Impeach Lincoln!

It seems, in the comments below, Neil and I may have realized the impossible - a Materialist and a Christian in civil exchange. Don't tell Sam Harris, who suggests that belief in a "Biblical God [who] consciously directs world events" disqualifies someone for public office.

Harris tells us he is "genuinely unnerved" of late, so let's handle this delicately. It could be downright unsettling were he to learn of George Washington's First Inaugural:

it would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe.

And certainly don't inform Harris of Abraham Lincoln's Second:

if God wills that [the Civil War] continue until... every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword... "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Well, at least these weren't significant Presidents.

It appears Edward Oakes is right: "Going from Nietzsche to Bertrand Russell to Richard Dawkins and ending with Sam Harris is quite a declension." Thankfully, however, there's Neil.

Wordless Weekend

hand
Originally uploaded by millinerd

Compelling Stuff

Theologian Robert Jenson taught an intro to Christianity course at Princeton University (not Seminary) last semester. A friend of mine was the preceptor. When he reported to Jenson that one of the students had become a Christian, Jenson's response was a non-chalant, shoulder-shrugging, "It's compelling stuff."

Speaking of which, in his Systematic Theology, Jenson explains that for Thomas Aquinas, God is "not a something, however rarefied or immaterial, but a going-on, a sequentially palpable event, like a kiss or a train wreck. The being of God, said Thomas, is not something actualized but the event of actualization" (Leithart gives the details).

The lack of attention paid to Thomism of late is the perfect set up for recovery, which sensitive expositions like Jenson's will do much to encourage. Thomas explained to me recently that

beautiful things are those which please when seen. Hence beauty consists in due proportion, for the senses delight in things duly proportioned, as in what is after their own kind - because even sense is a sort of reason, just as is every knowing power. (Summa I. 5.4.).

Aesthetic sense as a sort of reason? It seems Aquinas anticipated the "aesthetic truth" of Hans Georg Gadamer (whom Jenson seminarred with at Heidelberg) by approximately seven hundred years. Aesthetic cognition is, thankfully, not a new idea. What's new is its isolation from other, currently less fashionable modes of truth, like doctrine.

Elsewhere

Suffering as I am from semester-shock, to other blogs I must defer. Why am I the only one commenting at Fencing Bear at Prayer? The author, a successful professor at a top school describes her struggles, and how her faith ameliorates them. You might want to start with the song.

Also, interesting thoughts on Catholic/Orthodox conversions from Anastasia. Calling it a bi-annual crisis is about right.

Indiana Ong

Reading Walter Ong on Jacques Derrida is like watching Indiana Jones fight the swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Derrida does his little dance, and then Ong fires the orality gun:

Jacques Derrida has made the point that "there is no linguistic sign before writing." But neither is there a linguistic "sign" after writing if the oral reference of the written text is averted to... Thought is nested in speech, not in texts, all of which have their meanings through reference of the visible symbol... It is impossible for script to be more than marks on a surface unless it is used by a conscious human being as a cue to sounded words, real or imagined, directly or indirectly.

In contending with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Derrida is of course quite right in rejecting the persuasion that writing is no more than incidental to the spoken word. But to try to construct a logic of writing without investigation in depth of the orality out of which writing emerged and in which writing is permanently and ineluctably grounded is to limit one's understanding, although it does produce at the same time effects that are brilliantly intriguing but also at time psychedelic, that is, due to sensory distortions. Freeing ourselves of chirographic and typographic bias in our understanding of language is probably more difficult than any of us can imagine, far more difficult, it would seem, than the "deconstruction" of literature, for the "deconstruction" remains a literary activity (Orality and Literacy, pp. 75-77).

But despair not. If liberation from text is what you're after, one way of achieving it is through Judaism and Christianity, for "the orality of the mindset in the Biblical text, even in its epistolary sections, is overwhelming... God the Father 'speaks' his Son: he does not inscribe him."

Incidentally, in The Future of Christian Learning, Noll and Turner debate whether the academic approach of the Jesuit Ong is more "Catholic" (understated faith commitment) or "evangelical" (explicitly stated). Whether or not such characterizations are legitimate, Ong closes The Presence of the Word by reconciling both positions:

Those with faith read history differently - and, as I believe, more completely - than do others, but faith or no, we must all deal with the same data, and among these data we find not only the elaborate transformations of the word which follow upon its initial spoken existence but also the permanent irreducibility of the spoken word and of sound itself.

Novelist Converts

Not only are they converting to Christianity, but then combating secularization's inability to compute such data by talking it up. Here's Andrew Klavan (video) who provides what is by far the most salacious argument against materialism I'm aware of. And here's Anne Rice (audio) who irenically observes that for an outsider, bishops John A.T. Robinson and N.T. Wright are on the same side, both exposing - by superior scholarship - the dishonesty of New Testament criticism set out to "disprove faith."

Ten years ago, were someone to say that the blood-sucking vampires in Anne Rice's novels were in fact a subconscious longing for the eucharist of her Catholic youth, they'd be laughed out of the book club. That is, however, the exact interpretation that Rice has of her earlier novels now. (Suddenly, patristic interpretations of pagan myths as anticipations of Christianity don't look so strange.)

Klaven and Rice are reminiscent of other novelist converts such as Susan Howatch and Dean Koontz. Perhaps there's something about writing stories that puts one in touch with the world's truest one.

John Elevensies

Millinerd (est. 2003), is now 678 posts strong (I was going to alert readers at 666, but I didn't want to curse you). We've covered a lot over the years. As I reminisce, I see in hindsight, 20/20. That was a self-link inter-blog pun you just witnessed.

I'd like to return to the resurrection subject. Pavel Florenksy famously remarked that the icon of the Trinity by Andrei Rublev exists, therefore God exists. Fair enough. It is equally true, however, that John chapter eleven exists, therefore God exists. There at Bethany, Martha - through the haze of grief - confesses her orthodox belief in the resurrection. Christ answers that he is the resurrection. Enter trendy theologian who says "See, it's not about abstract obtuse dry dull dogmatic doctrine folks, it's about a totally post-foundational personal encounter!"

Wrong wrong wrong. It's about both. It was Martha's confidence in the orthodox doctrine of the Pharisees that led her to Christ who is, she then discovered, that doctrine's content. Read it. Furthermore, Christ does not then suggest Martha give up on doctrine. He gives her yet another, more resplendent dogma (the Christian doctrine of the resurrection). And there at the funeral parlor, he even tests her on it! How "unpastoral." His question is not do you believe me, but do you believe this. That's right, a (brace yourself) prop-- No. I can't say it. A propo... A propositi.... Courage. Focus.

Christ actually suggests a grieving woman assent to a propositional truth: "Everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die." A proposition, but one that is infused with a person ("believes in me"). Mary's answer to Christ's test? Yet another personified proposition. It's doctrine, albeit personified doctrine, all the way down.

A proposition: Christians who propose they can transcend "propositional truth" are only digging themselves deeper into the Enlightenment's epistemological pit. They need the ladder of Bethany, not the shovel of trend.

Wordless Wednesday

The Leviticus Bell
Originally uploaded by millinerd

The Grass is Always Greener

Mark Noll's dialogue with James Turner in The Future of Christian Learning is a worthwhile read. Noll's portion seems a fusion of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Is the Reformation Over and a general history of North American faith. In short, Noll is post post-Christendom. He observes that the Protestant Reformation did not destroy Christendom, but morphed it into Swiss Calvinist, English Anglican, and German Lutheran forms.

Where Christendom was attacked by political pressure or reconstituted without spiritual revival, as in the Napoleonic era, or where the reformers of Christendom no longer shared the instincts of Christendom, as with modern fundamentalism, then Christian learning was not robustly promoted or was even rejected. In sum, Christendom, however manifold its shortcomings, has historically proved to be a most propitious environment for the flourishing of Christian learning.

Such Christendom resources that some Catholics still have, and that Evangelicals need, include a positive take on matter, reason, institutions and traditions, the parish ideal and legal realism. On the contrary, Catholics need things evangelicals have, such as the revivalist instinct against formalism, mobilization, personal engagement, and the emphasis on the priesthood of all believers. "Like the symbol of yin and yang, evangelical and Catholic strengths and weaknesses are aligned with nearly perfect symmetry." What's odd is that - while mentioning converts to Episcopalianism - Noll only anecdotally mentions Catholic or Orthodox converts (which he does mention in Is the Reformation Over). Is the evangelical brain drain not a problem? For example, five out of six of Wheaton's most recent valedictorians, I am told, have or are seriously considering converting to Catholicism.

James Turner is less optimistic about possibilities for unity, at least not institutionally. Because of the "Darwinian ecology of American higher education." Baylor may look to Notre Dame, but Notre Dame will never look to Baylor (just as Baylor wouldn't look to a smaller Baptist school). Notre Dame has to look to Princeton and Harvard. Furthermore, Turner argues that the grounded, "sacramental" Catholic perspective extolled by Noll is the very thing that makes Catholic scholars not very different from secular scholars. Turner seems to take Noll's suggestions that there be "Christian scholarship" to be akin to "Christian plumbing." Turner then takes a good, hard look at Catholic schools, and the picture isn't pretty. Most Catholic schools, seeking to shed pre-1960 Thomistic "ghetto mentality," just want to fit in; hence they "whirl in a complicated dance with mainstream secular higher education." (One wonders if a calf is involved.) It's a nice warning to those valedictorians.

The Vatican can publish a catechism, but no pope can make Catholics read it, much less assent to everything is says. Catholic may be required to believe defined dogmas, such as papal infallibility, but many exempt themselves from the requirement.

Of course this is no surprise, but Turner's numbers are disheartening. At the largest Catholic school in the country, DaPaul, 70% of the students are non-Catholic, and many of the professors aren't even Christian. His realism enables Turner to suggest:

Evangelicals have no pope and no Vatican, yet in real-world terms they have a stronger theological center of gravity than Catholics do: that center, indeed, defines them. It would be ludicrous to minimize what divides evangelicals... [yet] why do we call all of these folks "evangelicals," and why do they so label themselves? It is solely because they share certain core beliefs - about the Bible, about new birth in Christ, about the awakened Christian's duty to spread the good news. Catholics do not agree among themselves about a single one of those items. But, then, they do not need to in order to be "Catholics."

Unfortunately, Turner's positive take on evangelicalism is not shared by the most astute students of contemporary evangelicalism. Turner's take may be history. The man who has put the most study hours into that arena right now appears to be David Wells. There's a nice summary here of his grim opening analysis in The Courage to Be Protestant (and audio interviews here and here), but I'll get right to the kicker:

Can the evangelical Humpty Dumpty ever be put together again? I think not. What was started in the 1940's, both in America and in Europe, has had a wonderful run, has created a multitude of churches and parachurch organizations, an immense and impressive array of scholarship, seminaries, colleges, social relief, missionary work, and a massive enterpriese in believing. However, today it is sagging and disintegrating... The word "evangelical" has oulived its usefulness.

Considering both sides aren't looking too good, one option outlined by Thomas Albert Howard in the opening of The Future of Christian Learning is "critical loyalty" to one's current tradition. It's a thought.

Theory Weary

Terry Eagleton, the Marxist who has taken to dismantling Dawkins in the public square, has been mentioned here before. Eagleton's suspicion of critical theory didn't start with After Theory (2003). In The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) he wrote that

it is difficult to read the later Roland Barthes, or even the later Michel Foucault, without feeling that a certain style of meditation on the body, on pleasures and surfaces, zones and techniques, has acted among other things as a convenient displacement of a less immediately corporeal politics, and acted also as an ersatz kind of ethics There is a privileged, privatized hedonism about such discourse, emerging as it does at just the historical point where certain less exotic [i.e. classical Marxist] forms of politics found themselves suffering a setback.

This could be compared to another Nathan Glazer quote, one that encapsulates his perfectly entitled book on modernism.

Architecture in recent years has turned away from the pragmatic social and behavioral sciences to the wilder reaches of critical theory because its early efforts to design better housing turned into a failure...

In both cases, prominent thinkers (both dissatisfied Marxists to varying degrees), without dismissing theory completely, identify it with an escape from action. This is not regrettable. It is a mercy that graduate students inhale the thick smoke of theory instead of the tear gas of the riot police, and that aggressive modernists are no longer trying to reinvent the world.

If - as theory's defenders would have it - theory merely involves a disciplined reflection on one's academic methodology, then fine. Long live theory. Just as nearly everyone is a feminist if feminism is "the radical notion that women are people," so too all but the most unreflective dogmatists are "theorists" if that's the definition of theory. But there are other ways of disciplined methodological reflection. One of them is theological, which, properly understood, always leads to action. Christian theology, for example, has a proven track record of spilling over into soup kitchens.

Wordless Wednesday

Sign to Guide the Future of Architecture
Originally uploaded by millinerd