."]

It's a Saturday morning, late in the semester, and you're here for a scholarly conference?  I love you guys!   Welcome to the club of freaks and geeks who pursue scholarship as a way of life.  

I hope that's a club you want to join (granted, there are Woody Allenish worries in the ballpark here).  I hope you're here contributing to the conversation because curiosity gives you an adrenalin rush, because generating new knowledge makes your heart sing.  Because the life of scholarship is not something that should be instrumentalized for other ends; nor should it be reduced to a particular profession; scholarship is a way of life--one I hope you'll pursue in your years ahead even if you never go to grad school or entertain becoming a professor or professional "scholar." 

The scholarly life is its own reward: it is a good life--it is the sort of reflective pursuit that has been valorized by the ancients.  It is also the sort of life that is increasingly difficult to sustain in a sound-bite culture of perpetual distraction.  In the age of the Kardashians and iPhone Twitter feeds, finding joy in the slow-food of scholarly reflection is a counter-cultural pursuit.  

Let me highlight three joys of scholarship as a way of life.

The Joy of Finding: Seeing New Corners of the World

The scholarly life is its own reward: joys of being a perpetual student (cp. my own continued experience of the joy of discovery, e.g., in returning to Jonathan Edwards' Freedom of the Will this past semester; I love teaching what I don't know!).  

Don't let initiation into the guild beat that out of you.  Build habits that will continue to propel you into new arenas in your future.

The Joy of Making: Unpacking the Potential of the World

We might be wrongly tempted to think of scholarship as a very passive way of life: observing, analyzing, describing, criticizing.  But in fact scholarship is a fundamentally creative way of life: it certainly requires us to be attentive and attuned to the world--to texts that are in front of us, to slides under the microscope, to data generated by experiments, etc.  Scholarship makes us accountable to a world.  But if we are really doing scholarship, then we are not just passive consumers of information, nor are we merely passive observers.  By posing questions and confirming hypotheses and arguing with the literature and making an argument, we are making.  We are unfurling more of the potential that is latent in the world, unpacking new possibilities.  Scholarship is a mode of poiesis, of making, creating.  It is a generative way of life.  Good scholarship is not unlike good craftsmanship: there is a special joy in the product of our labor.  

And let's remember: you don't have to be in a lab or a studio or a library to be doing this.  The best entrepreneurs are some of our best scholars.  A scholarly way of life contributes to culture and the common good.

The Joy of Collaborating

You might be tempted to picture scholars holed up in their offices or studios or laboratories, sequestered from the world, hunched over as they work in isolation. But the scholarly way of life is richest and most innovative when it is pursued collaboratively, through "wisdom networks" and in life-giving teams.  Ideas percolate communally.

-Jon Gertner's new book about Bell Labs, The Idea Factory, who shows us that "most sustained feats of innovation cannot and do not occur in an iconic garage or the workshop of an ingenuous inventor.  They occur when people of diverse talents and mind-sets and expertise are brought together, preferable in close physical proximity where they can have frequent meetings and serendipitous encounters" (Isaacson).  This has found expression in recent architecture for research facilities (Per Paul Goldberger's analysis in "Laboratory Conditions," New Yorker, Sept. 19, 2011, pp. 88-89).

This week I've had two wonderful interactions: with Jim Olthuis, my advisor through my master's degree and long-time mentor; and with Nathan Sytsma, a former student who worked as my MacGregor Fellow.  As a scholar, there is a unique joy in being both a "son" and a "father." 

A scholarly way of life is fundamentally collaborative--fostered in a community of friendship.  So remember your mentors and pay your debts: build into the lives of others; contribute to a team; mentor someone, explore and think and create alongside others.

Conclusion

To say that scholarship is a way of life is to emphasize that it is characterized by certain habits--of reflection, exploration, creativity, and collaboration.  These are habits that you have already learned and valued (you're here on a Saturday morning, for goodness sake!).  As move beyond your undergraduate education, resist the siren calls that would lure you away from this way of life.

For some reason, this brings to mind one of my favorite passages from Plato--a passage that called me to the way of life of a scholar:

"This much I ask of them: when my sons grow up, avenge yourselves by causing them thte same kind of grief that I caused you, if you think they care for money or anything else more than they care for virtue, or if they think they are somebody when they are nobody.  Reproach them as I reproach you, that they do not care for the right things and think they are worthy when they are not worthy of anything.  If you do this, I shall have been justly treated by you, and my sons also." -Socrates in Apology, 41e-42a

Letter to a Son Who's Graduating

Our church's youth group has a wonderful tradition: as part of a retreat for high school seniors, parents are invited to write a letter to their children that they receive at the retreat (and the kids are invited to write letters to their parents).  It's a wonderful rite of passage that encourages reflection and gratitude and honesty.  The result, as you might imagine, is a lot of tear-stained letters.

Deanna and I just finished our letters to our second-oldest, Coleson.  Deanna's was absolutely gorgeous and moving--I'm still wiping the tears off my desk.

In some ways, writing mine felt like a bit of an appendix to my "Letter to a Young Parent."  I reproduce just a snippet here, only because it's a way to share this wonderful quote and metaphor from Christopher Buckley's memoir of his parents, Losing Mom and Pup.

"We haven't always gotten it right as parents (as I'm sure you'll agree).  But we've always tried our best, and our only goal has been your flourishing. So we've tried to channel you toward a good life--a life well-lived. In Christopher Buckley's memoir of his parents, Losing Mum and Pup, he talks about his father teaching him to sail. "He taught me on that trip how to navigate by the sun and the stars with a sextant. As I look back, it seems to me one of the most fundamental skills a father can teach a son: finding out where you are, using the tools of your ancestors."  Well, I didn't teach you anything as concrete (or bourgeois!) as sailing, but I hope you some day see that we have been trying to help you get your bearings with the faith of our ancestors--Abraham and Isaiah and Paul and Augustine, and above all Jesus, who is both our brother and our North Star. May you always be able to navigate where you are, and who you are, and whose you are."

Generational Blackmail?

It seems like every other day I'm told another reason why young people are leaving the church: because Christians fight too much, or because Christians are too political or anti-gay or don't care about social justice.  Millennials, we're told, are leaving the church because the church won't bless their cohabitation or provide them with contraception for pre-marital sex. They're leaving because they don't care about fights over creation/evolution or abortion or worship style or what have you.  In sum, it seems we're regularly informed that if the church doesn't change, young people are going to leave.

And what exactly are we supposed to do with these claims?  I think the upshot is pretty clear.  Indeed, am I the only one who feels like they're a sort of bargaining chip--a kind of emotional blackmail meant to get the church to relax its commitments in order to make the church more acceptable?

Could we entertain the possibility that millennials might be wrong?

An Engagement with "Two Kingdoms" Thought

In my little corner of Reformed Christianity, there has been a notable uptick in folks who are sympathetic to "two kingdoms" (2K) theologies of culture--a model more traditionally associated with the Lutheran tradition.  There are aspects of 2K thought I appreciate, notably its robust emphasis on the church as a sacramental community as well, its critique of the idolatry of nationalism, and its goal to resist Christian accommodation to partisan politics.  There are other aspects, however, that I'm less enthused about.

I think this is an important conversation and one to which I hope to contribute over the next several years, culminating in volume 3 of my Cultural Liturgies trilogy, which will focus on political theology.  In the meantime, here's a first foray just published: "Reforming Public Theology: Two Kingdoms, or Two Cities?," Calvin Theological Journal 47 (2012): 122-137, reprinted with permission.


"Reforming Public Theology: Two Kingdoms, or Two Cities?," Calvin Theological Journal 47 (...

Confessions, Generations, and the Future of the CRC

Bob De Moor's editorial in the most recent issue of The Banner (the denominational magazine of the Christian Reformed Church) is both symptomatic and wrongheaded.  But given what's at stake in this summer's Synod, perhaps a word or two is in order.

The backstory, for those not previously enthralled by synodical proceedings: our denomination historically requires officers of the church (pastors, elders, and faculty of Calvin College) to sign the Form of Subscription as an expression of commitment to our Three Forms of Unity: the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dordt--three historic confessions of the Reformed faith.  Last summer, a committee proposed replacing the Form of Subscription with a much-watered-down "Covenant for Officebearers" which effectively said something like, 'I agree that these confessions were things people used to believe.' (I'm loosely paraphrasing.)  Fortunately, the committee's proposal was defeated at Synod and sent back to committee.

A revised version will come before Synod this summer.  I think it's still a tepid document, but not as bad as what was floated in 2011.  But De Moor has suggested that this tepid version is still too much.  Instead, he says,

We need to make the Contemporary Testimony what we sign on to instead of the historic confessions.

Of course, this is accompanied by the obligatory nod toward the confessions as "historical" documents that should be "honored"--but not, of course, believed.  As you'll see his the editorial, "we" are clearly smarter and too advanced in our knowledge to ever be able to believe these historic confessions.  Anyone who has read Bultmann will be familiar with this kind of move: 'These are really quite remarkable documents, but seriously: who could believe them in an age of electric light?'

I'm going to try to curtail my disdain for this sort of posturing.  Instead, let me say just three things:

(1) De Moor is once again executing plays from the liberal Protestant playbook.  Anyone who is at all familiar with the slide of mainline denominations will recognize this rhetoric and posture.  (I'd love to recruit a student to undertake content analysis of De Moor editorials and then compare them with similar documents from denominational magazines published by the PC(USA), ELCA, and United Methodists in the 60s and 70s.)  Indeed, I would encourage folks from the denomination--and especially synodical delegates--to prepare for Synod by reading Ross Douthat's Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, especially the chapter on "Accommodation" and then pp. 140-141 on the creeping anti-institutionalism that eviscerates thick confessional identity.

(2) While De Moor is pointing out the supposed historical limitations of Reformed confessions forged in the 16th and 17th centuries, in fact nothing in his argument can prevent the same stance and posture toward ancient catholic confessions like Nicea and Chalcedon.  Should we also just tip our hat to those creeds, Bob, but then pledge our allegiance to an activist document written by North Americans in the 80s?

(3) I have a little hypothesis to float here, and I know it will be somewhat off-putting.  But here goes: I think this is very much a generational issue.  More specifically, I think this is a baby boomer problem.  And for the past 20 years, the leadership of our denomination has been in the hands of baby boomers who absorbed an anti-institutionalism that was in the water in the late 60s and early 70s, which they then channeled toward the faith of their forebears--particularly their immigrant forebears.  This gave us the disastrous attempts by the denomination to turn us into bland "community church" evangelicalism.  It also produced the sort of covert Protestant liberalism that De Moor and others regularly tout.

Hey, baby boomers, I want to let you in on a little secret: you don't own the denomination, though I know you've acted like you do for the past 20 years.  And I know you think that the next generation is looking to eviscerate our confessional Reformed particularity just as you've been trying to do.  But it's a lot more complicated than that.  In fact, I think you should start to realize that those opposing you are not just "old codgers" who aren't as enlightened as you, but also younger folks who have seen where this goes and are actually looking for a more ancient faith.  Some of us Gen Xers and rising millennials are not interested in your "updated" faith: we're looking for the thick, rich particularity of historic Reformed faith, understood as an expression of catholic Christianity.

(If you want just a little confirmation of this, let me ask: have you ever heard of this guy Tim Keller?  Who ministers in Manhattan? [And that's Manhattan, NY, not Manhattan, MT.] Whose network of unapologetically Reformed churches have been growing in one of the most secularized regions of the country?)

I don't want to turn this into a generation-war.  But I do want our baby boomer leaders to know that we're here, that we're invested, and that we're not going away.  So get used to it.

Situating "The Fall of Interpretation" in a Corpus

The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic was my first book, originally published in 2000.  I don't know that one would have projected from that book that I would one day write a book like Desiring the Kingdom.  This clip explores how The Fall of Interpretation--including the new second edition--fits in the trajectory of my work, particularly Desiring the Kingdom, and even the forthcoming Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works.