Monthly Archives: February 2010

A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith
By Brian D. McLaren
320 pp. HarperOne. $24.99

When I praise Plato and defend my teaching Republic to college freshmen, I often say that Plato’s excellence lies not in the fact that he’s always right but that when he’s wrong, he’s wrong in compelling ways, ways that inspire me to imagine a better alternative.  While Brian McLaren is no Plato, parts of his most recent book A New Kind of Christianity have that Platonic character to them, getting things very wrong in ways that set me thinking about how I’d improve on his points.  Other parts of the book resonate quite nicely with things that I try to do as a Christian teacher or realize now that I should try to do.  But other parts still, alas, smack of the sleight-of-hand, the well-poisoning, and the other dirty trickery that make me mistrust apologetics literature of various sorts.  In other words, A New Kind of Christianity is a complex book, not consistently excellent but nonetheless very helpful in places.

Brian McLaren Gets it Right

As Phil Rutledge pointed out in response to our podcast on the Haiti Earthquake, when I talk about the Bible, I tend to talk not about one unified document but a library, various not only in cosmetic details but in a more robust sense of genre, asking certain questions in this book that lie out of bounds in other books, offering teachings here that seem to stand at least in tension with teachings there.  (I should note the obvious, namely that I do not speak for the other Christian Humanists on this point or necessarily on any given point.)  I tend to think that the flexibility of such a collection is part of the Bible’s strength, that the practice of being Christian community is richer because Christian teachers can pull from a broad range of resources depending on the contingencies of the moment without having to pretend that every moment is the same as every other moment.  When we need a text that shakes us out of complacency, the Bible has a book for that.  When we lean over the precipice of despair, the Bible has a book for that.  And so on.  I think that McLaren offers a handy next step in that thought process, noting that the Bible is a true collection of texts precisely because of the “spaces between” those strong positions of Deuteronomy or 1 Chronicles on one hand and Ecclesiastes or Job on the other.

Furthermore, McLaren highlights the God-defining character of Christ and insists that the Palestinian Jew Jesus of Nazareth and not the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover is a better starting point for disciplined reflection upon the character of God.  I know that making the historical Jesus that radically central flies in the face of much systematic theology (including that of Thomas Aquinas, one of my favorites), but I agree with McLaren that such a move is ultimately more faithful to the gospel of John among other Scriptural witnesses.

Finally, when McLaren gives advice to parishioners and clergy who find themselves resonating with progressive ideas, and his counsel leans consistently towards humble and peace-seeking measures rather than grandstanding, intellectual and moral arrogance, and other vices that so often characterize folks who think they’ve gotten something right while their neighbors still get it wrong.  His exhortation to “be a blessing” is probably my favorite part of the book.

I noted above, and I write again, this book does get some things very right, and by no means should anyone think that it’s error, error, error all the way down.

Brian McLaren Gets it Wrong

That said, as someone who loves intellectual history and who values some degree of historical precision, I do blame this book for playing fast and loose with historical identifications for the sake of scoring cheap rhetorical points.  One of the jokes that was current during my days at The Ooze forums was that the Emergent words for “really quite bad” were “modern” and “modernist,” and the word for “so much better, don’t you think?” was “postmodern.”  McLaren seems to have left that ugly and misleading binary pair only to settle on another pair, just as ugly and even more misleading (and also a binary that I started encountering back in seminary), the Manichean dualism of “the Bible” and “Greco-Roman religion.”  Resisting the temptation to examine every instance of “Greco-Roman” meaning just plain “bad,” I’ll point out a few that drew a chuckle from me for their historical naivete: Greco-Roman religion, apparently, has no place in it for homosexuality (175–apparently all of that Athenian praise for pederasty as superior to love-of-women doesn’t count), does not allow for multiple religions (212–never mind the Roman Empire’s grand scheme of syncretism that incorporated pantheons as diverse as the Celts’ and the Egyptians’), and stands as a pernicious idol called Theos, who stands as enemy to the Biblical god Elohim (65–I suppose the New Testament authors didn’t get the memo that the Greek language had that idol mixed in there).

The content of McLaren’s “Greco-Roman” tradition came about as the fruit of a conversation he relates in which an epiphany came to him, namely that the broad outlines of the traditional Evangelical narrative (he extends it to Catholic and Magesterial Protestant traditions as well) derive not from Biblical narratives but from Plato.  Unfortunately, McLaren casts Plato only as the first step in a larger metanarrative, and that move is what makes things go downhill in a hurry.  In McLaren’s “six-line narrative” to which he refers again and again as he digs into his ten questions, Plato is only the first stage in the grand narrative, ruined when the world falls from Platonic perfection (which sounds more like Plotinus’s realm of Ideas) into the “storied” world of Aristotle.

I’m certain Aristotle would have been surprised to find out that he was writing a simple sequel to Plato rather than supplanting his philosophy, but even more surprising to Alexander’s tutor would no doubt be that, according to McLaren, Aristotle held that forms do not have any existence, properly speaking, save as mental constructs.  (If Dante’s right that Aristotle is in Limbo, where he might converse with future ages’ non-Christian philosophers, no doubt someone has told him by now that the forms as purely mental was actually one of William of Ockham’s central contributions to philosophy in the fourteenth century.)  Perhaps more surprising still would be that, after dwelling in the Aristotle trench, the eternal souls that Plato does talk about (though sometimes in terms of reincarnation) return to a “Platonic” stasis, some by achieving salvation (another category rather alien to Plato and to Aristotle) and then reaching a final Platonic (neo-Platonic?) ideal, and some by falling into what McLaren calls “Greek Hades,” a construct that of course predates Plato and Aristotle by a few centuries and has little to do, in the texts I’ve read, with punishing earthly evil.  If one says anything about Homer’s Hades, one should say that it’s terrifyingly egalitarian, and that’s what Achilles hates so much–he’s forgotten just as readily as all of the other shades about him.

If all of that sounds familiar through the haze of misused Greek texts, it’s because the “Greco-Roman narrative” that McLaren would impose upon Plato and Aristotle (the tag team!) is far more akin to what Origen, Augustine, and other Christian writers would call the narrative of creation, fall, and redemption.  Although certain iterations of that narrative sequence deserve criticism, McLaren does nobody any favors (especially those of us who love teaching Plato) by inventing a syncretic thought-system that simply does not exist in classical texts and then loading that cumbersome burden on some of Christianity’s best tutors.

As a passing comment in the introduction to one of his chapters, McLaren notes that, although he’s not been a seminarian, he has read “thousands of theology books” (78).   I suppose my own counsel for aspiring Christian writers is that we read fewer books, perhaps dozens, but take the time that good books deserve to understand and live with them.

Brian McLaren Gets Sneaky

Given the unhappy choice between accusing a writer I like (and I do like Brian McLaren) of duplicity and insinuating that the same writer has forgotten or misread, I’ll usually err on the side of charity and say that, for example, McLaren probably read some really bad books about Greco-Roman philosophy instead of reading translations of Plato and Aristotle themselves, and that likely led to his strange construction “Greco-Roman.”  But there are moments of this book that make me deeply suspicious, and although I’d prefer not to approach people I like with suspicion… well, here goes.

In an early section of the book, McLaren relates a talk he gave at a conference in which he lined up seven people on the stage, each representing a historical figure. In a diagram that I won’t reproduce here (I’m going to be cross-posting this review, and so I’m trying to keep html to a minimum), McLaren labels seven stick figures as follows:

Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther or Erasmus, Calvin or Wesley or Newton, Pope Benedict or Jerry Falwell or Billy Graham

After he briefly notes that folks who get their theology from this stream aren’t “directly seeing Jesus” (36), he gives the people in the row a different set of names:

Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, Amos or Isaiah or Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Jesus

His point seems to be that the reading of Biblical texts that will follow in his book, unlike the “Greco-Roman” version of things, would work forwards up to Jesus rather than backwards to Jesus, therefore giving a different sort of story.

The problems are obvious, of course: without even reaching for my bookshelf, I could tell you in which books Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Erasmus, Calvin, and Pope Benedict talk about the six figures that McLaren seems to think he’s rediscovering. Beyond that, McLaren’s progressive theology, a tradition that doubtless deserves a hearing in its own right and on its own terms, has its own “hidden six” that McLaren never names. So if I might offer one possible lineup, some whose influence I detect globally and others with page numbers where I detected some of their influence:

Jesus, Vico (50-51), Hegel (239), Marx (239) or Darwin (14-15), Nietzsche or Wellhausen, Foucault (31) or Freud or Bultmann, Ehrman or Crossan or Borg

Such is not to say that the Traditionalist Six automatically deserves more of a hearing than do the Progressive Six. But I do think that anyone, left-wing or right-wing, should have the honesty to name one’s own influences rather than pitting one’s own Bible-loving self against one’s traditions-of-men enemies. All of us who come to the Christian tradition know Adam and David; let’s have some honest conversation about how we’re using them and how they influence us.

Beyond the invisible-influence suspicion, I had some real troubles with the ways that McLaren talks about professionally trained authority figures. In one passage he would say that folks who hold seminary credentials likely have good intentions but, because of their need to support themselves and because they haven’t progressed along his (Maslow-flavored–this is another instance of invisible influence) color-coded scale of theological awareness. In another he would refer to clergy-types as prison guards (31) who are keeping folks from their spiritual freedom. And with regards to formal training itself, McLaren in this book, as in his other books, makes a point of boasting that he’s not had formal seminary training (though apparently he’s read thousands of theology books), but late in the game, giving advice to clergy who think their congregations might be interested in moving up a step on the Maslow-McLaren rainbow, writes thus:

Get a consultant. There is enormous power in having the guidance of a wise, gifted, and experienced person who remains outside your congregational or denominational system. Good consultants are expensive, I know, but so are good heart surgeons, and the two have a lot in common. (247)

First of all, as someone who loves Plato (the real Plato, not the one whom McLaren invents earlier in the book), I immediately recognized Plato’s community-leader-as-physician riff, and I chuckled (just for a second) that McLaren was now out-Platonizing Plato.  For those who have not read much Plato, his argument for appointing the best and the brightest to administer a community rather than trusting such things to democracy involves comparing justice to medicine and noting that very few people want medical decisions made on the basis of popular opinion.  I would have expected such an argument to extend to ordained and seminary-trained clergy rather than freelance consultants, given the rather structured and hierarchical world of heart surgeons, but I was still chuckling.

But then, once the immediate amusement wore off, I remembered the mercenary and self-serving motives assigned to folks who actually dedicate their lives to one place as pastors and priests, and I was quite angry that he reserved none of that fury for hirelings who jet around the country collecting “consultant fees.”  For whatever reason, my angry self thought, McLaren prefers temporary fee-grabbers to those who practice the old monastic virtue of stability.

Then I realized that both Brian McLaren and Tony Jones pitch themselves as consultants, and after a bit of Google searching, I realized that Doug Pagitt and Len Sweet also advertise themselves as consultants. That’s when the anger turned to suspicion.

Please understand that I’m an equal-opportunity religious-consultant-hater; if Mark Driscoll or Jim Dobson or Ken Ham do the same, I don’t like that either. As an Aristotelian (the Aristotle whose Nicomachean Ethics I love, not the Ockham-Aristotle that McLaren invented), I believe that leadership happens best, especially for communities dedicated to reconstituting the body of the Cosmic King (that would be churches, folks), when those communities look within rather than shuffling through resumes, and I’m inclined to hold consultants far below the permanent-hire-from-out-of-town in terms of the goods they do for a community.  And given that McLaren in other places fires pot shots at the folks who dedicate their lives to particular communities in particular places, I couldn’t help but continue in my suspicion.

I realize that not everybody is as suspicious of out-of-town “experts” as I am, and I’d be fine if McLaren were consistently sanguine. But as it stands, it looks like he decided to use this book, which pitches itself as a moment of honesty, as a platform to promote himself and his Emergent Village buddies while calling dedicated ordained folks prison guards, and that’s an inexcusable bit of duplicity.

Brian McLaren Gets the Nod

As I wrote at the beginning of this marathon review, a book’s excellence lies not in its being right but in its being interesting. Given that criterion, I’d still recommend this book for folks interested in reading some philosophical-progressive alternatives to modern evangelicalism. There are some moments of sloppy thinking and others of outright self-serving dishonesty, but on balance, I can accept those sorts of things in a book that spurs me to think for a while, and I think that this book did. If you run into folks like the ones in the book’s opening anecdote, folks who tell you that Brian McLaren is too dangerous a writer for Christians to read without throwing their souls into peril, do those folks the courtesy of saying what the old lady in McLaren’s story told him: “I don’t see what the fuss is about” (2).

Today, February 16^th, is the feast of St. Juliana in the Latin tradition. While the earliest lists of martyrs link her with Cumae (through birth), she is also associated with Naples (the home of her relics) and Nicomedia (the legendary site of her martyrdom). Pinning her down historically is really impossible: though the venerable Catholic Encyclopedia asserts for Juliana the quasi-historicity of a conflated personage, it concedes that the stories associated with her are simply legends. What I care about, however, is not the history, but the legend, because the legendary Juliana is the one that is significant in Christian imaginations across centuries and cultures. In particular, I care about Juliana because she shares, with Beowulf, the distinction of being one of only two people in the Old English poetic corpus who manage to put a demon in a submission hold.

Juliana’s legend comes to us through various sources: the two I’m most familiar with are the Old English poem “Juliana”, by Cynewulf, and 13^th century Latin hagiographic compilation, the Golden Legend. (The Old English text of “Juliana” is here.) There are differences between the two: in Cynewulf’s poem, Juliana’s pagan fiance is Eleusius; in the Golden Legend, he is Eulogius; and so forth. But their accounts of Juliana’s encounter with a demon generally agree.

Here’s the abridged story for background: Juliana, daughter of a wealthy pagan, converts to Christianity. Unfortunately, she is betrothed to a prefect who is also a pagan; when he pressures her to move forward with the nuptials, she demands he also convert before the marriage. He refuses, she is jailed and then tortured.

It is in the midst of these torments that Juliana receives an (apparently) heavenly visitation, in which she is commanded to capitulate to her persecutor’s demands:

Then suddenly came into the prison the Enemy of mankind, skilled in evil; and he had the form of an angel. Wise was he in afflictions, this enemy of the soul, this captain of Hell, and unto the holy maid he said, “Why sufferest thou who art most dear and precious unto the King of glory, our God ? This judge hath prepared for thee the worst tortures, torment without end, if thou wilt not prudently sacrifice and make propitiation unto his gods. Be thou in haste when he bids thee be led outward hence, that thou make a sacrifice, an offering of victory, before that death come upon thee, death in the presence of the warriors. In this wise shalt thou survive the anger of this judge, O blessed maid!” (Juliana)

Juliana, rightly, questions this messenger’s veracity, praying for confirmation of the demon’s words from God. In reply, God gives her another command:

Then unto her spake a glorious voice from the clouds and uttered this word: “Do thou seize this vile one and hold him fast, till that he rightly declare unto thee his purpose, even from the beginning what his kinship may be.” And the heart of the glorious maid was glad; and she seized upon that devil. (Juliana)

At that point, the demon, like Grendel, wants nothing more than to get away—but Juliana’s grip, like Beowulf’s, is inescapable. She compels the trapped demon to confess all his misdeeds—an impressive catalog by any standard—that takes up the next 265 lines of the poem. In the end, she is called forth from prison to stand trial, and out she goes, dragging the devil with her, who begs for his release:

And in his grievous plight he began to lament his journey, bewail his torment, grieve for his fate, and he said unto her:

“I entreat thee, gracious Juliana, by the grace of God, that thou work upon me no further insult or reproach before men than thou hast already done, when thou overcamest the wisest in the prison shades, the king of the dwellers in Hell, in the city of fiends, who is our father, the lord of death. Behold thou hast afflicted me with painful blows, and in truth I know that, before or since, never did I meet in the kingdoms of the world a woman like unto thee, of more courageous heart, or more perverse, of all the race of women. Clear is it to me that thou wouldst be in all things unashamed in thy wise heart.” (Juliana)

Juliana relents, and the demon limps back to Hell, embarrassed at the thought of reporting his failure to the other devils. On this last point, the Old English poem is vividly and hilariously clear: “he, the announcer of evil, was wiser than to tell unto his fellows, the ministers of torment, how it befell him upon his journey” (Juliana).

So, this is the heroine of February 16: a martyr who endured to the end, who refused to surrender for relief, and indeed saw the temptation to surrender as itself another kind of attack.

* The image at the head of this post was discovered (via Google) on Flickr, taken by a photographer with the nom de album Jaycross, and is (apparently) a Spanish painting—not sure of the date.

Revised Common Lectionary Readings for 21 February 2010 (Lent, Year C)

Deuteronomy 26:1-11 •  Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16 •  Romans 10:8b-13 •  Luke 4:1-13

I’m a bit ashamed to admit that, although I could probably recite from memory the “Wandering Aramean Creed,” as I sometimes call it, this is the first time I’ve noted its ritual context.  Because it’s a confession of Israel’s story among the nations, and because I’m part of a missionary tradition, I suppose I just figured that it would be something recited in formal receptions of foreign officials or perhaps when Israelites were traveling.

But today’s lectionary reading put my guesses to rest, situating the verses in a context of sacrifice and festival.  An Israelite, according to Deuteronomy, should celebrate the wandering of Abraham precisely when coming into the fixed location of the name of God, the city of Jerusalem, the temple of Solomon.  Thus the situatedness and the strength of the City of David make it the perfect place to rehearse the weakness of the years in Egypt and the rootlessness of the patriarchs.  And as each makes a sacrifice, the end result is the perfect sort of wastefulness, a festival celebrating God’s deliverance and protection.  God’s gift of land, the farmer’s months of effort, God’s sustaining the very process of vegetable growth, and the farmer’s willingness to turn over the produce come together in this passage to make for a wonderful and beautiful balance, the sort of complexity and resistance to reduction that the Bible once and again demonstrates.

No wonder, then, when the Diabolos (the troublemaker, an abstraction which only later came to be a proper name or even species of disembodied critter) comes to Jesus, resists the sorts of reductionist tactics that the troublemaker sets before him.  Tested with the possibility of feeding the masses, Jesus no doubt remembers the complexity of the moment in the wilderness, the fact that bread-without-teaching (Torah) would have broken down the important connections between God’s sustaining a way of life, people’s striving towards a way of life, and the nations’ witnessing that relationship.

Asked to acknowledge the troublemaker as the true king of a troubled world, one who can give and take nations to those who would acknowledge his legitimacy as king (a reading, by the way, that made sense to the editors of the 1560 Geneva Bible, if I’m reading the marginal notes right), Jesus remembers that the kingdoms that stand now rose in the vacuum left when God drove out the Greco-Syrians in the days of the Maccabees, and the Persians stepped in only when the Babylonians overstepped their divine mandate and God threw them down.  Likewise with the Assyrians and the Babylonians, and likewise with the Solomonic Empire and Assyria.  In other words, those kingdoms that rise because of other nations’ troubles soon enough find their own trouble; the reign of God, in whatever form it takes, must be one that serves only YHWH.

The third temptation, of course, is the one that has fascinated the most people; after all, the Troublemaker quotes a Psalm to Jesus, a hunk of sacred writing that the early Church would have called Holy Scriptures.  When Jesus responds with a passage of Deuteronomy, he necessarily creates tension, and he doesn’t seem entirely concerned with explaining his hermeneutical strategies to the Troublemaker.  (This moment brings most clearly to my attention that Jesus and the Troublemaker are the only characters in this particular wilderness, making me wonder how this narrative, in all its detail, got to us, the faithful in 2010.)  But assuming that Jesus was mindful of his forefather, the wandering Aramean (and there’s no reason to think he wasn’t), perhaps he remembered that those who went before him, those who led up to his own particular and world-shattering ministry, suffered for some time, calling out to God and waiting for God to initiate the grand displays of power that Sunday school classes now call the ten plagues.  (There are actually eleven, if one counts the Red Sea’s destroying Pharaoh’s army as an eleventh plague.  And I do.)

So plenty without justice, power without orientation towards God, and relation to the divine without acknowledgment of creatureliness all stand out of bounds for the One who stands in for Israel, the culmination of the wandering Aramean and the Exodus generation and the Davidic kingship alike.  To abstract such things from their complex and storied context stand not as genuine goods but as tests, moments in which Jesus could recognize or miss the character of genuine goodness and the shape of God’s work in the world.

I know that Lectionaries developed well after the canonical books took their final forms, so I realize that my own fanciful wishes for the text would not have occurred to the gospel writers, but all the same, I’d like to think that, after Jesus told the Troublemaker that he would serve YHWH only, that perhaps he made his way to a synagogue in which the people heard about this wonderful confession followed by a wonderful celebration, that resisting the wiles of Trouble (or Fortuna, if one allows Boethius’s Consolation to be a Christian story in other terms–and I do) might have been followed by a celebration of the One who leads the faithful away from trouble, or delivers them from evil, depending on how one tells that story.  It might never have happened that way, but I like the idea.

I’ve been accused of being “anti-science” on the podcast, a charge against which I’ve done my best to defend myself. My suspicion, as I say in that second post, is not of science qua science but of science’s attempt to either (a) discover metaphysical truth; or, more often these days, (b) discount metaphysical truth as a legitimate thing. (Richard Dawkins, to recap, actually says in an interview with Salon.com that “why” questions aren’t worth asking; Michael Shermer says that the Self is a mere series of chemical reactions.)

So it’ll come as no surprise that I will suspend my normal stance on Edgar Allan Poe (I don’t like him much at all) for his poem “Sonnet—To Science”:

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities!
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

Obviously, the poem still applies today; you could easily mail it to Dawkins or Shermer and not have to change anything (and you’d probably want to highlight lines six and seven, which seem particularly directed at militant atheists who cloak their baseline fundamentalism under a veil of objectivity).

The truth, though, is that Poe is operating in a very clear tradition—the writers of the American Renaissance (and the period just before it, since Poe is generally not considered part of that movement) are united in their suspicions of science’s ability to create a coherent worldview, morality, and metaphysic. Think of Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark,” in which naïve scientism leads to the destruction of the human being; or think of Moby-Dick, which gives us hundreds of pages of cetological detail, which leaves us no closer to understanding the white whale. The writers of the American Renaissance are united in their general Romanticism, which—naturally enough—reacts against the dominant worldview of the previous generation, Enlightenment-style “objective” scientism.

Even Ralph Waldo Emerson—despised by Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville alike—gets in on the act. For example, in his essay “Love” (1841), he suggests that art is something beyond the scope of science altogether, a metaphysical truth: “The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.” This goes not just for objects of beauty, but objects of ugliness—because Enlightenment scientism is blindly optimistic (man is perfectible, the universe is comprehensible, and we’re probably going to do both next weekend), Emerson make a turn toward the dark (unexpectedly, for anyone unfamiliar with Emerson’s frequent pessimism):

Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour, if seen as experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. In the actual world—the painful kingdom of time and place—dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy.

Here Emerson has set up two paths to truth: the intellect, identified not just with reason but also with idealization; and the imagination, identified with experience, aesthetic appreciation, and inscrutability. This dichotomy basically persists throughout the writings of the American Renaissance. Thus Emerson can claim, in “Each and All,” that the scientific mindset destroys any ability to see things purely:

The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave;
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore.
(ll. 19-27)

Emerson’s actions here are the actions of a clichéd scientist—seeing something beautiful or interesting, he picks the scene apart and takes the components back to the laboratory, only to find that his analysis has destroyed what made the elements special to begin with. Poe gets at the same thing in “Sonnet—To Science” when he says that Science “alterest all things with thy peering eyes”; these are basically early versions of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle!

In the end, Emerson’s solution to the problem of analysis is a more or less religious solution—one must submit oneself to the beauty of the oneness of all things: “I yielded myself to the perfect whole” (l. 51), he says, and in this way maintains the beauty of the scene in his own subjective reaction to it. You can’t pick truth apart, and you can’t discover it in a laboratory—it’s an experience. (If this is sounding a lot like Christian existentialism, remember that Kierkegaard was writing at the same time as Emerson and Poe and that he, too, was reacting to Enlightenment scientism.)

But both Emerson and Poe have an attitude that’s more complicated than a simple rejection of science. Early on his career, Emerson was able to claim that “we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy”—a statement absolutely dripping with scientific optimism. The key to interpretation here, though, is the way those answers come: “Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put.” So any answers we get are going to come not from the laboratory but from lived experience, from the soul. It is worth noting, too, that the physical truths the scientist can discover are worthless for Emerson unless they lead to higher, spiritual truths.

That brings us back to Poe, who, like Emerson, does not simplistically reject science or its benefits. Indeed, I can think of very few nineteenth-century writers who utilized the sciences and pseudo-sciences of his day as effectively as Poe did—and of course the detective story, which he invented, depends on objective reasoning. Even Poe’s afterlife is couched in scientific terms. As one of the dead people in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” puts it,

Now it was that, in twilight, we discoursed of the days to come, when the Art-scarred surface of the Earth, having undergone that purification which alone should efface its rectangular obscenities, should clothe itself anew in the verdure and mountain-slopes and the smiling waters of Paradise, and be rendered at length a fit dwelling-place for man:—for man the Death-purged—for man to whose now exalted intellect there should be poison in knowledge no more—for the redeemed, regenerated, blissful, and now immortal, but still for the material, man.

The afterlife is physical for Poe; God Himself is physical, in fact, called in “Mesmeric Revelation” “not spirit, for he exists. Nor is he matter, as you understand it. But there are gradations of matter of which man knows nothing; the grosser impelling the finer, the finer pervading the grosser.” So Poe is a sort of materialist mystic—there is no such thing as the non-material world, and yet the world we see around us is not the end of the story because there is a hypothetical and non-testable “finer gradation of matter” all around us, in which God and dead people live. This formulation is bound to make both the scientist and the Christian angry.

Poe’s problem with science, then, as expressed in “Sonnet—To Science” is not that it formulates a wholly material universe—Poe himself does that—but that it assumes that it can get its mind around the materialist universe, a mindset he calls, in “Monos and Una,” “the propensity of man to define the indefinable.” Some things just are and cannot be studied—even if other things can be studied.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t use the indefinable for our materialist and scientific purposes, however. The dominant mode of Poe’s “tales of ratiocination” (the detective stories “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rouget,” and “The Purloined Letter,” along with more fantastic stories like “The Descent Into the Maelstrom”) is what John T. Irwin calls “scientific intuition”; M. Dupin, for example, acts completely logically in the detective stories in which he features, but he can do so only by taking leaps based on intuition. Poe offers a simultaneously scientific and mystical viewpoint, and if he criticizes the scientist in “Sonnet—To Science,” it’s only for leaving out half of the equation, and he would, I am certain, criticize religious believers for leaving out the other half.

I can’t fully agree with either Poe or Emerson here—I am, as the podcast introduction says, “unapologetically confessional,” and so I can’t accept the vague pantheism of Emerson or the mystical materialism of Poe. But I think they’re hinting at the proper relationship between faith and reason. Without the former, the latter can’t answer the ever-important why questions; without the latter, the former cannot survive in the real world.

What I Have Learned in 50 Years as a Theologian part 1

by Jack Cottrell

Yes, that’s my tradition.

As some of CHB’s readers know, I was baptized into Christ under the auspices of the Christian Churches/Churches of Christ, one of those non-denominational denominations with a slash in its name and whose congregants aren’t supposed to call themselves members of a denomination (much less use the diminutive “Campbellite” or mocking phrase “non-denominational denomination”).  We’re one of those 19th-century Protestant-unity movements now split into three branches who don’t talk to each other, much less engage in most ecumenical encounters, and those of us who have been blessed with an education in our history are cursed with our particular paradoxes.  And in the face of all these paradoxes, because I still do theology as one who is “Christian only, but not the only Christian” (one of our slogans that a handful of us still believe in), and because I believe I’m called to serve as Deacon to a congregation of non-denominationals, I still say I love my tradition even as it drives me nuts.

That’s all background; now I’m going to get into some substance.

I learned a few years ago, on a Campbellite message board that I only posted on for a couple months, that Jack Cottrell, a professor of whom I’d not heard in close to twenty years as a faithful Christian Churches congregant, is one of those figures who is at the unofficial heart of our movement, an author who has worked hard to define our own sectarian orthodoxy over his fifty-year career.  In that encounter, asked my opinion of a piece of his in the Christian Standard, one of our movement’s more popular weekly publications, I gave an honest assessment that his treatment of Just War Theory didn’t engage any of the primary texts and didn’t acknowledge any of the spots where Christians have expanded upon the Ciceronian tradition or even noted that the doctrine has a history at all.  I made the mistake (as I do less and less as I get older, though I still slip up) of saying that it wouldn’t have been a bad paper for a sophomore Intro-to-Christian-Ethics paper, except that he didn’t cite any sources.  Within hours, angry responses stacked up underneath my post, calling on me to issue a public apology to such an eminent man.  Because I was in no mood for such public display (and because nobody had actually demonstrated that I was wrong), I told Cottrell’s dedicated defenders to email their beloved professor and invite him to respond to my critiques like a man if his ideas were so great.

That wasn’t one of my proudest days.

I have to grant the possibility that my own snottiness brought forth the firestorm, but I did learn a lesson in the aftermath, namely that Cottrell was a name that, as a Stone-Campbell Christian, I needed to know and account for.  So when I saw his name on a retrospective piece in last week’s Standard, I knew I had to read it.  I wasn’t surprised but do admit some disappointment to see that, after 50 years as one of the public faces of my tradition’s sectarian tendencies, the first part of his retrospective consists mainly in Shibboleths from the last hundred fifty years or so.

Shibboleths are not always bad things; the source of the term, for those who think I’m neologizing, is Judges 12, in which the warriors of Gilead defeat Ephraim in a decisive battle and the warriors of Ephraim attempt to flee back across the Jordan.  When Gilead’s warriors capture a refugee, the test they use to see if they’re dealing with a local or with an Ephraimite is to have them say the word Shibboleth (a stalk of grain).  Because the Ephraimites didn’t have that consonant sound in their dialect, they would say “Sibboleth,” and the Gileadite would kill that one.

In modern usage, Shibboleths can be any of a spectrum of devices for saying who’s in and who’s out.  If you want to spot a Catholic in a theological conversation, bring up the Eucharist.  If you want to find the Mennonite, bring up military service.  And so on.  They’re not by any means always bad things; after all, the historic Creeds and Trinitarian formulas of the Church developed at least in part as Shibboleths for the project of spotting Marcionites, Ebionites, Arians, and other such characters.

What troubles me is not that Cottrell has presented in this piece a list of Campbellite Shibboleths; I recognize that he’s part of a wing of my own tradition that’s very concerned about establishing and maintaining our uniqueness among the “sects,” and I have too many friends who identify with that project to dismiss it outright.  What troubles me is that he frames those Shibboleths not as modern-historical tests of who’s in and out but as “eternally true, having withstood one attack after another.”  My critique of that categorical move makes more sense after a look at Cottrell’s “fundamentals” themselves, so without further ado, here are the “Fundamentals” that Cottrell lists in part 1 of his 2-part essay in The Christian Standard:

1. The Bible is God’s inerrant Word.

2. The only true God is the Creator-God of the Bible.

3. The transcendent Creator-God knows the future, even future freewill choices.

4. Human beings do have truly free will; Calvinism is false.

5. Jesus is the only Savior, and salvation comes only by knowing and accepting him as such.

6. The Holy Spirit does not give miraculous gifts today.

7. Demonic spirits are real and active today, even in Christian circles and in some Christians.

8. Sinners are saved by grace, through faith, in baptism, for good works.

9. Baptism in water is the point of time when God gives the saving grace of forgiveness through Christ’s blood and regeneration through the gift of the indwelling Holy Spirit.

10. The Bible does not permit women to teach men, nor to have authority over men, in the church.

11. There is no such thing as a secret rapture.

12. The lost will suffer eternally in Hell.

13. The church is intended to be “the pillar and support of the truth” in this world of falsehood and relativism (1 Timothy 3:15).

The Shibboleth-quality of these items is not hard to spot; item one has been a Shibboleth for about a hundred years to mark off historical critics, and item three bars entry to those who would entertain Process Theology and Open Theism.  Items five and twelve Universalists won’t be able to pronounce, and number seven, though it doesn’t fit well with item six (one is in trouble if demons are real but nobody has the miraculous gift of exorcising them), obviously keeps theological liberals out (while number six, in conjunction with number ten, keeps Pentecostals and Charismatics at bay).  Although my Dispensationalist lore is limited, I’m guessing that number eleven is aimed at that camp.  And number four comes right out and names the party to be excluded.

Granted, items two and eight and thirteen are fairly close to Biblical quotations, but removed from their first-century contexts and transplanted to twentieth-century contexts, they’re not hard to spot either.

If I were to issue some sort of theological call against such projects, I would not call for a moratorium on Shibboleths.  I think, in the end, that some of the most interesting and potentially fruitful theology starts there, and I’d be more than a bit of a hypocrite if I denied that one of my own “tests” for a writer has to do with the writer’s attitudes towards nation-states and their wars.  But I would call for some more rhetorical honesty, a willingness to put forth Shibboleths as Shibboleths, to argue for them as Shibboleths, to dispense with the bad-faith distinctions between “God’s doctrines” and “man’s Shibboleths.”  I’d call for Christians to make the best cases they can for the Emergent Shibboleths, the New Calvinist Shibboleths, the Anabaptist Shibboleths, Liberal Protestant Shibboleths, Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Shibboleths, and, yes, the Campbellite Shibboleths not as not-constructed but as adequately constructed, helpful as boundaries within which Christians can live together charitably and truthfully.  My hunch (and it’s only a hunch) is that, given at least that much honesty, perhaps Christians stand a chance of bringing ecumenicity and truthfulness a bit closer.  Without that much honesty, my fundamentals are going to remain your opinions, your nitpicking will offend my self-congratulating liberty, and their “doctrines of man” will never really have anything to learn from our “Biblical doctrine.”

In other words, I would challenge Cottrell or anyone else making lists of Shibboleths not merely to assert them and be done but to tell me and whoever else would read what Christians lose if we believe that miraculous gifts persist, how many women have to preach before Christian proclamation becomes invalid, why people who begin from different ontological assumptions about time are not fundamentally Christian, and so forth.  I realize that in a weekly publication there’s not much space for such things, but I do wish, when I see lists like this, that the author had petitioned for a longer series of editorials so that those of us who have not read the Corpus Cottrell could have a go with him.  I realize that making such changes radically alters the character of Shibboleths, turns arbitrary sounds (and phrases) into arguments and appeals and perhaps even reasoning-together.  I would welcome such alterations.  As it stands, this piece reminds me once again that, in the eyes of certain public writers in my tradition, I’m not even part of my tradition, and moreover that there’s still a place in that tradition for folks to make a living keeping folks like me out.

For folks who make their careers defining sects, that’s not such a bad thing, I suppose, but I’d rather try a different sort of project.

The tales of King Arthur have fascinated me ever since I first read them, years ago, in a volume of Reader’s Digest condensed books. One section of those stories that always attracted but puzzled me was the Quest for the Holy Grail. To an American Protestant of the late 20th century, this cycle of tales was evocatively alien, declaring itself Christian but expressing that affiliation in strange, unfamiliar ways. According to the version I read, the Holy Grail was the cup from the Last Supper, still containing liquid blood (!). Accompanying it was the spear that pierced Christ’s side, continually dripping blood (!!). And these things were brought to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea (!!!). Apparently all that got left out of my Bible! (Though it was never actually in anyone’s Bible–the Grail story isn’t even apocryphal, much less canonical.)

These years later, the Grail Quest still fascinates me, though it is now less strange than it was. It has become a familiar pattern of story, a narrative that feels normal and natural to me. That’s because I’ve come to understand something of the logic behind the Grail Quest literature. Part of what makes Grail literature so strange is that the reader naturally expects it to be of the same type of literature as the other Arthurian romances–and it isn’t. Grail romance uses the forms and trappings of chivalric romance, but its purposes are different. While chivalric romance tells the stories of knights and their earthly adventures, Grail romance is about a story behind those stories. The knights have earthly adventures, but those adventures mean something deeper: the knights unwittingly find themselves acting out roles of spiritual significance. In short, Grail romance is an allegory in which the characters, for the most part, don’t realize they’re in an allegory. And that, dear reader, is my point in discussing these three character types from the Grail Quest.

The oldest Grail romance, Chretien de Troyes’s Perceval, is about the Fool character type. Perceval is a simpleton and a naif who knows nothing about what the world is like or how it works, and continually causes trouble for himself and everyone else because of his ignorance. He wants to be a knight, but he doesn’t understand what a knight is; he only knows what a knight looks like, so he imitates the trappings of knighthood but fails to emulate the character and ideals of chivalry. The worst part is that Perceval the Fool doesn’t understand that he’s inside a story, and this recognition is necessary for the Grail Quest. For him, his life is a series of random disconnected episodes with no plot or meaning. It’s all very fascinating, but he understands none of it, least of all his own proper role. He cannot see where he is going, so he is always in danger of stumbling.

The Knight is the central character of the Grail Quest, and there are many knights in the Grail romances: Lancelot, Gawain, Bors, Galahad, even Perceval, once he awakens from his foolish state. The Knight is dimly aware of the story: he knows he is on a quest–that is, he knows the story’s end–but along the way he wanders through a trackless wilderness of perils and wonders. But despite the mysteries around him, the Knight’s consciousness of the story (the quest) and his role in it (the hero) gives him a sense of purpose. Armed with this knowledge, the Knight can face the trials of the quest with confidence.

Along the way, the Fools and Knights frequently encounter the third character type, the Hermit (sometimes a priest, an abbot, a nun, an anchorite, a friar–always someone of the holy orders). The Hermit’s role is to explain the story to those who, knowingly or not, are on the quest. After an adventure, a wandering knight will usually happen upon a lonely hermitage in the forest, and as the kindly old hermit feeds him and patches his wounds, he explains to the knight the inner significance of the adventure: the evil knight represented Satan, the imprisoned maidens were the souls of the elect, and the knight acted the part of Christ, rescuing His people from the clutches of the Devil. Because the Hermit sees the story around him, his perception of events is different from the Knight’s, and the Knight is often surprised when the Hermit praises or condemns him for his choices.  This is because the Hermit hardly seems to notice the mundane events anymore: he looks through them, to their higher significance.

The experience of a Grail romance, both for the characters and the readers, resembles the experience of looking at an Orthodox icon, though in this case the icon is a story, not an image. And within the story we see those who understand the story’s purpose and those that don’t: those who see the archetype above the icon and those whose vision stops at a “crude” 6th century egg tempera daub. Also, this is what my experience of Christianity is like. Often I do not see and do not understand: then I am a Fool. Sometimes I see, but do not fully understand: then I am a Knight. And rarely, sometimes only for a brief moment, I both see and understand: then I am a Hermit.

This week’s music: “Her Right Hand Rules the World,” by They Sang As They Slew, from Get Well (Northern Records, 2004). Great band, great record, great Tolkien reference.

General Introduction
- Nathan’s back, and he’s angry at us
- Another CHP ex cathedra announcement

Defining and Misdefining Epic
- Thanks, FailBlog
- That’s so random
- What’s a B-side?
- Aristotelian definition: epic as footnote to tragedy
- Unity on a grander scale

General Conventions of Epics
- What’s our favorite?
- Michial lays his cards on the table
- The descent into hell
- Why O Brother, Where Art Thou? bothers Nathan
- Epic similes
- In media res

The Nationalist Aura
- C.S. Lewis objects
- The shattering of national identity in The Odyssey
- Who owns Beowulf?
- The American search for national identity
- Are The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost epics?
- Primary and secondary epics
- Why Americans are jealous

Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Epic and Novel”
- A bit on Bakhtin
- The epic as dead form
- Epic distance
- Closed-offness
- We critique Bakhtin
- Michial praises poststructuralism (gasp!)

Mock Epics and Adaptations
- Why the mock epic died
- Garden State descends into hell
- Where is the Underworld in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Movies
- Why The Dark Knight is a novel, not an epic
- The period war film
- The Tolkien-ification of the Middle Ages
- Demythologizing the epic
- Michial defends two versions of Robin Hood
- Let’s hate on Troy; or, the world-weary ennui of Achilles
- David rants about the Robert Zemeckis Beowulf
- Demythologizing the hero
- Nathan ughs the Paradise Lost movie
- Your chance to win a Christian Humanist Podcast windbreaker!

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso. Trans. Guido Waldman. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Butler, Samuel. Collected Works. New York: BiblioLife, 2008.

Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Penguin, 1950. 3 volumes.

Gardner, John. Grendel. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Harmon, William, et al. A Handbook to Literature: Second Edition. New York: Prentice Hall, 1995.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Peter Jones. New York: Penguin, 2003.

—. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Poems and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 2000.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. New York: Norton, 2004.

Pope, Alexander. Selected Poetry. New York: Penguin, 1985.

Song of Roland. Trans. Glyn S. Burgess. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. New York: Penguin, 1979.

Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda: Norse Mythology. Ed. and Trans. Jesse L. Byock. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings: One Volume Edition. New York: Mariner, 2005.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2008.

UPDATE: Some supplementary resources cited obliquely by David: the first as the scholarly source of the much loathed King Arthur film, the second as a reading of Beowulf sensitive to the openness of narrative speech:

Littleton, C. Scott, and Linda A. Malcor. From Scythia to Camelot : a radical reassessment of the legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail. New York : Garland, 1994.

Robinson, Fred C.  Beowulf and the appositive style. Knoxville : U of Tennessee, 1985.

I’m not a great patriot, a fact you may have picked up on from the “God and Country” episode of the podcast. I’m certainly not anti-American, and I’m not particularly interested in living anywhere else—I’ve devoted my life to the study of American literature, and if you’re a little old-fashioned in your criticism, as I am, studying American literature means to a large extent trying to figure out what makes America special.

But the more I learn about the early days of this country, the less convinced I am that the American Revolution was a shining moment in our history. It started in ninth grade, I guess, when I learned about the Boston Massacre in detail for some time. I had a hard time identifying with the Americans, many of whom, as I understand it, were drunk and most of whom were throwing rocks at the British soldiers. The Boston Tea Party was perhaps not as disgusting, but it still made me uncomfortable to think that someone relatively innocent had gone through a lot of trouble to get that tea to the colonies—for nothing.

These are mobs, and they’re mobs no matter how much you dress them up as “political protest” and no matter how noble the reasons are that brought them together in the first place. Our country, then, began its history with at least two mass demonstrations, and the Founding Fathers wrote the right to (peaceably) assemble into the Constitution. There must be a difference between a protest and a mob, but my own constitution must be too delicate to notice it.

I’m wildly uncomfortable with mass demonstrations of any kind and no matter what the politics are. Athens, Georgia, is a hotbed of political protest, and at least once a week, as I walked to my car, I was forced to push my way through a crowd of people standing on a corner, holding signs that said “HONK IF YOU” fill in the blank: “HATE THE WAR,” “SUPPORT A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO CHOOSE,” “WANT FAIR PAY FOR A FAIR DAY’S WORK,” etc., etc. Some days, there’d be a group of counter-protesters across the street, holding up similar signs that said, “HONK TWICE IF YOU SUPPORT THE TROOPS” or “HATE ABORTION” or “THINK THESE PEOPLE SHOULD GET REAL JOBS,” and Broad and College would become a hideous cacophony.

What a waste of time, folks. Let’s say for a minute that the War in Iraq was fought primarily on the basis of what the residents of Athens, Georgia, thought. Is honking really the best way to express it? Is standing on the street corner? Wouldn’t you be better off writing your Congressman, or even writing a letter to the editor, or, you know, actually doing something worthwhile? (I find myself wondering—and David and Nathan can probably answer this question—if the anti-war protesters are still asking for Athenian honks now that the war continues under a president who isn’t George W. Bush.)

Protest is easy, in other words, especially loud, angry, and hateful protest. And I suspect that it’s hard for a large group of people to come together under the auspices of shared political views and not have things turn to hatred of the other side. A Sarah Palin fan famously yelled “KILL HIM” about Barack Obama at a pre-election rally a few years ago. That doesn’t mean that Sarah Palin wants to kill Barack Obama, but it does suggest that she has aggressively courted the type of voter who would yell a violent call to arms once he got around like-minded people.

Palin is now involved with the so-called Tea Party Movement, what must be the largest group of demonstrators in America today. They had a conference in Nashville last weekend, most of the press coverage of which I quite thankfully missed out on. I can understand the concerns of the Tea Party—I remain skeptical of the efficacy of the health-care plan Obama is trying to get through Congress, at least, and while I am generally on the liberal side economically (and on the conservative side socially), the Huffington Post will never ask me to blog for them.

But the Tea Party frightens me. It’s too big a group with too little in common (composed, as this article says, of “footloose Ron Paul supporters, goldbugs, evangelicals, Atlas Shruggers, militiamen, strict Constitutionalists, swine-flu skeptics, scattered 9/11 ‘truthers,’ neo-‘Birchers,’ and, of course, ‘birthers’—those who remained convinced that the President was a Muslim double agent born in Kenya”) to define themselves any way but negatively, and any group that primarily defines itself negatively is bound to turn their efforts to hatred before too long. And their tactics nauseate me. As one Tea Party constituent says, “Unlike the melodramatic lefties, I do not want to get arrested . . .  I do, however, want to take a page from their playbook and be loud, obnoxious, and in their faces.” Uh…congratulations? Are we supposed to admire a person whose stated goal is to make herself as annoying and shrill as possible? Way to take the least attractive methods in the liberal textbook and apply them to a party who could have risen above them.

The Tea Party movement is, of course, a product of Sarah Palin’s political populism and Glenn Beck’s gadfly conservatism. Palin’s populism has frightened me since she hit the national spotlight in 2008—her persona is, as we all know, that she’s just like me, you, and Joe the Plumber, and hey, we know how to run the country a lot better than those eggheads on the other side. Problem is, I don’t want the average Joe—be he Six-Pack or The Plumber—running this country. An appeal to the masses is an appeal, by definition, to mediocrity, and saying that you’re just like everyone else is an admission of your own unremarkability. If this country is as great as Republican rhetoric makes it out to be, doesn’t it take a remarkable person to run it? Apparently not.

In some ways, I feel as though we’re about to move into a new Jacksonian era. Andrew Jackson didn’t do American populism first, but he did it the best, to the point where his nickname in the press was “King Mob.” And indeed, urban mob violence became a commonplace under Jackson’s rule. His great skill was appealing to the common man (I am certain he would have used the term Joe Six-Pack had six-packs existed), whom he then used—cynically or otherwise—as a tool to get himself into office. He rewarded his supporters by inviting the whole lot of them to the White House for his Inauguration dinner. And that reception is where we see the real face of populism—a drunken mob who broke thousands of dollars worth of White House china and only left when they were lured outside by alcohol, like a donkey chasing a carrot.

I don’t mean to sound anti-conservative here—to the extent that the Democrats stoop to populist and rabble-rousing tactics, I dislike and distrust them, as well. I just wish the current crop of conservatives, in the Tea Party or otherwise, would find a civil and intelligent way to get their opinions into the great Marketplace of Ideas. I wish they’d find a way to make themselves heard without resorting to large, ugly crowds built on doctrines of negation. Any leader who gets put into office by a mob is likely to be a despot, as Alexander Hamilton tells us in the first Federalist paper:

The vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty . . . in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interests can never be separated; and . . . a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter.

“Sound and well-informed judgment,” then, is the key to making political discourse something other than the shouting of a mob, and it’s what’s missing in all demonstrations that devolve into anger and violence.

There is a way to do political protest right, I suppose–and that’s to follow the example of the Southern Christian Leadership and their Civil Rights protests in the late 1950s and early ’60s. What sets these mass expressions of discontent apart from the Tea Party is their tone–they are built not on hatred of a perceived enemy but on compassion for a genuine oppressor. Glenn Beck, it is fair to say, is less oppressed by Barack Obama than Martin Luther King, Jr., was by Bull Connor–and yet the former reacts with bile and hatred, which he passes on to his millions of fans, whereas the latter reached out his hand in love to the policemen with dogs and fire hoses ready to go. If mob rule looked more like that, maybe I’d be more in favor of it.

But that’s the opposite of populism, really, because it refuses to set up a “we the people” vs. “them the interlopers.” It’s built on an understanding that we are all in the same boat.

Revised Common Lectionary readings for 14 February 2010 (Epiphany, Year C)

Exodus 34:29-35

Psalm 99

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2

Luke 9:28-36

The Transfiguration is one of those stories that I’d like for Paul to have known about, and if one were to ask me why, I’d point to this little bit in 2 Corinthians as it sits next to Luke’s version of the Transfiguration in this week’s readings.

The phrase “in Christ” is one that has given me more trouble than it does most, at least if my experiences teaching Sunday school (which I’ve been doing, without more than a couple months’ break, since 1995) reflect the anxieties of the average Stone-Campbell non-denominational Christian.  When I was in my late teens and early twenties, that slippery little phrase came across to me as a mystical cipher, something that could mean something just a bit different every time Paul uses it (and he uses it often).  I figured it must be something similar to what I was reading in St. Julian of Norwich, a mystical blurring of one’s own person and Christ’s, and that presented its own troubles: given my own personality and disposition towards reality, I had a very clear sense of where d I ended and God began (yes, I acknowledge that God is Being without beginning, but you know what I mean), and I feared that my own overdeveloped sense of my own contingency was getting in the way of my being “in Christ.”

Then N.T. Wright came along, and as folks know who know me, his big scholarly “trilogy” (he originally planned it to be a series of five scholarly monographs, and he’s promised in recent publications that volume four will be coming soon) revolutionized the way I read the Bible and, by extension, see the world.  His proposal was so elegant and simple that it’s no wonder I hadn’t thought of it before: if Paul uses the phrase “in Christ” frequently in his letters, perhaps its meaning is linked to something else he talks about frequently in the same letters.  Wright points to an obvious candidate, the image of the Body of Christ.

Leaning heavily on Ephesians 1-2 (which, Wright has convinced me, is as valid a “starting point” for constructing a Pauline theology as is Romans 1:16-17), Wright suggests that to be “in Christ” is to be “in”corporated into the Body of Christ, which is the Church, as Paul states unequivocally in Ephesians 1.  Therefore, what Paul predicates of people who are  “in Christ” here and there seems to refer to people who by participation in the Eucharist, the Baptism, and the Teaching (also things that Paul brings up in Ephesians) have taken on identity with the King of all reality, the Christ sitting at the right hand of the Father.  In other words, although the image has a mystical character to it, the image has an intelligible content that governs what sort of mysticism we’re talking about.

And so the strange bit about reading Moses with the veil on, although it’s clearly playing with philosophical categories that remain alien to the modern reader, starts to make some sense, provided that Paul knew some version (probably not Luke’s since most scholarship dates Luke-Acts after the Pauline epistles) of the Transfiguration.  If one who is “in Christ” is incorporated into the very body of the King, whom Paul identifies with Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified, then it’s not too hard to imagine that what Jesus, in one sense the “body of Christ” while he was walking around Palestine, saw on the mount of Transfiguration is now a vision of Moses and Elijah that the Church, the “body of Christ” while Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father, shares.  In other words, the one being who sees Moses aright, as the perpetually-brilliant bearer of the Torah of God, is the one who sees Moses as one sitting on one side as Elijah sits as the other, in other words one who sees both as attendants upon the body of Christ in the world.

There’s more to say, as is always the case when one reads Paul, but I have to think that something like the picture that Luke paints in Greek prose must have been somewhere in the complex of thoughts and influences and traditions that constituted the writer we call Paul when, inspired by God, he gave us this wonderfully perplexing little chunk of the letters to the Corinthians.  As is often the case with Paul, it presents us less with concrete moral teachings and more with a wonderful vision and its implications, a King’s body constituted of saved souls, shunning falsehood and cunning because of who we are, a Church who sees Moses aright and does not lose heart, an assembly of free persons, liberated by the Spirit that informs and inspires us.

May the freedom that comes with being the Christ’s body elevate our souls and remind us of our particular Christian mission.

Crévecoeur and the Two Faces of America

The back of the Penguin edition of J. Hector St. John de Crévecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer says “History” on it, and the Library of Congress has it filed (in my library, anyway, obviously absent a great deal of books) between 1,000 Places to See in the U.S. and Canada Before You Die and the John Steinbeck travelogue Travels with Charley in Search of America. This placement is a lie.

Letters from an American Farmer is full of such lies, beginning with its title. These aren’t letters—at least they’re not letters in the sense that they were never sent to anyone in particular from anyone in particular—and they’re not from an American farmer. Well, kind of. Crévecoeur was a French immigrant to the United States back before they were particularly united, and he owned a farm in Orange County, New York. But he’s not the American farmer, “James,” of the letters.

I’m not interested in figuring out why exactly Letters from an American Farmer is considered a historical text instead of the first American novel. (It was first published in 1782, nearly a decade before Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple came out in England.) My interest in the text—and this is apparently true of nearly everyone who reads it—is historical rather than literary anyway. That’s not to say that Letters from an American Farmer isn’t a delightful little book, because it is far more readable and entertaining than most historical texts from the colonial era—but I’m interested, old-fashioned critic that I am, in what it has to say about that peculiar animal, The American.

Crévecoeur, it must be said, loves America. And he loves it specifically because it has not had time to build up a civilization, as has the debased and polluted Europe from which he comes. Americans are not quite noble savages, but the primitivism of the country does ennoble its citizens: “Here we have in some measure regained the ancient dignity of our species: our laws are simple and just; we are a race of cultivators; our cultivation is unrestrained; and therefore everything is prosperous and flourishing” (Letter I). Crévecoeur manages to mix society with back-to-the-earth ideology—a difficult task, and one that can perhaps be accomplished only in a new culture like seventeenth-century America.

With this rejoicing in the simple, it’s not surprising that we see a wide strain of Enlightenment optimism in Letters from an American Farmer. The minister in the first letter, for example, tells Crévecoeur’s narrator that “your mind is what we called at Yale a tabula rasa, where spontaneous and strong impressions are delineated with facility,” referring, of course, to John Locke’s famously optimistic “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” This optimism allows Crévecoeur to promote a very small and limited government. I see modern libertarianism in statements like the following: “Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement?” (Letter III). Crévecoeur sounds almost like Ayn Rand here, glorifying selfishness as though if everyone behaves selfishly, the world will come out okay.

This attitude was enormously popular in the colonial days of this country—you see the same arguments, for example, in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and, though a bit more under the surface, in Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. And of course, it persists today, both in Randian conservatism and in the sort of liberalism that suggests that education is the answer to every social ill. (For a good discussion of where that attitude comes from, I recommend Jay Fliegelman’s Prodigals and Pilgrims.)

But Crévecoeur is of two minds in Letters from an American Farmer. As the letters progress, things get darker. He tells us in the second letter that “Good and evil . . . are to be found in all societies, and it is in vain to seek for any spot where those ingredients are not mixed.” If the first few letters are marked primarily by the good in American society and the blithe Enlightenment optimism that good inspires, evil makes its presence more and more known as Crévecoeur continues writing.

There is a good autobiographical reason for this, incidentally. In 1779, while Crévecoeur was still working on the Letters, he was falsely imprisoned by the British as an American spy. He left the country after three months in jail, leaving his wife and most of his family behind. He would return to the United States in 1783, but he would never see his wife again, as she would die during his absence. It is no doubt difficult to believe in the inherent goodness and perfectibility of man when one is torn from one’s family by the forces of government.

You can feel this in the later letters. Crévecoeur maintains his blitheness while describing Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, but eventually his farmer heads south to Charleston, South Carolina, and all hell breaks loose. “The three principal classes of inhabitants are lawyers, planters, and merchants,” he tells us. “This is the province which has afforded to the first the richest spoils, for nothing can exceed their wealth, their power, and their influence” (Letter IX).

If he doesn’t outright blame the lawyers for slavery, he at least blames them for not stopping it. Slavery, he tells us, is our great national evil because it destroys both slave and master; neither is “permitted to partake of those ineffable sensations with which Nature inspires the hearts of fathers and mothers; they must repel them all and become callous and passive.” It destroys entire generations, “bred in the midst of slaves, [who] learn from the example of their parents to despise them and seldom conceive either from religion or philosophy any ideas that tend to make their fate less calamitous.” Crévecoeur literally sees no hope for the slaveholding South, a 180-degree reversal from his feelings about Massachusetts and Connecticut.

(It should be noted that he engages in some serious bad faith in claiming that slaves in the North “enjoy as much liberty as their masters; they are as well clad and as well fed; in health and sickness, they are tenderly taken care of; they live under the same roof and are, truly speaking, a part of our families.” This sort of statement has been counterindicated by everyone from Alexis de Toqueville to Harriet Beecher Stowe to Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig. It is simply not true.)

At any rate, near the end of this chapter, Crévecoeur falls to his knees, lifts his hands toward heaven, and screams the following:

The history of the earth! Doth it present anything but crimes of the most heinous nature, committed from one end of the world to the other? We observe avarice, rapine, and murder, equally prevailing in all parts. History perpetually tells us of millions of people abandoned to the caprice of the maddest princes, and of whole nations devoted to the blind fury of tyrants. Countries destroyed, nations alternatively buried in ruins by other nations, some parts of the world beautifully cultivated, returned again into their pristine state, the fruits of the ages of industry, the toil of thousands in a short time destroyed by few!

No Puritan could have said this better. Crévecoeur is, it seems, only as optimistic as his surroundings. When he is in the pleasant and relatively free Northeast, he believes in the perfectibility of mankind; when he is in the South, he wants God to reign down fire from heaven on all the inhabitants of this horrible planet. This attitude is, I think, typical of the American consciousness, which veers from extreme optimism to extreme pessimism every decade and a half or so, spurred in one direction by technological innovation, bull markets, and charismatic leaders and in the other by war, economic downturns, and the Indianapolis Colts making it to the Super Bowl.

We have a few Great National Myths in this country—there’s the myth of the self-made man, which I’ll be talking about next week, and there’s the myth of social mobility. But no myth has more impact on me personally than the myth of the frontier, the myth of movement, the myth of what Frederick R. Karl calls “spatiality.” “Americans,” he tells us, “abhor a vacuum and have, accordingly, structured a literature in which they can pursue the limitless.” This pursuit takes place primarily physically: think of Huck Finn lighting out for the territory, or Rabbit fleeing his infant daughter’s funeral—or, for that matter, think of Bruce Springsteen and Mary heading off down Thunder Road “to case the Promised Land.” (Yes, casual fans—it’s case, not chase.)

My assertion here—and I know it’s taken a long time to get there—is that our national myth of the frontier stems from our national two-facedness, as demonstrated so perfectly in Letters from an American Farmer. We’re as optimistic as our surroundings, and since our optimism comes from an unspoken belief in the noble savage, it makes sense that we would head vaguely West, into open space, in order to diffuse the evil that congregates with large groups of Americans.

In Crévecoeur’s final letter, he bemoans the state of international politics, the conflict between the America he loves and the Britain to which his personal beliefs bind him. (“Must I renounce a name so ancient and so venerable?” he asks.) The only solution he can come up with is to move further into the frontier, where he and his family will become full-blown Native Americans, building a wigwam, receiving new names, and speaking Indian languages. His solution, in other words, is to try to maintain his optimism by cultivating his pessimism—he can believe in the inherent goodness of the woods only by believing in the inherent evil in Charleston. (To put it in Springsteen’s terms, Mary is only desirable in the first place because of the ghosts of her past lovers “haunt[ing] this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets.” I love that song.)

Crévecoeur didn’t create American spatiality; Karl says it stretches straight back to Christopher Columbus. But, subconsciously or not, he gives us the real reason for it—he explicates our incredibly complicated attitude toward civilization and the wilderness, our constant desire to turn the latter into the former and our intense fear that we’ll succeed at it. So we have to keep moving, making new civilizations only to abandon them. As Travels with Charley in Search of America tells us, “Nearly every American hungers to move.”

Maybe the Library of Congress was on to something after all.