What is happening to my neatly (yes, that was The Voice) polarized world (yes, that was Jackson)?

Thinking Alone

Curiously, one can imagine someone today remarking along these lines,

"Christianity I can get, but Derrida and Levinas are blowing my mind."

Conversely, I read the following statement in a recent letter from a friend:

"Derrida and Levinas I can get, and on and on, but this election bit blows my mind."

I will remember this statement, because as complex as Levinas and Derrida may be, genuine Christianity (most especially the doctrine of election) will always be infinitely more difficult to grasp, and the fact that my friend feels his mind being stretched beyond capacity in regard to the doctrine of election is a signal that it may in fact be genuine Christianity that he is encountering. For Christianity has always been, in a way, the fellowship of those who don't understand.

Continue...
For example, a person who claims to know that Christ was a merely a great teacher has Christ understood, but a Christian who claims the same man was and is God has surrendered all hope for strictly "rational" attainment, and is consigned to a lifetime, nay, an eternity of perpetual wonder at just what that assertion entails.

Likewise, if one wants to understand the Trinity one will need speak with Arius, for a Christian can't help you - the best we can do is confess and adore. Should one desire to fathom the way the human and divine natures co-relate in Jesus, Eutyches and Nestorius can provide clear cut "answers," but a Christian cannot - the best we can do is believe and worship. If one seeks to comprehend the Christian moral life - Pelagius is your man; but Augustine could never provide a satisfying "explanation," nor can a Christian - all we can do is depend and obey. Arius, Eutyches Nestorius and Pelagius are of course all heretics, by which I mean those who insisted on thinking alone, outside the Church, and so persisted after many-a-warning. It is fashionable today to "charitably reassess" these thinkers in order to remove that scarlet "H," but why? Perhaps they're proud of their distinction. After all, they figured it out, and have the distinction of being "original" - a coveted modern luxury that no Christian (at least in regard to doctrine) can afford. Wrote Lewis,

"In the New Testament the art of life itself is an art of imitation... 'Originality' is quite plainly the perogative of God alone; even within the triune being of God it seems confined to the Father... If I have read the New Testament aright, it leaves no room for 'creativeness' even in a modified or metaphorical sense. Our whole destiny seems to lie in the opposite direction, in being as little as possible ourselves, in acquiring a fragrance that is not our own but borrowed, in becoming clean mirrors filled with the image of a face that is not ours." (p. 191)

By suggesting that Christiantity is the "fellowship of those who don't understand," I don't mean of course that heresy is clear and Christianity confusing, but that Christianity is by definition beyond the grasp of our minds - not irrational, but transrational. It presses the pedal to the metal of our rational capacities and then just keeps pressing. This is why the Latin bumpersticker for the Christian intellectual life became Anselm's fides quaerens intellectum rather than the other way around. Therefore the shrug of the shoulders and raising of hands after a bout of rigorous theological inquiry should rightfully lead to those same hands being lifted up in prayer and praise.

Because Christian doctrine is so mysterious, it is important that our identity as Christians be as much tied our communal participation in the visible Church as it is to our individual decision of faith, called as we are to be members of the very definable community of those unable to define God. If heresy is thinking alone, it only follows that orthodoxy is thinking together. And speaking as one who regretfully learned to play guitar solo but never in a band, the possibilities of the latter sound much more interesting:

"This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. The Church... swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist [or a postmodernist]; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom -- that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect." (Orthodoxy Chp. VI)

Brackets affectionately added by me.

millinerd miscelany

For getting a perspective on life in the Holy Land from a very sharp American Catholic priest whom I know, check out these Letters from Jerusalem. What makes it even more interesting is that he's working here.

I realize I'm a holiday behind the times, but if anyone wants to know the exactly how the St. Valentine's Day tradition arose, and I mean exactly, you might want to give this free lecture a listen.

And finally, thanks for Lenlow for leading me to the Art equivalent of the D.J. trainer.

millinerd retracts

Okay I give up. It's official: Count me among those who hastily dismissed Derrida and have come around to appreciate him. Thanks to Rob and Jay for the help by leading me to this. Writes Caputo,

"But what the critics missed (and here not reading him makes a difference), and what never made it into the headlines is that the destabalizing agency in his work is not a reckless relativism or an acidic skepticism but rather an affirmation, a love of what in later years he would call the 'undeconstructible.' ...his critics never heard of this because it was not reported in Time Magazine, but they did not hesitate to denounce what they had not read..."

Guilty. I was underinformed, but talked anyway. Not a good idea. So allow me to publically repent for violating the commandment not to bear false witness against one's neighbor. Caputo continues,

"It was not surprising that in the last fifteen years Derrida would start talking about religion, telling us about his 'religion (without religion),' about his 'prayers and tears' and about his Messiah."

Perhaps related is a comment I will make on Princeton Seminary's new President Iain Torrance's intentionally (I suspect) ambiguous inaugural address on Friday.

Continue...Torrance certainly did not trumpet the Gospel-with-altar-call from the P.U. chapel, but (dare I say) an inaugural address that sought to foster connections between P.U. and P.T.S. may not have been the place for that.

When he first arrived, Torrance made much of Rabbi Jonathan Sack's The Dignity of Difference, which is an informed and responsible book, and a very (not surprisingly) Jewish book. There are statements in it against universality that can only fall from the lips of an adherent of a religion that makes no claims to universality, such as Judaism. A Christian cannot follow suit, unless of course the charge to "baptise all nations" actually reads "baptize some nations" or the promise that "every tongue shall confess and every knee shall bow" actually reads "some tongues and some knees" or the assurance that "Christ shall be all in all" actually reads "Christ shall be some in some." Of this I'm quite sure our new President is well aware.

But my reading of Torrance's earlier addresses to the Seminary that quoted heavily from Sacks was not that he meant the Church should take its cues from Sacks, but that Sack's comments are of great import for fostering the virtues of listening to alternate viewpoints in an academic environment. And believe you me, that is a message that an institution as divided as Princeton Seminary needs to hear. I suspect Torrance also recommended Sacks because he very eloquently reminds Christians how poorly the revelation they've been entrusted with has at times been stewarded. (Interestingly, so has the current Pope.)

But Torrance, so it seems to me, must believe in the definitive and final revelation of God in Christ (along with its inevitable universality), for he has made that quite clear in other chapel addresses. Following his father (T.F. Torrance), who followed Karl Barth, President Torrance has humbly and happily asserted that the person of Jesus Christ tells us who God is, and that there is in fact no other God than this. And what's great about that statement is of course that it's not distinctly "Torrancian," or "Barthian" - it's simply Christian.

The subtely of the inaugural address was therefore I presume not the subtely of Genesis 1 but of Matthew 10.

Or so I hope.

For those who care...

(and count your lucky stars if you don't) below is a statement by George Lindbeck that makes it abundantly clear that the "cultural linguistic" approach is NOT antithetical to the "propositional" approach.

Inspired by Wittgenstein, Lindbeck came up with the cultural linguistic paradigm in order to communicate the Gospel to the postmodern mind. It was not intended to undermine our confidence in that Gospel. If you don't believe, me - take it from the horse's mouth:
George Lindbeck Replies to Avery Cardinal Dulles:

In reviewing The Church in a Postliberal Age (October 2003), Avery Cardinal Dulles focuses on what he calls the “Lindbeck project”—put forward most fully in The Nature of Doctrine (1984)—taken as a whole rather than on the particularities of the book itself. This is all to the good as far as I am concerned, for I have long been waiting for him to put his comprehensive assessment of the project into print. The review reads like a request for a public response, and for that I am grateful. Before responding, however, I should mention that James Buckley, the editor of The Church in a Postliberal Age and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences of Loyola in Maryland, is in effect a coauthor of the book. He has woven those of my shorter writings he selected out of many into a remarkably unified whole by means of extensive interpretive comments. He did this work without any input from me: I did not even know which writings and organizing themes he had chosen until the page proofs arrived. To my shame, however, I never read them, and thus it is I who am responsible for the editorial failures Cardinal Dulles cites. The most egregious, the failure to correct the consistent omission of fide from sola fide Christi in an article of that title, happened long before Buckley’s watch when I condensed and rewrote an essay which I first published, as a footnote indicates, in a German version (which, not surprisingly, is free of this error). Cardinal Dulles does not blame anyone by name, but it should be made clear that it is I, not Buckley, who am at fault. Turning now to my reply to Cardinal Dulles, I shall, except for thanking him, bypass the “many aspects of the Lindbeck project” about which he says he is “enthusiastic.” What Cardinal Dulles criticizes is not so much my cultural-linguistic view of religion as the associated regulative (or “grammatical”) understanding of church doctrines (or “dogmas,” in Roman Catholic usage). He thinks that my stress on their intrasystematically regulative role makes it doubtful that they also function propositionally; or, in more conventional terms, he suggusts that the emphasis I place on truth as coherence with other beliefs obscures the primacy of truth understood as correspondence to objective reality. He concludes that “Lindbeck’s own program concedes too much to postmodern relativism.” This indictment, I shall argue, is a mistake, but as I am in part responsible for the misunderstandings which occasioned it, I shall not blame the Cardinal, but simply seek to clarify the confusions that have led him astray. As I have already indicated, Cardinal Dulles suggests that the chief reason for what he regards as my relativism is that “for Lindbeck, the truth of Christianity . . . is predominantly intrasystemic.” He then goes on to say, as if this were a consequence, that “[Lindbeck] refrains from saying that God is in Himself triune or that the Son of God is really a divine person.” This apparent implication is, I suspect, stronger than he intends. We know each other well enough so that I do not take him to imply that I have mental reservations about these affirmations when I recite the Nicene Creed on Sunday or defend Chalcedon against its detractors. Rather, the fault with which I am charged, as I interpret it, is that my project either appears or is relativistic despite my intentions to the contrary. Cardinal Dulles writes in reference to my treatment of “the missionary enterprise” that “the rhetoric of Lindbeck, if not his actual thought, seems to undercut” what I want to say. Most of his criticisms seem to reflect a similar doubt as to whether the problem is with my “rhetoric” or with my “actual thought” (i.e., theories), but their cumulative effect leans towards the latter. Thus, to illustrate, Cardinal Dulles appears to think that I doubt the following: “In agreement with Lindbeck’s editor, I [Dulles] do not see the cultural-linguistic approach as antithetical to the propositional. If we are to worship, speak, and behave as if the Son of God were himself God (as Lindbeck rightly affirms), is it not because the Son really and ontologically is God, whether anyone believes it or not? By inserting the homoousion in the creed, the Council of Nicaea was indeed laying down a linguistic stipulation; but more importantly, it was declaring an objective truth.” Moreover, Cardinal Dulles seems to suspect, though he does not assert, that I neglect the point Polanyi argues against Wittgenstein “that we cannot intelligently debate about linguistic rules unless we are conjointly aware of the subject matter to which the words refer. To substitute grammatical debates for debates about the things meant is to obfuscate the necessary connection between meaningful language and reality.” From this obfuscation it follows, Cardinal Dulles concludes, that “Lindbeck seriously undermines, if he does not dismiss, the propositional truth of dogma.” This he apparently equates with the propositional truth of Christianity. I take this to be the core of the complaint that Lindbeck “concedes too much to postmodern relativism.” Given the conventions governing book reviews, Cardinal Dulles is precluded from citing chapter and verse in support of this indictment, but I shall try to fill this gap by discussing three difficulties that have led many readers to conclude, as he does, that I undercut “the propositional truth” of the faith. The first difficulty attaches to the self-involving character I attribute to religious truth claims in general and Christian ones in particular. This, to be sure, is not a problem for Cardinal Dulles, though it is for many others, but why this is so needs explanation. He is not among those who find the virus of relativism in my contention in The Nature of Doctrine that a sentence such as “Christ is Lord” becomes a “first-order proposition” capable of “making ontological truth claims only as it is used in the activities of adoration, proclamation, obedience, promise-hearing and promise-keeping which shape individuals and communities into conformity to the mind of Christ.” To deny this contention is to suppose that those whose assent to the truths of the faith is, in Newman’s sense, purely notional and not at all real are nevertheless uttering first-order propositions, truth claims about the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when they recite the creed. Such a supposition implies, in turn, that propositions are verbal formulae or, perhaps, Platonic ideas rather than, first of all, beliefs, judgments, acts of the intellect, as medieval Aristotelians and many modern thinkers maintain. Cardinal Dulles like myself, if I understand him rightly, is on the side of the medievals supplemented by Newman in reference to the sentence just quoted. If so, however, I find it puzzling that he doubts that I, like him, “do not see the cultural-linguistic [regulative] approach as antithetical to the propositional.” Why does he not take at face value my claim that the version of the regulative approach to doctrine which I utilize is compatible with “the modest cognitivism or propositionalism represented by at least some classical theorists, of whom Aquinas is a good example”? The answer to this question appears to lie in a second source of difficulties, my rhetorically motivated but also, as time has shown, conceptually confusing tripartite division of truth. Cardinal Dulles is one of many who have been misled, and so I shall here simply summarize a mea culpa and a clarification first published fifteen years ago (see my “Response to Bruce Marshall,” The Thomist 53 [1989] 403-6). I there agree that it is confusing to speak, as I do in The Nature of Doctrine, of three kinds of “truth”: categorical, intrasystematic (coherentist), and ontological (correspondence). This trichotomy can be innocently employed. It does no harm and may be helpful sometimes to speak of two other kinds of “truth,” categorical and intrasystematic, that are necessary in order rightly to affirm the ontological truth of, for example, Christus est Dominus. First, in the absence of appropriate categories and concepts, Christ’s Lordship is misconstrued. That Lordship is unlike any other: it involves, most astonishingly, the suffering servanthood of One who is God. Unless this is in some measure understood, “Christ is Lord” is false: it predicates the wrong Lordship of Jesus Christ. Nor does this proposition correspond to the reality affirmed by faith unless it is also, in the second place, intrasystematically “true,” that is, coheres and is consistent with the whole network of Christian beliefs and practices. In the light of these clarifications, the tripartite division of “truth” implies neither relativism nor lack of objectivity. Yet even if the trichotomy is in some circumstances harmless or perhaps even helpful, it is also dangerously confusing. Categorical adequacy and intrasystematic coherence are “truth” only equivocally. Properly speaking, they are necessary though not sufficient conditions for truth in the third (but primary) sense of correspondence. My original discussion of the matter refers in passing to the distinction between conditions for truth and truth itself, and is thus technically free of error. But the references are tangential and fail entirely to advert to the related and decisive distinction between the justification of belief (for which categorical and intrasystematic “truth” are conditions) and the truth of belief (which is a matter of correspondence). Because of these deficiencies, it has been easy to suppose that the second, intrasystematic kind of “truth” is an alternative to rather than a condition for propositional or ontological truth. When this happens, readers falsely conclude—with delight in the case of postmodern relativists, but, more to my liking, with sadness in the case of Cardinal Dulles—that “for Lindbeck, the truth of Christianity . . . is predominantly intrasystemic.” A corrected formulation, in contrast, simply notes that special attention to the intrasystematic (and categorical) conditions for affirming ontological truth is inseparable from a cultural-linguistic perspective on a religion such as Christianity. It most emphatically does not imply that the realities which faith affirms and trusts are in the slightest degree intrasystematic. They are not dependent on the performative faith of believers (as if, for example, Christ rose from the dead only in the faith of the Church), but are objectively independent. The remaining and third difficulty is definitional. To define official church doctrine, as I do, in terms of its intrasystematically regulative functions is to exclude ontologically propositional uses. Thus instead of saying that the Lindbeck project “seriously undermines . . . the [ontologically] propositional truth of dogma,” Cardinal Dulles could have gone further and said that the project by definition entirely strips dogma of such truth. The insertion of “by definition,” however, provides an escape for him as well as for me. He could have added, if he was so inclined, that stripping dogmas of ontological reference by definition relocates rather than abolishes affirmations of the propositional truth of the faith. These affirmations are not to be looked for in the regulative, dogmatic uses of the Nicene Creed, for example, but rather in its more basic use as the Church’s liturgically central and communally and individually self-involving confession of faith. The ontological truth claims of the creedal confession of faith remain existentially foundational and are also chronologically prior to its becoming dogma in 325 and 381. This makes it possible to agree with the substance of Cardinal Dulles’ statement that “[b]y inserting the homoousion in the creed, the Council of Nicaea was indeed laying down a linguistic stipulation; but more importantly, it was declaring an objective truth.” Formally, however, it would be better to say from a doctrine-as-regulative perspective that the linguistic stipulation protected (not “declared”) objectively true affirmations. This is not an unprecedented suggestion. Newman among others can be invoked in favor of this regulative rather than declaratory role of official doctrine. As I read him, he includes the insertion of the homoousion in the creed among those “exercises of reasoning [which] indeed do but increase and harmonize our notional apprehension of the dogma” but add little to our real assent, “and if they are necessary, as they certainly are, they are necessary not so much for faith as against unbelief.” One final comment: Cardinal Dulles infers that I am “postmodern” chiefly from my use of Wittgenstein and Geertz. That use, however, was heuristic rather than probative and could be entirely omitted without materially affecting my argument. The influence of John Henry Newman has been considerably greater although I rarely mention him: he is not a favorite among the postmoderns whom I am also, I admit, trying to address. In the secondary literature, furthermore, the legitimacy of my reliance on Thomas Aquinas has been much more discussed than has my relation to any modern, much less postmodern, author. On that point as well as many others I treasure Cardinal Dulles’ opinion, but I hope he will be able to agree that at least “postmodern” and “relativist” can be dropped from his list of criticisms.

Source: Jan. 2004 correspondence in First Things

science isn't scary II

Washington D.C.'s Smithsonian apparently gets nervous around "religious" folk, even if they have a Ph.D.

In fact, even if they have two.

"Biologist Richard Sternberg filed a legal complaint against Washington's Smithsonian Museum of Natural History for branding him a religious fundamentalist and denying him access to facilities, due to his editorial role in the 2003 publication of a scientific paper by intelligent design advocate Stephen Meyer" (source).

Nevertheless, it struck me in visiting the Smithsonian's phenomenal walk through the history of life, that one could have just as easily been navigated through it using the first chapter of Genesis as by their museum guide.

Observe...
Here is the history of the earth as we know it now. What follows, is how that seems to playfully (not fixedly) correspond to Genesis chapter 1.

Verse 1: The eternity of the earth was an idea so common in the ancient world that creatio ex nihilo was one of the main objections against early Christianity. Fortunately early Christians stuck to their guns despite the unpopularity, for if ever there was science capable of supporting the position, the Big Bang is it.

Verses 2-9: Precambrian period

Verses 11-13: Paleozoic period

Verses 20-23: Mesozoic period

Verses 24-26: Cenozoic period

Verses 27-31: Holocene period

Does anyone know of a cosmogony written in the Ancient world that comes anywhere near the kind of proximity to contemporary science as does Genesis? To my knowledge, the answer to this question is no. Which leads me to think that there is certainly something special about this text. And because Scripture should not be expected to submit slavishly to modern standards (let alone postmodern ones), "inerrant" is not the word I would choose to describe the property. But "inspired" certainly is.

(That image from this exhibit, also now in D.C. at the N.G.A. - See it!!!)

The first proponents of Darwinism in America, it is so easily forgotten, were Christians. Said Dr. Asa Gray,

"a theistic view of Nature is implied in his [Darwin's] book" and Darwin's ideas "would leave the doctrine of final causes, utility, and special design just where they were before."

One historian explains Gray's position like this:

"If Darwin's view of natural selection implied that the history of life resembled a game of dice, these dice had been loaded by a merciful and intelligent Deity"(p.19).

But still lingering as we are in the shadow of the Scopes disaster, I can unfortunately imagine the Smithsonian exhibit having a shaking rather than confirming effect on one's faith.

That considered, why don't they have field-ed placements (which is Seminary speak for on-site education at hospitals or churches that one needs do in order to graduate) at natural history museums? In the meantime, considering the scenario described above, we may have to go undercover.

What's not to love? I have to admit I was won over... and was late on the uptake because I'm still in the stone age (or at least the bronze) and have to get my pictures actually developed.

c'est finis

Deconstruction started in the field of literary criticism. Looks like it may have ended there as well. (My condolences to those who have recently adjusted their theological claims to accomodate it.)

When George Steiner, who not only at age twelve could recite the Iliad and the Odyssey by memory (in Greek), but who according to the New York Review of books has "perhaps read more widely in cognate fields than anyone else alive," asserts that "any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs must finally be underwritten by the assumption of God's presence" (p. 3), then things have definitely changed.

In a brilliant review of Real Presences, Ronald Sharp writes the following:

"Unlike most other critics of deconstruction, Steiner faces up to its darkest implication without flinching. If he comes out on the other side, it is because he has passed through its corroding fires rather than circumventing them.

'On its own terms and planes of argument,' Steiner says, 'the challenge of deconstruction does seem to me irrefutable'(132). What is required, he suggests, is a recourse no less radical than that of deconstruction: a leap of faith, a 'wager of transcendence'"(214).

And here's the kicker - Real Presences was written over ten years ago. Isn't it about time Christians started catching up... again?

Or better yet, let's stop playing catch-up in the first place. We should not have needed a George Steiner to pull us out of the deconstructionist pit in the first place - we should never have gotten in.