Monthly Archives: August 2011

Happy Birthday to CHP guest host and little brother Ryan Gilmour today!  He’s reached the age that Thomas Aquinas regarded as perfect.  

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 21 August 2011 (Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A)

Exodus 1:8-2:10 and Psalm 124  •  Isaiah 51:1-6 and Psalm 138  • Romans 12:1-8  • Matthew 16:13-20

I hate to admit it, but as much as I value my seminary education, and as much as I love all of my friends from seminary, I’m glad I’m not all that close to the seminary scene any more.  (The college where I teach is contemplating starting a theological graduate program, so I might some day return by virtue of seminary scene coming to find me.)  Learning to ask the sorts of questions that I ask when I study and when I teach the Bible was great, but when I read blog posts and Facebook updates and other off-the-cuff electronic text from people still around theological graduate schools, I see a body of concerns that just don’t concern me any more.  More precisely, I see conversations dominated by binaries that I just don’t find useful anymore.  One can advocate for either charity or political change, but to call for both draws suspicion.  One can either believe in economic justice or in a Church whose sex lives stand in contrast to the libertinism of the Roman Empire (or the New Left), but to stand in favor of one means supporters of the other are going to be suspicious.  One can either hold the Bible to be authoritative or challenge conventional readings of the same, but nobody really does both.  And so on.  And if I’m honest, I see those binaries, too often for comfort, mapping themselves onto familiar liberal/evangelical (or progressive/conservative, if you must) territories.

This week’s gospel reading is just such a text, and it troubles me that, at various points of my own intellectual life, I probably insisted strongly that Peter’s calling Jesus “Son of God” had little or nothing to do with Christian doctrines of Trinity, or that it had little to do with anything else.  (Like I said, I’m glad to be away from it; I didn’t claim never to have been a part.)  When I read it now, in my mid-thirties and miles away (geographically and otherwise) from the “cutting edge” of biblical and theological studies, I’m inclined to see this passage in ways that borrow both from Dominic Crossan and from Billy Graham.  Indeed Peter (in this version–I realize there’s a briefer Mark version) says something beyond Psalm 2 when he calls Jesus son of the “living God,” but certainly he says no less than what Psalm 2 says about the monarch.  And while I’d be among the last to say that anything like a Nicene Christology was an intellectual option for a monarchic-era Israelite or even for a first-century Palestinian tradesman, I also would be among the last to say that the limits of the Psalmist’s intellect (or the fisherman’s) are the same as the horizons of the text.  Even without doctrines of Scriptural inspiration, literary texts always outstrip their authors’ horizons, and with the confession that God indeed inspired the Psalms, the possibilities that open up are at least capacious enough to include Nicene confessions.

In short, I want history and theology, both confession and literature.  And now, a decade out from seminary, I’m much more confident in thinking that the Bible we’ve got can give me both.

May our knees bend at the proclamation of the King, both at the reading and at the preaching of the Holy Scriptures.

• The utter moral bankruptcy of national academic conferences
• Some tidbits from Barth on relationships between Scripture and theology
• Some facile, relativistic tidbits on pop music in the twenty-first century
• Some facile, relativistic tidbits on mercenaries in the twenty-first century
• A conservative critique of the Pledge of Allegiance
• More bad-news trends in American colleges
• A nice summary of the “new perspective” approach to the New Testament
• The diversity of the Christian intellectual scene in China
• 

There’s a game Christian intellectuals sometimes play regarding ancient philosophers. “If he had lived 400 years later,” the question goes, “would Plato (or Aristotle, or Euripides, or Cicero, or Confucius, or whoever) have been a Christian?” Good existentialist that I am, I suspect that people hold their religious beliefs for reasons that have more to do with deep-seated spiritual need than with being logically convinced–and thus that questions like this one are fundamentally unanswerable. A better question: “What does Plato (or whoever) say that echoes strangely and unexpectedly with the Gospel?” One need not agree with C.S. Lewis’s assertion that Christ fulfills all religions to think that Mencius or Homer found some fragment of truth that the death and resurrection of Christ put into a larger context.

It’s a bigoted way to read the great works of the past, and I understand that. But I still can’t escape it, which is why Thomas Aquinas kept coming to mind this morning as I read Horace’s distinctively non-Catholic Satires. I don’t know Thomas’s work well, but I doubt seriously that he spent much time reading Horace, whose poems are dirty, crude, and scatological–and yet deeply concerned with virtue. (In this they also prefigure the novels of John Updike, which depict human sexuality in nauseous detail but which are ultimately concerned with what goodness looks like in the modern world.) But Thomas meets Horace in their common intellectual ancestor, Aristotle, who is both the most important secular influence on Thomas and the foundation of Horace’s system of virtue.

Aristotle’s ethical system is most famous for its articulation of the so-called “Golden Mean,” which he develops in the Nicomachean Ethics and implicitly uses in most of his other works. “Excellence,” says Aristotle,

is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. Now it is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect; and again it is a mean because the vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while excellence both finds and chooses that which is intermediate. (1106b-1107a)

For example, we can look at various reactions to fear. A soldier who is afraid to die is scheduled to go into battle. The virtue associated with this scenario, of course, is bravery. The soldier with not enough bravery turns tail and runs, an action that most of us would condemn. But Aristotle also condemns the soldier with a surfeit of bravery, the soldier who lacks the instinct for self-preservation. The proper response to fear is to acknowledge it but to do what has to be done. This is the virtue of bravery, as distinguished from the vices of cowardice and foolhardiness.

Incidentally, we should be careful not to give Aristotle too much credit for the Golden Mean; countless other thinkers from the East and the West alike came up with versions of it. But Aristotle’s is the foundational formulation of the principle–at least for Westerners.

I am not sure of the degree to which Horace was aware of Aristotle’s philosophy, but it’s clear that, even if he didn’t know the text itself, the content had filtered down through the centuries. The Golden Mean is an unspoken force behind many of the satires, but it’s especially clear in the first poem of Book I. Here Horace addresses the working man, the man who slaves away at a job he can’t stand but who dreams of doing something more stimulating. The problem, of course, is that this description applies to nearly everyone who works, a universality that intrigues Horace:

How is it, Maecenas, that no one is content with his own lot–
whether he has got it by an act of choice or taken it up
by chance–but instead envies people in other occupations?
“It’s well for the merchant!” says the soldier, feeling the weight of his years
and physically broken down by long weary service.
The merchant, however, when his ship is pitching in southern gale,
cries “Soldiering’s better than this!” (1.1.1-7)

This is a remarkable opening for at least two reasons. First, we in the modern world are apt to think of occupational ennui as the invention of the Industrial Revolution; many of us sit amid the throb and hum of our various machines and dream of simpler times. To see that laborers in Horace’s day–unbound to cubicles, fluorescent lights, and TS reports–were as unsatisfied with their jobs as we are with ours is to be struck by the absolute universality of Horace’s anthropological observation. Second, Horace (who seems to be utterly content in his own occupation) clearly has great sympathy for the dissatisfied workers whom he describes; he fully understands why they’d want to leave their chosen or fated fields.

But he doesn’t excuse them. Instead, he notes slyly that, were they given the opportunity to change occupations, “they’d refuse, even though they could have their heart’s desire (1.1.19). Why this absurdity? he asks, exasperated and amused. The workers, he says, “maintain that their only object / in enduring hardship is to make their pile, so when they are old / they can then retire with an easy mind” (1.1.30-32). This is not, let us admit, a ridiculous answer, nor is it without its analogues in the natural world:

In the same way
the tiny ant with immense industry . . .
hauls whatever he can with his mouth and adds it to the heap
he is building, thus making conscious and careful provision for the future. (1.1.32-35)

But the example of the ant, says Horace, condemns the workaholic and the striver rather than justifying them. After all, even the ant works only for a season and “Then, as the year wheels round into dismal Aquarius, the ant / never sets foot out of doors but, very sensibly, lives / on what he has amassed” (1.1.36-38). Not so the unhappy worker, whose labor never ends and who pushes himself to the limit out of greed and envy. Why work to build a pile on which to retire, Horace asks, when half a pile would be plenty?

To make his point, he turns to another image from the natural world. Sensible people, when they are thirsty, get a glass of water. But the striver has bigger plans; he says,

“I’d sooner draw it from a big river than from this
piddling stream, although the amount would be just the same.”
That’s how people who like more than their fair share
get swept away, bank and all, by the raging Aufidus,
while the man who wants only what he needs doesn’t draw water
clouded with mud, nor does he lose his life in the torrent. (1.1.55-60)

Horace is not arguing that we should live the life of the carefree hobo, you’ll notice–the satires are not the Roman version of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, and that his metaphor for money is water suggests that slacking off is an equally bad idea. The point is to get the money one needs and then to enjoy it; after all, in Horace’s view, that’s what money is for.

There are two ways to go wrong once you’ve got money: You can either toss it around like a Rockefeller with a brain tumor, or you can hold onto it so tightly that Caesar’s face is burned into your palm. Further, recoil from either tends to lead to its opposite:

When I urge you not to be a miser
I’m not saying you should be a rake and a wastrel. There is
a stage between the frigid midget and the massive vassal.
Things have a certain proportion. In short, there are definite limits;
if you step beyond them on this side or that you can’t be right. (1.1.103-107)

Reading Horace, I realized something that made the connection between Aristotle and Aquinas crystal clear.  The Golden Mean is not merely a guide to ethical behavior, and the Nicomachean Ethics is not properly classed among the humanities. Rather, Aristotle is acting in his capacity as a scientist, describing a natural phenomenon that human beings ignore at their peril. After all, one does not avoid stepping off a ledge because it’s ethically wrong to do so; one avoids stepping off a ledge because gravity is a natural force.

Thus, proper behavior is written into the fabric of the world itself, a phenomenon Catholic theologians call natural law. I’m not sure I believe them, incidentally–the Fall seems to have sufficiently mucked things up to make going against “nature” the more ethical decision sometimes–but I see now where the idea comes from, and it was the ribald ethical poet of Rome who showed me. I’m not sure what Aquinas would think.

I don’t keep count of how many times people recommend books to me (I never have the presence of mind to start the count on the first instance, and three or four in, I figure I won’t be able to keep an accurate number), but in the case of Francis Schaeffer’s How Shall We then Live?, I can remember when someone first recommended it.  I was home in Indiana on summer break from my first year at Milligan College, where I’d taken two semesters of Humanities (Milligan’s interdisciplinary history/literature/philosophy/art-history core course sequence) from a mostly-conservative English professor and two semesters of Bible survey from a moderate-to-conservative New Testament professor.  While I was talking to the owner and manager of the local Christian bookstore in Indiana about both (and noting that, as someone who was more than a little conservative, he was more than a little concerned about some of the things I was reporting to him as things I’d learned), he noted that they had a video series that I could rent (these were the days when some physical structures kept collections of VHS tapes for people to take home on a nightly-rental basis) by someone called Francis Schaeffer.  It sounded interesting, but since I was on my way back to Tennessee in a short while, I declined to rent it.  Over the years, in online and in-person contexts, several folks have recommended Schaeffer, but until this summer, fifteen years after the first recommendation, I’d never had occasion actually to buy and to read it.  Since it would be more than a bit daft to write a review of a thirty-five-year-old book, I’m going to write a bit about some of the surprises that met me and some of the questions that occurred to me as I read this much-recommended volume.

Two things stuck with me most as I finished the book.  The strangest thing about this book is its central rhetorical contradiction.  Schaeffer clearly knows that he is not writing the first cultural history of the Western tradition: by the time How Then Should We Live? hit the presses in 1976, William Fleming’s Arts and Ideas (which my college used as our art-history textbook) was more than twenty years old and in at least its fourth edition.  I note this not to say that no history is worth rewriting (that’s the point of the discipline of history, as far as I’m concerned) but to note that, when he undertook to write an arts-and-ideas sort of history, he wrote such a history with a particular perspective and for particular purposes.  I knew that’s what he was doing when he attacked Dante and Caravaggio for failing to be good Protestants, and I knew that’s what he was after when he excused the destruction of ancient artworks by over-zealous iconoclastic Protestants as the ill-informed but understandable reaction to a culture of idolatry.  Those sorts of moves, the new assignments of blame and the exoneration of old accusations, is the stuff of revisionist history (which, as Donald Kagan notes in his lectures on Thucydides, gets entirely too bad a rap), and I expect it.

When I got deeper into the book, therefore, I was more than a bit disturbed to see Schaeffer issue a rather panicked assessment of television as a cultural force.  His take was not McLuhan’s, the media-ecological project that would become the nucleus of Neil Postman’s career assault on the tube.  Instead, the television news program is the artistic vision of human beings, something perspectival:

The physical limitations of the camera dictate that only one aspect of the total situation is given.  If the camera were aimed ten feet to the left or ten feet to the right, an entirely different “objective story” might come across.

And, on top of that, the people taking the film and those editing it often to have a subjective viewpoint that enters in.  When we see a political figure on TV, we are not seeing the person as he necessarily is; we are seeing, rather, the image someone has decided we should see.  (240)

I’ll admit that I reread that passage a couple times to make sure I’d read it right.  After all, by that point in this brief book, the reader has gotten a 239-page treatment of Western cultural history as Francis Schaeffer has decided that we should see it.  And given the definite limitations of a brief book on 3000 years of history, Schaeffer’s book is a picture of an account facing physical limitations and therefore giving a partial picture.  I would not attribute such a strange disconnect to willful deception–after all, I never met Francis Schaeffer, and every account I’ve read of the person points to a person with a great concern for the truth–but I do see in this contradiction a suspicion of rhetoric that ignores its own rhetorical project.

The other oddity of the book is its reliance on underdeveloped post hoc ergo propter hoc arguments.  Over and over Schaeffer points to post-Darwinian, mechanistic accounts of human life (Skinnerian and otherwise) as resulting from the humanism of the Italian Renaissance (164 and others).  He likewise credits (without much explanation) the brutal violence of the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, as compared to England’s almost-bloodless Glorious Revolution or the relatively subdued American Revolution, to France’s and Russia’s failures to become Protestant (124).  Beyond the grand regional generalizations to which one must consent for these to make sense, one must also agree that there are two sorts of people in the world, namely Protestants and everybody else.  That much one might be able to swallow if one’s reading of Augustine identified civitas dei with Protestantism, but even granting that, Schaeffer never accounts for historical phenomena like the large number of Lutherans that were German citizens and National Socialist party members in the thirties; the fact that the Glorious Revolution happened scarcely a generation after the brutal Civil War in England (whose regicidal faction was unmistakably Protestant); and that the ideas of the Italian Renaissance and the French/German/Swiss Reformation were scarcely easy to separate either in seventeenth-century England or in eighteenth-century America.  That Schaeffer finds Protestant theology more faithful than Catholic or that Schaeffer thinks that certain ideas make other ideas more plausible I can applaud; that he makes complex historical events the simplistic results of sectarian differences I have a harder time with.

Still, several pleasant surprises made this book a fun read.  Although, in the waning years of the Cold War, he’s careful never to issue criticisms of “Capitalism,” Schaeffer does exhibit a nuanced sense of the dangers of economic ideologies, naming “the lack of a compassionate use of accumulated wealth” (114, 116, among others) as a genuine systematic problem that even Protestant regions face and advocating, among other things, universal state health care (116) as policies that only an atheistic/social-Darwinian ideology could imagine opposing.  (I wonder whether the prominent GOP pundits who blurbed my edition of the book–published in 2005, when GOP pundits weren’t nearly as skittish about “the government”–regret that now.)  Moreover, Schaeffer names with delightful clarity why I can’t stand certain films that “the cultured” hold up as unassailable masterpieces, making the distinction between a genuine work of art, which speaks to the whole person, and a “bare philosophic, intellectual statement” (197).  Finally, Schaeffer names well, twenty-five years before such things unfolded in Washington, just how societies without a sense of what the political means, would respond to terrorism.  Such societies, Schaeffer writes, because they do not have any sense of liberty as a genuine political good, will “give up liberties” and welcome “a manipulating authoritarian government” (248) when decades of comfort get disturbed and the government promises to destroy evil (a strange promise for a government to make, as I tried to say even back in the last decade, but then again, it was the folks who recommended Schaeffer who seemed most convinced that a government could do just that).

In other words, this oft-praised book is neither an utter disappointment nor entirely convincing but, as far as my reading is concerned, an interesting possibility that didn’t quite live up to what such a project could be.  That’s nothing to sniff at, of course; I’m sure that my own writing has all of these sorts of flaws without many of its virtues, and although I try to be more forthcoming about the rhetorical quality of my own writing (and even about my own ideologies), there’s nothing here that I can name as willfully deceptive.  Granting that, I still see this book as an attempt to bite off too much subject-matter in too brief a volume, and the writing sometimes shows.  Such a brief book (not even a third of the length of Fleming’s Arts and Ideas) should stay utterly focused on the historical arc, but Schaeffer often breaks off into preacherly anecdotes that never get explained.  Moreover, sometimes the prose style entirely breaks down, most notably when Schaeffer writes about the rise of rock and roll:

This emphasis on hallucinogenic drugs brought with it many rock groups, for example, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix.  Most of their work was from 1965 to 1968. (170)

Whether one likes Schaeffer’s ideas or not, the syntax of this sentence, not to mention the location of Pink Floyd’s and the Grateful Dead’s main work in the mid-sixties, are hard to call anything but sloppy, and one ought not to deny such.  Even so, I do have to tip my hat to any book that mentions the Incredible String Band.  I thought the Gilmour family might be the last place that the Incredible String Band lives on, but here it is, in the textbook of a dozen evangelical colleges.  At any rate, the point here is that this book is a mixed bag of a short volume, at turns nuanced and reductionist, sometimes exhibiting the lifelong teacher’s way with words and sometimes breaking down into freshman-comp prose.  Like many such books, the sorts that get held up as cultural monuments by some and dismissed as hack-jobs by others, it’s probably a bit of both.

I suppose, fifteen years later, I can live with that.

• Is the contemporary American novel written in vernacular English?
• A Londoner visits Atlanta (and has several nice things to say about it!)
• What’s Harold Bloom’s favorite book of the Bible?
• Our buddy Chris Gehrz tries to figure out what “Christian fundamentalist” means in the mass media.
• What’s Catch-22 really about? (Michial sez: If you didn’t know that already, you’re not reading closely enough.)

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 7 August 2011 (8th Sunday after Pentecost, Year A)

Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28 and Psalm 105: 1-6, 16-22, 45b  • 1 Kings 19:9-18 and Psalm 85:8-13  • Romans 10:5-15  • Matthew 14:22-33

God rarely repeats a story, but after the Exodus, just about every story God tells echoes.  Just about everyone who grew up hearing the King James Bible preached will be able to recite the phrase “still, small voice” (still the best translation of 1 Kings 19:12), but fewer people remember why God was appearing to Elijah on the mount of Moses in the first place.  Certainly this was an occasion of comfort that Elijah needed–on the run from the agents of Jezebel after the rout of the prophets of Ba’al, Elijah had become convinced that he was the only faithful one left in the northern kingdom of Israel.  He feared, rightly, that a Punic queen who snuffed out his life would in the same stroke destroy the last one who openly would tell Israel of YHWH’s demands for absolute and exclusive worship.  When God reveals the seven thousand faithful, it comes as a surprise both to Elijah and to the reader.

But the comfort is not the sum total of the message: Elijah has three very particular tasks put before him: he must anoint a new king of Damascus, likewise anoint a new king of Samaria, and anoint his own successor.  Along with the echoes of the Moses story, YHWH here is putting Elijah into a retelling of the story of Samuel, only this time the stakes are even higher than when Samuel ventured forth under divine pretense to find a new king in the days of Saul.  As a sign of the far-ranging authority and designs of YHWH, Elijah is to go first not even to any of the twelve tribes liberated from Egypt but to the Arameans, some of Israel’s oldest enemies, to name a new king.  Rightfully speaking, Elijah is going into a place where he has no business meddling: he speaks in behalf of a God who did not rescue Syria from Egypt, who has not given Syria any Torah to speak of.  Yet YHWH sends Elijah.

Likewise the errand to Israel stands as nonsense, though in this case it’s not new nonsense.  Ahab lives, and Jezebel rages, yet Elijah is to anoint Jehu, the slayer of apostates, as the new king.  And while he’s at it, since he’s going about naming successors to kings who haven’t died yet, he should probably name his own successor.

In short, the encounter with God in the wilderness happens so that Elijah can speak the word of God in the cities.  The still, small voice comes to reassure the prophet that his own treasonous voice will in fact be the voice of God to the nations.  Elijah’s life is spared by flight and by provision of food only so that he can name the one who will go on when he no longer walks the earth.  All of these things are parts of the prophet’s life, and the comfort is no more intelligible without the mission than the mission would be intelligible without the divine favor.  Such a rhythm of seclusion and proclamation, of rest and commission, is the shape of the story of the faithful from old times, and it continues both through the life and ministry of Jesus and on into the Christian era.

Thus stands my brief argument for the gathering of the faithful on the day of the Resurrection and the prudent preference not to gather too often the rest of the week.

May our own encounters with the God whose voice is silence send us forth boldly to proclaim all that the nations need to hear from God.