MidMo?

I've remarked before that many of the things I say in this blog could get me beat up by my college self. Please don't tell him especially about the following - because I have been particularly impressed by what that one time symbol of oppressive Evangelical authority Duane Litfin has had to say about Christians in higher education:

"In communicating with his or her secular colleagues, what the Christian scholar is about, to use Lewis's terms, is a 'kind of transposition or adaptation from a richer to a poorer medium,' that is, a transposition from a fuller Christ-centered understanding that is charged with significance, to the secularist's more circumscribed understanding that may be strong on facts but weak on meaning" (spring '05).

Certainly that goes for Christians in a "secular" University, but how sad that such transposition is a skill Seminarians sometimes need develop as well.

But here's my favorite:

"What we in Christian higher education must articulate - precisely because it is so profoundly entailed in biblical Christianity - is a view of knowledge which avoids the pitfalls of both modernity and postmodernity. It refuses to capitulate to modernity's radical 'objectivist, disinterested onlooker conception of knowing' with its false claims to human certainty; but it also refuses to succumb to the radical subjectivism or perspectivism of postmodernity, with its equally bogus claims of humility.

A biblical stance requires something between these two extremes. We can make no claims of mastery or of an exhaustive, God-like knowing of anything. But neither should we relinquish all claims to genuine knowledge or truth. We seek instead the balance of that historic Christian understanding of knowledge which furnishes us not with 'certainty,' but with confidence; not 'sight,' but a genuine knowing that some things are so because God has disclosed them to us, and has made us creatures such that we are able to some degree to apprehend truly that disclosure, whether from revelation or through our own discovery" (winter '06).

Neither modern nor postmodern? I suppose it's too late now to halt Evangelical/Emergent infighting. But were it possible, those two paragraphs would make a nice recipe for a truce.

Adjective-Orthodoxy

To puzzled onlookers, allow me to explain: Adjective-orthodoxies are the things that we Protestants conjure up when we're not willing, for a variety of reasons, to become actually Orthodox. And with that confession, here is a recent turn of this particular inter-Protestant debate from heavyweight theologian Leithart:

"The relocation of Christian faith and orthodoxy from the external creeds and practices of the church to the inner heart is one of the characteristic moves of modernized Christianity... To the extent that McLaren internalizes faith, to that extent he's still laboring under the constraints of modernity."

In light of that, I'd like to see a comparison of Brian McLaren's Generous Orthodoxy with Tom Oden's Paleo-Orthodoxy. Though neither author seeks to merely regurgitate the Neo-Orthodoxy of the 1950's, I wonder, are these two later expressions of orthodoxy opposed? If so, which wells go deeper, McLaren's or Oden's?

Because it is less familiar at least in the circles I run in, here are a few nuggets from Oden's The Rebirth of Orthodoxy, which charts his vision for the robustly ecumenical, Paleo-Orthodox future:

On Diversity
"The modern idea of diversity is less diverse than the ancient ecumenical idea of oecumene. The classic concept of oecumene (universal, the whole world) spans many generations - even millenia - while the modern idea of diversity spans but a single century (or more likely only a slice of that - one generation, or one subset of one generation) (115).

On Boundaries
A center without a circumference is just a dot, nothing more. It is the circumference that marks the boundary of the circle. To eliminate the boundary is to eliminate the circle itself. The circle of faith cannot identify its center without recognizing its perimeter (131).

On Might Makes Right
Is Orthodoxy merely the skewed memory of [economic and political] winners?... [That] supposition reflects[s] a standard sophomore classroom objection to orthodoxy. The most familiar form of that argument is the Marxist or social-location argument [and] Vincent of Lerins provided [its] classic answer: the argument from martyrdom. As Vincent noted, it is self-evident that the martyrs had no economic interest. Most had already given their fortune to the poor, so they had no material wealth to risk.

The fourth century Arians lived by collusion with political oppressors. They had plenty of intellectuals and power manipulators on their side, while orthodoxy had to be defeneded largely by nonscholars and laypeople, by modest men and woment of no means, by lowly persons who had no training or special expertise but understood their lives in Christ. The power of numbers and votes in those days was clearly on the side of the Arians....

Nor is Athanasius justly pigeonholed as a winner - exiled a half-dozen times and chased all over the Mediterranean world... John Chrysostom suffered exile and death in political oblivion. Jerome lost his position in Rome and went to the far country of Palestine to live the monastic life... In what conceivable economic or political sense was Anthony of the Desert a winner? Or Mother Theodora? Or blind Didymus? How did Polycarp or Felicitas or Perpetua or Cyprian or Ignatius 'win'? The died horribly for their faith.

The 'winner-loser' oversimplification wrongly applies a competitive sports metaphor to complex historical processes (37-39).

On Evangelical Starvation
In their desire to have no text but scripture, evangelicals have tended to lose sight of the ways the Spirit has worked through the history of exegesis to being the Word of scripture to reception. Prematurely assuming that ancient patristic sources must be anti-scriptural rather than confirming scripture, they have eschewed patristic nourishment, leaving unsatisfied their hunger for roots - a hunger that has grown since the days of Luther, Calvin, and Wesley, who knew the writings of the church fathers well... (65).

On Mainline Establishment
"The religious community that fastens itself parasitically on the latest movement in modern thought does not easily survive the collapse of that movement. When its host is dead, the parasite loses its noursihment. As modernity collapses before our eyes, those who think of themselves as most up to date are being abruptly outdated. They are the last to recognize the rebirth of orthodoxy" (155).

It's quite the book, and judging from the contributers, so is the related collection of essays on Paleo-Orthodoxy dedicated to Tom Oden. But don't forget, there's always Orthodoxy straight-up as well.

From Russia with Love

Tuesday it was off to New York, or Neah Iorkee as my Modern Greek teacher says it's pronounced. And as it was the first day of the transit strike I enjoyed a semi-deserted city while delighting in the occupational hazard of having to see exhibits before they move.

Folks, the Cold War is definitely over (you heard it here first). This I know from the fact that both Russia and the once Soviet-blocked Czechoslovakia are strutting their cultural stuff for all to see. It's nice to experience their national treasures instead of their nuclear warheads.

Russia
Because the trajectory of Russian art basically parallels that of "Western" art, it provides a refreshing twist on the tired art historical canon while still imparting similar lessons. First came the icons, and it was worth the trip alone to see a real Andrei Rublev... but rather than submit icon writing to the Western cult of the artist as I did in that last sentence, better yet was seeing one of two genuine copies of the famous Madonna of Vladimir, traveling outside of Russia for the very first time.

Moving chronologically with the exhibit, next came Peter the Great's inferiority complex where, in the original perestroika, he tried to be Paris. But because imitation is boring... fast forward a century to when in the person of Vasily Perov, Russia produced her own Courbet (cf. this with this). Perov also gave us an enduring portrait of Dostoevsky (not at the exhibit), but my favorite was this. Though perhaps an exaggeration, still it may accurately reflect the kind of decadent Christian culture that led eventually to Lenin. It wouldn't be the first time that the poor behavior of the people of God contributed to a disaster of epic proportion.

Next came the Wanderers, the Russian equivalent to Romanticism, and the exhibit ended with some moderns. But unfortunately everyone's favorite Russian painting, Roses for Stalin, wasn't there.

Prague and Van Gogh
I didn't get to do Prague on my Grand Tour this summer, but that's alright because Prague came to me (the world has yet to learn). Though some may find it silly that so much of the artifacts in the Prague exhibit were made to house relics - how is that sillier than the scores of crowds crawling over one another to see an etch that was but a preparatory drawing for a painting by Van Gogh? Answer that to my satisfaction and I'll send you a dollar in the mail (sorry, one winner only).

Not that I'm against Vincent (see # 9). He is the subject of my favorite song, and I even listened to Kevin Bacon's (!?) Met-sponsored reading of the letters to Theo. But though some (actually, one in particular) of the drawings were so good they elicited a gasp, still I find the cult of the saints much less of a stretch than the cult of the artist. Van Gogh himself, as Kathleen Powers Erickson's book has explored, was interested throughout his entire career, in a very different kind of God.

Though the Prague exhibit was primarily Catholic, I left convinced that the Protestant case for art only gets stronger. Not only to we have the chief Reformer on record for art, but the exhibit explained that a century before him Prague's proto-Reformer Jan Huss made similar defenses of images against his more radical followers.

MOBIA
The way most museums are laid out, and the way many art historians speak today, you'd think that religious painting was phased out after the Enlightenment. I've even heard respected art historians infer as much. With such a perspective (or lack thereof), it's hard to make sense of or this journal or this organization... so they often just get ignored. And while sorry to disappoint, as I've mentioned before, religious painting is experiencing a sort of rinascimento right there in Neah Iorkee.

And though I just missed the Next Generation exhibition at the MOBIA, and least I was glad to see the contributors have been collected in this book for future reference.

Finally, Merry Christmas everyone... especially to those of you who read this far. And to avoid that Dec. 26th let-down feeling, remember, it's a season, not a day.

Christmas War(s)

We've all heard a lot about the "pagan" origins of Christmas. This is of course not as much scandalous as it is true. But I think it fair to say that Christmas was the result of a strategic appropriation by Christians (for which Bede gives us a clear record) rather than hostile infiltration by pagans. Pre-Christian cults such as that of Isis and Bacchus didn't just roll over and play dead. They had to be intelligently subverted, in the same way that other forces try to intelligently subvert what remains of Christian culture today (see below).

But when it comes to really understanding current Christmas traditions, the key may not be as much the ancient pagan past than the recent Victorian one. It seems the War on Christmas didn't start with the ACLU but with Reformed Protestants, who nixed it because it smacked not of paganism, but popery. In England Puritans outlawed it under Cromwell, a prohibition which continued in Boston, where from 1659-81 one could be fined for its celebration. Thanks to England's Oxford Movement however there was the nineteenth century Victorian reappropriation, which these United States (now sufficiently individuated from the motherland) were prepared to pick up on.

Perhaps America's cozying up to Christmas may also have had something to do with the literal war on Christmas of 1776. German Lutherans were of course much less priggish than the Reformed about things smacking of popery, and more than one historian has surmised that the Teutonic tradition of robust Christmas celebration may have led to Hessian mercenaries being easily overcome after Washington's crossing. Should this be true, then our country is the happy result of Christmas hangovers.

Aroma

Thanks to the amusing network of friends surrounding tomtastic, I found myself browsing through Chuck Norris facts, and came across a few with an Advent theme:

"Chuck Norris was the fourth Wiseman. He brought baby Jesus the gift of 'beard'. Jesus wore it proudly... The other Wise men, jealous of Jesus' obvious gift favoritism, used their combined influence to have Chuck omitted from the Bible. Shortly after all three died of roundhouse kick related deaths."

Actually that was more of an Epiphany-theme. The Advent one is

"Chuck Norris doesn't sleep. He waits."

Tonight I am going to try to use that as a semi-amusing Youth Group Lock-In talk segue to what Advent is really all about. It's a rhetorical hook that I figure has a 25% chance of succeeding.

Advent is of course about Christ's coming in the flesh, but also about his less popular future coming in glory. Hard to believe? Perhaps. But I've felt less and less crazy about believing that Jesus actually will show up one day upon realizing that the common objections are dealt with not by theologians "accommodating the delay of the Parousia" centuries after Christ didn't come as many expected, but right there within Scripture itself. But the real kicker is that whether or not Christ appears in our lifetime (for which the chances are relatively slim), we will all experience what is effectively the Second Coming of Christ for each of us personally on the day that we die (for which the chances are relatively high).

I don't think our culture has quite forgotten this. Somewhere deep in the tomes of Karl Barth's Dogmatics I remember him referencing a debate about the secularization of Europe in which the vestiges of Christianity were referred to as "an aroma in an empty bottle," the empty bottle being a de-Christianized Europe, and the aroma being whatever vague hints of the Christian past remained. Heavyweight theologian Carl Braaten recently used the language as well to describe the American scene:

"Our pastors and laity are being deceived by a lot of pietistic aroma, but the bottle is empty."

One can smell this aroma quite distinctly in, for example, The Christmas Carol which Denise and I got to see at McCarter thanks to the generosity of friends. Though I can imagine someone arguing it isn't, Dickens' serial/book/play/movie is impossible without Christianity. At one point in the play (at least as performed at McCarter) Scrooge actually prays out loud to "the Spirit of Christmas" to help him change. In another era that was called repentance. [Theological digression: It seems Scrooge is a Modalist: The generic "Spirit of Christmas" lurks behind its three manifestations: The Spirits of Christmas past, present and future.]

But when judgment becomes the threats of "Spirit of Christmas future" to let Tiny Tim go turkeyless, and when the Holy Spirit becomes the "Spirit of Christmas" who can help us all change by infusing the blessed sacrament of jolly good cheer, then what we have is the "aroma in an empty bottle." I couldn't help thinking I had heard a very similar story before. Except the ending isn't so happy - as the ending very well may not be for many of us.

And what about Santa Claus? I am sure most of the kids in my Youth Group don't believe in Santa Claus, but I will attempt to persuade them to believe that there actually is someone who is making a list and checking it twice and will one day reward us, or not. Though that aroma tells us of a mere lump of coal, the real thing tells us of a lake of fire. Thought the aroma tells of a few cool toys, the real thing tells of an eternal crown of glory. Though in the minds of most kids Santa will go, Christ endures as the deep red Chianti that can survive one's intellectual maturation without evaporating.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for Dickens and Santa (and for that matter, Chuck Norris). They can serve as great preparations for the truth a la Narnia - and knowing the truth behind them makes them all the richer. War on Christmas? It's hard to get too worried about it when what is being warred against is often just a whiff.

The Chronicles of Nausea

Aslan's no lion - he's a Republican fascist. That's just one of several things I learned from reading Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee's review of the first film installment of Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia... woops! I mean Nausea. She warns "unbelievers" to carry a sick bag with them when they see it because of the religious significance.

Another idea might be to just not see it. But I guess Ms. Toynbee was forced to. And considering she said the movie is "deeply faithful to the book's own arm-twisting emotional call to believers," I suppose she was forced to read the book as well, and forced to come to Christian conclusions about it. With all that forcing, one might suspect she has "issues," but one doesn't need to. She tells us:

"Every one of those thorns, the nuns used to tell my mother, is hammered into Jesus's holy head every day that you don't eat your greens or say your prayers when you are told."

Because Narnia awakens such unpleasant Toynbee family memories, Polly recommends as an alternative the fellow Lewis-despiser Philip Pullman's "marvelously secular trilogy His Dark Materials." Fear not Polly, you too will have your movie soon enough.

But in the meantime, she's disgruntled with her fellow Guardian reviewer Peter Bradshaw who dared to like this one. Keep in mind, this guy is actually their film reviewer, and he gave The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe five stars. Writes Bradshaw,

"There will be many adults like me, who after loving the book as children went through a long post-adolescent phase of hysterically repudiating it after the Christian-humanist parable was explained. For me, it is a phase that this movie has definitively brought to an end."

The AOL keyword there is "adult." Being an adult means forsaking the turbulent waters of post-adolescent hysterical repudiation for the harbor of rational reflection. It means mother's issues are no longer your own. And best of all, it means you can listen to perspectives that differ from your own without throwing up.

Alas, were I a better Christian I would read things like Polly's review and rather than get snippy, grieve for the inadequate witness to the real Aslan that must have somehow led to her visceral reactions to all things Christian. Perhaps I should pray for Polly, instead of pegging her which is so much easier to do.

I'm getting there. In the meantime, adulthood beckons us all.

The Trial Continues

...that is, postmodernity's endless one.

Have Christians spent too much time critiquing postmodernity? Yes. Can you blame us? Well, it's kinda fun. But I'll admit it takes energy better spent both speaking and living the Gospel, especially considering those outside the church are often much better at critiquing postmodernity than Christians are. I've mentioned several before, but this time, here come the Marxists, with a rhythm of argument that may sound familiar:

"Postmodernist culture has produced a rich, bold, exhilarating body of work across the whole span of the arts, and has generated more than its fair share of execrable kitsch. It has pulled the rug out from beneath a number of complacent certainties, pried open some paranoid totalities, tainted some jealously guarded purities, bent some oppressive norms, and shaken some rather solid-looking foundations. It has also tended to surrender to a politically paralyzing skepticism, a flashy populism, a full-blooded moral relativism, and a brand of sophism for which, since all conventions are arbitrary anyway, we might as well conform to those of the Free World. In pulling the rug out from under the certainties of its political opponents, this postmodern culture has often enough pulled it out from under itself too, leaving itself with no more reason why we should resist fascism than the feebly pragmatic plea that fascism is not the way we do things in Sussex or Sacramento.

"Postmodernism has a quick eye for irony; but there is one irony above all that seems to have escaped it... In a powerfully estranging gesture [the revolutions of Eastern Europe have] expose[d] postmodernism as the ideology of a peculiarly jaded, defeatist wing of the liberal-capitalist intelligentsia, which has mistaken its own very local difficulties for a universal human condition in exactly the manner of the universality ideologies it denounces" (25).

"The irony of post-modernism is that while purporting to have transcended modernity, it abandons from the start all hope of transcending capitalism itself and entering a post-capitalist era. Postmodernist theory is therefore easily absorbed within the dominant cultural frame and has given rise recently to texts such as Postmodern Marketing, which attempts to utilize the insights of thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudillard to market goods within a capitalist economy" (193).

(By the way, if you too are interested in "transcending" capitalism, I know of a writer who will get you there much quicker than Karl Marx.)

I can appreciate Christians who call themselves postmodern in order to "reach this generation" with the Gospel. But considering what may be this generation's increasing disillusionment with postmodernity, perhaps one should consider being post-postmodern for exactly the same reason.

therapeurocracy

Looks like Kristina, a friend of mine from Seminary, got published. It's one of those funny-at-first-but-upon-reflection-quite-sad bits.

My only critique is she didn't use the word "therapeurocracy."

Atheist, Agnostic, Christian

Atheist or agnostic I am not. Why? Among other reasons, because neither perspective, it seems to me, makes the best sense of reality; I have therefore strapped myself to the church's mast that I might refuse such siren songs.

Do atheists and agnostics still have good insights to offer? Of course, insights which - should they be true - Christianity can ably absorb.

"The very nature of a true philosophy relatively to other systems is to be polemical, eclectic, unitive: Christianity was polemical; it could not but be eclectic; but was it also unitive? Had it the power, while keeping its own identity, of absorbing its antagonists, as Aaron's rod, according to St. Jerome's illustration, devoured the rods of the sorcerers of Egypt" (Chp. 8)?

Why yes, Mr. Newman. Christianity did so absorb the insights of other philosophies and faiths - and still does.

And while I tried to make a case below that any truth in atheism is in fact absorbed by the Christian faith, I'd thought I'd do the same (again) for agnosticism. Wrote Patrick Henry,

"Things do not proceed [in orthodox Christianity] in an uncluttered, straightforward way. On the contrary, argument is constantly getting tripped up in the tangled underbrush of paradox, and it might almost be a general rubric for oikonomeia [God's dealing with creation] that any assertion which forces the mind out beyond what it would normally accept is probably true" (Church History, vol. 45, No.1 p. 23).

Example?

"He who cannot be contained is confined within the Virgin's womb; he who is beyond all quantity becomes three cubits high; he whose position cannot be designated stands and sits and reclines; he who is beyond all place is laid in a manger; he who is before all time reaches the age of twelve; he who is without form is seen in the form of a man; he who is incorporeal takes a body and says to his disciples: 'Take, eat, this is my body'" (Patrologia Graeca 99.332B)

That brilliant quote from St. Theodore (translated by Henry). Can anyone really understand the mystery that the Advent season prepares us to celebrate? Not if you're a Christian - you can only confess and adore a mystery beyond knowledge. Therefore perhaps only a Christian can be a genuine agnostic (lit. without knowledge); while at the same time, possessing the greatest knowledge of all.

Aaron's rod - it's still hungry. Happy Advent everybody.