About You: Fully Human, Fully Alive
By Dick Staub.
207 pp. Jossey-Bass. $22.95.

Dick Staub is the host of what may well be the finest podcast out there on the subject of Christianity and the arts, The Kindlings Muse. He has a knack–clearly derived from his previous life as the host of a three-hour daily interview-based radio show–of picking the right panel of guests and then stepping out of the way. He apparently saves his opinions for his pop-theology books, of which About You is the fourth. Staub clearly counts C.S. Lewis as his role model, and indeed, his writing has the same go-down-easy aura of gentle rigor one finds in Lewis’s nonfiction. They both delight in speaking about heavy ideas in a way that makes the lay reader feel smart and engaged–without talking down to him, as so many works of popular theology do these days.

In About You, Staub’s topic is one I’ve heard a lot–especially from Eastern Orthodox Christians–and which appeals to be quite a bit: the notion that Christ’s death and resurrection accomplish more than mere penal substitution, that in fact salvation involves our becoming more “real,” more “fully human” in the sense that Christ Himself is fully human and fully divine. There would be several ways to get this message across. The easiest would be a syrupy self-help volume about the value of each individual. Staub veers uncomfortably close to this method at times, but as he says, “the simplistic bromides of positive thinking have turned me off” (4), and for the most part he avoids formulas and one-to-one correspondences. He also mostly avoids treacle of the Max Lucado variety, though at times he seems too bent on telling his readers how incredibly special they are.

His main technique is an entry-level existentialism–not the California “full potential” kind but something less flattering, something that acknowledges that we are what we’ve done but also a better self that races always ahead of us. That we strive to be “fully human” at all suggests, as Sartre puts it, that “we are what we are not,” that a nothingness lurks deep in our being, and Staub chalks this discrepancy up to the Fall of Man, a barely remembered event that nevertheless has imprinted itself on our “collective memory” (ix). Therefore, while he begins his book with the affirmation that each of us is a genius (on the sketchy grounds that “Webster’s second definition of genius is ‘an individual’s natural abilities and capacities’ [4]–actually, this merely suggests that we all have genius), he immediately backtracks to discuss the world’s creation as perfect and man’s destruction of that perfection.

Staub is a bit slippery in this chapter, and not without good reason in this highly politicized area of theology. He insists that our creation by God is the important thing and then invokes Stephen Jay Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria:

I am serious about both my faith and contemporary science. I think they are compatible. I do not believe issues of apparent disagreement between faith and science can be resolved by ignoring or dismissing one or the other; rather, we need to see them as equally important albeit different ways of looking at the same world. (17)

He doesn’t take any clear stand on evolution, which probably bothers Ray Comfort but not me: what matters is that the God described in the Bible created the world, not how God did so. Staub does a great job teasing out the implications of the Imago Dei and explaining why creation in a broad sense matters. His whole argument hinges on this chapter. If we’re not created in the image of a creative and loving God, he says, our miniature creations and imperfect loves are mere delusion. If we are, on the other hand, then to express ourselves creatively is to get closer to being fully human.

The book does a good job of branching out from this beginning, and Staub discusses things like alienation, salvation, and individual destiny with ease and depth. He’s particularly effective in his critique of the evangelical pitfall of solipsistic individualism. More conservative than most of the Emergent Church, he nevertheless takes the best insights from that movement, mixes them with the little-read Mark Twain piece Extracts from Adam’s Diary, and comes to the measured conclusion that “our essential need for company counterbalances our undeniable individuality. We thrive on camaraderie and companionship as much as or more than we crave occasional solitude” (41). This is not an original thought, of course–but then Staub never claimed it was. It’s refreshing, in a world where Christian popular-press authors feel obligated by arrogance or agent to tell you that their every book is something you’ve never seen before, to find someone happy with being a popularizer. Lewis would be proud.

In fact, one of Staub’s most interesting points revolves around this issue. The problem with contemporary society, he says, quoting a friend, is that we’ve lost our middlebrow culture:

In his definition, “middlebrow individuals” are interested in thinking through ideas and issues, but are turned off equally by both highbrow pretensions and lowbrow mindlessness. Middlebrow culture is where academics and mere mortals once met to converse; it is where we forged a path that shunned academic theory without application and rejected the dumbing down of culture. (88)

This diagnosis certainly flatters those bloggers and podcasters who, like me, are planted firmly in the realm of the middlebrow. But is it true? The middlebrow is all around us, and not just on the Internet: Cornel West is on Talk of the Nation every other week; folks have bestsellers with books like Freakonomics and Hot, Flat, and Crowded; Stanley Fish has a regular column in the New York Times; and even a charlatan like Glenn Beck finds an academic to conspicuously worship. It’s true that we lack a Christian public intellectual along the lines of Lewis or Karl Barth, but the enormous machine of the Emergent publishing empire demonstrates that it’s not for lack of trying. I agree with Staub that there’s a problem with the middlebrow–but it’s not as simple as saying that it doesn’t exist. I will likely expand my thoughts on this subject in a future post–so stay tuned if that’s the sort of thing you’re into.

I’m not really the target audience for About You, I suspect, for the same reason that Nathan Gilmour isn’t the target audience for A New Kind of Christianity: I know the material he’s popularizing too well. But for a therapeutic, relatively conservative introduction to existentialist ideas–keeping in mind that Staub never claims outright that he’s writing such an introduction–you could do a lot worse than this book. I assigned it to my high-school-level Sunday School class, and it’s driven the students to a higher caliber of question. And it’d make a good gift for a recent Christian-college graduate, on his or her way to the crisis of faith that so often comes next. Just ignore the ugly, non-descript cover.

In an effort to be more like every other blog, we’re going to start having an occasional post of links to interesting articles. Our debut installment:

• Why Glenn Beck isn’t the Great White Christian Hope.
• Camille Paglia sees the humanities waning as the trades wax.
• A characteristically measured and insightful political critique from R.R. Reno.
• Stanley Fish says that plagiarism is more like breaking the rules of golf than like committing a moral transgression.
  • Stanley Fish replies to the people who predictably freak out at such an idea.
• Biola University chapel kicks off a series on the Gospel of John with a great lecture from Mickey Klink.
• Craig Farmer, history professor at Milligan College, lays down the law on text messages in class:

Colors of God: Conversations about Being the Church.
By Randall Mark Peters, Dave Phillips, and Quentin Steen.
231 pp. Authentic.  $15.

Three years have passed now since I stopped posting over at theooze.com’s message boards, and I have to admit that I don’t entirely miss the experience.  When I did decide to leave, the tone in general had for the most part (with happy exceptions) become belligerent, and I grew tired over time of people’s scoring “gotcha” points when I was trying to explore what I took to be important ideas and intersections of ideas.  As folks know who read here and who used to read over at Hardly the Last Word, I’ve come to enjoy blogging more than message-board posting because blogs allow for paragraphs that explore ideas, and for the most part, folks who read blogs don’t mind reading those paragraphs and allowing some exploration.

Oh, and I can moderate the comments.

The sad thing about my departure (and no, I’m not returning) is that, in the three years or so that I posted there, I was interacting (I found out later) with some folks who would become at least moderately well-known in Emergent circles, but I didn’t have enough of a grasp of that cluster of phenomena to say much about it.  (Whether I’m part of it or not I’ll allow others to judge.)  Colors of God is another artifact that makes me realize that the line that Emergent folks so often use, the bit about Emergent’s being a conversation, is not some bit of pop-culture fluff but in reality a key to understanding what’s going on in that loose coalition of thinkers, speakers, and book-writers.  To say that the whole shebang is really just the latest public face of Evangelicalism is to ignore figures who really do wish to popularize some of the more liberal/mainline theologies that have developed in places like Union Theological Seminary.  To say that it’s all a front for theological liberalism is to ignore that a relatively conservative intellectual like Scot McKnight is at the core of the conversation’s history.  And to say that it’s somehow a repudiation of the core principles of the Reformation is to ignore books like Colors of God, a joint project of Randall Mark Peters, Dave Phillips, and Quentin Steen, a project unintelligible except in the context of a radical Lutheran theology of grace.

The core of their theology as presented in this book is a Lutheran understanding of the gospel, namely that human wretchedness is forgiven and forgotten, without remainder, by the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  That core conviction is the blue color in their four-color scheme, and taken in a large sweep, there’s little with which to quibble.  Asked to give in brief form the broad outlines of Christian theology, certainly something like that contention would appear in my own account.  My concern is that the broad sweep becomes totalizing, resulting in a tendency to rule out certain interpretations of Biblical texts without considering the shape of the texts themselves.  I first noticed the trend on page 40, when Randall Peters says that certain (apparently obvious) interpretations of the Parable of the Good Samaritan categorically can not be right, but throughout the book the three authors in turn declare that this or that reading cannot be allowed because it doesn’t fit without remainder into the first principle of their theology.  As readers who look at my lectionary posts know, one of the functions I believe the Bible should serve is to correct us, and my fear at the outset in this book was that a rigid adherence to a system would disallow the rise of a “theological datum” (Walter Brueggemann’s term) in any part of Scripture.  Without that possibility, I feared, the Scriptures become rather impotent to correct, since they can only tell us what we already think.  As I proceeded, my suspicion never did get extinguished.

The green color in their four-color scheme represents health, and this is where some of my past concerns about Luther’s formulations come to fruit.  Since forgiveness is without remainder, no action (in the scheme of Colors of God, mind you) can please or displease God more than God is currently pleased.  (I’ll get to the Hell bit later.)  Therefore all actual human life, in this system of thought, is to be judged not in terms of obedience or holiness but in terms of health, both physical and psychological.  This is where the strong psycho-therapeutic background of Dave Phillips comes to dominate the conversation, and it’s where the book does not oppose but largely dismisses giant parts of Christian tradition with regards to sexual fidelity, disciplines of prayer, and other such things not because they’re “bad” but because they’re irrelevant in terms of the blue color.  This is also where the authors hint at the possibility of a counter-cultural or prophetic critique of what they refer to as “the kingdom of man” (but don’t give anything like the details that Augustine gives to his civitas terrana) but can’t seem to muster any good reasons why one would want to oppose consumerism, advocate for environmental protection, or perform any of the other (new-left-flavored) actions that they seem to want to commend.  As I noted before, when all human action becomes irrelevant for the big picture (the blue color), there’s little reason to do something as “unhealthy” as to live counter to the prevailing ideologies of the day, and this book provides little reason, other than the avoidance of seeming “religious,” to discipline one’s life in any intelligible fashion.

The red element is inclusive community, and once again, it’s an outgrowth of the previous two.  The only aim of such a community, it seemed as I read, was to make sure nobody got too “religious” or did anything “unhealthy” in terms of contemporary psychological research.  As with the first two colors, the authors showed themselves willing to cherry-pick both Scripture and Christian-era theologians to demonstrate their points, but never did there seem to be even the slightest room for novelty, a thought which challenged the big frame.  In fact, when they addressed the possibility of Hell, they did acknowledge it, because they want to remain orthodox, but they insisted that Hell would be filled not with persecutors (a la Revelation) or those consumed with lustful desire (a la the Sermon on the Mount) but with the “religious,” those who would exclude anyone.  For a book trying so hard to be “conversational,” there was little room for anything like a consideration of other possibilities for interpretation in these matters, and I remembered a thought that I’d formulated back in seminary: to see what people truly value, ask them who’s in Hell.

I have to say at this point (I’m honest to the point of rudeness that way) that this book’s “conversation” format irritates me.  Throughout its pages I kept thinking that it shouldn’t have been a book in the first place but a video production of some sort.  The book is a long transcript of a conversation, complete with requests by one author that another explain a concept just mentioned and interjected jokes (and responses to those jokes) that one expects at a panel discussion but not in the run of a long-form prose essay.  This probably would have worked nicely as a DVD series or an online video-content feed or something else; as a book it doesn’t work that well.  I’m certain that other reviewers will commend it for “thinking outside the box” or making things “dialogical,” but in my mind it’s kicking a field goal at a chess match: it might have been better to do DVD things on a DVD.

The final color, yellow, has to do with engaging pop culture as a site for theological reflection, a rather uncontroversial point which they insist flies in the face of “religious thinking.”  I did find some of their choices for pop culture theology amusing (extended meditations on Green Day’s “Good Riddance/Time of Your Life” and Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris,” just for starters), but since this is something that I try to do (to the extent that I keep up with pop culture) in my own ministry, I don’t have all that much to say about it.

In sum, I think Colors of God is a good example of one way that folks have taken historical theology (in this case Luther’s doctrine of grace) and attempted to articulate that theology in actual ecclesial communities.  It’s also a helpful reminder that Emergent, whatever else it might be, is a place where radical Lutheran psychotherapy can, for the moment, exist comfortably along side Hegelian evolution-theology and the environmentalist-liberation theologians, and even if the hard-nosed, foul-mouthed Calvinists have left the party, there’s still room for genuine difference in that strange cloud called Emergent.  And for my money, that’s not entirely a bad thing.

This week’s music is the 1982 Daniel Amos classic “The Double,” one of the few songs I know about Platonism. It’s crazy out of print (and just crazy), so it plays in its entirety at the end of the episode. Enjoy.

General Introduction
- An apology for blog silence
- An explanation for repetition

Platonic Idealism
- David explains the Theory of Forms
- Where the math comes in
- Plato’s bizarre theory of learning and knowing
- Children remembering heaven

Democracy
- Will Michial rant about populism?
- Plato’s terrifying ideal society
- Four types of lesser societies
- Why American society is an oligarchy
- How literal is The Republic?
- The poet at the gates

Augustine and a New Kind of Platonism
- Thank God for Plato
- Why it’s a waste of time to talk to atomists
- Augustine’s dissatisfaction
- How antimaterialist is Augustine?
- Autobiography and theology
- C.S. Lewis and the sins of ideas

The Search for the Historical Socrates
- The progression from real to original
- Who is The Stranger?
- Aristophanes and The Clouds
- Is Socrates a sophist or just a jerk?

C.S. Lewis as Neo-Platonist
- “It’s all in Plato, it’s all in Plato.”
- The Narnia beyond Narnia
- The blades of diamond grass
- Platonism in the apologetics
- Independent Platonist traditions
- Did Plato read the Pentateuch?: In which we go off-topic

CL Cool P
- Why do conservatives love a radical like Plato so much?
- The shift of ages, the worship of the ancient, the distrust of the masses
- The rebellion against analytic philosophy
- Absolute truth
- How conservative was Allan Bloom, anyway?
- A long digression about what conservative and liberal really mean, anyhow
- Our modern-day Sophists and why David Grubbs is a total fascist

How Christians Should Read Plato
- A stepping stone
- Be careful
- Gilmour tries to find a place in the middle
- The importance of revelation

BIBLIOGRAPHY
I’ll refrain from giving an individual citation for all of the Plato dialogues we talked about today and just include  the edition of the collected works that I use.

Abbott, Edwin A. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2008.

Aristophanes. The Clouds. Lysistrata and Other Plays. Trans. and Ed. Alan H. Sommerstein. New York: Penguin, 2002. 65-130.

Augustine. City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin, 2003.

—. Confessions. Trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin. New York: Penguin, 1961.

Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Collins, 1932.

Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce. New York: Harper One, 2009.

—. The Last Battle. New York: Harper Collins, 2000.

—. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. New York: Harper Collins, 2009.

—. Mere Christianity. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2001.

Lowry, Lois. The Giver. New York: Delacorte, 2006.

Plato. Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson. New York: Hackett, 1997.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 5 September 2010 (15th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C)

Jeremiah 18:1-11 and Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18 • Deuteronomy 30:15-20 and Psalm 1 • Philemon 1-21 • Luke 14:25-33

As I’ve mentioned before, I have preached in my lifetime somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred sermons over a span of about fifteen years.  That’s not to say that I’m any good at it, but I have spent my hours writing sermons, about thirty of them between the years 2000 and 2002 and the rest before and after that span.  I won’t claim to be a good preacher, but I will say that preaching has, more than anything else that I’ve done or read, affected the way that I interpret the Bible.  I did not take any preaching courses in college or seminary (and I kick myself for that omission whenever I have to prepare a sermon), but in Bible classes and in round-table discussions and in books about preaching (I’ve read a dozen or so of those) I become convinced fairly early in that process that preaching a paragraph of the Bible rather than a shotgun-scatter array of proof-texts is more faithful to the Bible than so-called “topical” sermons.

I note those things because, over fifteen years of preaching paragraphs of Scripture, I’ve become more and more convinced that what Walter Brueggemann calls the “theological datum” is what makes preaching such an interesting enterprise.  The theological datum presupposes a theology that puts the text of the Bible at the unchallenged center of the theological enterprise, and it refers to those moments in the Scriptures which cause disruptions in a system, be that system Deuteronomic curse-and-blessing historigraphy, the sapiential cause-and-effect of Proverbs, or (in the case of these texts from Deuteronomy and Jeremiah) accounts of divine providence that assume an entirely unilateral scheme of history, God pronouncing on Jacob and Esau arbitrarily and then pronouncing on everybody else with the same sort of arbitrary favor and disfavor.  To take this Jeremiah text seriously, to take it as a theological datum, means to allow that, at one moment at least in Israel’s journey as worshipers of YHWH, they took YHWH to be offering them genuine agency in their rise and fall.

The theological datum, of course, is not the only option that an interpreter of Scripture has in the face of such texts.  Certainly theologians, faced with this sort of passage, have shown themselves more than willing to let a hermeneutical trick govern the reading and keep the most obvious sense of the grammar and vocabulary to have any force.  Perhaps this allowance of agency is a mere anthropomorphism, or perhaps YHWH sets this possibility before Israel not in earnest but knowing all along (and in most such accounts foreordaining) that they should take another path and face destruction.  In such accounts, strangely enough, such theologians will usually blame Israel for taking the path that they could not but take.

I put my favorite figure of the Continental Reformations on this post because, in my view, his humble reading of such passages continues to be the most compelling.  To paraphrase Erasmus, if an imperative occurs in the text of the Bible, unless there’s a very good reason nearby in the text to suppose otherwise, one should read it as an imperative, a command that assumes the possibility that the hearer of the command might in fact carry the command out.  And in cases of conditional constructions, one should assume that YHWH actually means to point to genuinely possible conditions.  Alas, when Erasmus articulated this reading in a dispute with Martin Luther, most Church historians give the match to Luther.  I can only assume that his innovative hermeneutics, theatrics, verbal abuse, and sheer copiousness of words win the bout, because his approach to such texts is to assume that every such conditional or imperative construction in the Bible is a sort of trick on God’s part, a trick whose aim is to render even one’s understanding of the text of the Bible suspect, a move God makes in turn for the sake of rendering despair in the reader.  (When the Bible supports Luther’s point, he’s far more confident of its clarity, but that’s for another discussion.)

But the text as it stands, taken to mean what it seems to mean on a first reading, presents a certain compelling beauty that such a trickster-hermeneutic lacks, a vision of YHWH extending forgiveness and the dignity of grasping that forgiveness to Israel.  Certainly nobody reading this passage could maintain with any seriousness that turning from Israel’s evil will make God like Israel more–one does not offer such reinstatement to those not already beloved–but nonetheless Israel remains a genuine character in the story, no mere parable or plot device, and this English teacher and occasional preacher and Erasmean just prefers to read things that way.

May we continue to press each other’s theological systems, always open to hear our own pressed, and may God bless and forgive our efforts to proclaim God’s gospel.

Today’s “On the Square” article from First Things is an interesting exploration of the decline of conservative social values, even as conservative economic values continue to rise. Far be it for me to speak for Gilmour and Grubbs, but I think it’s safe to say that all three of us have more sympathy for the socially conservative than the economically conservative. I certainly do.

A short episode to lead off season three. We’ll be back to our usual length next week. Our new standard theme music (you won’t hear it that often–only when I can’t find something more appropriate) is “SDP” by the Danish band The Kissaway Trail. They’re like Arcade Fire without the self-seriousness because we’re like the Emergent Church without the self-seriousness!

General Introduction
- Welcome to Season 3

A New Kind of Our Lives
- Michial gets a job
- Nathan moves across the hall
- David writes furiously, teaches Beowulf
- Our race to the doctorate

Why Christian Humanism?
- Read our blog
- Openly confessional
- Forming the human character
- Not mere self-replication
- Christian humanist or humanist Christian?

Why a Podcast?
- Our history
- Existentialist, Calvinist, free-floating
- Adding respectability

Fixing the Format
- Getting looser
- Getting tighter
- Going deeper
- The dynamics of the conversation
- Nathan toots his own horn
- Actual tension without argument

What’s the Year Got in Store?
- Topics from listeners
- In which you learn what we don’t know
- Music, archaeology, politics, and the Bible’s literary influence
- More episodes on intellectual giants

A Quick Commercial Break
- Listen to CWC: The Radio Show!
- Why being in graduate school turns you lame

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 29 August 2010 (14th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C)

Jeremiah 2:4-13 and Psalm 81:1, 10-16 • Sirach 10:12-18 or Proverbs 25:6-7 and Psalm 112 • Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 • Luke 14:1, 7-14

I should open by saying that sympathizing with the unsympathetic characters in the Bible sometimes feels like cheating.  That doesn’t mean I refrain (I’ve got a draft going of a novel with King Saul as its protagonist, for pity’s sake), but I do sometimes get guilty about it.  One valid and helpful reading of this week’s text gets enraged at the idolaters in Jeremiah’s Jerusalem along with the prophet and (presumably) along with YHWH.  And the rhetoric comes at them fast and furious: not only are they unfaithful; oh no.  They’re also unreasonable, forsaking the God who delivered from Egypt.  And more than that, they can’t even manage the degree of fidelity that one can expect from “the nations,” who seem to keep their gods around quite nicely, thank you very much, irrespective of the fact that those gods aren’t really divine at all.  (I had to resist strongly to avoid an exclamation point just now.)

On the other hand, a reading more akin to an Aristotelian take on tragedy might have some value as well.  When I look at these idolaters, perhaps fear and pity rather than sympathetic rage should be the order of the day.  After all, Israel is the only nation in the region (I shy away from worldwide claims) without images of the gods.  The psychological need for a visible focus alone makes me wonder whether I would be all that much more devoted to a deity whom I can’t even imagine because it’s against the commandments.  Beyond that, though, Jerusalem isn’t exactly a city free from danger.  As Jeremiah writes the oracle that YHWH sends him, the armies of Babylon have overthrown the seemingly invincible Assyrian empire, which in turn had ousted the superpower Egypt, and in the recent memory of the southern tribes has to be the exile and disappearance of the ten northern tribes on the hooks of Assyria’s power.  Perhaps the cult of an idol is a cracked cistern that holds no water, and perhaps the gods of the locals are fountains that don’t give any water in the first place, but I can’t believe that the temptation would be slight to go with what I could point to when the chips were down.

Today’s reading from Hebrews can hold forth with great zeal that Jesus will never leave or forsake, and the rhetorical question, “What can anyone do to me?” sounds wonderful in the comfort of my office, but when I think of the existence of a persecuted group like south-Sudanese Christians, I can see why “Crusade” is still in their vocabularies and automatic rifles in their hands.  I would hope that, in those circumstances, I would retain the faithfulness to an invisible Christ, that I would choose martyrdom, but I simply cannot claim that I have done so, that I would with certainly reject the power of the sword.  I just don’t know that.  But relying on one’s own strength never has been central to the gospel that the Christian Bible would hold forth.

May the God who sometimes parts the Red Sea and other times allows the faithful to die as martyrs strengthen all of us as we strive towards that which is unseen.

Super Sad True Love Story
By Gary Shteyngart
334 pp. Random House. $26.

Gary Shteyngart’s third novel, the awkwardly if endearingly titled Super Sad True Love Story, is a dystopian vision of America’s future. But the dystopia in question is not the one of Brave New World or 1984 or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?–it is too recognizable our own world to really be science fiction, though I suppose that’s the realm in which its genre hovers. It is set in the not-at-all-distant future, just far enough out so that Shteyngart can stretch out the flaws of our age like silly putty–just far enough for the world to be easily mockable yet pathetic, and, in its way, far more chilling than anything Orwell and Huxley dreamed up, simply because we can see its decay and desperation all around us.

Its closest literary analogues are Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins and Don DeLillo’s White Noise, though Shteyngart’s milieu is more futuristic and funnier than DeLillo’s and lacks the urgent Catholicism that always pulses beneath the surface of Percy’s. The nearest thing I can think to compare it to is Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy, though the book is far more serious than the movie. In any case, we’re given a future in which America’s star has been eclipsed and the country has begun a slow, technology-fueled slide into the intellectual Stone Age.

It is a sad and banal world of casual vulgarity. All Americans carry an iPad-esque device that broadcasts their rating for a word that begins with F- and ends with -ability; women wear clothes made of onionskin that display their breasts and genitals to anyone who cares to take a look; and futuristic podcasters are on the air 24/7, talking shamelessly about the abuse they suffered as children and the explicit details of their meaningless sexual encounters. Orwellian doublespeak runs rampant, though it is not imposed on the citizenry by an all-powerful government. Instead, it spreads like a disease on the streets. In one scene, for example, our protagonist, Lenny Abramov, believes his friend Vishnu Cohen has suggested that they commit a lewd act in a Staten Island bar:

“Jeez, cool it, Nee-gro,” I said, already slurring my words. You’ve got a little cutie at home” . . .

“It’s F-A-C,” Vishnu explained. “I said, ‘Let’s F-A-C.’”

“What does that mean?”

“He sounds like my granny in Aventura!” Noah was bellowing. “‘FAC? What’s that? Who am I? Where’s my diaper?’”

“It means, ‘Form A Community,’” Vishnu said. “It’s like, a way to judge people. And let them judge you.”

The social commentary would be hamfisted were it not so horrifyingly true to our own time. One can hear conversations very close to this–sarcasm under the guise of friendship–in hipster bars from Greenpoint to Silver Lake.

Indeed, Shytengart has a particular ear and eye for the speech and lives of hipsters–and in the world he describes in this novel, if you’re not elderly and dying or a soldier and killing, odds are you’re a hipster. There may never be a takedown of the overeducated, oversexed, overironized “creative class” as bitterly accurate as the following, which comes after Lenny’s friends learn about a National Guard attack on the homeless:

Meanwhile, at the Cervix [an impossibly cool Staten Island bar], the stunned silence had already been replaced by a general mood of frivolity mixed with practiced outrage, people throwing around their near-worthless unpegged dollars and crowning themselves with Belgian ales.

Those readers who have stumbled too close to a party thrown by a certain type of humanities graduate student will smell the real world in descriptions like this one: Political activism is knee-jerk and related to sexual conquest, and intellectual self-congratulation mixes with the basest hedonism into a thick, bilious stew.

Lenny skirts close to this attitude, but for the most part he is outside of his circle of insufferable friends. He is saved by a certain cultural conservatism, which is to say that he more readily identifies with the generation before our own, as do many of us. In our day, this conservatism manifests itself as a conscious striving toward a vanished literary culture. Lenny’s protest is at once simpler and more radical than our own: In a world absolutely obsessed with electronic youth, he clings stubbornly to the low-tech past, in the form of books. His peers, and especially people a few years younger than him, cannot read in any meaningful way–even the best liberal-arts colleges teach only “skimming.” Books themselves are malodorous doorstops, and the younger generation can only look at them quizzically, wondering when the interactive animation will start up. Teachers of literature will recognize that this attitude is only barely satire on Shteyngart’s part.

The major plot of the novel involves Lenny’s interaction and romantic entanglement with Eunice Park, a Korean-American fifteen years his junior. Because of the terrible cultural shift, this decade and a half may as well be a lifetime: In Eunice’s eyes, Lenny is ancient and rotting and impossibly square. A child of an ange in which one either looks like a movie star or is regarded as Sasquatch, she is disgusted by Lenny’s physical appearance (average by any fair standard). And yet she is drawn to him for reasons she cannot really understand but which clearly revolve around his being “like what Prof Margaux in Assertiveness Class used to call ‘a real human being.’” Lenny’s attraction to her is his kicking against the grave–he is obsessed with death from the first sentence of the novel–and a product of his needing to be her savior, to rescue her from things she’s not aware she needs to be rescued from.

Their relationship rings true to the sad ambivalence of so many real-life relationships: We’re not sure if Lenny and Eunice love each other, but it’s clear that they need each other in a not-particularly-healthy way. We are inclined to root for them, even as we know that their relationship’s inevitable end will be the best thing for both of them. We know they are doomed (from the title, if nothing else), and we are glad, in a way, even if it breaks our heart.

Meanwhile, America is essentially coming apart at the seams all around them. A privatized National Guard has set up checkpoints all over the city, protecting nothing in particular; the country is at war with Venezuela; and China, sick of propping up another nation’s dying economy, very reasonably demands their money back. Everything coalesces into a catastrophe no less terrifying than DeLillo’s “airborne toxic event,” and it’s a testament to Shyteyngart’s deft handling of the interpersonal aspects of the novel that the reader cares far more about the relationship between Lenny and Eunice than about the firestorm swirling around them. The catastrophe exerts a strange effect on their relationship, and like everything else connected to them, it feels terribly and devastatingly real.

This is the plot–though I have left out a great many lovely and nasty surprises–and it would have been enough to make Super Sad True Love Story interesting. It is made great, or at least very good, by Shteyngart’s amazing powers of description, manifested in particular in two ways. The first is the majestic depictions of New York City. Lenny notes as he takes the Staten Island Ferry back to Manhattan that “Every returning New Yorker asks the question: Is this still my city?” His answer: “It is. And if it’s not, I will love it all the more. I will love it to the point where it becomes mine again.” He suggests a sort of geographic salvation, and he finds it with descriptions like this one:

Noah told me that there’s a day during the summer when the sun hits the broad avenues at such an angle that you experience the sensation of the whole city being flooded by a melancholy twentieth-century light, even the most prosaic, unloved buildings appearing bright and nuclear at the edge of your vision, and that when this happens you want to both cry for something lost and run out there and welcome the decline of the day.

This sentence is an emblem of the entire novel: Beautifully sad, lonely but searching for connection, finding the unlikely moment of grace, however fleeting, in the declining fortunes of a once-great empire. The city redeems Lenny with its soft, hazy light, and Lenny redeems the city with his willingness to comb its tired streets for moments like this one. Parts of the novel read like a love letter to Shteyngart’s adopted hometown, and they underscore the degree to which he belongs to the tradition of Jewish New York humor, which, from Dorothy Parker to Woody Allen to Larry David has always been as sad as it is funny.

It’s no surprise, then, that Shteyngart’s other great skill is finding the supreme and existential sadness coiled around the heart of his supremely funny satire. Most of the novel’s characters are too plugged-in and media-savvy to betray their fundamental loneliness–but it’s obvious that in their rare moments of self-reflection they must feel as empty as does Lenny, whose experience writing in his diary qualifies him to discover other people’s terrible secrets. He notes of his elderly Russian-immigrant father: “Sometimes when he spoke I surmised that, at least in his own mind, he had already ceased to exist, that he thought of himself as just an empty spot cruising through a ridiculous world.” In Shteyngart’s fading empire, everyone who gives it fifteen seconds of thought–a small category, to be sure–must feel this way. Knowing this, we understand why people live their lives through electronic devices and anonymous sex: It’s a way of forgetting, of never remembering in the first place.

In the Heideggerian nightmare of Super Sad True Love Story–a world ruled by technology, a world of sein without the da, a world where death is on the verge of being eliminated, at least for the very rich–Lenny Abramov is the most important sort of rebel. He is willing to look deep into his own being and to be honest about what he finds there. And in a world of electronic ephemera, he writes it down so that future generations can return to it again and again. Shyteyngart, it goes without saying, has done the same.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 22 August 2010 (13 th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C)

Jeremiah 1:4-10 and Psalm 71:1-6 • Isaiah 58:9b-14 and Psalm 103:1-8 • Hebrews 12:18-29 • Luke 13:10-17

When I first returned (or came, I never can quite decide) to Christianity as a teenager, I imagined the Pharisees as basically identical with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritans: folks who loved to play “gotcha” with arcane rules, lying in wait for the innocent but hapless “normal people” who are just going along, minding our own business.  In other words, I suppose I thought of them the way that Libertarians think of Democrats.  As time rolled on and I did some formal research, both on Puritans and Pharisees, I started to understand them quite differently, perhaps a bit closer to how they might describe themselves.  I found that Pharisees were not the same as Pelagians, that they were concerned not with doing good things so that God would like them better but with making sure that, when the Almighty brought justice to earth, that they would not, like their lax neighbors, miss out on that entirely gracious moment.  The difference is a subtle one, but especially in light of the genuinely harsh and sectarian Qumran group, the Pharisees come across less as “gotcha” artists and more as modern-era culture warriors.  In other words, the Pharisees had ideas about how Israel was to live, and their genuine concern was that the other Jews, by refusing their strictness, were missing out on the true life of the faithful, and that life began with the interpretive community called Synagogue.

The setting for many of Jesus’ exorcisms is inside the Synagogue, and this is no accident: since the Synagogue is a place where people interpret the law of Moses, Jesus’ presence there means that new interpretations are coming forth, and the repeated arrivals of demons at the Synagogue is not some sort of latent “anti-Semitism” so much as a signal that the war between the Son and the Satan is, among other things, a war over the Bible.  (The temptation narratives echo this idea.)  In this encounter, Jesus counters the Pharasaic view that the Sabbath is primarily a symbolic distinction between the pious and the lax, countering that at the roots of the Sabbath are those first Ten Commandments of Exodus, and at the heart of those commandments is not “law” in the abstract but God’s rescue of the oppressed from the powers of the world, whether those powers be Pharaohs or demons or even one’s own warped desires.  In this case, Jesus seems to imply that the God who commanded the Sabbath is also the God who delivers from unclean spirits, and there is no bad time to celebrate that central reality.

The shame of Jesus’ opponents is not the triumph of Enlightenment-style piety-without-ritual over the “provincial” ways of the Pharisee so much as a return to the particularity that the Pharisees forget as they abstract rule from story: Jesus, in other words, is trying to keep Moses in the law.  May our own lives of devotion and of moral struggle continue to draw from the grand stories of God’s salvation.

I realize that the last three weeks I haven’t done a lectionary post, and for that I do apologize, but do look for more here.  I’m starting today, and my goal is to continue to post them before lunch every Monday.