Thank God for Committees: Contribution to a Reformation Day Panel

The Meeter Center for Calvin Studies asked me to be part of a panel reflecting on the legacy of the Reformation. We were each given five minutes. Here are the notes for my brief contribution:

There are lots of features of the Protestant Reformation for which I’m grateful. I see it as an Augustinian renewal movement within the church catholic that led to the sanctification of ordinary life. The Reformers returned us to Scripture, renewed worship, and released the self for encounter with the risen Christ.

But today I want to focus on an underappreciated legacy: the Reformation’s theological investment in polity, particularly their emphasis on a plurality of leaders and the priesthood of all believers. In other words—and I can hardly believe I’m saying this—I’m grateful to the Reformers for giving us committees! The hard, frustrating work of committees is how we learn to the work of forging the commonweal.

• This isn’t just about doing things “decently and in order.” It’s not about a dazzling org chart, and it’s not just some curmudgeonly concern with “following the rules.” The plurality of leadership is rooted in an anthropological and institutional realism: eschewing any perfectionism, we see the ongoing failings of even regenerate hearts and minds, especially when they are inflated by the concentration of power. So leadership is diffused without being diluted; governance is shared; authority is borne by many shoulders. “The prophets are subject to the prophets,” as Paul put it. 
• Gifts beyond professionalism: offices of authority are entrusted to those with gifts, desire, and calling not just those credentialed with divinity degrees or theological credentials. And it is surely one of the virtues of the Reformed & Presbyterian traditions to have discerned that these leadership traits—gifts, desire, calling—are not limited to those with testicles. (Image of the Lord’s Supper being served by all women elders as a kind of signal that the curse is being rolled back.)
• Though this all hinges on formative, substantive catechesis: as go elders, so go the church. 
• Why I’m particularly grateful for this Reformation legacy today: because of it’s spillover to political life. It was these Calvinistic intuitions that bequeathed to us the institutions of checks & balances that are now features of liberal democracy. 
• On one level, they reasserted the dignity of the individual: when Jesus knows the number of hairs on your head, you can’t be reduced to a cog in some collectivist machine. 
• On the other hand, Reformed intuitions about polity and healthy institutional life bequeathed to us governmental structures enshrining shared government, internal corrections, and the sort of life-saving bureaucracy that gums of the gears of impatient, willful kings and dictators. (Hi there, Robert Mueller!!) The multi-pronged, self-correcting government envisioned by the US Constitution was, in many ways, dreamed up by Calvinists who didn’t trust themselves. Dr. King would later remind them they should have trusted themselves even less—and yet he appealed to their founding intuitions to make the point. In that sense you could say King was asking for an even more Calvinist Republic. 
• But this too depends on a kind of catechesis: civics and the formation of civic virtue, as well as a healthy dose of self-suspicion—all in short supply today. The hard good work of Reformed & Presbyterian polity is how we learn to be good citizens, too. 

Translation and the Afterlife of Words: A few thoughts on Ruden's new translation of the Confessions

Translations are a bit like music: you attach yourself to what you encountered in your youth. You reify what emerged when you were coming of age. You canonize what formed you.

So if you first encountered Proust through battered paperback versions of Scott Moncrieff, you'll be disposed to resist Lydia Davis' masterful new translations. "Accuracy" hardly matters: for you, Proust just speaks Scott Moncrieff.  A different translation sounds like someone else's voice. These commitments and loyalties are not necessarily rational; they're more like an existential allegiance--even a kind of friendship.

So, too, with translations of Augustine's Confessions.  For some generations, it was Pine-Coffin. Others were passionately committed to Frank Sheed's rendition.  For me, it was and always has been Chadwick's translation for Oxford University Press--which is why, as you might expect, I found Boulding's translation a tad overwrought, like she was trying too hard.

No surprise, then, that I greeted the arrival of Sarah Ruden's new translation with skepticism.  And within the first page--in the first line!--my skepticism was confirmed and I recoiled in my Chadwick allegiance.  The occasion was her decision to translate dominus as "Master" rather than "Lord."  So the cherished opening line of the Confessions greeted me as: "You are mighty, Master, and to be praised with a powerful voice" (Ruden). Contrast this with Chadwick's opener: "You are are great, Lord, and highly to be praised."

I quite literally closed up the Ruden translation in a kind of literary disgust.

Imagine my sense of chastisement, then, when no less than Peter Brown--the unsurpassed biographer of Augustine--praised Ruden's translation. Even worse, Brown particularly lauded Ruden's decision to render dominus as "Master."  Here's Brown making the point:

The measure of the success of Ruden’s translation is that she has managed to give as rich and as diverse a profile to the God on the far side as she does to the irrepressible and magnetically articulate Latin author who cries across the abyss to Him. Most translations of the Confessions fail to do this. We are usually left with the feeling that one character in the story has not fully come alive. We meet an ever-so-human Augustine, with whom it is easy to identify even when we most deplore him. But we meet him perched in front of an immense Baroque canvas called “God”—suitably grand, of course, suitably florid, but flat as the wall. 

How does Ruden remedy this lack of life in God? She takes God in hand. She renames Him. He is not a “Lord.” That is too grand a word. Its sharpness has been blunted by pious usage. Augustine’s God was a dominus—a master. And a Roman dominus was a master of slaves. Unlike “Lord,” the Latin word dominus implied, in Augustine’s time, no distant majesty, muffled in fur and velvet. It conjured up life in the raw—life lived face to face in a Roman household, lived to the sound of the crack of the whip and punctuated by bursts of rage.

He continues: "To make God more of a person, by making Him a master, does not, at first sight, make Him very nice. But at least it frees Him up. It also brings Augustine to life."  

When someone like Peter Brown is making this point, you step back from your allegiances and start to question yourself. 

But having done that, I'm digging in and sticking with my Chadwick, and disagreeing with Brown (and Ruden).  It comes down to the life of words and who "owns" Augustine.

First, the life of words: Every translation is an adventure in sailing from one language to another, and often from one time to another. (I have some of my own experience with such mis/adventures.)  And words in either language are not static: they have a life of their own. Indeed, they have an ongoing life that survives their speakers and authors such that words come to us encrusted with all kind of barnacles and freeriding associations by the time they disembark on the shore of our imagination.  This is certainly true of the three words at stake here: dominus, Lord, and Master. 

Brown thinks "Lord" carries a whiff of medieval feudalism and prefers "Master" because it reflects the antique world of Augustine's use.  But this is to evaluate a translation of the Confessions as a classicist, and to imagine that readers of Augustine are coming to it as classicists.  For those who encounter the Confessions as a devotional classic--which is still the vast majority of its readers, I expect--their interest and investment is not merely historical or antiquarian.  More to the point, I doubt many of them appreciate the late-ancient connotations of dominus, nor do they think of feudal fiefdoms when they hear the word "Lord." 

Conversely, to praise the rendition "Master" for its classical accuracy and literary verve seems to quite willfully ignore all the connotations that have attached themselves to the word "Master." Indeed, perhaps I found it particularly jarring and offensive to read that opening line of Ruden's translation because I had just finished Colson Whitehead's disturbing but essential novel, The Underground Railroad, which paints a world full of "Masters" that were one more reason to believe God couldn't possibly exist.

This brings me to my second point. In some ways, this is a question of who "owns" Augustine--not in the sense of who can claim him, or invoke him, and claim to speak for him.  I mean something different: which afterlife of words is most germane to the project that Augustine himself is engaged in?  Which history of connotation overlaps with Augustine's endeavor?

When we consider these questions, I think "Lord" is the right choice precisely because of the afterlife of this word in Christian piety.  When the vast majority of Christians hear or say the word "Lord," they are not academic historians for whom medieval feudal orders are rumbling around in their heads.  They are people who are part of a larger people that has been praying to a Father for millenia.  "Lord," for them, is not "grand;" it is familiar.

Indeed, this is what's so surprising about Ruden's decision in that opening line. By rendering it "You are mighty, Master, and to be praised with a powerful voice," she virtually cuts off the echo of allusion to Psalm 47:2 that Chawick recognizes. Ruden's rendition is a decision that hides this as the language of prayer--which is surely an odd thing to do for a work that is, in its entirety, framed as a prayer. The language of Chadwick (and others), invoking "Lord," pays homage to language prayed for centuries before him and, more importantly, prayed for centuries after him.  It is a translation decision that recognizes the ongoing effect of the King James Bible in transforming the connotation of "Lord" for English-speakers ever since (a reality that is still true even in our so-called "secular" age).  And its find its home among readers who are co-pilgrims with Augustine, who approach their dominus as co-heirs with the Son.

On "orthodox Christianity": some observations, and a couple of questions

What do people mean when they wring their hands about the fate of "orthodox Christianity" (small-o) today, or when they vent about the treatment of "orthodox Christians" in an increasingly secularized society?

A few observations and a couple of questions:

Historically, the measure of "orthodox" Christianity has been conciliar; that is, orthodoxy was rooted in, and measured by, the ecumenical councils and creeds of the church (Nicea, Chalcedon) which were understood to have distilled the grammar of "right belief" (ortho, doxa) in the Scriptures.  As such, orthodoxy centers around the nature of God (Triune), the Incarnation, the means of our salvation, the church, and the life to come.  The markers of orthodoxy are tied to the affirmations of, say, the Nicene Creed: the creatorhood of God; the divine/human nature of the Incarnate Son; the virgin birth; the historicity of Jesus' life and death; the affirmation of his bodily resurrection and ascension; the hope of the second coming; the triune affirmation of Father, Son, and Spirit; the affirmation of "one holy catholic and apostolic church"; one baptism; and the hope of our own bodily resurrection.

Interestingly, and perhaps a little ironically, even low church, anti-creedal Protestants end up measuring orthodoxy by these same measures.  Even more interestingly, early 20th century "fundamentalism" and the conservative renewal in historic streams like Presbyterianism, also revolved around these orthodox markers. The famous Fundamentals of 1910-1915 focused on these historic markers (with added Protestant polemics about Scripture and Roman Catholicism). And Machen's Christianity and Liberalism was pegged to these same markers: Doctrine, God and Man, the Bible, Christ, Salvation, and the Church. (You won't find the words "sex" or "marriage" in Christianity and Liberalism.)

Contrast this with most invocations of "orthodox Christianity" today. In some contexts, the use of the word "orthodox" seems to have nothing to do with these historic markers of Christian faith.  Indeed, in many cases "orthodox Christianity" means only one thing: a particular view of sexuality and marriage. Indeed, in some books of late, the adjective "orthodox" is only invoked when talking about morality, and sexual morality in particular.  In fact, in some of those books the historic markers of orthodox Christianity as summarized in the creeds make no appearance and almost seem irrelevant to the analysis.  So when people are said to suffer for their "orthodox" beliefs, or when we are told that "orthodox" Christians will be hounded from public life and persecuted in their professions, a closer reading shows that it is not their beliefs in the Trinity, Incarnation, Virgin Birth, or Resurrection that occasion these problems, but rather their beliefs about morality, and sexual morality in particular.  There don't seem to be any bakers refusing to bake cakes for atheists, and I've yet to hear of Silicon Valley CEOs being fired because they affirm the Incarnation of the Son or the resurrection of the dead.

I note this only to observe that this deployment of the term "orthodox" is recent, innovative, and narrow.  Ironically, it reflects a trait of modernity that those who use it would abhor: a tendency to reduce Christianity to a morality (see: Kant).  One could forgive Martian anthropologists who, parachuting into contemporary debates, concluded that "orthodox Christianity" just is a sexual ethic.

Now, no one for a second can deny that such views of sexual morality and marriage have been the historic teaching of the church. The weight of Scripture, tradition, and perhaps even "natural law" have sustained these views and beliefs for millennia. And one could argue that the silence on such matters in, say, Machen or The Fundamentals only reflects what was taken for granted, not what was unimportant.  Certainly.  And just because they are not matters of creedal definition doesn't mean they are matters of indifference. The creeds don't say anything about Christian nonviolence, for example, but that hardly means Christians are therefore free to adopt any posture or position they want if they follow the Prince of Peace.

But it is surely also worth pointing out that conciliar standards of orthodoxy do not articulate such standards. If the adjective "orthodox" is untethered from such ecumenical standards, it quickly becomes a cheap epithet we idiosyncratically attach to views and positions in order to write off those we disagree with as "heretics" and unbelievers.  If "orthodox" becomes an adjective that is unhooked from these conciliar canons, then it becomes a word we use to make sacrosanct the things that matter to "us" in order to exclude "them."  And then you can start folding all kinds of things into "orthodoxy" like mode of baptism or pre-tribulation rapture or opposition to the ordination of women--which then entails writing off swaths of Christians who affirm conciliar orthodoxy.

So perhaps we should be more careful with how we use the adjective orthodox.  It can't be a word we flippantly use to describe what is important to us.  The word is reserved to define and delineate those affirmations that are at the very heart of Christian faith--and God knows they are scandalous enough in a secular age.

Perhaps we need to introduce another adjective--"traditional"--to describe these historic views and positions on matters of morality.  Why?  Because otherwise these other markers will end up trumping the conciliar marks of the Gospel.  That is, the things we append as "orthodox" start to overwhelm and supersede what the church has defined as orthodox.

Here's where my questions arise:

1. Do you really want to claim that Christians who affirm all of the historic markers of orthodoxy but disagree with you on matters of sexual morality or nonviolence or women in office are heretics?  So that someone can affirm the core, scandalous, supernatural tenets of the Gospel, and affirm the radicality of grace, and yet fall outside the parameters of your small-o "orthodox Christianity?"

2. Those who stretch the markers of orthodoxy seem oddly selective. (Were condemnations of usury "orthodox?" They were certainly historic and traditional.)  Let's look at a concrete example: the historic creeds affirm "one baptism."  Consider, then, this scenario: You are a conservative Anglican who has raised your children in the faith since they were baptized as babies. Your daughter falls in love with a nice Southern Baptist boy. They are engaged to be married, and want to make their home at the local Baptist church and be married there. For your daughter to become a member, she will have to re-baptized. Aren't these Baptists--who share your sexual morality--rejecting the (creedal) orthodox marker of "one baptism?"  Who's "orthodox" now?

Making this distinction doesn't settle anything. But it does change how we have the conversations. And it's worth remembering that people are watching and listening in. While we debate matters of importance, let's hope that those who overhear us still hear the scandalous, marvelous, miraculous affirmations of creedal orthodoxy ringing loud and clear: that "He descended to hell. The third day he rose again from the dead." And he forgives us.

Mortality and My Library

It is the first day of summer, at least according to my own personal academic calendar. The college’s commencement was this past Saturday. My official duties have been discharged for the year. Too many writing obligations loom for the summer; so, of course, I’m procrastinating. The piles and piles of books on the floor beside our bed somehow became stacks in our youngest son’s bedroom. But he has now returned from college. So those piles were dumped in my office while I was out of town, barring the way to my desk. This is a welcome distraction.  I “have” to look for shelf space for all these books in order to get down to work. 

The piles have a kind of archaeological quality: they are like the strata of my attention and fancies over the past year, the fits and starts of my curiosity. All the dust on a volume of Shelby Foote’s Civil War history indicate that it has been the bedrock of the stack. Tiny volumes like Patti Smith’s Auguries of Innocence got lost in the layers of larger tomes. It now sits on the stairs to be returned to my bedside, along with A. Scott Berg’s Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. After all, these are the sorts of books that summers are for. 

Some of these volumes look at me with stern judgment, signals of failure: my bookmark indicates I only made it halfway through Niall Ferguson’s biography of Kissinger, though the dog-ears and pencil notations indicate some vested interest. Issue of Paris Review and n+1 are half-read, displaced by the next issue. 

i recall fondly my second readings of George Saunders’ Tenth of December and Adam Haslett’s collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, as I prepped for their novels, which were both excellent.  

The nonfiction layers are curious to me now: Catching Fire, an evolutionary history of cooking sits not far from Peter Gay’s Modernism: The Lure of Heresy—which brings to mind a delightful visit to Powell’s in Portland. Indeed, handling each book comes with a whiff of its provenance—in Pasadena and Asheville, a gift from a friend, a book review assignment. 

And as I try to find room for all of these on shelves already burgeoning and lined two rows deep, I’m returning books alongside others unread. Despite all the Julian Barnes I read this year, there are still books on the shelf I’ve not made it to yet. There’s volume 3 of Foote’s civil war Narrative glaring at me unread. I put Colson Whitehead on the shelf and am reminded that Richard Wright is still waiting for me. As are volumes of Updike and Edith Wharton. I find a place for Hitchens’ Arguably only to be reminded that I have all these treasures from Alfred Kazin waiting to be read. 

A young man builds his library in hope. Each paperback treasure is acquired as an act of aspiration. A library is an image of the man he hopes to be: the canon he constructs is a standard of what he thinks he ought to know. It grows quickly, in unexpected ways, exceeding his attention. But there will always be more time to read, right? 

A middle-aged man tends his library with a more sombre aspect. Reshelving a book unfinished is one more failure, a door one closes perhaps never to return. When I put The Noise of Time back on the shelf, I recall all the places Barnes has accompanied me on this adventure. But I see some of his novels still unread and wonder if I’ll ever get back to this corner of the library. In fact, it was Barnes who gave me a word for this: le réveil mortel—the wake-up call of mortality. Who knew tidying your library could be such an existential risk?

At some point you realize: I will die with books unread on my shelf. So be it. The grass withers, the flowers fade, the pages become mildewed and musty. So too will I.   Even those unread books are a sign of aspiration, ambition, hope. I’ll die reading. I trust there are libraries in the kingdom.  

2016: The Year in Reading

No "bests." No rankings. No claims to objectivity or trendsetting or reports from secret avant-garde gardens of literature.  Just some impressions looking back over a year in reading. (You can see a glimpse of some of my reading at GoodReads.)

Novels that haunt me: 2016 was a pretty incredible year for fiction.  I won't likely finish Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad before the year is out (I just started it), so won't include it here--though so far it is remarkable.  The two novels that have most impressed me--and impressed themselves upon me--are Don DeLillo's Zero K and Adam Haslett's Imagine Me Gone.

Zero K is poised for the moment--a character study of trust amidst failing states and outsized hopes in technology, taking seriously an enduring religious impulse that characterizes our secular age.  It's conceptual scope is ambitious while it's plot and dramatis personae are focused and minimal.

Imagine Me Gone is a zoomed-in family drama that dives into the ripple effects of mental health, all constructed around a musical motif that generates metaphors and provides a cadence to the story.  Having been a fan of Haslett's short stories, I wasn't sure his gifts would translate into a novel.  Imagine Me Gone blew through that skepticism.  The energy and insight of Haslett's prose more than make the jump to the novel form.  Here's just a taste of a passage I noted:

I took my first pill as soon as I filled the script at the CVS in Copley, a few blocks from Dr. Gregory's office. By the time I'd reached Newton Centre on the Green Line, I couldn't stop smiling. The kind of big, solar smile that suffuses your whole torso, as if your organs are grinning. Soon I began to laugh, at nothing at all, pure laughter, which brought tears to my eyes, no doubt making me appear completely insane to the other passengers. But happier I have rarely been. For that hour and the three or four that followed, I was lifted down off a hook in the back of my skull that I hadn't even know I'd been hanging from. Here was the world unfettered by dread. 

Book I couldn't finish: Anthony Lane Fox's biography of Augustine was positively doldrumesque. Though I took the book on assignment, after multiple attempts, I finally had to abandon ship. Life's too short to read horrible biographies--especially when Peter Brown's bio is right here on the shelf next to it. No one has yet improved on Brown's masterpiece.

Poetry I can't put down: I should note Ocean Vuong's new collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which is melancholy and discomforting and yet charged with gratitude and hope.  But there is one poem that has been an absolute game-changer, a poem I bumped into by accident almost but has spun tendrils around my heart.

Like some of the most important books in my life, I picked up this book on a discount table (I'm a long-time believer in "bibliographical providence").  Specifically, I ran into Ted Hughes Selected Translations at Vroman's in Pasadena, one of my favorite shops and an annual haunt.  A fan of Hughes' guttural, earthy, Yorkshire poetry, I somehow had missed this part of his corpus so added it to my stack.  Only several months later did I wade into the collection which ranges from ancient to contemporary poets.  It was a poem by the Hungarian poet, Ferenc Juhász that sucked me in.  It is almost sacrilege to try to describe "The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets" in prose.  Try imagine Pan's Labyrinth as poetry, a 13-page compressed epic in which a mother is calling to a distant son who has fled.  The poem has a cyclical cadence about it, a call-and-response that feels like a litany, unearthing death and debts and all the things that make us sons and daughters. I have re-read it countless times in 2016 and don't expect to stop anytime soon.

A Life: I read some marvelous biographies and memoir this year (Camus; Kissinger; Bruce Springteen's Born to Run; Accidental Life, Terry McDonell's insightful romp through magazines and editing; and more). But it is the heartbreak of Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday that has lodged itself as a thorn in my soul.  I'm still not really in a place to write about it--the beauty and honesty of Zweig's prose and his paean to Vienna amidst the horror and deceit of Hitler's rise.  The displacement; the desecration; the decimation of a culture and a people.  The quotidian evil of war. The erosion of rights. The striving for a cosmopolitan community despite the clamping down of borders and the stomp of nationalist jackboots all around.  Zweig makes you face things you hope he's wrong about: "If there is one new art that we have had to learn, those of us who have been hunted down and forced into exile at a time hostile to all art and all collections, then it is the art of saying goodbye to everything that was once our pride and joy."

Sonic Habits: Thoughts on an Advent Hymn

When it comes to matters musical, I am a rank amateur--a lover without training or expertise; a listener who knows what he likes; a hearty singer without much skill. I'm grateful for a profession in which I can constantly create an acoustical ambience of music to wallpaper my workday.

However, as a philosopher with interest in liturgy, I'm also somewhat attuned to what my friend Jeremy Begbie calls the "sonic environment" of worship.  Beyond the theological and imagination-shaping significance of lyrics, Begbie has taught me to be attuned to musical form as its own kind of lived theology (a while back this spawned a little reflection on Ryan Adams and Taylor Swift).

So today I've been pondering a classic advent hymn, "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming," that we sang at Sherman Street CRC this morning.  Rooted in the imagery of Isaiah 11 (the OT lectionary reading for this second Sunday of advent), with a bit of admittedly romantic flourish and speculation, it was the tune that grabbed me today.  Our hymnal sets this to a 1599 German tune, Alte Catholische Kirchengesäng (with harmonization by Michael Praetorius).  You can listen to a rendition of it; or here's a snapshot of the tune (from a different hymnal source):

What struck me is how I--and to some extent, our congregation, I think--kept getting hung up on those third half notes (in the first stanza on "from," "of," "when," etc.).  It's like our sonic habits are used to a certain cadence and tempo that keep things moving.  At some unconscious level, we expect the next note to come more quickly.  We're feeling stretched and a bit impatient by those two half notes already and when the third arrives we're sonically impatient. Our inner tempo, trained by the cadences of a frenetic pace that always gets its way, perturbedly tells our tongues: "C'mon already--let's get this show on the road! I haven't got all day."  We want a quarter note but the hymn hangs us up on that third half note over and over again.  We're asked to sing another half note in a quarter note world.

Which is precisely why the tune of the hymn is its own kind of Advent discipline.  The notes are teaching us to wait, to experience the impatience of waiting (again!) for the Judge who is coming--who does "not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears; but with righteousness he will judge the needy; with justice he will give decision for the poor of the earth" (Is. 11:3-4).

How long, O Lord?

An American Lent

"What are you giving up for Lent?"

This question tells us a lot about American Christianity. While the question alludes to historic Christian practices of fasting and self-denial associated with the penitential season of Lent, the syntax of the question also points out a crucial shift: even our self-denial is an act of self-expression. Our submission to discipline is converted to act of will power.

The sociologist Stephen Warner talks about the "de facto congregationalism" that characterizes American Christianity such that even episcopalian and liturgical traditions become governed by dynamics of autonomy and independence. Perhaps we could equally talk about a "de facto Pelagianism" characteristic of American Christianity such that even those practices of self-denial become mediums of expression and choice. (In my new book, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, I describe this as an "expressivism" that has captured our understanding of worship and discipleship, in contrast to a more historic appreciation for the importance and priority of formation.)

In a more robustly communal practice of the faith, my self-denial is not up to me. The practices of fasting and feasting are not a matter of choice: they are part of the spiritual architecture of the church. It's not so much that I choose to abstain from meat; meat is not going to be served. There are communal commitments embedded in an environment that takes the emphasis off of my choice and will power and instead throws me into the formative power of the practice.  My participation in the formative disciplines of Lent isn't another chance for me to show something to God (or others).  It is an invitation to have my hungers retrained.

Liturgical Lessons from Ryan Adams' 1989

Taylor Swift's 1989 is often the soundtrack for my morning run. Its pop energy is just what my middle-aged body needs to keep pace. And "Shake It Off" queues up just as I'm starting to flag and I'm energized to shake off the doldrums, and all the haters.

This morning I bumped Ryan Adams' cover of 1989 into the run rotation.  It was a revelation.

First lesson: his is not a soundtrack for vigorous exercise. More like the score for a dark, lonely Friday night corkscrewing yourself into a bottle of bourbon.

But the second lesson is more important: Adams' version taught me something about worship.

When you listen to Adams' cover of Swift's album, you finally realize how incredibly sad it is--that buried down beneath the perky melodies and auto-tuned precision of a pristine sound is a lyrical world of heartbreak, disappointment, and despair.

Not until you hear Adams' mournful rendition, in the gravelly timbre of his voice, does the truth of 1989 disclose itself.  It's like, up to now, the melodic tenor and sonic grammar of Tswift's album was lying about what it said. The sound isn't true. There is a kind of disclosure and revelation and truth that is viscerally carried in the sonic environment of the album, and it took the heartbroken musical genius of Ryan Adams to unveil this--to point out the cognitive (and pre-cognitive!) dissonance at work in Taylor Swift's original.  Adams' cover tells the truth about the music, and thus tells the truth about a sad, broken world by redeploying Swift's lyrical honesty in a sonic environment that fits.

(Jeremy Begbie could explain this much better than I ever could, but I can't imagine convincing him to listen to either version of 1989!)

What does this have to do with worship?  We live, you might say, in a major chord culture.  We live in a society that wants even its heartbreaking lyrics delivered in pop medleys that keep us upbeat, tunes we can dance to. We live for the "hook," that turn that makes it all OK, that lets us shake it off and distract ourselves to death.  And this cultural penchant for a certain sonic grammar seeps into the church and the church's worship, so that we want songs and hymns and spiritual songs that do the same.  But as a result we often create a (pre)cognitive dissonance between the Bible's honesty, carried in our hymns and psalms, and our pop retunings.  Or we embed them in a sonic liturgical environment that endeavors to be, above all, "upbeat" and positive--a weekly pick-up encouraging you to just "shake it off."

But then a Ryan Adams comes along and takes you back to lament, and reminds you of all the minor chord moments of the biblical narrative, and invites you into a sonic environment that actually tells the truth about the broken world you live in, and that your neighbors live in, and that refugees from Syria live in.  Worship should be a proclamation that tells the truth, not just lyrically, but sonically.  And that means music that resonates with broken hearts.  Even though the Gospel exhorts us to "lift up our hearts," sometimes that only happens because God in Christ comes down to meet us in our brokenheartedness.  That will sometimes happen in song.

"Do not be intimidated by the torrent of impiety"

In the early reconnaissance stages of a new book on St. Augustine, I've been reading his Expositions of the Psalms and came across this striking passage, given the time in which we find ourselves.  In some ways, it reminded me of my Cardus colleague Ray Pennings' recent op-ed in the National Post.

Augustine, preaching on (Vulgate) Psalm 57:8 ("They will be scorned like water that flows away"):

You should not be intimidated by rivers that are reputed to be powerful torrents, my brothers and sisters. They are full of winter rain, but don't worry; after a short time their force abates. The water rushes down and roars for a while, but it will soon subside; it cannot continue its spate for long. There have been plenty of heresies that have died away.  They flowed between their bands as long as any force remained in them; but then the water level dropped, the river-beds dried, and their memory scarcely survives today. People do not recall they they ever existed.  They will be scorned like water that runs away.  But the same is true of the whole world. It does on in its noisy course for a while and tries to drag along anyone it can catch. All the unbelievers, all the proud folk, crash against the rocks of their pride with a din like that of water rushing toward a confluence, but they must not frighten you. They are only swollen winter rivers that cannot flow all the year round; they will inevitably dwindle toward their proper place, which means the end of them. 

Yet the Lord himself drank from this torrent of the world. Here it was that he suffered, from this same torrent he drank, but he drank by the wayside, as he passed it, for he did not stand in the way of sinners.  What does scripture say of him? He will drink from the torrent beside the way, and therefore he will raise his head (Ps. 109 [110]:7).  This means: because he died, he was glorified; because he suffered, he rose again. Had he been unwilling to drink from the torrent on the way, he would not have died; if he had not died, he would not have risen from the aded, and would not have been glorified. But in fact he will drink from the torrent beside the way, and therefore he will raise his head.  Our Head is raised up already; let his members follow him.

~Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, 57.16

On Fatherless Days

In memory of Franz Wright.

Father's Day is easy for me: I have none.  They all left.

So I don't have to find an awkward card amidst the cloying selection on offer.  I don't have to make the clichéd choice between necktie or power tool.  I don't have to endure the awkwardness of a largely wordless afternoon in the presence of my progenitor, or remember to call and then try to wrangle a conversation out of the receiver.  ("I don't have to," of course, is it's own sort of spin, papering over the "I don't get to" buried beneath it.)

So Father's Day is easy for me.

It's the rest of the fatherless days that are difficult.

When I was 12 years old, my father divulged his affair with my mother's best friend.  He promptly kicked me, my brother, and my mother out of the house and moved in his mistress, her children taking over our bedrooms.  We moved to a different town and saw him only a handful of times after that.  The encounters I remember were abusive and terrifying.  The last time I laid eyes on him was when our oldest son was born.  That was almost twenty-three years ago.

My mother remarried.  Her husband was the male presence in my life during my teen years, a mostly spiteful, antagonistic father-substitute.  But I'd take what I could get.

He left too.

In many ways, I've been a father longer than I've been a son.  While I make no claims of being either good or exemplary, the most sacred call I'm trying to answer in my life is to be a faithful husband and father.  I've spent every ounce of psychic energy I have to try and make sure that Father's Day is never "easy" for my kids by simply showing, on every other day: "I'm still here."

I'm still here and I'm not going anywhere because I don't want to miss a thing.  I don't want to miss you wearing a cape and rubber boots to the grocery store, or the first time you got an earring (which we did together!), or watching you meander toward finding who you're called to be, or seeing you blossom into the very image of your mother.  I don't even want to miss the disappointments and darkest moments because I can't imagine how difficult it must be to endure those without a father.  Or rather, I can, which is why I can't imagine how my own father could let that happen and why I promise I'll still be here.

I'm still here even on the days that I blow it and exasperate you.  I'm still here on the days I have to tell you, "I'm sorry."  I'm still here even on those days when it seems like I'm a million miles away, distant and detached and aloof because I'm haunted by the overwhelming absence of my father who has torn a hole in my life. Like Keats' "negative capability," this is the sort of absence that is a presence, a hole that takes up space and eats you alive.  It's an absence that makes it difficult to sometimes be present to others, even when you're in the same room.  It's this distance that Franz Wright finally named for me years ago, in a poem about the destructive presence of his own father who left.  As Wright puts it,

If I’m walking the streets of a citycovering every square inch of the continentall its lights outand empty of people,even thenyou are there 

If I’m walking the streetsoverwhelmed with this love for the living 

I will still be a blizzard at sea 

Since you left me at eight I have always been lonely 

star-far from the person right next to me, but 

closer to me than my bones you 

you are there

I'll always be in the room and will ask you to forgive me.  It's just that I'm fathering without a father, working without a net, trying my damndest to pull off this acrobatic trick of not leaving. That's how I love you.

Thankfully, despite all these absences and departures, I have found a model and exemplar.  Or rather, I have been found by a model Father.  So there are no fatherless days because I have been found and adopted by a heavenly Father who promises to never leave me nor forsake me.  Indeed, I've been invited into the life of the triune God who embodies everything this deeply human heart of a son is longing for.  The God I worship is a Father who loves his Son, and who says what any and every son longs to hear:

And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:16-17 ESV).

And I know that I am in his Son, I am his son.  I have spent a lifetime hoping to hear these words from my earthly fathers.  God only knows how much my frenetic, driven energies are still subconscious cries to be recognized by a father who left, who never asks, who has never come looking for me.  But the grace of the Gospel is to know that I am a son who is beloved.  It may be heretical, it may be indulgent, but one of my deepest eschatological longings is to be welcomed into the kingdom by the Son who shows me the Father (John 14:9), who will tousle my hair like a boy and simply say, "Good job. I'm proud of you."

All of this was stirred up for me this week by another poem, by Seamus Heaney, a masterful meditator on the relationship between fathers and sons.  His poem, "The Follower," stopped me in my tracks:

My father worked with a horse-plough,                             1
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing                                     5
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck.

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye                                        10
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back                                  15
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow around the farm.                              20

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.

I never want Father's Day to be as "easy" for my kids as it has been for me.  Which is just a way of saying I don't want them to have to endure fatherless days.  I'm not going away.  But I'm not haunting them.  I don't want to burden them.  I'm cheering them on, ready to pick them up when they stumble. I want to be that net I never had, so they can acrobatically launch into their lives, confident in the love of a father loved by the Father that loves them, too.

In Memoriam: Helen Piett

As many of you know, I don't come from a small "town;" I come from a small village.  Embro, Ontario had a population of just about 600 people when I was growing up, without even the one proverbial stoplight to slow down passers-through who would miss it if they blinked.  If you've read an Alice Munro story or a Robertson Davies novel--especially the Deptford trilogy--you'll have a pretty good sense of what it was like.   A lot of stiff-upper-lipped Scotsmen who coached hockey and spent Thursday nights at the lodge; a lot of salt-of-the-earth women who tolerated them and ran things from behind the scenes.  Within a block of each other was the Presbyterian church and a local United Church congregation, and the green between them was where I remember celebrating Embro's 125th anniversary in 1983.

I won't romanticize it.  No doubt it was a difficult place to be an outsider.  And when I was young, the stability of the place was already eroding: the culture of divorce and dislocation would eat away at a more ancient fabric.  But the village and surrounding rural township forged an identity in two primary nodes: the hockey arena and our rural school.

I am just old enough to remember the original arena: a green ramshackle driveshed of a building on Argyle Street--basically corrugated metal and a roof over what would otherwise be an outdoor rink.  It was here that I would take my first steps on the ice, though within a few years a new arena would be built on the other side of town, the local temple of Canadian religion.  For a significant swath of the community, life revolved around the arena.

But even more of us were bound together by the school.  All of us were bussed from miles around to a country school north of Embro: Zorra Highland Park, whose name signaled the Scottish heritage of the township ("Embro" is said to be a garbled form of the "Edinburgh").  My first teacher there in kindergarten also happened to be my great aunt, Helen Piett (née Smith).  I was terribly sad to learn that Aunt Helen died a few weeks ago, on November 22, 2014.  I feel like I owe her memory and legacy a word of thanks.

My first-hand memories of Aunt Helen are memories of "Mrs. Piett," my teacher.  Because it was a country school, we went to kindergarten all day, every other day, so I remember her getting us settled down for nap time in the afternoons.  "Get your mats, children"--cushy, ugly, brown naugahyde mats for sleeping on the floor.  I remember her comforting me and putting a band-aid on my hair after Darryl Fraser hip-checked me into one of the cubby-holes, sending me off with the principal to get stitches in Tavistock.  I remember how every year, for generations, she created silhouettes of each student's young profile by tracing the outline of our heads projected by the stark light of the filmstrip projector.  She would cut these out of black construction paper, mount them on stark white backdrops, label the name and date in her meticulous cursive hand, and then present them to the parents.  Often when I visited friends in their homes, these shadows of their younger selves adorned the walls like memories.

For reasons that are painful to discuss, I never really got to know Mrs. Piett as "Aunt Helen."  Those corrosive forces that fractured families hit my own, leaving estrangement and dysfunction in their wake.  The entire "Smith side" of my life disappeared behind the walls erected by divorce--walls that are invisible and yet also block our way.

But then just before we moved to the United States in 1995, somehow Aunt Helen got in touch with me and passed along what is now a treasure to me: a family history of The Maisley McWilliams in Canada, 1846-1939, with five supplements tracing the history up until 1994.  Little did I know that Aunt Helen was also the family historian.  Most significantly, she had written me into the history I thought I'd lost.  There was my name in this story.  And even more: there was my marriage to Deanna in that final supplement.  And there were my two sons, their births in 1992 and 1994 etched into this family tree.  While I thought this family had forgotten me, Aunt Helen hadn't.

And she didn't ever again.  Faithfully, every year, she would send our family a Christmas card with one of her lovely letters of reflection and gratitude.  And we would reciprocate, partly in gratitude, but mostly because she was the only set of arms reaching out to us from this lost side of my life.  In Children of Divorce, Andrew Root argues that divorce is traumatic because its effects are ontological: it rends our very being.  Aunt Helen was someone who was trying to keep me stitched together.

This week we received a letter from Aunt Helen's daughter, Marlene Matheson.  Its first line both pierced my heart and cheered my soul:

It is with sadness that I write this last 'Christmas' letter for Mom.  Mom will be spending Christmas with Jesus Christ this year.

I am grateful for the quiet, steady witness of saints like Aunt Helen.  Thank you, Aunt Helen, for the gift you gave our family: the gift of a history, a story, but also the model of one who longed for the Lord of history.  Enjoy your well-deserved rest in the country you've been looking for your whole life.  I can't wait to see you there.

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Responding to a Common Critique of "Who's Afraid of Relativism?"

Eduardo Echeverria has published an article-length critical review of my book, Who's Afraid of Relativism?, in the latest issue of the Calvin Theological Journal and the editors gave me an opportunity to respond.  I took them up on it, in part because Echeverria's serious engagement deserved a reply, but also because his critique reflects a common mis-reading of my project (of the sort you might see, for instance, in Philosophia Christi).

I've uploaded my response, "Echeverria's Protestant Epistemology: A Catholic Response," at Scrib and embedded it below.

One contextual note about a joke embedded in the title: Echeverria is a former Neocalvinist who converted to Roman Catholicism; I, on the other hand, am a Reformed Protestant.  Get it?

"Echeverria's Protestant Epistemology: A Catholic Response" by James K.A. Smith

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Labor Day Lament: A Poem

This "last Friday" of summer has a feel of Fall about it: we'll head to the first high school football game tonight with sweatshirts to guard against evening chill.  As I'm watching the kids on our street squeeze out the last dregs of summer, I'm reminded of how I approached Labor Day weekend as a child--which then reminded me of a poem I wrote several years ago.  It's probably not worth the light of day, but it might capture how some of us feel about the twilight of summer:

Labor Day Lament

When did Labor Day lose

its apocalyptic tenor? 

its doomsday connotation? 

its autumnal terror?

For a boy of twelve

Labor Day comes like a thief in the night,

with the sound of a dreaded trump

announcing the end of

catching crayfish and walnut fights—

as if the first day of school

was a recurring Armageddon.

For a boy of sixteen

Labor Day is the Day of Judgment,

the parousia that quashes

a summer of paramours—

when teasing bikinis and spaghetti straps

become draped in the wool of

Catholic school uniforms whose

scratchy discomfort enacts

a tartan penance.

For the young man at twenty-seven

Labor Day is lost in the blur

of cubicled time,

barely a blip in the whir of ambition

and the tribulation of his toil.

But at twilight

in the yard—

in the cemetery of his play—

in the gloaming of summer,

the smell of that adolescent dread

briefly hangs on the unkempt lawn

like neglected manna,

a tenuous revenant lurking

between tricycle and sandbox.

Its haunting no longer spooks

his responsible adult disenchanted soul.

Tuesday will be no Second Coming.

Apocalyptic is kids’ stuff.
We’re too busy slouching toward success.

Sending our Daughter Off to College: A Guest Post by Deanna

Today we moved our daughter, our third child, into her dorm room at Calvin College.  It was everything we could have hoped for, and everything we've been trying to pretend wouldn't happen all summer.  Our baby girl has been launched into the next season of her adventure with Christ.

My wife, Deanna, sent a note to our closest family to share an update.  I found her little note so lovely, so fitting, so poignant, I asked if I could share it here, and she agreed.  

I just got home from taking Maddie to Calvin. The day we have been both looking forward to and dreading all at once. We like her so much. 

All the cliches are true. It goes by so fast. It seems like just yesterday...Where does the time go? Of course, there were so many days that led to this one. 6649 to be exact. So many of them ordinary, trying, never ending. And then there were the magical ones. All of the "firsts." All of the moments that have added up and been tucked away and made us into the people we are today. 

We are so very thankful. Profoundly grateful for our Maddie and her brothers. We look forward to watching her grow over the next 4 years and are trusting in God's amazing love for her. 

One of my favourite pictures of her from when she was little is this one I have included. She was pretending to be  a bird. Arms open wide, face to the sun, looking ahead, soaring. It perfectly encapsulates who she is. She is ready to fly. 

Love,
Deanna

We Need More Than Liturgy: AGREED

It's always, er, let's say, "intriguing" to read an article that purports to be a critique of your work which, in turns, criticizes what you have also criticized and espouses positions that, in fact, you have also argued.  In short, it's puzzling to read an article that claims to disagree with you when said article argues for the same positions you hold.

I say "intriguing," but what I really mean is frustrating, disappointing, and puzzling--especially when such a "critique" is not some random musing hastily posted to a blog but an article that appears in a major evangelical publication that (one assumes) has been vetted by editors who (again, one would think) exercise some critical quality control.  (I say this as someone who also edits a magazine and has had to reject articles--even articles I've commissioned--when authors weren't willing to correct caricatures.)

This was my experience upon reading Kirsten Guidero's puzzling, somewhat meandering article, "We Need More Than Liturgy," published by Christianity Today.

The problem isn't critique.  Critique is how knowledge advances and how authors continue to learn.  And I've appreciated some well-founded critiques of both Desiring the Kingdom (DTK) and Imagining the Kingdom (ITK).  Indeed, as I note in the Preface to ITK, insightful criticisms of DTK shaped how I approached volume 2 of the Cultural Liturgies Project.  I've also engaged the helpful criticisms of my project from "the Westmont Four" that appeared in Books & Culture (here and here).

Lots of other criticisms are simply mistaken and uninteresting and usually exhibit the critic's inability to understand an argument (or that the critic has already decided before reading that book X is "wrong" because it is written by Y and Y is associated with Z, etc.).  Most of these sorts of "critiques" appear on blogs and I happily ignore.

Guidero's is this sort of "critique," but it appears with the imprimatur of Christianity Today and, one has to conclude, its editors.  It's frustrating to feel compelled to write a response to such a piece since it's required only because an author and editors failed to actually read what I've already written.  And if my response seems tedious, it's precisely because I find it tedious to have to restate what Guidero should have already read (supposedly "has read").  My response, then, is as much an indictment of the editors of Christianity Today as it is of Guidero.

Without further adieu, a few notes:

Liturgical Evangelicalism?

Guidero's attributes to me a "defense of liturgical evangelicalism."  I dare anyone to find any instance in which I have either used this term let alone "defended" it.  I have no idea what it would mean to be "a champion of the evangelical liturgy cause."  To the contrary I have been persistently skeptical about what "evangelicalism" means.  Instead, ever since the final chapter of Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? (2006), I have argued for catholic faith. "Evangelicalism" is not my term nor my identity.  I'm a Reformed Catholic.

Only Bodies?

Guidero mistakenly thinks I argue for some kind of reductionistic materialism, as if we were only bodies--that I set up liturgical formation "against" cognitive processes and am engaged in "a continued zero-sum game pitting mind against body."  Instead, she argues for the "enduring interrelation of our bodies, brains, and identities."

Here's the problem: that's also what I argue for.  Both sides of her claim are so baffling to me I don't even know where to begin, but I think it must stem from Guidero's inability (or refusal?) to really grasp what I argue in chapter 1 of ITK (an admittedly challenging chapter, focused on Merleau-Ponty).

Following Merleau-Ponty, I emphasise the "hybridity" of our being--that we are mind and body (ITK, 43).  This "betweenness" and inter-relatedness of mind and body is almost the entire burden of the first chapter of ITK (see especially pp. 69-72 about the "wholeness" of our experience).

[Also relevant is a footnote on ITK, p. 55, drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre: "The term animal (as in “liturgical animal” or “imaginative animal”) is just a philosophical way of naming our embodiment, of saying that we are not essentially souls or only minds but embodied thinkers that Aristotle called “rational animals.” We aren’t angels. Merleau-Ponty and Johnson press us to situate the rationality in our animality, in our embodiment. Alasdair MacIntyre makes the same point: “our whole initial bodily comportment towards the world is originally an animal comportment” (Dependent Rational Animals, 49).]

I'm not arguing that we are only bodies; I'm arguing that we are not less than bodies.  She takes my argument for irreducibility as if it were a reductionism.  But I don't know how many more ways I could protest that in the book.  Guidero is working with a dichotomy that I explicitly refuse.  For example, I conclude ITK by emphasizing "that this attention to our unconscious habituation and embodied 'feel' for the world is not meant to denigrate or neglect the role of reflection and intellectual analysis.  I am not setting up a dichotomy: either practice or reflection.  To the contrary, my hope is to foster intentional reflection on practice in order to encourage reflective immersion in practice" (p. 186).  The entire Preface of ITK makes this same point: if my argument is anti-intellectual, both of my books sure ask people to do some really hard thinking about worship!  In that sense, I only wish Guidero would have thought a little more carefully about all of this.

Furthermore, I explicitly agree with her claim about how we ought to be engaged in worship: as I emphasize at the conclusion of ITK, "worship requires full, active, conscious participation even if it is also forming us in ways that elude our conscious awareness.  If our immersion in the practices of Christian worship is always and only a matter of 'going through the motions,' then we are not really practitioners" (p. 187).

If some of Guidero's evangelical friends have latched onto "liturgy" as some kind of magical antidote, that's not my fault.

Emotionalism?

According to Guidero, I argue, in DTK, that "Christian education must be entirely redirected in order to better foster such liturgical emphasis on the emotions."  (Guidero has a habit of simply putting a title in brackets in a mode of vague reference--though this might have been a result of editorial trimming.)

Really? I'm baffled.  I've searched high and low throughout Desiring to see where I even talk about emotions.  All I could find was a critique of emotionalism on p. 79 and then a more substantial discussion on p. 224 where, again, I critique emotivism.  In the context of a discussion about campus worship, I push back on dichotomous models that emphasize either the intellect or emotions.  "[B]oth sides," I point out, "tend to either reduce Christianity to a belief system or an emotivist experience."  In contrast, I argue that "if we begin from the assumption that humans are liturgical animals, and that the Christian social imaginary is carried in the practices of Christian worship, then...the role of the chapel is not to stir our emotions or merely fuel our 'spiritual' needs..."

Guidero doesn't seem to appreciate the nuances of the philosophical account of the emotions that is unpacked in ITK drawing on scholars like Merleau-Ponty, Mark Johnson, Iain McGilchrist, Bob Roberts and relevant work in neuroscience. (One can find further exploration of a nuanced account of emotion in my earlier book, Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy). She also seems to confuse my (Burkean) sense of the "sentimental" (also per David Brooks) as if this was some kind of Oprah-fied Hallmarkism and the stuff of Nicholas Sparks' movies--when, in fact, this is precisely what I criticize.

That I could be guilty of extoling "emotion-driven Christian liturgy" is almost laughable: you should come to my church!

No Guarantees

In what she takes to be opposition to my project, Guidero emphasizes that "liturgical formation does not guarantee virtue formation."

But where do I ever make claims about such a "guarantee?"  I reject any sort of liturgical determinism (just as Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu also reject determinism, as I note in ITK).  And already in DTK, I noted the limits of liturgical formation.  Consider, for example, an important footnote on p. 208:

I suggest that my account of secular liturgies might be able to provide a framework for explaining why the practices of Christian worship don’t seem to transform those who participate in them. For instance, I can think of a congregation gathering week in and week out for historic, intentional Christian worship that includes all the elements discussed here; and yet, from the perspective of shalom, some of its parishioners are unapologetic and public participants in some of the most egregious systemic injustices. Does that falsify my claims here? I don’t think so, at least not necessarily. Rather, we will need a more nuanced account of how some liturgies trump others; in this case, we could suggest that though these parishioners participate in Christian worship, their participation in other secular liturgies effectively trumps the practices of Christian worship. Such a line of investigation might also require that we attend to empirical realities, drawing on a theologically informed psychology, sociology, and ethnography.

Furthermore, I conclude ITK with an entire section emphasizing the importance of reflection and liturgical catechesis, inviting worshipers to think about what they're doing when they worship (pp. 187-189).  There, drawing on the wisdom of my friend John Witvliet, I explicitly name and reject the kind of liturgical superstition that Guidero attributes to me.

Liturgies from Heaven?

I'm not quite sure what to make of Guidero's section, "Who Decides?," but she seems to attribute to me some kind of traditionalism as if I think there is "one, true" Christian liturgy that was handed down from heaven to...who?  Cranmer? Calvin? Bob Webber?  I'm not sure because, simply, I don't hold this view.

If some people are prone to liturgical positivism and traditionalism, what does that have to do with me?  I explicitly reject this kind of static, "deposit" model of Christian liturgy, even though I do argue for a core, catholic liturgical inheritance that is the accrued wisdom of the body of Christ, led by the Spirit over the course of history (see esp. ITK, pp. 169-171).  But I also explicitly note that this does not preclude innovation in liturgical forms (p. 174n.61):

This is not to say that there is no room for innovation or improvisation in Christian worship or that affirming the formative wisdom of historic Christian worship requires merely repeating status quo forms. The point is rather that improvisations and innovations of worship form need to be attentive to the narrative arc of the form and the unique “incarnate significance” of worship practices. Innovations that are “faithful” will preserve the plot of that narrative arc and deepen the imaginative impact of worship. Unfaithful and unhelpful innovations will be developments that are detrimental to the imaginative coherence of worship.

Was there some other way I could have said that so Guidero could hear it?

Conclusion

These notes still don't quite capture the gulf between the positions she ascribes to me and those I actually argue for in DTK and ITK.  To do so would be to rewrite those books.  The best I can do is invite you to read the books carefully (even if Guidero didn't) and assess for yourself.

Do we need more than liturgy?  Absolutely.  In fact, I wrote a book called Desiring the Kingdom that concluded with the same point.  And that we need nothing less.

On "Courage" in the (Christian) Academy

[a few thoughts composed on my iPhone on the shore of Little Platte Lake]

Someone has said that academic squabbles are so nasty only because they are so unimportant. Nonetheless, many academics like to see themselves as "courageous"--exhibiting intellectual heroism, taking stands that are unpopular, leading to some kind of "martyrdom."  This is the kind of "courage" you claim when you've dodged the draft and type with hands never blemished by a callous. 

This self-understanding of academic "courage" takes specific forms among Christian scholars, and is perhaps ramped up by adding religious stakes to the mix. Again, the scholar likes to imagine himself or herself as "courageous" for saying unpopular things, for speaking truth to power, for questioning the status quo. 

There are "progressive" versions of this in which the courageous scholar-martyr is marginalized by evangelicalism for taking unpopular stands that are nonetheless supported by "science" or "justice" or "democracy" or "experience" or what have you. As a result s/he is critcized, bullied, rejected, ostracized, ignored, excluded, etc. But the courageous scholar is willing to endure such sacrifices for the sake of Truth, Justice, Science, Progress, Diversity, etc. 

But progressives don't have the corner on the courage market. There are conservative Christian scholars who tell themselves the same story: they are willing to risk marginalization, exclusion, derision, even appearing the fool in order to stand up for The Truth against academic trends, intellectual fads, and the temptations that roll into the university under the guise of Progress.

But when one looks at these scenarios more closely, I think one will see that, in fact, neither is risking very much. Those "courageous" progressives don't really value the opinions or affirmations of conservative evangelicalism anyway. What they really value, long for, and try to curry is the favor of "the Enlightened"--whether that's the mainstream academy or the progressive chattering class who police our cultural mores of tolerance. Sure, these "courageous" progressives will take fire from conservative evangelicals--but that's not a loss or sacrifice for them. Indeed, their own self-understanding is fueled by such criticism.  In other words, these stands don't take "courage" at all; they don't stand to lose anything with those they truly value.

Similarly, "courageous" conservatives who "stand up" to the progressive academy aren't putting much at risk because that's not where they look for validation and it's not where their professional identities are invested. They are usually "populists" (in a fairly technical sense of the word) whose professional lives are much more closely tethered to the church and popular opinion.  And in those sectors, "standing up to" the academy isn't a risk at all--it's a way to win praise. When your so-called contrarian stands win favor from those you value most...well, it's hard to see how "courage" applies. 

But here's what we don't often see: Christian scholars who have vested their professional lives in the mainstream academy willing to take stands that would be unpopular at the MLA or APA or AAR. Conversely, we don't see many conservative scholars willing to defend positions that would jeapordize their favored status with popular evangelicalism. 

Now both of those options would require courage.

O.K. Bouwsma on philosophers and philosophy

O.K. Bouwsma, a graduate of Calvin College's philosophy department, was a longtime professor of philosophy at the University of Nebraska and, later, the University of Texas.  He is one of four presidents of the American Philosophical Association who was an alumnus of our department here at Calvin.  He was also one of the first U.S. interpreters of Wittgenstein and influenced students like Norman Malcolm who went on to play a significant role in the reception of Wittgenstein in North America.

I was recently re-reading one of Bouwsma's classics, a little review essay on Wittgenstein's Blue Book that first appeared in the Journal of Philosophy in 1961.  It includes one of my favorite passages of philosophy ever, and makes me think being a student of Bouwsma must have been spell-binding:

I have been trying in these paragraphs to represent a certain source of misunderstanding, an obstacle to misunderstanding.  It may also be represented in this way: Philosophers are people who investigate what sorts of things there are in the universe.  They are, of course, scrupulous in these investigations beyond the scrupulosity of any other investigator.  They stand at the gate and wait, fearing to tread where angels rush in. And what do they ask? They ask questions such as: Are there angels, universals, pure possibilities, uncrusted possibilities, possibilities with a little mud on them, fairies, creatures made of beautiful smoke, relations, the Lost Atlantis, real equality among tooth-picks, sense-data, ghosts, selves in prison with two feet, everlasting shoe-makers, heaven, thinking horses, pure uncontaminated acts, absolutely independent tables, the minds of stars, the spirits of an age, perfect circles, the geometrical point of a joke, the devil, floating impressions, categorical don’ts, one simple called Simon, perspectives waiting to take their places as the penny turns, gods, any ding-dong an sich with a bell so one can find it in the dark, trees, houses, and mountains of the mind, itches of necessary connection, two impossibilities before breakfast, blue ideas, enghosted pieces of furniture, etc. 

 And if now anyone comes to the reading of this book [Wittgenstein’s Blue Book] expecting the author, for instance, to say: “Yes, yes, God exists,” and then to show him a new and knock-out proof that is guaranteed for a thousand years or to help him to an old one, long buried in a Kant heap, but now freshly washed and polished, well, the author is more likely to remind him that thought Nietzsche some years ago read an obituary notice to the effect that God is dead, he, the author, had not even heard that God was sick.  “The living God!”  And as for inventing any new apriori synthetic, a new drug to cure this or that, or any and all, sorts of incertitude, though he seems at one time to have been interested in inventing a new type of airplane propeller and showed a keen interest in all sorts of gadgets, a milk bottle, for instance, from which with the use of a spoon, one could pour off the cream—“Now, there’s America for you!”—this particular form of invention he seems not to have been interested in.  He was more inclined to recommend a few old home remedies and common herbs, garden variety simples which he was insistent one should not confuse.  And as for those readers in general who want answers to their questions and who, if they already have answers, want better reasons, the author givens neither better reasons for the old answers nor any answers, and those readers who keep their questions may be considered either fortunate or unfortunate as the case may be. 

I have tried to show how it is that this book should disappoint some readers, supposed that they had expectations in reading it.  I have suggested that the reason why such readers have such expectations is that it is, or is read as, a book in philosophy.  And it is a book of philosophy, surely?  Well, it is and it isn’t.