Luke University

Friday, February 29, 2008 Luke chapter 20 could be subtitled "Christ among the academics," especially religious academics. Like anyone claiming religious truth today, the accusation from the worldly wise - as from the Sophistichristians - is, "Who is it that gave you this authority" (20:2)? In other words, "How dare you traffic in metanarratives?"

Realizing that the perpetual questioning of authority is itself a uniquely oppressive authority (Chesterton's reply to Nietzsche's "Question authority" was "Say's who?"), Christ throws in a wrench to stall the scribal gears. Lacking the metaphysical guts to answer a simple question - whether John's baptism was from God or man - the religious academics give up. Christ thereby proves to the crowd that their chief teachers, by virtue of their supreme sophistication, have become incapable of making any pronouncements at all. We imagine Christ smiling as he says, "Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things" (20:8). How can you have a conversation with someone who is unable to speak?

Example: Are you a believer or not M. Derrida? Sorry, I'm far too sophisticated to answer that, and anyone who can is "naïve." (Hear it in his own words here.)

Luke 20 continues. After an infuriating parable, the academics send in their big guns, "spies who pretended to be honest" (20:20). Here are those who claim to honor the "richness of the faith heritage" for its narrative value, the ones for whom aesthetics trump truth. Christ, however, knows their hearts. The spies' attempt at entrapment leads to that most brilliant answer, "Render unto Caesar...", but no matter. In Luke 23:2, they'll simply lie about what he said anyway to get him killed.

Next, the Sadducees pipe in with a logical circus trick intended to show literal belief in the resurrection to be ridiculous. "What about the legend of the septupletly wedded wife?" These are the materialists, who will always be with us. Christ dismantles the threat only to show that yes, he actually believes in real resurrections (20:34-38). Everyone's impressed, but the show goes on.

Christ fires back with his own question, leaving them hanging for an answer. "What do you make of Psalm 110:1?" I too, Christ seems to be suggesting, am familiar with the baffling complexity of Scripture, but it doesn't lead me to worship the goddess of ambiguity, and her consort, the lord of liquidity. Familiarity with the complexities of Scripture does not leave one without an answer: They're looking at the answer.

Christ closes his speech to the religious academics - who are too sophisticated for simple belief, who know so many options that they can't pick one - with yet another possibility that they're unprepared to take seriously: Outright condemnation (20:45-7).

Today, one never quite know where the Sophistichristians will arise. Who would have expected them in self-professedly Evangelical circles and publications, but there they so frequently appear. And lo, in a frankly feminist medieval history text, one finds this from historian Barbara Newman:

Finally, and most controversially, I believe that religious experience reveals the traces, however opaquely filtered, of a real and transcendent object. This is not to exclude the possibilities of self-deception and deliberate fraud, both common in medieval Christendom as in all societies where religion is a hegemonic force... Nevertheless, I assert this conviction to clarify my theoretical stance and to overthrow the last bastion of reductionism. To leave a space for transcendence means to allow for the possibility that, when historical subjects assert religious belief or experience as the motive of their actions, they may at times be telling the truth.... It was not because of their commitment to feminism, self-empowerment, subversion, sexuality, or "the body" that [medieval woman] struggled and won their voices; it was because of their commitment to God.

While the Sophistichristians can't afford such transparency, a secular historian - no doubt at significant personal cost - can? I suppose such clarity of prose makes Newman, at least for M. Derrida, a bit dense. To the Christ of Luke, I imagine it would make her luminous. "I tell you, I have not found such great faith even in Israel" (Luke 7:9)!

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References
From Virile Woman to WomanChrist (pp. 16-17, and 246).
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credit where it's due

Friday, February 22, 2008 I'm inventing a blog award for unbridled excellence. One time only, and the winner is in: Stuff White People Like. (If you already know about it, oh well.) The posts may sting a little, which is why they're particularly appropriate for Lent.

Don't miss NPR, Mac, Apologies, Arrested Development, DailyShow/Colbert , Prius, Knowing what's best for poor people, Recycling, and so much more. Irony was one of my favorites, but one must admit the commenter who said "nothing is more ironic than stuffwhitepeoplelike" has a point. Other comments aren't nearly so edifying.

While the mockery (let's face it) is earned, how does one escape the scourge? The site, it seems to me, has a lot to do with what we white people - indeed, any people - become when we lose the gospel - that most reliable tool for relentless self-criticism, that trusty crowbar for prying oneself from the world.

Then again, on Sunday mornings, there's always the Times.
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last night's eclipse

Thursday, February 21, 2008
I'm not gonna lie, I was proud of this. Not perfect, but it took me forever. In the meantime I'll be listening to TWIP. Here are some buildup shots.

Best viewed after reading D.W.'s helpful post.
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Tuesday, February 19, 2008 I went to buy some brown shoes yesterday, but was told that they wouldn't go with charcoal pants, so I didn't buy them. Upon my return home my wife simply guffawed. Today she sends me this (you may need to skip the ad).

Case closed.
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Elephant? What Elephant?

Monday, February 18, 2008
Now that we're all Tractarians, engaging in practices that would horrify the more principled minds of the Reformed tradition, one can be forgiven for wondering whether Protestant theology can ever catch up with current practice. What would Increase Mather think of Evangelical Lent? I'm a big fan of such developments, but at best, we're playing Catholic better than many Catholics do. At worst, we're just playing Catholic.

The "Ancient/Future" inclination isn't just a mood (those for whom it is simply aren't serious), but it actually leads somewhere. Small wonder that those at the forefront of the Bob Webber-initiated Evangelical incline towards tradition often end up actually Catholic. The anxiety this generates perhaps explains the defensive undertone to Chris Armstrong's helpful cover story, which besides referring to Catholicism and Orthodoxy as "the other two great confessions," contains this astonishing statement: "in short, the search for historic roots can and should lead not to conversion..." (emphasis added).

Such underlying anxiety might also explain why Betty Smartt Carter would review Son of a Preacher Man without even mentioning that in it, Franky becomes Orthodox; or why Alan Jacobs would mention In the Ruins while sidestepping its belated appendix; or why such a careful thinker as Mouw would write as he did.

I'm not blaming these thinkers as much as commiserating with them. It's not easy when the Anglican house where such tensions are normally entertained is on fire. The recent quality and quantity of conversions to Catholicism or Orthodoxy are among the more serious challenges American Protestantism has ever had to face: For rather than threatening the best Protestant principles, this opponent fulfills them.
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Thursday, February 14, 2008 Tradition demands that today, I link to this. Who am I to question tradition?
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Keeping Marxism alive

Tuesday, February 12, 2008 Observing Marxism in the academy, one can't help think that Terry Eagleton was right: "It looked as though what had started life as an underground movement among dockers and factory workers had turned into a mildly interesting way of analyzing Wuthering Heights."

But why give up so easily? Paul VI, in a gutsy lecture in Nazareth at the height of the Cold War (1964), once ruminated on the nature of work. Christ's hidden life of labor at Nazareth allows even the ordinary events of our workdays to be consecrated.

Nazareth, home of the "Carpenter's Son," in you I would choose to understand and proclaim the severe and redeeming law of human work... I want to greet all the workers of the world, holding up to them their great pattern, their brother who is God (533).

To the humanist, the Christian plays the card that God is human. To the Marxist, the Christian plays the card that this human was a worker. The humanist and Marxist then leave the table insisting that such cards shouldn't be in the deck, leaving the Christian with the responsibility of stewarding the chips they left behind.

I'm a free market fan, but it still needs be said: Workers of the world - worship!
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evolution as a pick up line?

Monday, February 11, 2008 I finally got around to listening to Alvin Plantinga's torpedo to naturalism (downloadable here), where he takes a doubt toyed with by the later Darwin, and shows it to be a weapon, not a toy.

In short, the argument is that there may be apparent, surface discontinuities between theism and science, but these overlie much deeper, systemic continuities (i.e. the trustworthiness of knowledge). Conversely, there may be apparent, surface continuities between naturalism and science, but these overlie much deeper systemic discontinuities (i.e. the untrustworthiness of knowledge). If, as a naturalist would argue, our cognitive faculties are merely a product of evolutionary drives (concatenations of the mating urge), what possible trust can we put in them to be reliable when it comes to abstract scientific questions? If materialism is true, are not "arguments" one more verbal cocktail intended to propagate the species? What matters, from a naturalist's perspective, is survival, not scientific accuracy.

On the contrary, Plantinga shows evolutionary theory to be something the theist is in best position to affirm. Of course, this doesn't mean that secular scientists can't continue to do good work, only that that if such scientists insist on the ideology of naturalism, their conclusions will be self-referentially incoherent.

Next thing you know someone will write a respected book about how the entire project of reason itself, and hence science, is not a product of the supposed Age of Reason, but that it lies on a theological foundation secured in the Middle Ages, without which the Age of Reason would have been impossible. Oh wait, that already happened.
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The Inhellectual

Wednesday, February 06, 2008
I was walking through the Met with another academic this weekend, and we encountered the above from the school of Bosch, c. 1550. Christ is barging down the gates of hell, and as soon as he crosses that ravine, he will encounter an intellectual. To get ahead this one has become merely a head. He even has a few disciples, subservient peons to serve as stands for his all important book. The image served as a fine warning to both of us.

Of course, there will probably be many scholars in heaven as well, but today is Ash Wednesday.
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'48/'08

Sunday, February 03, 2008

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