The Boat & the Church, from Sermon 75 of the Homilies of Saint Augustine of Hippo, likely delivered in Carthage circa 395. Meanwhile the boat carrying the disciples — that is The Church — is rocking and shaking amid the storms of temptation, while the adverse wind rages on. That is to say, her enemy The Devil strives to keep the wind from claming down. But greater is He who is persistent on our behalf, for amid the vicissitudes of our life He gives us confidence. He comes to us and strengthens us, so we are not jostled in the boat and tossed overboard. For although the boat is thrown into disorder, it is still a boat. It alone carries the disciples and receives Christ. It is in danger indeed on the water, but there would be certain death without it. Therefore stay inside the boat and call upon God! When all good advice fails and the rudder is useless and the spread of the sails presents more of a danger than an advantage, when all human help and strength have been abandoned, the only recourse left for the sailors is to cry out to God. Therefore will He who helps those who are sailing to reach port safely abandon His Church and prevent her from arriving in peace and tranquility? What really has to be guarded against is the boat going off course and turning back. This happens when people give up hope of heavenly rewards, and turn under the distorting pull of greed to things that can be seen but pass away. You see, people who are being troubled and tempted by their passions, and yet keep their sights on the realities of the inner life, do not despair like that, but pray for their offenses to be forgiven and remain determined to win through and sail across the rage and fury of the sea.
A publication of Houston Baptist University
FALL 2010
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THE CITY Publisher Robert Sloan Advisory Editors Francis J. Beckwith Adam Bellow Paul J. Bonicelli Joseph Bottum Hugh Hewitt Ramesh Ponnuru Editor in Chief Benjamin Domenech Reviews Editor Micah Mattix Writer at Large Hunter Baker Contributing Editors Matthew Lee Anderson Ryan T. Anderson Matthew Boyleston David Capes Joe P. Carter Victoria C. Gardner Coates Christopher Hammons Anthony Joseph Joseph M. Knippenberg Louis Markos Wilfred McClay Dan McLaughlin Matthew J. Milliner Russell Moore Robert Stacey Joshua Trevino THE CITY Volume III, Issue 2 Copyright 2010 Houston Baptist University. All rights reserved by original authors except as noted. Letters and submissions to this journal are welcomed. Cover photo by Lou Vest. Email us at thecity@hbu.edu, and visit us online at civitate.org. 2
in this issue Art & Society Matthew J. Milliner on Two Art Worlds Matt Boyleston on Literature & Irony A Discourse on Bob Dylan & America
9 A New Age Samuel Gregg on Deficits & The Devil Dean M. Riley on The Age of Information Mollie Hemingway on Marriage & Bigotry Joseph Knippenberg on Faith & Obama Jay Richards on Christian Socialism
9 Books & Culture R. Albert Mohler Jr. on The Emerging Adults Micah Mattix on Ayn Rand’s World Jordan Ballor on Dietrich Bonhoeffer Lou Markos on Evangelism & the Jews With Poetry by Catherine Tufariello And The Word by Cyril of Alexandria And introducing
The Republic of Letters A new column by Hunter Baker
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Flowering Pear Catherine Tufariello The ornamental pear Bursts almost overnight, Its greenness interlaced With whorls of cirrus white, Five-fingered blossoms curved To cup capricious air. These blooms, the only fruit The tree was born to bear, Were pink-tipped, sticky fists A day or so ago And soon will flitter down Like flakes of April snow, Confetti from a wedding Swept up when guests have gone. But now the bride, arms lifted, Still waltzes on the lawn In her embroidered gown, Ruched veil and trailing sleeves. Is this the girl who hid Unseen among the leaves? Exempted from the Fall, The need to be of use, Resplendent in her prime, Prodigal, profuse, And holding nothing back, She tosses her bouquet, Made for joy and pleasure On the seventh day.
Catherine Tufariello is an award-winning poet. Her latest book is Keeping My Name. She lives with her family in Indiana, and teaches at Valparaiso University. 4
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A TALE OF TWO ART WORLDS ]october0and0its0others} Matthew J. Milliner n a recent conversation in Books & Culture with three Christian intellectuals involved in the arts, the art historian James Elkins discussed the blackballing of non-ironic religious perspectives in the ostensibly secular art world. This was not the first time. Elkins has repeatedly borne the brunt of Christian frustrations, for Elkins is one of the only “art world” representatives who has bothered to listen to Christian perspectives at all. Accordingly, this particular exchange read as if a noble prince of a powerful, distant kingdom had chosen to serve as an emissary to a band of exiled art world peasantry. Elkins laments that he (a mere prince) is powerless to change the art world’s hostility to religion, which is not directly, but unconsciously legislated by the powerful kings and queens of the contemporary art world. October reigns, he tells us, October being a Marxist journal of art and politics, founded in the Seventies and responsible for launching its editors into some of the most influential art historical positions in the United States. “[I]t can sound as if I am silently promoting the widening circle of theorists who are influenced by October…” explains Elkins, and yet academic art history, overshadowed by October, “is an account on which everyone else depends.” Nearly a century ago, the Dada manifesto ended “To be against this manifesto is to be a Dadaist.” Similarly, Elkins suggests that to even deny being a follower of October is to be captive to October. There may be lots of art going on outside the academic world, but should one bother to think or write about art, there’s no escaping the influence of this particular journal. “Worlds of art, yes,” said Elkins, “worlds of art writing, no.” In the intellectual climate of the art world, it’s always October. 5
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This exchange with Elkins is enough to cause the exiled Christian peasantry to turn—should we dare—to the pages of October, and read the decrees of that distant kingdom, in hopes, perhaps, of learning the cause of our banishment. This is difficult, as October is a moving target, hosting a variety of perspectives that can reside under its canopy of progressive politics. Others have been there before us. October’s Public Enemy #1, the conservative art critic Roger Kimball, surveyed the journal’s output in a chapter entitled “The October Syndrome,” from his widely vilified book, Tenured Radicals. It was a funny analysis, and because October doesn’t do funny, it was not taken well. Kimball identified October’s Marxist strategy of seeing art and culture as “essentially reflections of economic processes,” and hence, “art should be primarily a form of political activism.” The legend that appears on every cover of October, “Art|Theory|Criticism|Politics” should therefore, in Kimball’s estimation, read “Art = Theory = Criticism = Politics.” Kimball scored some rhetorical points in his essay, but as he would no doubt freely admit, his vaccination to prevent the spread of the October Syndrome has not been entirely effective. Kimball’s approach represents a heroic one-man assault against the October kingdom, by someone whose courage we might admire, but whose strategy—due to its track record—we might not wish to perpetuate. Perhaps, therefore, we could give the analysis of October another go, in hopes of finding a few fleeting points of contact. Kimball’s analysis, after all, was first published in 1990, and October has not stood still. For example, Kimball inveighed (rightfully) against October’s impenetrable academic prose, which “seeks to compensate for the choking airlessness… [by] punctuating every observation with a hint of violence or risqué sex.” But such notorious inaccessibility, which banks upon the humble reader’s assumption that he or she must not be smart enough to fathom the writer’s intention, has lately been criticized even from within the pages of October itself: “Most critics of late,” complains October contributor Suzanne Perling Hudson, “have chosen to retreat into academic solipsism and abstruse theoretical models, further marginalizing their attempts at appraisal in favor of jargon-laden rhetorical gymnastics…” October, then, has its share of surprises, and it may be time for another look. 6
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nce upon a time, a now canonically postmodern art critic named Rosalind Krauss, began October when she left Artforum in 1976. The inaugural issue of October, while consciously resisting nostalgia, found inspiration from Russia’s October revolution of 1917, and promised to look for ways that “literature, painting, architecture and film required and generated their own Octobers, radical departures articulating the historical moment that enclosed them…” October, back in 1976, endeavored to scan the contemporary horizon for these revolutionary moments, pitting itself against “that academy” which, the editors then felt, gave insufficient coverage of the new. It would be far too easy, perhaps even unkind, to here point out that October, due to its success, is now “that academy,” inhabiting the very corridors of power they set out to critique. They are faced now—due to their power to perpetuate this academic control—with the same Stalinist temptations that ultimately ruined those successful revolutionaries of October, 1917. It might also be too facile to point out that the Soviet Russia that October indirectly identified with in the Seventies and Eighties (perhaps as a means of pitting themselves against the Carter/Reagan era), is now experiencing an Orthodox religious revival. But again, our aim is to move beyond facile or dismissive engagement. Instead, we might admit that October’s statement of purpose is, in fact, quite compelling, and there may be good reason for the journal’s hard-earned success. However distasteful a market analogy might be to October’s selfunderstanding, we might use one to explain the journal’s favorable position in modern academe. October invested in postmodernism when shares were risky and cheap. The stock soared, and the journal reaped the inevitable benefits. We might then concede that October has the right to enjoy its justly gained rewards. That cloud of postmodern witnesses, which now surrounds graduate students and undergraduates alike (Bhabha, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, Žižek, and Cornel West) were not only cited in October, but were key contributors to the journal early on. October’s stable of writers analyzed art by fusing Leftist politics with everything under the poststructuralist sun, from queer theory to psychoanalysis, thereby charting what it named our “antifoundational era.” In the realm of visual art, this involved, among other projects, undermining art’s midtwentieth century confidence. In fact, the journal’s distancing itself from Krauss’ modernist mentor, the modernist critic Clement Green7
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berg, might be considered a sort of Girardian “founding murder” from which October derives much of its power. But from a Christian perspective, this iconoclastic approach has positive aspects. If modern art made overweening claims, was not October’s a necessary critique? “Art advances where religion once led,” declared the modern painter Piet Mondrian. Mark Rothko promised his flat forms could “destroy illusion and reveal truth.” Surely this undue confidence in the naked power of art was due for some chastisement. We do well here to recall N.T. Wright’s remark that “part of the point of postmodernity, in the strange providence of God, is to preach the Fall to arrogant modernity.” October appears to have been the chief bearer of such unhappy but obligatory tidings in the realm of modern art. Writes Krauss:
In the increasingly de-sacralized space of the nineteenth century, art had become the refuge for religious emotion; it became, as it has remained, a secular form of belief. Although this condition could be discussed openly in the late nineteenth century, it is something that is inadmissible in the twentieth, so that by now we find it indescribably embarrassing to mention art and spirit in the same sentence. October’s mockery of modernism’s religious ambition does not, of course, mean October has been a friend to traditional faith. But the smoke and mirrors of theory, it also needs be admitted, made for some unforeseen epistemological possibilities. Consider an early October essay by the French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman entitled “The Index of the Absent Wound.” Kimball is especially contemptuous of the essay because of its (admittedly) convoluted style, wherein “arcane references and wild generalizations are thrown around wholesale.” But Kimball’s stylistic disagreements led him to miss something significant. Didi-Huberman concludes his opaque essay—which explores the Shroud of Turin— by punting to that paragon of clarity, Thomas Aquinas. Furthermore, his purpose for citing Aquinas’ hematology is because, “in a certain way, theologically speaking, [Thomas] rescues” the Shroud of Turin from its detractors. Granted, for a theologically sensitive essay on the Shroud, I far prefer the chapter on the subject in the volume Seeing Salvation by Neil MacGreggor (or as his employees at London’s National Gallery call him, due to his combination of professional com8
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petence and Christian faith, “St. Neil”). But in October, we have something arguably more interesting: A scholar who evokes a semiotic haze only to then smuggle through it—perhaps despite himself—a normative Christian claim: That the body and blood of Christ are in heaven inviolate. The article reminded me of one recent occasion in seminar at Princeton, when I heard an October enthusiast suggest, in passing, that students consider (without necessarily endorsing) the “epistemology of the miraculous.” his brings us to Leo Steinberg’s famous essay, “The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion,” which first appeared in October. This article, which later became a book, provides us one of the most effective of October’s unintentional self-descriptions: “[T]he ‘oblivion’ to which the title of this essay refers - is profound, willed, and sophisticated. It is the price paid by the modern world for its massive historic retreat from the mythical grounds of Christianity.” We might here dispute the definition of the term “mythical.” And yet, one does suspect that the “oblivion” of some intentionally obfuscating postmodern prose is often simply a form of linguistic procrastination, a concentrated refusal to consider the Nietzschean consequences of rejecting the Christian order. But Steinberg gives us more. Like the historian Carolyn Walker Bynum’s book Jesus as Mother, the title of Steinberg’s essay promises scandal, only to deliver the Christological norm. Steinberg gives us a portrait of a fully sexualized yet perfectly chaste Christ, “proving nothing less than what the Creed itself puts at the center: God’s descent into manhood.” Christ’s chastity, explains Steinberg, “consists not in impotent abstinence, but in potency under check.” In retrospect, Steinberg’s chaste Christ stands out in chiaroscuro contrast to October’s frequently dark and consistently graphic endorsement of sexual pleasures that lie outside “the narrow limits of institutionalized sexuality.” Through the politicized context of what have been called the “art wars” of the late 1980s, October found in Robert Mapplethorpe’s erotic photography a new October, thereby allowing Senator Jesse Helms, even after his retirement, to serve as the convenient decoy for the considerably more sophisticated Christian aesthetic tradition. Of course, Christians can learn something from October’s analysis of Helms: “[C]ensorship tends to publicize, 9
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reproduce, and even create the images it aims to suppress.” But this is something most of us have long understood. Another strategy of religious engagement might be to point to October contributor, (and art historical institution in himself) Professor Michael Fried. Fried boasts an impressive track of publications, but arguably it all began with his most famous Artforum essay, “Art and Objecthood,” which began with an excerpt from Jonathan Edwards’ journal, one that Fried read in Perry Miller’s biography of Edwards. In addition to remarking that a mighty jungle of contemporary art criticism seems to have therefore sprung from a solitary seed plucked from Edwards’ fertile prayer life, we might also remark that Jonathan Edwards scholarship has come a very long way since Miller’s study, which dates to 1949. What—we can innocently inquire—might genuine engagement of America’s great theologian of beauty look like today? We could also point out the uncanny coincidence that the art critic most responsible for reintroducing beauty into contemporary art discussions, Dave Hickey, happens to be a descendent of Jonathan Edwards. Or consider Princeton’s Hal Foster, another October editor, who meditated on the implications of the art of Robert Gober at the end of his book Prosthetic Gods (2006). Foster sees a return to Beauty and Spirituality in the world of contemporary art (it’s hard not to), but Foster sees Gober paving a different path:
[B]etween riddling and redeeming, between an aesthetic of missing parts and a dream of wish-fulfillment, there are other paths; and Gober intimates one third way… that neither fixes on trauma nor leaps toward redemption. A recent volume produced by the Christian peasantry entitled The Beauty of God (IVP Academic, 2007) contains a curious overlap between Foster and artist Bruce Herman, who writes of art that can “memorialize suffering but move beyond it to redemption, healing and eternity. The ascended Christ still bears earthly wounds.” Foster, to be sure, is hesitant to leap toward redemption, while Herman is willing to embrace it; but both are determined to emphatically reject what Foster calls a “faith that magically undoes loss.” Elsewhere, in an article on Gerhard Richter, Foster points to a “beauty with a dramatic core, a ‘wounded’ beauty that works over (but not through) its own loss…” Again, there’s a curious overlap. As if cued by Foster’s 10
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suggestion, the Christian peasantry organized a traveling exhibition entitled “A Broken Beauty,” accompanied by a visually arresting and intellectually substantive catalog that explores the intersection of beauty, suffering and loss. One could be forgiven, in this instance, for thinking that the October kingdom and the Christian exiles were in some kind of covert communication.
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oving towards the immediate present, we find all is not well in the October kingdom (as in the rest of the academic world). To return to our market analogy, October is well aware that postmodern stock is falling. Indeed, the wave of postmodern theory the journal helped generate has risen and crested, and October watches, alongside all of us, wondering what will emerge from the foam. Recent October article titles such “Elegy for Theory,” “Remember Foucault,” “An Archival Impulse,” and (most tellingly perhaps) “Theory as an Object” speak for themselves. October has long acknowledged the crisis in the avant-garde, attempting to find ways of maintaining its critical edge in the twilight of postmodernity. To the editors’ credit, the journal periodically solicits reader responses to a questionnaire, publishing the best of such responses. The latest reader query attempted to fathom the state of contemporary art at the dawn of the second decade of the 21st century. On behalf of the editors, Hal Foster asserts that terms like postmodernism “have run into the sand, and, arguably, no models of much explanatory reach or intellectual force have risen in their stead.” The editors cast the net wide, in hopes of dragging in clues to monitor the elusive Zeitgeist. We can imagine the October kings and queens standing on the balcony of that distant kingdom, calling out for art world oracles, hoping that a true prophet from among the critics will arise. The published responses were intriguing. Some participants took the opportunity to hit October where it hurts: “The ‘institutional object’ of contemporary art serves primarily to secure a viable urban lifestyle for art and academic professionals.” Some reminded the journal of earlier promises it hadn’t keep, and another rattled the Marxist saber, attempting to rouse the journal to its founding mission of progressive protest. Among the respondents was our noble prince, James Elkins. For him, the state of the international art world is so diverse that art history can no longer hope to contain it. “The unity of 11
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the field of art has dissolved,” affords another contributor in agreement. Art historical timelines, quips an especially amusing respondent, should be replaced by “something like a scene from The Blob.” During the Bush years, the mission of contemporary art was clear: “Everyone had become a rabble-rousing critic-activist-curator… Then Obama happened, and we are still in a state of collective shock.” In short, October appears to be in a holding pattern, waiting for that next October, perhaps hoping that one of us might galvanize their mission by becoming another Jesse Helms. et us leave, for a moment, the distant kingdom of October, and look closer at the band of exiled peasants, to chronicle what is afoot in the “Christian” world of art. Entering the camp, one immediately finds several people hanging out by the fence, staring longingly at the distant kingdom of October, wishing they had a place in its lofty corridors. As their thought is the least interesting, let’s move past them, and go deeper, into the heart of the camp. There we find eager professors, numerous “theology and art” advocates, serious artists of faith and a teeming network of journals, conferences, and organizations. All in all, the atmosphere is vital and healthy. Aware that their reputation of producing cheap Christian kitsch has branded them as less than serious, the Christian refugees are especially eager to work hard, as embarrassed by he who shall not be named (Thomas Kinkade) as the Marxist thinkers of October are by Socialist Realism. The camp of Christian exiles, so far as I can observe, can be divided into three groups. Protestants, most especially evangelicals, are sufficiently ashamed by their iconoclastic past that they now vigorously promote aesthetic excellence. While the strongest work done in the Protestant camp may come from those who venture outside of it, it would be unfair to not also point out that self-consciously Protestant attempts at aesthetics have been worked out as well. We find a larger crowd in the Catholic camp, a group which has— following two Popes who have passionately advocated the arts— realized the extraordinary richness of their own tradition. In fact, only a generation ago, some of their own (Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson) occupied the art world’s theoretical high ground that October enjoys today. Recent studies have effectively revivified these figures, and younger scholars are actively articulating a Neo-Thomist 12
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artistic approach. But should the Neo-Thomist option not satisfy, an entirely different group of Catholic scholars look to Hans Urs von Balthasar for inspiration. Balthasar, we might argue, dug even deeper than the Thomists, tapping the Patristic reservoir. Aesthetics was not the caboose, but the engine of Balthasar’s theological project, leading to one of the most fruitful outpourings in this subject area in—I think it fair to say—centuries. Which leads us to the sleeping giant in the Christian refugee camp—the Orthodox. It was John Meyendorff who suggested that, “of all the cultural families of Christianity, the Byzantine was the only one in which art became inseparable from theology.” The central collection of spiritual wisdom of this icon-centered tradition is called, after all, the Philokalia (love of beauty). It is not surprising, therefore, that from this sub-division of the encampment, the most fruitful and confident engagement with the October crowd has lately come. For a sampling, it is worth briefly plumbing some of the contents of David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite, considering it perhaps a belated reply to the aforementioned October questionnaire. The entire postmodern project appears in Hart’s perspective as “a meta-metanarrative, the story of no more stories,” as just one more “strategy of power, serving a deeper, even perhaps unconscious desire to set sentinels at the boundary of every other narrative… a ‘colonial’ discourse of its own, imperiously inscribing its negations across every other narrative…”
If for Lyotard the sublime (conceived as the unpresentable) must be the starting point of modern aesthetics, beauty remains the still more original point of departure for a Christian aesthetics, because the sheer interminability of beauty’s serial display can always overtake every invariable sublimity. Hart sees formless sublimity as the essence of postmodern aesthetics. Indeed, two October editors—Rosalind Krauss and Yve Alain Bois—published a book with just that title, Formless. (Conversely, the first volume of Han Urs von Balthasar’s seven volume aesthetics is subtitled Seeing the Form.) Hart contrasts the negative infinity of the postmodern sublime with the “positive infinity” of Christian beauty. Beauty, properly understood, is “more uncontrollable than the sublime, more dynamic…” The sublime presents an “essentially weaker grasp of being’s infinite determinacy and beauty.” Hart calls for a 13
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“Christian optics,” which “far from representing another mutation of the alleged ophthalmocentric regime of ‘metaphysics’ - is a call to an altogether novel order of visibility.” All this is to say that Hart is in perfect step with October rhetoric, mimicking its style, but challenging it with a more persuasive account of visual phenomenona. But, a Marxist critic might respond, is not the beauty of such “Christian optics” easily assimilated into the market dynamics of capitalism? Not according to Hart. It is in fact postmodern, Deleuzian thought which can be considered “a simple transfer of the myth of capitalism’s ‘self-made man’ to the realm of ontology.” Even Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values has been “transformed into the universal value of price.” Hart lists the pro-“choice” movement as a perfect example of an October-favored cause that is perfectly concordant with the worst aspects of capitalism. Another example of the market’s assimilative power is the “commodification of art… involv[ing] an emphasis upon such quantifiable but anaesthetic matters as authenticity, sheer novelty, and the potential for financial appreciation…”
Real art, though, in its true nature, by virtue of its intricacy, craft, and splendid inutility, repeats the gesture of creation, its gratuity, its generosity, its character as gift; art proclaims a delight more original than simple function. Beauty, for Hart, is genuinely resistant to the ethos of the market, “because it excites a love that is made perfect in dispossession, that requires distance…” Should October still be hunting new Octobers, they might consider that this peasant exile has generated his own: “Insofar as beauty can resist revaluation as commodity…it is a revolutionary force.” here is reason to think, however, that the lone voice of one articulate exile is not the only challenge to the October kingdom. More and more, the place of religion in the contemporary academic world is being reassessed. The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo has marveled at “the breakdown of the philosophical prohibition of religion” in academia. When, after the death of Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish was asked what will “succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy,” he “answered like a shot: religion.” In addi14
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tion to documenting how postmodernity has uniformly denigrated visuality, Stanford historian Martin Jay has suggested that academic interest in religion has “generated a tsunami of scholarly commentary in many different fields sweeping over the nascent twenty-first century in the way that reinvigorated religious practice promises to do as well.” This has already impacted the discourse of art, be it through Sally Promey’s major Art Bulletin article, “On the ‘Return’ of Religion in Scholarship of American Art,” or Harvard’s Jeffrey Hamburger suggesting that when it comes to medieval art history, “The critique of theology must itself be deconstructed.” This rising interest in religion has impacted the field of contemporary art as well. In the Books & Culture exchange with which I began, Elkins promised that a forthcoming volume would document some new open-mindedness to religion in the art world. This book has since been published as ReEnchantment, the seventh volume in Routledge’s Art Seminar series, and it does not rescind Elkins’ promise. October contributors Michael Fried and T.J. Clark were invited to contribute to the Re-Enchantment symposium, but declined. Elkins reports that they felt “it would be simply too ‘painful’ to sit at a table at which people would talk about religion and art at the same time.” We might permit Clark and Fried their hesitations, but in the same volume, a younger art historian suggests they are “caught up in smug intellectual fictions of their own devising.” An October contributor, Thierry de Duve, was criticized in the same volume for his “ex cathedra” secular pronouncements. And this is not to mention the many overtly Christian contributors in the volume that also bristled at the residual secularism at the affair Re-Enchantment endeavors to record. Duke’s David Morgan provided an essay that shows how the distancing of “art” from traditional “religion” is a modern construct, one with most unappealing consequences. It was just this separation that enabled “art” to serve as an “autonomous cultural force that was sacralized in its own right,“ transmitting the “essence of an age or nation,” which few scholars today would wish to endorse. Elkin’s own contribution to the volume repristinates his earlier thesis that only vague New Age spirituality, not religion, has a place in the art world. (He is not taking sides—mind you—just reporting.) There is truth to what he is suggesting, but for a different view, consider Harvard’s Camille Paglia, writing in the Spring 2007 issue of Arion: 15
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I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion. Let me make my premises clear: I am a professed atheist and a pro-choice libertarian Democrat…. For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people’s faiths is boring and adolescent. The New Age movement, to which I belong, was a distillation of the 1960s’ multicultural attraction to world religions, but it has failed thus far to produce important work in the visual arts. I’m not sure I would put it that strongly, but like Elkins, I’m not taking sides—just reporting. Such new academic openness to religion has meant challenges to October are growing bolder. James Romaine’s article, “Gerhard Richter: The Capacity for Belief” and Wayne Adams’ “A Reflection in the Window: Gerhard Richter Longs for More,” in a recent issue of Image together constitute a concerted attempt to wrench “Europe’s greatest painter” from the constraints of October editor Benjamin Buchloh’s limited interpretive horizon, employing not religious projections, but the words of Gerhard Richter himself. They are not alone in doing so, and find Robert Storr, the former director of the Museum of Modern Art, an ally in their new interpretation. Even some October contributors have shown openness to traditional faith. In a book entitled The Monstrosity of Christ, the Radical Orthodox theologian John Milbank conversed at length with Slavoj Žižek. The interaction was made possible because of Žižek’s increasing engagements with theologians such as G.K. Chesterton. If it can happen to one October contributor, it can happen to others.
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e could rally the Christian refugees with tales of October oppression, hoping to instigate a peasant revolt. But even Roger Kimball—the daring foot solder who once issued a “battle plan” to retake the academy—has admitted such an overt takeover strategy is doomed. Instead of a rag-tag peasant uprising to take over the October kingdom, Christians involved in the arts need to emerge from exile and become serious, independent landowners. The increasingly favorable place of religion in academia invites just such an emergence. Our inexhaustible acquifer of theological aesthetics means little without the up-to-date scholarly equipment that enables it to irrigate dry, barren art historical land. Fruitful landowning would mean that instead of seeking the validation of October, we 16
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could offer them needed nourishment instead by generating what David Morgan calls the “produce of intellectual labor.” For example, instead of complaining about the triumph of the Dada aesthetic, we could do the art historical work of exhuming the suppressed thought of its co-founder, Hugo Ball, who defected and converted to Catholicism. Instead of surrendering to barren art historical paradigms that October has rightfully criticized, we could fertilize the discipline with the forgotten fathers of art history, the evangelical John Ruskin or the Orthodox Pavel Florenksy. However enjoyable and encouraging Christianity and Art conferences may be, we might even consider excusing ourselves from the next one, and going to secular art conferences or walking the gallery scene instead. Art world ambassador Elkins is right to have suggested that serious thinking about art depends upon the established art narrative modern, postmodern, and beyond—that October has done so much to shape. But in addition to being perfectly consistent with a garden variety critique of idolatry, this narrative is at an impasse, and the resurgence of scholarship on religion offers a promising way ahead. In addition, the destabilizing theological touchpoints within October mentioned above are a permanent part of the journal’s history that Christians should feel willing to engage. Exile, to be sure, has its comforts, and landowning requires sustained intellectual fieldwork under the wearying post-postmodern sun; but only serious historical and critical reflection can move us towards that possibility that Elkins tantalized us with: “[A] change in the sum total of people who give us our best account of art.”
Matthew J. Milliner is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Princeton University. Read more of his work at his blog, millinerd.com. 17
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THE LANGUAGE O F PA R A D O X \irony0and0poetry| Matt Boyleston n Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s first English Prayer Book in 1549, the forerunner of our Book of Common Prayer, the Eucharistic Blessing of the Priest reads as follows: “The body/ blood of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.” With simple dignity, Cranmer translates into English the ancient medieval blessing in such a way that allows communicants to continue to conceive of Communion as transubstantiation, that the bread and wine impart grace by being the actual body and blood of Christ. However, his much more overtly Protestant Second English Prayer Book in 1552 gives the blessing in this way: “Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving” and “Drink this in remembrance that Christ’s blood was shed for thee and be thankful.” Here, the Eucharistic blessings become a call to remember Christ’s sacrifice in a Zwinglian manner. In the Prayer Book of 1559, the Church of England handled the Eucharistic dispute in a typically moderate, Elizabethan manner. Their version, preserved unto our own Prayer Book reads thusly: “The body of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul into everlasting life and take and eat this, in remembrance that Christ died for thee and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving.” The church combined both blessings, allowing its communicants to understand the sacrament as each individually wanted and affirming the irony of Consubstantiation: that Christ is spiritually but not physically present in the Eucharist. This Elizabethan example of irony essentially depends on a definition promoted by the New Critics and scholars like Wayne Booth, 18
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Kenneth Burke, Harold Bloom and especially Northrup Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism. This definition of irony describes a poet’s recognition of incongruities and his controlled acceptance of them, or in Frye’s words, that irony “takes life exactly as it finds it.” Irony, in this case, is the understanding that life is paradoxical and then dwelling fully in that paradoxical state. As a social and intellectual movement, the Renaissance itself is ironically situated between the bookends of Medieval Scholasticism and Enlightenment Liberalism. It continues elements of the great system that precedes it as it looks forward to the great system that follows. I would argue that this irony is an, or even the, essential characteristic of the Renaissance and is the contributing factor in the energy and life of so much of Renaissance culture. After all, this is a culture which, under the auspices of education, produces the seeming hard-nosed realism of Machiavelli’s The Prince and the idealistic civilization of Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. The question I would pose, and seek to answer, is what role this type of irony plays in the education of a Christian. In particular, I want to explore the Renaissance idea of Christian humanism and suggest what this term may mean for the future. As I teach at Houston Baptist University, a school dedicated to bringing Athens and Jerusalem together, it is (to use the prayer book’s language) “meet and right so to do.” n the Renaissance, Christian humanism refers to the reaffirmation of man’s creation in the image of God. Christian humanism, as represented by figures such as Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus, and Thomas Moore reevaluated the medieval focus on mankind’s fallen nature. Here is Pico’s estimation of Man in his Oration on the Dignity of Man:
that man is the intermediary between creatures, that he is the familiar of the gods above him as he is lord of the beings beneath him; that, by the acuteness of his senses, the inquiry of his reason and the light of his intelligence, he is the interpreter of nature, set midway between the timeless unchanging and the flux of time; the living union (as the Persians say), the very marriage hymn of the world, and, by David’s testimony but little lower than the angels.
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Man is created in the image of God. But the Renaissance’s celebration of this Godly man is given a different perspective in the Reformation. Consider John Calvin’s estimation from his Institutes:
First, we are so vitiated and perverted in every part of our nature that by this great corruption we stand justly condemned and convicted before God, to whom nothing is acceptable but righteousness, innocence, and purity. Thus, man is fallen or depraved. In fairness, these isolated quotations are over-simplifications of complex issues, both theological and behavioral, but they do represent the dual nature of Christianity’s understanding of man’s existence on earth. One can only properly understand what it means to be human if one clearly places each of these states, Man’s creation in the image of God and Man’s fallen nature, in an ironic relationship in which one never affirms one state at the expense of the other. In fact, it is this continuing paradox that gives Christian humanism its distinctive energy and particular usefulness. It is simultaneously affirmative and negative. Sir Philip Sidney, due in part to the unique irony of the via media Church of England (simultaneously Catholic and Protestant) gives us an extremely useful model both in the Renaissance and for today of how to write poetry in full knowledge of this paradox, this irony. Elizabethan England may in-and-of itself be understood as a Golden Age fixed between two periods of religious and social turmoil. This is of course a simplification, but it is useful nonetheless and further emphasizes C. S. Lewis’s description of its literature as “Golden” in contrast to earlier Tudor writing as “Drab.” Furthermore, Sidney represents the Heidegger’s famous understanding of being, in Poetry, Language, Thought, as “Poetically Man Dwells.” This idea of “poetically dwelling” offers us a spiritual and practical vision of life lived in this deep irony. If poetry is truly, as Cleanth Brooks teaches us, the language of paradox, then to understand fully our paradoxical state as Christians is to dwell poetically. And still further, one must use the language of paradox to properly educate a student concerning this paradoxical, this ironical condition of man. Sidney’s famous “Defense of Poesy” is in many ways an educational manual in how to teach poetically. Sidney, like most humanist writers in the Renaissance, means Poesy to include all imaginative 20
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literature: all fictions. One may at first ask the obvious question: Why does one need to defend or apologize for poetry in the first place? As a practicing and publishing poet, I can affirm that one does need to defend and apologize for poetry, and often. Upon learning of my career choice, the first question most people ask is some variation of “And how do you make a living?” But there is a more serious question asked in the Renaissance concerning the role of imaginative literature: In what ways is imaginative literature similar to or different from lying? Certainly we must place this text in its humanist contexts. And I would also suggest we ask this question anew. The concept of the poet in the Romantic Age (in which we still live) has so elevated his position that it has, in effect, answered the question by diminishing it. I would suggest that this elevation has actually lessened the influence of poetry in the world because we no longer take poetry seriously as a moral subject in-and-of itself. The situation reminds me of the famous remark by the great Russian poet Joseph Brodsky where he laments that in the Soviet Union there were serious limitations about what he could write, yet still his books were in great demand. After immigrating to the United States, he had full artistic freedom, but no one read his poems or bought his books. he problem of the truth of poetry begins of course with Plato’s rejection of poets which is best expressed in the dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon in book ten of The Republic. For Plato’s Socrates, poetry is a corrupting force. The central objection to the imaginative arts lies in its very nature as a fiction. Poets produce lies: either bad copies of reality or actually dangerous fantasies. In fiction, moral value need not correspond to the form of goodness or justice. Good people can suffer and bad people be rewarded. Vice can be lauded and virtue condemned. However, Socrates leaves open the possibility that poetry may be allowed back into the polus if a proper use can be found for it. Renaissance literary criticism attempts to find that use. Sidney’s “Defense” displays its irony immediately in relation to the occasion upon which it is composed. The “Defense” may be a specific reaction to the general tenor of the Puritan attack on secular society, especially the theater, in the late 1570’s and early 80’s. As a leading 21
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Protestant aristocrat, nephew of the Earl of Leicester, descendent of Lady Jane Grey, the Nine Days’ Queen, Sidney’s emerging reputation becomes tangled in the censorship debate when Stephen Gosson dedicates one of these attacks, The School of Abuse, containing a pleasant invective against “Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters, and such like Caterpillers of a Commonwealth” to Sidney. Edmund Spenser in a letter to his friend Gabriel Harvey writes that Sidney “was for his labour scorned, if at least it be in the goodness of that nature to scorn.” Here we have a prominent Protestant rejecting the fanatical (or is it the logical?) extremes of his own hard-fought and hard-won Protestantism. Furthermore, the rhetorical pose of the “Defense” is itself ironical. Consider Sidney’s self-effacement at the beginning of the “Defense”: “I will give you a nearer example of myself, who (I know not by what mischance) in these my not old years and idlest times having slipped into the title of a poet am provoked to say something unto you in the defense of that my unelected vocation.” The key phrase is “unelected vocation.” It vibrates with the entire tensions of the Reformation. Or at the end of the tract when Sidney addresses his readers: “I conjure you all that have had the evil luck to read this inkwasting toy of mine.” What for a true courtier could waste less ink than a defense of the vernacular language put in service of the education of the subjects of the emerging (and independent) nation-state? Sidney most famously values the ability of poetry to both delight and instruct. We may think of each of these roles in relation to the central paradox of Christian humanism as I have defined it: to delight serves Man’s nature as created in the image of God, to instruct serves Man’s fallen state. Sidney gives direct understanding of this paradoxical state:
Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man’s wit with the efficacy of nature, but rather give right honour to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who, having made man to His own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature; which in nothing he showeth so much as in poetry, when, with the force of a divine breath, he bringeth things forth surpassing her doings—with no small arguments to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of Adam, since our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it. 22
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Notice particularly Sidney’s paralleling of “erected wit” with “infected will.” Or here:
This purifying of wit, this enriching of memory, enabling of judgement, and enlarging of conceit, which commonly we call learning, under what namesoever it come forth, or to what immediate end soever it be directed, the final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of. This is more than simply saying “Teach us the most that we are able to learn.” What sense does it actually make to both speak of as high a perfection and as degenerate souls? Or later, “But all, one and other, having this scope: to know, and by knowledge to lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying his own divine essence.” Sidney’s definition of poetry is teleological and directly derives from Aristotle and as such is particular, and practical: “Poesy, therefore, is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting or figuring forth— to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture—with this end: to teach and delight.” The idea of moving forth is the act of creation. The mimetic definition of art for Sidney is one particularly relevant for the Christian Humanist in his civic responsibility because knowledge is valued teleologically: “with the end of well-doing and not of wellknowing only.” The doing aspect of this type of education is entirely dependant on the poet’s role as an imitator or maker and thus is an imitation himself of the divine maker. A historian, for example, is chained to the reality of the world: or in Sidney’s words, he is “captive to the truth of a foolish world.” His question is “what is” not “what should be.” s a teacher, I have noticed the devastating effects on students, and our culture in general, by the lack of the mimetic arts. It seems to me that students ask the wrong question of themselves and of their educations. They ask: “What do I like, what do I think, how do I feel?” instead of asking “What should I like, what should I think, how should I feel?” And thus we build education around the idea of simplistically attracting students instead of 23
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using fiction to lift students’ vision to an appreciation or contemplation of something beyond or above themselves. This type of education, though still deeply ironic because of these visions, must be in tension with the realities of the world. Much of the world’s greatest evil is done in the name of unrealistic but essentially lofty ideals of human perfectibility. What makes this particular understanding of Christian humanism so useful is that it always keeps believing (to use Dickinson’s phrase) “nimble.” The educated person is able to have his head in the clouds without floating away on one. Poetry, then, is irony under control and put to good use. The poet “nothing affirms, and therefore he never lieth” making poetry essentially a type of indirect affirmation, a praise of God’s creation and a sober reflection of Man’s fallen state.
Matt Boyleston is Assistant Professor of English and Writing at Houston Baptist University. 24
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B O B DY L A N & AMERICA [the0augustinian0artist{ A Conversation Benjamin Domenech for The City: Today we’ve gathered a group of five friends and colleagues—including a Catholic, an Evangelical, an Anglican, an Orthodox Christian and an Atheist Jew—to discuss Bob Dylan, perhaps the most influential musician alive today, and particularly his fascinating approach to the spiritual realm, and how he writes about faith and God. orgive me if I start with a memory, which seems less wrong if only because the subject we have in Bob Dylan is the king of reminiscing, mostly about what never was and what never will be again. The first time I heard Dylan— really heard him—was a decade ago, my freshman year in college, when the top ten single list included songs from R. Kelly, Celine Dion, Britney Spears, Ricky Martin, Christina Aguilera, and Destiny’s Child. Standing out from a sea of cliche-ridden Pulp Fiction posters and ludicrously over-sexed pinups, there was one guy in the hall, a short guy dressed in black who had put up just one poster: a vast picture of Johnny Cash. He had moved in ahead of us all and was listening to an album that I would only later come to adore: Dylan’s Time Out of Mind. I, still stuck in the shallow rut of teen angst songs, listening in the pre-iPod age to a mash of eighties guitar rock, hippie reboots, and hip hop, mocked it like the young fool I was. “Hey, it’s The Frosh in Black,” I said to the guy. He did his part to reinforce the image by wearing a lot of black—and eventually the whole hall called him that. I don’t think my folks would reject the description that they were (and are) hippie Christian musicians—treehuggers turned foresters, flower children turned evangelicals—and all us kids learned piano and guitar from them. But the Dylan I heard growing up was limited, 25
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mostly just his efforts with The Band (I still remember that opening riff of “Odds and Ends”). I heard more Crosby Stills and Nash, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Joni Mitchell and the Allman Brothers...very little Dylan. I had seen The Wallflowers, the band of his son Jakob, twice—once at a Tibetan Freedom festival—and liked them fine, but they were hardly a game-changing— just a pop-rock band that performed mostly to give women a chance to throw their underthings at Jakob. In my ignorance, I thought of Dylan as “Jakob’s dad,” which I’m sure would make any fan cringe— but it was mostly because I knew of him through caricature, and through a handful of protest songs. Please, forgive me, I knew not what I did. still have no recollection of my hallmate’s actual name. But I remember the music that came from his room over the months to come, and today I think I own it all. In retrospect, Frosh-in-Black had the best musical taste of anyone I’ve ever met, and he loved Dylan more than anyone I knew. He worked on the college radio station (of course) where I ran into him on occasion. Eventually I was asking him where he got his vinyl. Soon I was snagging everything by Dylan and Cash that I could find—the differences and similarities between the two artists are fascinating—and discovering as I went that there was this whole world of music that I had never heard before, the radio had never played, incredible stuff. I got the Biograph collection and read every bit of the liner notes by Cameron Crowe. After I had just heard “Things Have Changed” for the first time in 2000, I came across this, the Cash-Dylan performance of “Girl From the North Country” in 1969, it was something that slammed me. Sure, he was a poet, a troubadour, a sinister storyteller—but this guy could sing? I never knew it. Since they have the perspective of the times we live in now, the albums of the past few years are my personal favorites—Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, Modern Times—even as I acknowledge that Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 are technically more impressive. It’s less the young rebel than the old wanderer that gets me, the guy who’s been on a pedestal for so long and is laughing at the people who put him there, or when they come digging through his garbage, chases them away brandishing a bicycle pump. It started a long time ago of course—so he’s used to it. 26
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When it comes to faith, I think Dylan has a particularly Old Testament view of the world, and I think this is borne out in his interviews, which I find hilarious (the riff about Sam Houston and the three legged dog in Together Through Life is classic). Dylan is a storyteller, but an audacious one, a tease, a jester, but also—like the town fools of old—one with a purpose. Consider this answer from Dylan to a recent question:
A lot of the acts from your generation seem to be trading on nostalgia. They play the same songs the same way for the last 30 years. Why haven’t you ever done that? I couldn’t if I tried. Those guys you are talking about all had conspicuous hits. They started out anti-establishment and now they are in charge of the world. Celebratory songs. Music for the grand dinner party. Mainstream stuff that played into the culture on a pervasive level. My stuff is different from those guys. It’s more desperate. Daltrey, Townshend, McCartney, the Beach Boys, Elton, Billy Joel. They made perfect records, so they have to play them perfectly … exactly the way people remember them. My records were never perfect. So there is no point in trying to duplicate them. It’s striking how Dylan has remained true to his own bizarre vision of the path ahead, unlike so many of the artists in his generation— and what’s more, that his pro-American nationalism remains unrelenting. I went and saw him perform a few years ago, his stage a stripped down piece of Americana. His voice was stronger than I expected, and it brought to mind the Czeslaw Milosz poem in his old age, wondering whether death would bring insight into “the lining of the world.” Milosz writes of “A word wakened by lips that perish, A tireless messenger who runs and runs, Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies, And calls out, protests, screams.” I couldn’t help but think that this grizzled old Midwestern IsraeliteChristian cowboy was telling stories that were less about the old days then they were about the grand days, larger than life people, of desperation and faith, legends and myth and the truth behind them all— writing songs about “the lining of the world.” So let me ask you all this: what does Dylan mean to you, and why does he mean it? 27
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Francis Beckwith: I remember the first time I really listened to Bob Dylan. I had, of course, heard of Dylan. But I had never really listened to him. It was late summer 1978. I was 17 and heading off to college at Idaho State University in Pocatello. While driving through Utah, I picked up an AM station that had as its lunch-hour album, “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits.” I don’t remember exactly why, but I was just taken by the voice, the lyrics, and the music—as if good, true, and beautiful were incarnated in one strange voice. So, when I arrived in ISU, I immediately bought an 8-track of the album. I listened to it over and over again. For some reason, I was moved to pray for Dylan’s soul. (I am not making this up). I learned in February, 1979, at a Leon Patillo concert at UNLV that Dylan had become a Christian. At that same concert Patillo told the audience after the altar call that several months earlier Bob Dylan had become a Christian. I had been a fan of Dylan’s music for over a year when I heard Patillo’s announcement. In fact, in November 1979, I joined Peter, Ruth (Peter’s wife), and Peter’s younger brother, Fiore, Jr., in attending a Dylan concert in San Francisco, in which Dylan performed only songs from his overtly Christian album, Slow Train Coming (1979), and his forthcoming collection, Saved (1980). It was an amazing experience. I had never been to a “Christian” concert in which half the audience was praising the Lord while the other half was smoking pot, though I suspect there were some audience members who were doing both. As the concert went into its encore portions, many of Dylan’s fans who had hoped to hear a Dylan classic, like “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “Like a Rolling Stone,” realized, to their dismay, that it was not going to happen that evening. Some began to boo and yell obscenities at him, while others walked out in disgust, demanding their money back. Seemingly to issue a stern reply to this spectacle that was occurring in front of him, Dylan, sitting at the piano, began singing “Pressing On.” Accompanied by only four female Gospel singers, his piano issuing slow rhythm and blues riffs, Dylan belted out his words as if he were a prophet who had just returned from the wilderness with a divine warning to stir the wayward masses. Peter, Ruth, Fiore, and I stood, cried, and clapped in awe at this cacophony of sounds, smells, voices, and words that were transcended by the clarity of the Christian mes28
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sage emanating from Bob Dylan’s microphone. That was an experience that has stuck with me for decades. Over the next 3 years I bought Freewheelin’, Times, Another Side, Bringin’ It All, Highway 61, Budakon (yes, that), Street Legal, Blonde and Blonde, Blood on the Tracks. Over the next couple of decades I bought many more albums, including some bootlegs, one of which is from the 1979-80 Christian concert tour. I wound up attending five Dylan concerns total (1979, 1992, 1995, 2001, 2007). In 2006 I contributed a chapter to the book, Bob Dylan and Philosophy, in which I make the argument that Bob Dylan had always had a “Christian conscience.” My favorite type of Dylan song is the lyrically-stuffed ones, seemingly endless, which contain so much more than most music of our time.
Benjamin Kerstein: I imagine we all have our founding narrative in regard to Dylan. For me it was a chance listen to “Like a Rolling Stone” on a jukebox when I was 13. But the thing that is most compelling about him is that he is, to use a cliche, the quintessential American artist. I don’t say this purely because he is American or because his music encompasses most, if not all, of the history of American popular music; but rather because of the degree to which his artistic persona (personae is probably more accurate), reflect what I—as longtime expatriate—think is the true nature of the United States. Essentially, American existence is a palimpsest existence. America builds itself up, tears itself down, and builds itself up again. Each time it makes use of the ruins of the old as the raw material of its present incarnation. This, to me, is the essence of Dylan’s music. He himself has spoken of striving for a style in which time stands still and everything occurs simultaneously. I think you see this in a great deal of his music, but especially in the song “Blind Willie McTell” (which I think is his masterpiece) in which events and images from across the entire sweep of American history merge into a single, kaleidoscopic image, glimpsed by the singer as he is “gazing out the window / of the St. James Hotel.” I think he has perfected this style in recent years, which is one of the reasons I am a partisan of recent Dylan as equal to, if not greater than, his classic work. “Blind Willie McTell”‘s final lines, “God is in his heaven / and we all want what’s his / But power and greed and corruptible seed / 29
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seem to be all that there is” point toward another aspect of Dylan’s work, which is the influence of the prophetic tradition. The idea of Dylan as an actual prophet is a silly one, but there is no doubt that his lyrics—especially his greatest songs—share a strong affinity with prophetic literature. That is, they tend to be non-systemic, aphoristic, morally fervent, and condemnatory of the world as it is. In addition, there is the strong presence of apocalyptic imagery. Obviously, one can see this quite plainly in songs like “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” “Ring Them Bells,” “Gotta Serve Somebody,” and all of his Christian and protest songs. I think it also appears prominently, however, in songs like “Angelina,” which appears at first to be a love song; “Idiot Wind,” which seems quite personal but becomes universal as it opens up, and “Like a Rolling Stone” itself. Obviously, a lot of singers like to think of themselves as prophets (thank you, Bono!) but what makes Dylan so interesting is the lack of partisanship involved. He is almost impossible to pin down politically. Or rather, he is easy to pin down politically until he shifts 180 degrees in the opposite direction. One can find liberal, radical, reactionary, and deeply conservative sentiments throughout Dylan’s work, and yet there is a sincerity in all of them that speaks, I think, to the artist’s talent for empathy rather than fealty to a particular ideology. He seems to prefer things this way, if his wriggling during his 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley is anything to go by. In any case, it is not a coincidence that he could appear in the execrable Howard Zinn’s new documentary “The People Speak” a few short years after recording “Cross The Green Mountain,” which is clearly sung from the perspective of a defiant Confederate soldier. rancis has already spoken of Dylan as a Christian, and I don’t wish to engage in theological debates, but I do want to emphasize what is both a personal and cultural perspective from the opposite point of view; which is that this prophetic Americanism that I have been talking about strikes me as very much the work of a Jewish artist. A Jew in the diaspora, at least in the modern era, must be someone who wears masks in order to fit into the larger society around him. One of the great dilemmas of diaspora life has always been how far to take this, and at what point one runs the danger of becoming the mask rather than oneself. Dylan’s genius, I think, stems from his ability to use these masks in order to inhabit the voices and 30
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lives of American history, and to play them out through his own artistic persona. Who, after all, is Bob Dylan? He is a mask worn by Robert Zimmerman. Thus, Robert Zimmerman can be Bob Dylan, and Bob Dylan can be a left-wing folksinger, a born again Christian, a motorcycle punk, a country crooner, a wizened riverboat gambler, a relaxed family man, a hooded recluse in dark glasses... In effect, anyone; just as his albums so often shift in tone and musical style, and the various voices he inhabits nonetheless sound authentically like himself. Dylan approaches these masks, these disguises, not as a burden but as an opportunity for a new personification, both of himself and of his country. When I read his autobiography, and found that he had spent months in the New York Public Library reading old newspapers from the Civil War, I was not surprised, but I was struck by how perfectly it fit. What else would Robert Zimmerman be doing during the process of becoming an other? What is remarkable in the case of Dylan, is that he has become so many others, and yet has remained so resolutely himself.
Paul Cella: There are few errors easier to fall into than making too much of the Bob Dylan mystique. We blunder badly when we make of him more than he is. A considerable portion of the literature on this man commences either in that cringe-worthy portentousness of the hip English professor (think Donald Sutherland in Animal House), or in the affected detachment of postmodern ennui. All the warmth and playfulness and humor in Dylan’s songwriting vanishes under the pressure of these pedants. It was against this tedious business that Andrew Ferguson’s recent anti-Dylan polemic in the Weekly Standard proved, to my mind, most effective. As I see it, the core of Bob Dylan’s greatness consists in his distinctly American innovations in the English language. It is usually through this that his other qualities flow. If you examine each phase of his career, you will find at back of it a signature song, an exemplar, which conveys its particular significance through the medium of something distinctively American. From the debauched humor of “I Shall be Free” (“Well, ask me why I’m drunk all the time / It levels my head and eases my mind”) to all the bluesy masterpieces of the mid-1960s, to the evangelical enthusiasm for the Book of Revelation, especially its grimmest portions (“Can they imagine the darkness 31
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that will fall from on high / When men will beg God to kill them and they won’t be able to die?”), to the mournful meandering verses of “‘Cross the Green Mountain”—in so many of Dylan’s best songs, only an idiot could be insensate to the images and sounds of America that permeate them. en referred to Dylan’s “pro-American nationalism”; I believe that Douglas Brinkley used that phrase in a magazine article this year. But I don’t think that’s quite right. He’s a patriot, and there is a difference between the two. It may be suggested by saying, with Chesterton, that a patriot is a lover; his spirit is one of enjoyment, gratitude, humility before the ineffable. The spirit of the nationalism, meanwhile, is of a much more ambitious variety; there a hunger to it; it partakes of the desire to expand and augment and even conquer. The nationalist aims to vindicate his country before the world; and he reaches readily for abstractions and verbal abbreviations to accomplish this vindication. The patriot will brook no such abbreviations. His mind is impressed above all by particulars, by the singularity of experience, which cannot be captured and preserved in slogans or even doctrines. In this there is inevitably a deep sense of tragedy, for all that the patriot loves must perish, though his only desire is to preserve it. In that light I would say emphatically that Bob Dylan is a great patriot. A patriot is at base a particularist. And Dylan’s art reflects his deep love and affection for all the astonishing variety of America’s particulars.
Benjamin Kerstein: I think that Dylan beautifully captures something that Americans themselves often overlook, which is that they are particularly adept at what the Japanese call mono no aware. It’s something like “the pleasurable sadness occasioned by the realization of the transience of all things.” Perhaps this is because America is so much about the future? And Paul—your claim about a “deep sense of tragedy” in the patriot struck me as especially insightful in the case of America, which is a country that is always changing and sloughing off the past as if it never happened. The line that sprung to mind was “all must yield / to the avenging God” in “Cross the Green Mountain.” There is a mournful strain in American letters that often gets overlooked—Walt 32
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Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” for instance, or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. This seems to come out of the innate sense that a land of infinite possibilities is also one in which the past (i.e., the possibilities that have been made actual, and then have died away in the face of new possibilities) is always lost and being lost.
Sean Curnyn: I’ve written a great deal—too much, I’m sure—about Dylan and perhaps because of this it’s hard to even know how to approach the basic question of what he and his music mean to me and why. To take the more personal tack: I started listening to his music at around age 16, while I was living in Ireland. The album “Infidels” was out and was getting a lot of play, especially since Bob was coming to do an open-air show around that time. I didn’t go to the show, but did wonder what the fuss was about, and scraped up my change to buy the cassette version of the album. I still remember the feel of the thin, tightly folded lyric sheet with all of those densely written songs on it. I scrutinized it too hard, perhaps, and Dylan came across as too serious, too dark, and his songs seemed to require too much work to truly enjoy. But a friend of mine who was also getting into Bob had his older brothers’ albums to exploit, and it was on borrowing and hearing “Shot Of Love” that my head exploded, so to speak. It was the joy in his singing and playing, the great exuberance and fun of songs like “Watered-Down Love” and “Property of Jesus,” that won me over completely. I could go back to “Infidels” and listen to it knowing that it was OK to give the songs room to breathe; they did not all have to be analyzed and weighed and parsed for allegory before simple enjoyment was allowed. It’s a lesson that’s stuck with me, but I still have to remind myself of it occasionally. I may as well continue reflecting on “Infidels” in order to get to how my appreciation of Dylan changed through the years. Back then, reflexively a Leftist and idealist type, I didn’t really get songs like “Man of Peace” or “Neighborhood Bully” which seemed to hold out no hope for an improved state-of-affairs on Earth.
Democracy don’t rule the world You’d better get that in your head 33
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This world is ruled by violence But I guess that’s better left unsaid. That’s from the same album, from the song “Union Sundown.” It’s embarrassing to contemplate now, let alone to confess, but I really couldn’t figure out whether Bob was protesting the fact that violence ruled the world, or rejoicing in it. It didn’t seem right to just be accepting it. It was in the same way that I didn’t really get why Dylan had not gotten on board with the antiwar movement in the 1960s. There seemed a strain of cynicism in him that disquieted me—all the more because of how so many of his songs moved me so deeply. I will not bore anyone further with coming-of-age moments, but suffice it to say that as I got older and changed and received some hard-knock lessons in human nature, Dylan’s music—instead of shrinking into triviality and nostalgia like that of some other artists I liked—just gathered greater resonance and depth. I don’t think I’m telling anyone the news by saying that if you listened to “Blood On The Tracks” once every five years, it would be an almost entirely new emotional experience on each occasion. The songs reach down there and probe and inhabit the new places in yourself that have appeared over those years. Although that album is intense in a special way, I think the same thing can be said, in one way or another, for his work generally. And that’s quite a lot to say, actually; I don’t think the same could be said for the work of many of those who are commonly considered Dylan’s peers, as great as their music has been in other ways (e.g. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones). The resonance of Dylan’s work is tied up with the way the great folk songs have stood the test of time, and it’s tied up with the very biblical view of the universe and of human nature that occupies his songs. As he said once (maybe in the notes to “Biograph” that Benjamin Domenech mentioned, though the exact location escapes me now), “the Bible is the only thing I have that holds true.” I think that in part by grounding his own work so firmly, and having an internal judge so adept at keeping it from straying, Dylan has continually come up with all of these songs that keep knocking us back on our heels, moving us to tears, and somehow lighting the way.
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Benjamin Domenech: What sticks out to you about the perspective Dylan has on human nature, which sets him apart—in my view— from nearly every other artist of his generation? How would you describe it, and has it influenced your own views?
Benjamin Kerstein: I think Dylan managed not to fall for two of the biggest fallacies of the 1960s: 1. The baby boomers invented everything, and 2. Since they invented everything, there’s no need to care about the past at all. Whether because his connection to folk and blues music was emotional rather than political; or because he’s just smarter than most of his contemporaries and actually studied history (again, the Civil War newspapers); he seems to have developed a view of human nature that is sober but not cynical, while being well aware of the fact that there is nothing new under the sun. I don’t think anyone can develop an awareness of history and not be struck by how human beings keep doing the same things for the same reasons, and usually making the same mistakes. This tends to convince one that human nature is more or less the same over time, and that, most likely, we will not prove any better than our forebears. In the ‘60s, that was practically heresy. However, there is another side to Dylan’s view of human nature, which is where we delve into his religiosity. I think it comes out quite well in the final lines from Masked and Anonymous:
Sometimes it’s not enough to know the meaning of things, sometimes we have to know what things don’t mean as well. Like what does it mean to not know what the person you love is capable of? Things fall apart, especially all the neat order of rules and laws. The way we look at the world is the way we really are. See it from a fair garden and everything looks cheerful. Climb to a higher plateau and you’ll see plunder and murder. Truth and beauty are in the eye of the beholder. I stopped trying to figure everything out a long time ago. Obviously, one can interpret this as a basically nihilistic statement, but I don’t think that fits with the moralistic content of Dylan’s lyrics. The more likely interpretation strikes me as a statement on the limits of knowledge, along the lines of “the sea is vast and surpassing deep, 35
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and who can find it out?” or, to strike an ecumenical note, “for now we see as through a glass darkly, but in the end we will see face to face.” It’s an acceptance of the fact that human knowledge (and human nature) is limited, and that we will never be able to “figure everything out.” We can figure some things out, such as the fact that we can’t figure everything out, but we can never have an absolute knowledge of things. That’s really an ancient point of view, and needless to say, decidedly out of step with his times.
Sean Curnyn: I think that Benjamin is exactly right here. And in trying to think of something pithy of Dylan’s on the subject of human nature, I had also thought of those lines from Masked and Anonymous, in particular of that line, “what does it mean to not know what the person you love is capable of?”I also think of these lines from “Mississippi” in this context: Some people will offer you their hand and some won’t Last night I knew you, tonight I don’t… So many thing that we never will undo I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too “Mississippi” paints a portrait of a world coming apart and breaking down; there’s an undescribed huge crisis or disaster stripping the veneer off of everything and exposing people’s deepest motivations. In this it’s not unlike “High Water,” from the same Love and Theft album. I’ll never forget how I felt hearing these songs in the wake of September 11th, 2001, the date the album was officially released. I think that Dylan’s songs do not descend into cynicism even at their darkest, because while full faith is never really entrusted in another human being or in any human institution, there remains a sense of faith in something larger, and underlying it all a kind of optimism. To stick with “Mississippi:”
My clothes are wet, tight on my skin Not as tight as the corner that I painted myself in I know that fortune is waitin’ to be kind So give me your hand and say you’ll be mine. Of course you have to hear it sung to get the full poignancy in that juxtaposition of impending doom with hope and even joy. 36
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Paul Cella: I agree with Sean that Dylan’s poetic imagination is noteworthy for its extraordinary fusing of tragedy and joy. The man writes songs of pulverizing squalor, which somehow manage to uplift. The luckless tramps who parade through his great narrative songs, if rendered prosaically, would be as depressing as the most dire and oppressive modern novel. The paradox is that they rarely leave you down. On the contrary, they can be peculiarly rousing. The 1976 song “Isis,” for instance, records the dreary adventure of some fool who gets roped into grave-robbing scheme and barely escapes with his life. His partner is not so lucky. Yet there is at back of it a quiet humor and steadying warmth at variance with the surface squalor of the story. Sean mentioned “Mississippi,” which is another excellent example. There is even an obscure version of that song which opens with this stark elegy: “I’m standing in the shadows with an aching heart / I’m looking at the world tear itself apart / Minutes turn to hours, hours turn to days / I’m still loving you in a million ways.” A simpler variation on paradox is evident in the numerous tunes where Dylan has mischievously paired sprightly, brisk music with bitter invective. “Queen Jane Approximately” or “Positively 4th Street”come to mind. Who, precisely, is the object of the unrelenting sarcasm and vituperation of these songs is of course a matter of dispute—what is not in dispute is the infectious blending of contrary moods and forms. I also agree with Benjamin on the point about human limitation. There is a moment in Scorsese’s marvelous documentary when, in the course of discussing the celebrated “Dylan goes electric” controversy, a speaker adduces the reason (or one of the reasons) for the folk revolt against Dylan’s new sound that, “it wasn’t ‘better world acoming’—it wasn’t that.” Indeed it wasn’t. It was, rather, the world as it is.
Francis Beckwith: Dylan, in some ways, exhibits the internal contradictions of the person tethered to tradition, committed to hope, but realizing man’s fallen nature and all that that entails. Dylan is, in a word, Augustinian. The clearest example of this are the two songs on Infidels: “License to Kill” and “Neighborhood Bully.” The first sounds like a pacifist 37
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anthem. But it isn’t. It’s an analysis of our disordered souls. The second sounds like the screed of a Zionist with a Hobbesian political philosophy. But it isn’t. It’s a defense of what Dylan believes is just. He does not love order for the sake of banishing anarchy. He loves justice. So, Dylan doesn’t hate war. He hates unjust war. And he doesn’t love the absence of war, since that may be an unjust peace. For Dylan, realism about human beings does not entail cynicism. It requires redemption. But since that rarely happens, you have to sleep with one eye open, with one foot in eternity and one foot in the flux of this world. This is thoroughly Augustinian.
Benjamin Domenech: The Zagajewski poem, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” comes to mind on that last point, Paul. Let me ask a more practical question, with this lead-in: Dylan is one of those bizarre figures who is still non-mainstream, still a revolutionary, yet he may be unique in this sense—for all his oddity, for all the inability to categorize, he’s sold over a hundred million records. He does advertising—98 million people saw his Pepsi ad with Will.i.am, one of the most ludicrous pairings ever in my view given the talent differential. I think of him in some ways a working musician, in the same way there are working actors, plying their trade and without any sense of false pride about what they do or the effect they have on people. What went down in Atlantic City (where Dylan was stopped by a police officer who did not recognize him, and surprise, he didn’t have any identification) was classic Dylan, in the sense that, where other rock stars would be outraged at not being recognized, he was apparently not bothered at all. So what is it about Bob Dylan that appeals to people? Why is someone without any of the trappings that sell today—no sexy backup dancers, no grinding, nothing hip, nothing telegenic, a weirdlooking grizzled old guy who has to struggle mightily to sing—still popular and divisive in a way mostly reserved for big pop stars?
Benjamin Kerstein: It would be a mistake to overstate Dylan’s appeal. He has sold a lot of records in total, but he’s been working steadily for almost fifty years, so I’m not sure that this indicates the kind of massive appeal that artists like Michael Jackson or The Beatles have enjoyed at various points in their careers. 38
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Dylan’s never had a blockbuster record like Thriller, or the sort of mass hysteria that characterized Beatlemania. To a certain extent, he’s always been a cult or a niche act; the catch being that the niche in question keeps changing as he keeps changing. I think Dylan’s appeal has always been a shadow one. He’s there in the margins of American popular music, and from there he exerts an influence far out of proportion to his actual sales. How many people, after all, think Jimi Hendrix wrote “All Along the Watchtower”? I think the reason for the intensity of his appeal was articulated fairly well—albeit in inarticulate 1960s fashion—by Joan Baez in the Scorsese documentary, when she says that, for the people who get it, Dylan goes “Way, way deep.” Dylan’s work simply has an emotional impact that most artists today do not; and although he touches less people than, say, Britney Spears, he does so in a way that is far more profound, lasting, and influential.
Paul Cella: Dylan’s appeal is definitely a mysterious thing. I would conjecture that it derives in part from a handful of prominent songs that almost everyone knows (even if they only know cover versions and don’t even realize that they’re Dylan songs), in part from his general mystique as America’s greatest living song-writer, and in part from his base of committed fans, who are a motley and influential lot. Moreover, Dylan has made a real, creative contribution to the English language as it is used in America. He can really turn a phrase. Finally, there is his enormous influence on other musicians, as evidenced by the ubiquity of Dylan covers. A former Deadhead friend of mine tells me there were nights (back when he was following the Grateful Dead around) when the Dead would play a half-set’s worth of Dylan tunes and generally butcher the lyrics.
Sean Curnyn: Without a doubt, Dylan’s popularity rests on the way in which his songs (and his performances of them) move and entrance people in ways they cannot dismiss. You might say that to some degree for any popular artist, but in Dylan’s case the particular magic he works overcomes those more obvious reasons why people might be inclined to dismiss him, especially in the latter part of his career: he’s old, he’s weird, he can’t sing, etc. The continuing fascination that many in the media have with him as an icon of 1960s counterculture has probably helped to some extent, because however fal39
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lacious those shorthand characterizations of his history and identity are, there is (as they say) no such thing as bad publicity. What’s especially interesting to me, though, is how Dylan went from being fairly widely-dismissed as a washed-up crank in the mid-1980s to his current status, of releasing two original albums in a row that entered the U.S. chart at number one (albeit that we know album sales ain’t what they used to be). I think especially of how much attention his “comeback” album “Time Out of Mind” received when it came out in 1997. Dylan was on the cover of Newsweek or Time magazine, and many other places too—a lot of attention for someone who had been off the map for some years and whose last several albums hadn’t caused any particular stir. The inclination to give this attention to him no doubt came out of a sense of who he was as an icon, and perhaps the desire by baby-boomers in high places in the media to relive or revive some part of their own past. Yet the interesting thing is how Dylan, by dispensing with all that stuff from the past himself and holding true to the up-to-the-minute discipline of his art, used this attention (deliberately or not) to shake off the iconic cobwebs and assert himself more in the public eye as who he now was, rather than who they used to think he was. “Time Out of Mind” wasn’t like “Blonde on Blonde” or “Blood On The Tracks” or anything else Dylan had done before; it was great, but in its own rather new way. The succeeding albums have also not conceded anything to nostalgia, obviously. He himself is aware of the kind of chains he’s succeeded in shaking off. On the release of “Modern Times” in 2006, he put it this way in Rolling Stone magazine:
“Time Out Of Mind” was me getting back in and fighting my way out of the corner. But by the time I made “Love and Theft”, I was out of the corner. On this record, I ain’t nowhere, you can’t find me anywhere, because I’m way gone from the corner. I have to think that by “the corner” one of the the things he has in mind is the stultified perception of him that existed in the media, in the public mind, and just in the air. There still are hung-up perceptions of him out there, but by and large they have crumbled into ruin thanks to the vitality of his work over the past decade. 40
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Dylan is an artist who thrives on his work being appreciated—a natural thing, after all—and he badly needed to chase away those old ghosts and expectations that at one time strangled the reception for each new record he made. I think he’s certainly succeeded in doing that, and it’s no small thing at all. Whether his current good album sales are terribly important in the scheme of things or not, the important thing to note is that he’s done it all on his own terms.
Francis J. Beckwith is Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies, and Resident Scholar in the Institute for the Studies of Religion, at Baylor University. His most recent book is Politics for Christians: Statecraft as Soulcraft (InterVarsity Press). Paul J. Cella III is a writer and blogger in Atlanta, Georgia. Read more of his work at whatswrongwiththeworld.net. Sean Curnyn is a writer living in New York City. You can read more of his thoughts and essays on Bob Dylan at his website, rightwingbob.com. Benjamin Kerstein, a graduate student in Tel Aviv, is Senior Writer for The New Ledger. Benjamin Domenech is Editor in Chief of T H E C I T Y . 41
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Vanishing Twin Catherine Tufariello The pulsar of her heart Kept time awhile with one That shone as if through fog— A slightly fainter sun, Though not by much: both burned Obscurely, light-years off, As, with a fascination That was not yet love, We watched their beacons mapped Against black depths beyond. Now conjured, now concealed Under the sweeping wand That fixed their magnitudes And axes on a chart, How similar they seemed— Two worlds, inches apart,
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Blinking in synchronous Morse code. We didn’t guess One signal would dissolve In static nothingness, Eluding our cupped hands, A phosphorescent spark Or momentary wish Returned to formless dark. What will this nameless face Blurred in her own, this other, Seem to her? Will she dream it Sister or shadow brother, Rival or counterpart, Half-heard, fugitive rhyme, Child in a frozen wood Lost on the way to time?
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D E M O C R A C Y, DEFICITS & THE DEVIL 4ECONOMIC)DECEPTIONS$ Samuel Gregg ometimes the best economists aren’t economists. One of the most famous plays in Western history was penned by the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). His two-part drama, Faust, is considered one of the greatest works of German literature. This complicated and sometimes disturbing text tells the story of a young scholar, Faust, who enters into a pact with the devil, Mephistopheles. In return for Mephistopheles’ services to help him realize his ambitions, Faust wagers the devil his soul. Throughout the play, Faust asks Mephistopheles to help him achieve several ostensibly good ends. But each time he summons up the devil’s power, Faust gets more than he bargains for. In one scene, for example, Faust finds himself living as the landlord of a prosperous estate. His tranquility is disturbed only by an elderly couple who holds a freehold enclave on Faust’s land. Faust asks Mephistopheles to displace them. The devil fulfils his request, but in a way unanticipated by Faust: the elderly couple’s house is incinerated and the couple murdered. At the beginning of part two, however, the play makes a surprising excursion into economics. Accompanied by Mephistopheles, Faust attends the court of a ruler whose empire is facing financial ruin because of profligate government spending. Rather than urging the emperor to be more fiscally responsible, Mephistopheles—disguised, revealingly, as a court jester—suggests a different approach, one with disturbing parallels to our own age. 44
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Noting that the empire’s currency is gold, Mephistopheles maintains there is surely plenty of undiscovered gold underneath the earth belonging to the emperor. Thus, he argues, the emperor can issue promissory notes for the value of this yet-to-be-found gold, thereby generating fresh monetary resources for the government and solving its debt problems. Not surprisingly, the emperor and his treasurer are delighted with this idea. It means the monarch can avoid making hard economic choices while simultaneously providing the empire with desperately needed currency. Mephistopheles subsequently deluges the court with paper money, and Faust is praised by emperor and commoner alike. The results, however, are not what are expected. First, the issuance of paper money does not solve the emperor’s spending problems. Instead the ruler and his court become even more extravagant, knowing they can always print more paper money to cover their evergrowing expenses. Second, the devil has subtly but fundamentally changed the basis of the empire’s currency. Instead of being rooted in the solidity offered by a tangible and valued asset, the currency is now based on flimsy paper promises. Thus long-term monetary stability and powerful restraints on extravagant government spending are sacrificed for short-term gain.
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oethe finished writing the second part of Faust in 1832. Modern economics was then only emerging from its infancy. Yet Goethe’s insights go to the heart of three of our most intractable long-term economic problems. One concerns the impact of fiat money. Technically speaking, fiat money is a currency that a government declares to be legal tender, even though it has no intrinsic value. Throughout history, fiat money has been the exception rather than the rule. Most currencies have been based on physical commodities, particularly gold. By contrast fiat money is ultimately based upon enough people having faith that a given currency will be accepted for the purpose of economic transactions. Such faith, however, is easily shaken. The euro’s tribulations throughout this year are a good example of what happens when people begin losing their faith in a fiat currency. The expression “as good as gold” underscores the confidence people have always at45
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tached to commodity-backed currencies, especially in difficult economic times. The second problem concerns the temptation faced by governments as they struggle to solve their deficit problems. In 2009, America’s federal government posted a $1.4 trillion deficit. That’s 10 percent of U.S gross domestic product, a level not witnessed since World War II. Given a choice between cutting spending, borrowing, or inflating the money-supply, the third option appeals to many politicians. Moreover, like Goethe’s emperor, it’s exactly what many Western governments did between 1945 and 1980: short-term relief was bought at the expense of long-term fiscal stability. But perhaps the biggest lesson from Goethe’s Faust is that selfdeception is intrinsic to all foolish acts, including those with an economic dimension. Whenever governments choose comforting economic illusions over difficult economic truths, then, like Mephistopheles, they will employ dubious means such as state-engineered inflation or public-sector indebtedness to make ill-conceived economic policies seem less burdensome to those who will in the long term eventually have to pay the price. Self-deception is especially apparent in many European governments’ responses to the current economic crisis. Only a short while ago some European politicians were touting the European social model’s superiority over what many continental Europeans deride as “Anglo-Saxon capitalism.” Now, however, governments across Europe are scrambling to avoid the fate of Greece. Moreover, they are doing so by contemplating—and, in some cases, implementing—the hitherto unthinkable: reducing their budget deficits by diminishing the expansive welfare states to which many Europeans have long been accustomed. In doing so, these governments are finally acknowledging a truth initially obscured by the crisis of the euro: that for all the disarray generated by the euro’s recent tribulations, Europe’s economic woes have more systematic causes. One cause is several decades of low economic growth. As the Czech president Václav Klaus recently observed, “average annual economic growth in the eurozone countries was 3.4 percent in the 1970s, 2.4 percent in the 1980s, 2.2 percent in the 1990s and only 1.1 percent from 2001 to 2009.” “A similar slowdown,” Klaus added, “has not occurred anywhere else in the world.” 46
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A second problem is Europe’s profound demographic decline. On current projections, for example, Spain’s over-65 population is set to increase from its present level of 17 percent to 25 percent by 2030. That means fewer people working to support growing numbers of pensioners. When low economic growth and declining demography are combined with European welfare states—generous state-provided health and unemployment insurance; early retirement and liberal state pensions; large public sector employment; legislation that emphasizes job security over labor market flexibility—something eventually has to give. Greece has reached that point. The rest of Europe is struggling to avoid following Greece into the abyss. Even so, many European governments are proceeding down the reform path with barely disguised reluctance. In France, for example, President Sarkozy’s government wants to raise the official retirement age from 60 to 62. That will not strike many as a radical reform. By contrast, Spain’s Prime Minister Zapatero is already cutting pensions, civil servants’ wages, and social programs. He has also promised labor market reform, something the IMF has identified as desperately needed in Spain. Yet, as the Economist correctly notes, Zapatero “shows no willingness to force reforms past the unions. He will do what he has to do, but always the minimum and without enthusiasm.” No doubt, this reflects a disinclination of many European politicians—on the left and right—to concede that the post-war European effort to use the state to provide as much economic security as possible has encountered an immovable obstacle in the form of economic reality. Yet it is arguable—albeit highly politically incorrect to suggest—that it also reflects the workings of a potentially deadly nexus between democracy (or a certain culture of democracy) and the welfare state. One justification for democracy is that it provides us with ways of aligning government policies with the citizenry’s requirements and of holding governments accountable when their decisions do not accord with the majority’s wishes. But what happens when some citizens begin viewing these mechanisms as a means for encouraging elected officials to use the state to provide them with whatever they want, such as apparently limitless economic security? And what happens when many elected officials believe it is their responsibility to pro47
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vide the demanded security, or, more cynically, regard welfare programs as a useful tool to create constituencies that can be relied upon to vote for them? The end result should surprise no one: a spiral of expanding welfare that neither politicians nor the expanding number of welfare beneficiaries have any real desire to stop until things become so unmanageable that there is no alternative. The problem, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America, is that public opinion, especially what he called “common opinion,” is “the dominant power” in democracies. The contemporary French philosopher Pierre Manent goes even further to claim that in democracies “it is not dogma that comprises shared opinion; it is shared opinion that is dogma.” It follows that if enough people want expansive welfare programs in a democracy, the capacity for politicians to oppose, for example, the desire of 51 percent of the population to progressively loot the other 49 percent, is limited. To resist is to court electoral rejection or, as we have seen, rioters running amok in the streets of Athens. A number of twentieth-century scholars have sought to address this problem of democracy and ever-expanding state welfare. In the third volume of his book Law, Legislation and Liberty, for example, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich von Hayek outlined a series of constitutional rules that he thought might limit the democratic state’s tendency to drift in this direction. Several decades earlier, German market-orientated economists such as Walter Eucken, Franz Böhm, and Wilhelm Röpke elaborated a whole system of constitutional principles they believed would render democratic states strong enough to resist capture by interest groups, but also limited enough to prevent governments from expanding their economic powers beyond a number of core functions. But if the twentieth century has taught us anything, it is that even the most robust of constitutional arrangements have not been able to achieve such ends in democracies that lack politicians and citizens who grasp the essential wrongness of using the state to support themselves at the perpetual expense of others. Moreover, implementing such policies does not even require solid majority support from the population. In most democracies, people can only gain political power by cobbling together large enough coalitions of support based on a range of often incompatible promises made to sometimes very 48
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different interest groups. After being elected, democratic governments are under enormous pressure to use their political power to favor their various supporters if they want to avoid having their erstwhile followers turn against them. The bartering of privileges and grants to different groups is thus almost inevitable in a democracy if a government wants to retain its coalition of support. In these circumstances, expanding the welfare state to reward particular adherents is a difficult temptation to resist. As Röpke commented: “To expand the welfare state is not only easy but it is also one of the surest means for the demagogue to win votes and political influence, and it is for all of us the most ordinary temptation to gain, at no cost to ourselves, a reputation for generosity and kindness.” Likewise, democratic governments attempting to reduce the welfare state run the risk of alienating particular groups within their supporting coalition. This may be enough to ensure a government’s defeat at the next election. This is precisely what happened to Gerhard Schröder’s Social-Democrat-Green government in Germany after it implemented welfare reforms between 2003 and 2005. Not surprisingly many governments opt instead to retain the status quo, despite often being aware of the long-term economic consequences. Unfortunately for Europe, that status quo is no longer fiscally sustainable. oes this mean that shrinking the welfare state requires a diminishment of democracy? The answer is no. Most authoritarian regimes ranging from Hitler’s Germany to Chavez’s Venezuela have proved more than willing to use generous welfare schemes to mollify large segments of the population. In other words, it is not as if democracy is unique in being coupled with welfare states, and so the cure need not lie in reducing democratic norms or institutions. The beginning of a proper response is to recognize that a democracy’s ability to resist the long slouch towards the soft despotism of the welfare state requires two things. The first is to shift the incentives for economic mobility and security so that they lie in the private sector rather than in becoming a recipient of state largesse. This task is very difficult when much of the population already enjoys some measure of state income. Yet it is dwarfed by the immensity of the 49
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second challenge: developing a moral and political culture which underscores the undesirability of politicians and citizens using the state to live at others’ expense. This means confronting the selfdeception that is so much part-and-parcel of political discourse in America and Europe today, both at the elite and popular level If opinion polls are correct, it may well be that, culturally-speaking, it is too late for much of Europe. The modern European welfare state goes back to the late nineteenth century when Otto von Bismarck, Imperial Germany’s ruthless “Iron Chancellor,” introduced state social insurance in an undisguised attempt to placate the growing German industrial working class and the ever-increasing number of Social Democrats they elected to the German legislature. Far too many Europeans now simply assume a munificent welfare state as part of the economic landscape. Indeed the increasing number of older West Europeans today has no incentive to change. Their attitude might be described as “Après moi, le déluge.” America, however, is a different story. The sheer intensity of resistance to the Obama Administration’s healthcare legislation was about many things. But it surely reflected the fact that millions of Americans are simply unwilling to go the way of Western Europe. Successful long-term resistance, however, is going to depend upon Americans understanding that the link between democracy and the welfare state has to be broken, and that the only way to achieve this objective over the long term is through facing up to our economic self-deceptions and recommitting the United States to some of the very best aspirations of its Founding—a love of liberty, an embrace of the virtues needed to sustain freedom, and an unwillingness to delegate to the state the responsibilities that free men and women owe each other.
Samuel Gregg is Research Director at the Acton Institute. He has authored several books including On Ordered Liberty, the prize-winning The Commercial Society, and Wilhelm Ropke’s Political Economy. Portions of this piece originally appeared at The Witherspoon Institute’s ThePublicDiscourse.com. 50
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W ISDOM & G OD IN THE A GE OF I NFORMATION ]potter0and0clay} Dean M. Riley ow glorious it is to live in an “information age.” We are surrounded by it, driven by it, and have created whole new technological avenues to access it. We crave it daily, hourly, and minute by minute. Information infuses the way we live, it guides our choices, and it is an ever-present part of our lives—the search for it is a near constant activity, so much so that it drives internet search companies to gigantic financial success, just because they help people find what they are looking for. Yet this age can be frightening, as well. How do we keep from drowning in a sea of information? An estimate in March 2008 placed the amount of information on the internet at 281 Exabytes (2.25 x 1021 bits or 281 billion Gigabytes). Can you imagine what that will be in ten years? How does one find relevant information when there is so much available? How do we determine what information has value, and what does not? Do we really have a good understanding of what good information is? We can begin with a basic understanding of information theory—a theory that tells us more about the world we live in, about our minds and thoughts, and also, if understood properly, about God. If you would like to find someone to blame for this information flood other than Bill Gates, you might consider Dr. Claude Shannon. Shannon was a mathematician and the pioneer of modern infor51
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mation theory, educated at the University of Michigan and MIT. In 1949, he and Dr. Warren Weaver co-wrote The Mathematical Theory of Communication, which many consider the cornerstone of modern information theory. Weaver wrote his portion with less mathematics and condensed Shannon’s formulae into three components: 1. Technical ("Did you hear me?"), 2. Semantic ("Did you understand me?"), and 3. Behavioral ("What will you do?") Shannon wrote the book for engineers and those working with telephone systems. Over time, other disciplines began applying Shannon’s theory to electrical engineering, biology, genetics, physics, neurobiology, economics and more. Due to its complexity, many believe that “information” cannot be defined, including Shannon himself. So others have devised ways to understand this intricate concept, and the way their views contrast provides us with some interesting questions to answer about the way we view research and information. Dr. Brenda Dervin, a professor in the Communications Department at Ohio State University, calls her theory “sense-making.” She believes that humans walk a fence between ordered reality and chaos, where information cannot be designed or organized. That fencewalking leads her to believe that humans are not so much information-seekers and finders as they are information designers. Humans will invariably walk between both states. Dervin postulates that we all walk that fence within a space-time continuum, viewing information as “external” to one’s self. Think about the experience of going to the library and locating one resource you need, or going to the grocery store to purchase a gallon of milk. Yet the reality is that we bring our entire internal lives into any search. Everything that we know, including our education, experiences, and beliefs affect how we search—the research process is inherently dynamic, because the things for which I search today (and all that I know today) can change tomorrow because of something I experienced, read, or heard after my initial search. New terms and concepts will alter future searching patterns. Consider the experience of berry-picking. The picker finds ripe or useful berries and plucks them one-by-one to add to the basket. J.S. Ottaviani says that each search has the potential to produce useful 52
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information—so we find the pieces one-by-one just as one picks berries, with the knowledge that not all of them will be ripe. Today’s researchers often believe that they can create that one allencompassing search query that will perfectly yield everything needed. But this is not how things play out—instead, what happens instead is that we wander into the great digital forest to do our “digigathering” and “digi-hunting.” As we gather our “digi-berries”, we must remember that seemingly useless results along the way can still be fruitful if they yield new search terms, subject headings, etc. which can be used for search refinement. We need to add these types of berries to our basket. Others, like Michael Buckland, see information as external and sees three principal uses of “information:” as process, as knowledge, and as thing. He contends that the evolution of language only adds to the confusion among people. Buckland sees anything that is informative as a “thing”—a tree, a brook, a rock—in an attempt to preserve an “objective” character to data. There must be objective things (i.e., information) which exist independently of the searcher. While Buckland sees an independent world, Dervin sees a world in a specific moment in time. She argues that information is tied to a specific perspective. The moment a “searcher” is involved, information becomes inextricable from that moment. Yet as Buckland says, “Human beings do things with [information] or to it.” hese two seemingly disparate beliefs actually work well together when viewed from a theological perspective. God is the creator of all things and we are created in His image, and so Dervin’s theory helps “give shape” to research just a human potter gives shape to a lump of clay. On the other hand, Buckland’s theory reminds us that there is an external nature to information just as God Himself is beyond and above anything in this universe. It has always struck me that The Word was not understood until He came to us in the flesh. God is capable of working in a specific moment in time, yet is not bound by the rules of that moment—and hence, His ability to turn the dust into life, the mundane into the miraculous—and so, as His children, we can turn information into understanding.
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The attitude of scientists toward the question of how information guides our lives is a fascinating trend as well. Dr. Werner Gitt, the Christian retired director and professor at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology, believes that information is at the root of all activities of living organisms down to our DNA. Gitt contends that ultimately, “information” has an element of purpose to it— toward the ultimate purpose, according to Gitt, that we know God. It may be that Shannon did not include this idea in his elements because, for him, this would have merely been a measure of statistical success—a sign the message was received without errors, and the transmission was successful. Recall the story of Philip and the Ethiopian—when man receives God’s word, when he hears and obeys, that is the definition a successful transmission. One modern example of this is a convert to Christianity who is also a scientist at the top of his field—geneticist Francis Collins, the current director of the National Institutes of Health and former head of the Human Genome Project, who had an interesting answer to a question posed by Charlie Rose a few years ago. Rose asked Collins if he can “define his God,” to which he replied:
Can I define my God? I would hesitate to put into words the character God the Creator, because it seems as if one is already narrowing the definition of what must be, by its nature, indefinable. Whatever vision one has of God, it must by definition be too narrow. Even Richard Dawkins says that if there were a God, it would be so incredible, none of us would be able to describe him. Well, I’m with you on that, Richard. I grew up in a home where faith was not practiced, and I was an atheist by the time I was in graduate school, studying quantum mechanics at Yale. Then I went to medical school and encountered life and death in a much more real fashion, not a hypothetical one, and realized that I had never really done the work necessary to make a decision about whether God was a real plausibility or not. Along the way I realized that atheism is the least rational of all the choices. It is the assertion of a universal negative, as Chesterton said, and scientists aren’t supposed to do that. Then I began a two year process of looking for information, of asking ‘why do believers believe anyway, what is all of this?’, thinking I 54
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was going to strengthen my disbelief—only discovering along the way, that I went the other way.
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hy is it important to have a working understanding of information in the 21st century? Once we find information, what do we do with it? And how do we avoid drowning in this sea? Immanuel Kant, in his famous essay “What Is Enlightenment?”, wrote: “If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.” Avoiding this attitude is vital to the survival of 21st century students who live in a much smaller world, but one where information’s flow is more unceasing than ever. It has been said that what we gain in speed, we lose in accuracy—in a life that moves so fast, we must not make the mistake of leaving God out of the information question. Information gives form to our ideas, it adds flesh to the bones of thought—and in putting our thoughts into form or shape, we engage in a process as old as time—pulling together elements as the Creator, navigating a formless, chaotic universe. In our own small way, as we adapt and navigate this flood, we imitate this act by giving shape to clay. In a sense, we become information apprentices. We must retrain and renew our minds. Information can be a step toward gaining wisdom and helping us better understand our Creator and His creation, or it can be a barrier, a distraction. As we progress farther into the twenty-first century, telling the difference between information and understanding will be all the more critical. We must remember our purpose as we navigate. Remember that Christ’s lordship is over all, including information. Remember the men of Issachar, who David gathered as he prepared to battle King Saul, and who, the writer of First Chronicles tells us, understood the times and knew what Israel should do. Should we not do the same?
Dean M. Riley is Professor in Library Science at HBU’s Moody Library. 55
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MARRIAGE & BIGOTRY ]the0media0game} Mollie Ziegler Hemingway he definition of the word “bigotry,” according to many in the media, is standing up in defense of the traditional definition of marriage. While at the Washington Post, blogger Dave Weigel got into hot water for saying, “I can empathize with everyone I cover except for the anti-gay marriage bigots.” He later apologized. Julian Sanchez, a libertarian writer and CATO Institute scholar, publicly claimed that all arguments against same-sex marriage are either stupid or bigoted. The press coverage of the political battle over marriage shows their views to be pervasive: last year, the Washington Post actually apologized for describing a proponent of traditional marriage as “sane.” Not because it was offensive to characterize the rest of the movement as crazy, bigoted and evil but because it wasn’t “neutral” enough. In 2004 the New York Times public editor wrote that it was “disappointing” to see the paper “present the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading.” And that was a critique of the news side of the operation, which has only moved to greater advocacy in the years since. The opinion side of the paper is overwhelmingly biased in favor of same-sex marriage and against supporters of traditional marriage. It’s not altogether unlikely that Times columnist Frank Rich permanently installed a “bigot” key on his computer to ease his writing. People in all of the 30 states who have been given the opportunity have voted to continue to define marriage as a heterosexual institution. This is not entirely surprising in that marriage—for whatever variations it has included—has been defined as a heterosexual institution in every culture throughout history. But if the political, cultur56
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al or media elite had a chance to vote on the issue, there would be little, if any, opposition to redefining marriage to include same-sex unions. When Californians voted in favor of traditional marriage in 2008, same-sex marriage supporters responded by vandalizing churches and Mormon temples. They targeted individual supporters and contributors, developing blacklists and pushing people out of jobs. Hollywood quickly put together a video mocking Christians as, you guessed it, bigots. The media and elite opinion makers seem to believe that bigotry is the one and only reason why anyone would ever have qualms about revising marriage law. Perhaps the reason why the elites are so quick to label opposition to same-sex marriage as bigotry is because they haven’t considered, much less heard, the arguments in favor of traditional marriage. efore deciding if bigotry is the only reasonable explanation for opposition to same-sex marriage, the institution must be defined. A friend of mine who is an enthusiastic advocate of same-sex marriage explained to me that marriage is “two people who want to be together and want to formalize that partnership.” I asked her why it was limited to two people. She said that “technically” it shouldn’t be, but she’s not that “extreme.” I asked her if marriage was for any two people or whether there was some sort of definition to the relationship. She said there should be no government definition. Like many of her fellow advocates, she thinks that people who oppose this idea are “bigots.” And, in fact, disallowing gay people from entering a partnership so defined would be bigoted. Another friend of mine who is an enthusiastic supporter of traditional marriage told me that marriage is when a man and woman form a permanent and exclusive bond that is naturally fulfilled by creating and raising children. He said that a marriage is sealed through the sexual act that unites a couple as a single reproductive unit. He said that society has an interest in defining marriage because it has an interest in protecting the welfare of children, which are the natural product of the sexual union of men and women. In this view, limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples is anything but bigotry. Jonathan Rauch, an eloquent proponent of same-sex marriage (see Rauch’s piece in the Summer 2009 issue of THE CITY), has said that 57
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bigotry cannot explain opposition to opening up the institution to include same-sex couples. He notes that the public has not objected to gay parents having custody of children or to same-sex couples adopting children. He thinks that the public opposes same-sex marriage not because it normalizes homosexuality, but because it abnormalizes the conventional family.
Same-sex marriage, in this view, is in some sense the ultimate symbolic assault on what is left of the unity of sex, marriage, and procreation. ‘Ultimate,’ I might add, in both senses of the word: ‘extreme,’ but also ‘last,’ the blow that completes the most destructive demolition work of the sexual revolution. After gay marriage… how can sex, marriage, and procreation ever be put back together again? Because Rauch deals honestly and fairly with those he opposes, his arguments in favor of same-sex marriage are more convincing than those who cry “bigotry” at the slightest opposition. Federal Judge Vaughn Walker falls in the latter camp. He dismissed support of traditional marriage as nothing more than irrational religious bigotry when he ruled in August that California’s voterapproved ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. Like my friend who favors same-sex marriage, he stated that marriage has nothing to do with gender difference or procreation. Less explained was what marriage is if it’s not defined as it has been traditionally. hroughout history, marriage has been nothing if not a framework to manage sex and procreation. But it is also true that the institution has been tremendously weakened by changes in law over the last few decades and a concurrent culture-wide disregard for its importance, much less its relationship to sex and childbearing. Still, no matter how much people may wish it were otherwise, the fact is that the procreation of offspring is the natural byproduct of sexual congress, something only possible between man and woman. While two members of the same sex may never procreate, members of the opposite sex do it all the time. Marriage was the institution created to ensure that children that result from sexual congress would be taken care of by their parents. Now judges and advocates of same-sex marriage say that marriage has nothing to do with gender difference or procreation, but they 58
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conveniently ignore the more difficult questions about defining the institution they would create in traditional marriage’s stead. Perhaps once proponents of same-sex marriage tire of calling their opponents bigots, they will recognize that they must work beyond the limits of their sociopolitical circles to deal with the consequences of such a sweeping social redefinition. A bigot is someone obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices. It’s worth considering, in this debate at least, who fits that definition best.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, a reporter in Washington, D.C., writes for getreligion.org about the media’s coverage of faith. 59
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F AITH IN THE A GE OF O BAMA ,religion0and0politics.< Joseph Knippenberg s a political observer and scholar, I spent the better part of the first decade of this millennium (the part when George W. Bush inhabited the White House) trying to follow the peregrinations of the faith-based initiative. This was to be the core of Bush’s ”compassionate conservatism,” a well-meaning but ultimately ill-fated attempt to build upon the “charitable choice” provisions included, most prominently, in the 1996 welfare reform legislation in an effort to mobilize “armies of compassion” to deal with America’s social problems. Inspired in part by Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion and in part by Roman Catholic social thought (above all, the idea of subsidiarity), Bush thought that churches, faith-based organizations, and neighborhood groups could be more effective than government bureaucrats in touching the hearts and transforming the lives of those in need. Back in 2000, this sounded like such a good idea that even Al Gore endorsed a version of it. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons—the hyperpartisanship born of Bush’s disputed victory in Florida, the new emphasis on national security in the aftermath of 9/11, and the narrowly political and ultimately unimaginative focus of many White House staffers and Congressional Republicans, to name just a few—the initiative was marginalized at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Efforts to pass legislation extending the principles of charitable choice to a wider array of government programs foundered on Capitol Hill. And those who headed the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives—good men, all of them—might have had the sympathy and well wishes of the President, but they never seemed to 60
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have the ear of those in the White House policy and political shops who had the greatest influence over the Administration’s agenda. I regard this as a missed opportunity to bring the Biblical concern for the least among us together with the hard-headed principles of free market economics and fact-based (not faith-based) policy analysis. The Bush Administration ultimately failed persuasively to make the case that it is compassionate to be concerned with generating wealth and creating jobs, to care about cultivating responsibility and character among all the members of a community, and to empower individuals and communities to help themselves. Stated another way, Christian faith—indeed, most religious faith—is perfectly consistent with a realistic and prudent appraisal of what’s possible in this fallen and fractured world. With the departure of George W. Bush from the political stage, his role has been taken quite handsomely, albeit also quite differently, by Barack Obama. Beginning early in his quest for the presidency, Obama sought to articulate a vision of religion, government, and society. Consider, first, this statement on the campaign trail about how he came to faith:
It wasn’t until after college, when I went to Chicago to work as a community organizer for a group of Christian churches, that I confronted my own spiritual dilemma. I was working with churches, and the Christians who I worked with recognized themselves in me. They saw that I knew their Book and that I shared their values and sang their songs. But they sensed that a part of me that remained removed, detached, that I was an observer in their midst. And in time, I came to realize that something was missing as well— that without a vessel for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would always remain apart, and alone. For Obama, this is a consistent theme (and one, I might add, with deep roots in the tradition of Christian thought): the only genuine community is a community of faith. But while for some Christians this recognition leads to a desire to defend the garden of the church from the wilderness of the world (or at least to distinguish between the two), Obama carries the Christian call to community into the world. He seems to wish, as he has put it at various times, to build 61
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the kingdom here on earth. Here, for example, is what he had to say during the campaign about the role of the African-American church:
I believed and still believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change, a power made real by some of the leaders here today. Because of its past, the black church understands in an intimate way the Biblical call to feed the hungry and cloth the naked and challenge powers and principalities. And in its historical struggles for freedom and the rights of man, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world. As a source of hope. The church is “an active palpable agent in the world,” a “source of hope.” But the hope is not for a better world to come in the bye-andbye, but a better world, if not here and now, but as soon as possible. Here’s how he stated the responsibility of Christians in a forum hosted by Jim Wallis:
[T]he starting point is that, "I’ve got a stake in other people, and I’ve got a set of responsibilities towards others, not just towards myself," and that those mutual responsibilities, those obligations, have to express themselves, not just through our churches, and our synagogues, and our mosques, and our temples, not only in our own families, but they have to express themselves in our government. Some months later, he drew the logical conclusion of this line of argument in a speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta:
[I]f changing our hearts and minds is the first critical step, we cannot stop there. It is not enough to bemoan the plight of poor children in this country and remain unwilling to push our elected officials to provide the resources to fix our schools. It is not enough to decry the disparities of health care and yet allow the insurance companies and the drug companies to block much-needed reforms… The Scripture tells us that we are judged not just by word, but by deed. Obama speaks as if the first move of someone faithful to God’s word is to call for government action, not to act directly through his or her own charitable efforts. Those who don’t engage in political action of the sort he approves are apparently hypocrites, satisfied 62
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with mere words. His religious commitments are a kind of conversation-stopper, as the late Richard Rorty once said. Note also that the action he calls for is aimed at satisfying the bodily needs of those who receive the help. As a matter of social or political action, he’s not concerned with saving souls. o be sure, Obama elsewhere acknowledges his (and our) own sinfulness and the need for salvation, and quite properly does not regard government in having a role to play in this. But he also doesn’t draw what should be an obvious conclusion from this observation. Consider this formulation, taken from Federalist #51:
[W]hat is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. Human beings who are finite, fallen, and fallible will surely misuse and abuse power. The more power you give them, the more that can (and will) go wrong. Obama’s statement rightly points to the role of the people in holding government accountable, but doesn’t recognize how deeply flawed and dangerous this human instrumentality is. As the Apostle Paul reminds us in Ephesians 6:12, we always struggle against rulers and authorities. President Obama’s confidence—dare I call it faith?—in government is evident when he acts or calls for action at the intersection of religion and politics. Consider his remarks at his first National Prayer Breakfast, in February, 2009:
We know as well that whatever our differences, there is one law that binds all great religions together. And [then British Prime Minister] Tony [Blair] and I did not coordinate here—there’s a little serendipity—Jesus told us to "love thy neighbor as thyself." The Torah commands, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow." In Islam, there is the hadith that reads, "None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself." The same is true for Buddhists and Hindus, for followers of Confucius and for humanists. It is, of course, the Golden Rule: the call to 63
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love one another; to understand one another; to treat with dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment on this Earth. It is an ancient rule, a simple rule, but also perhaps the most challenging. For it asks each of us to take some measure of responsibility for the well-being of people we may not know, or worship with, or agree with on every issue or any issue. Sometimes it asks us to reconcile with bitter enemies or resolve ancient hatreds. And that requires a living, breathing, active faith. It requires us not only to believe, but to do, to give something of ourselves for the benefit of others and the betterment of our world. In this way, the particular faith that motivates each of us can promote a greater good for all of us. Instead of driving us apart, our varied beliefs can bring us together to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, comfort the afflicted; to make peace where there is strife and rebuild what has broken; to lift up those who have fallen on hard times. This is not only our call as people of faith, but our duty as citizens of America and our duty as citizens of the world. And it will be the purpose of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships that I’m announcing later today. The goal of this office will not be to favor one religious group over another, or even religious groups over secular groups. It will simply be to work on behalf of those organizations that want to work on behalf of our communities and to do so without blurring the line that our Founders wisely drew between church and state. This work is important, because whether it’s a secular group advising families facing foreclosure, or faith-based groups providing job training to those who need work, few are closer to what’s happening on our streets and in our neighborhoods than these organizations. People trust them. Communities rely on them. And we will help them. Much of what Obama said here could have been said by his Republican predecessor. But Bush would have stressed (and did stress) what government can’t do, as in these remarks in a 2001 meeting with the leaders of Catholic Charities:
There is no way that Government can create love. Love comes from a higher calling. Love is inspirational. But what Government can do is fund and welcome programs whose sole intent is to change lives in a positive way. 64
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Shortly thereafter, in his remarks to the 2001 National Prayer Breakfast, Bush said this:
Millions of Americans serve their neighbor because they love their God. Their lives are characterized by kindness and patience and service to others. They do for others what no government really can ever do—no government program can really ever do: They provide love for another human being; they provide hope even when hope comes hard. Where for President Obama, love leads to government action, for President Bush, government has to leave room for love. The former emphasizes his hope for the efficacy of governmental action, the latter his respect for its limits. his difference can be stated another way as well. For Obama, faith-based and neighborhood groups are an extension of the government. For Bush, they are a supplement to government. For the former, they extend the reach of government into the lives of citizens, “perfecting” a union that is at its heart a civic or worldly community. For the latter, they pose a limit that government should both respect and support. This difference emerges reasonably clearly in the way President Obama has constituted his Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and in the recent report of his Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, A New Era of Partnerships: Report of Recommendations to the President. While Bush chose faith-based advisers like John DiIulio and Jim Towey, whose emphasis was clearly on policy and service, Obama’s office is led by Joshua Dubois, who came to the White House from the campaign, and the council is staffed by Mara Vanderslice, whose stock in trade in both the Kerry and Obama campaigns was outreach to faith communities. There is an old dictum about politics which says that “personnel is policy.” If personnel choices matter, President Obama’s approach to “‘faith-based and neighborhood partnerships” is more calculatingly political than was his predecessor’s. During the campaign, he remarked that “[o]ne of the things that I think churches have to be mindful of is that if the federal government starts paying the piper, then they get to call the tune.” If the recommendations of the Advisory Council are any indication, he enjoys calling the tune. Thus one of 65
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the principal emphases of the Council’s recommendations is on environment and climate change, and it recognizes “the importance of faith-based organizations taking a prominent leadership role in influencing policy, education, and action in those areas” (my emphasis). We have here gone beyond the realm of encouraging and supporting service to mobilizing political support on behalf of particular policy initiatives. In this respect, churches and faith-based organizations are to be treated as political extensions of the Administration. There is a little more nuance in the Advisory Council’s recommendations regarding inter-religious cooperation. While there are two clear political goals here—promoting peaceful pluralism at home and abroad, and mobilizing diaspora groups to engage with their fellows in their homelands—the Council observes that “the partners must guard against the manipulation of religion, the marginalization of those who decline to participate, and the undue expansion of the role of government in interfaith dialogue.” The Council also calls upon those who participate in these programs to “[r]respect religious differences,” [p]reserve the identity of each religious community,” and ‘[h]onor the different ways religious communities are organized.” These are important principles and were, indeed, the hallmarks of the Bush Administration’s faith-based initiative. But the Obama Administration has thus far remained agnostic with respect to one of the principal ways in which religious groups can maintain their distinctive identities while cooperating with one another and with government. While the Bush Administration was vigorous in protecting religious hiring rights—that is, the rights of faithbased organizations to hire only those who respect their distinctive missions—even in the face of concerted Congressional opposition, President Obama has dithered. As a candidate, he joined his fellow Democrats in inveighing against using federal dollars to “discriminate” in hiring. As President, he hasn’t gone to the mat to defend the freedom of religious groups to hire only those who support their mission. Rather, he has, so to speak, kicked the can down the road, opening the possibility of legal review when challenges arise. With his propensity in many respects to cede the initiative to Congress, I fear that it is only a matter of time until he acquiesces in the abridgement of those rights. If and when that happens, every dollar the government spends to partner with a faith-based group will be a secularizing dollar. There 66
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will be some groups that will be quite comfortable singing the Obama Administrationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tune. Others will opt out. What happens to them depends, in some measure, on broader developments in politics and culture. Will government and the public sector continue to grow, crowding out private and non-governmental alternatives and demanding an ever-larger share of our resources? Will the impulse to give charitably diminish as our tax burdens rise, as the conviction grows that government can do better or more than the nongovernmental sector, or as the deductibility of charitable contributions is diminished or eliminated? Or will the government overreach, demonstrating (yet again) that it is neither omnicompetent nor omnipotent? Will we come to our senses, placing our faith where it belongs? For me, it is both a matter of fact and an article of faith that government cannot do all that some of us expect of it. But it is also a matter of fact that finite, fallen, and fallible human beings will continue to worship idols. Fewer people seem to be paying attention to the old battle lines in the so-called culture wars. Rest assured, however, that there are still lines. The issues we are currently disputingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;above all, the size and role of governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;are not merely economic and technical matters. It behooves those of us who care about faith in this world and the next to remember that.
Joseph Knippenberg is Professor of Politics at Oglethorpe University, an Adjunct Fellow of the Ashbrook Center, and a member of the Board of Scholars of the Georgia Family Council. 67
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C AN Y OU B E A C HRISTIAN S OCIALIST ? ,faith0and0the0poor< Jay Richards ‘ve often maintained that while the Judeo-Christian tradition can be shown to support free enterprise and capitalism, it doesn’t provide precise answers to every economic policy question. In fact, I’ve gone so far as to say that it’s possible to be a socialist and a Christian. Unfortunately, when speaking extemporaneously, one doesn’t always put things precisely. And in a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute last fall, I said that it’s possible to be a good Christian and a socialist. An edited version of my lecture eventually became an article that was published in THE CITY (“Christianity & Capitalism,” Winter 2009). And as it happens, the comment elicited objections from some fellow Christians. Perhaps the best one (along with some kind words) was from former Attorney General John Ashcroft:
“I think you can be a good Christian and be a socialist”is probably true in as much as God is gracious enough to forgive any and every affront. But to the extent that socialism and big government so frequently seek to do “the Lord’s work” by forcefully confiscating other people’s money and property, they are involved in the compound evils of theft and the substitutionary displacement of the private act of charity by the entitlement of government. Who needs God when so much of what is expected of Him and by Him is supplied by the coerced act of government rather than the Godly impulse of sharing? 68
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That’s a good point. On reflection, I think I said more than I meant to say, and erred in so doing. Here’s what I should have said: I think one could trust God and affirm, say, the Nicene Creed (the touchstone of Christian orthodoxy), while also believing that the state ought to own the means of production and determine all the basic terms of the market, such as price and production. There have been many such people. It’s not my place to question either their sincerity or their status in the eyes of God. At the same time, being a good Christian surely includes working out the wider implications of one’s worldview—plumbing the depths of one’s first principles, and fusing them with the practical knowledge needed to make prudential judgments. And socialism, despite its compassionate rhetoric, inevitably involves gross violations of the right to private property—otherwise known as theft. That right is presupposed in at least two of the Ten Commandments (you shall not steal and you shall not covet your neighbor’s possessions). Socialism estranges individuals from the right to the fruits of their labor. It allows a centralization of power utterly contrary to truth that all human beings are fallen. It harms the poor by decimating the information and incentives needed to abundantly produce and efficiently distribute goods and services. And, when implemented with resolve, it unleashes unprecedented brutality and grotesque violations against the dignity of human beings. At some level, every educated person in our society knows these things, or ought to know them. It is for reasons such as these that Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), flatly rejected socialism. He didn’t mince words:
Hence, it is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal? So can a Christian be a socialist? Well, yes, in the sense that the same person can unwittingly but sincerely hold conflicting beliefs. But can a good Christian, knowing what he or she ought to know at the beginning of the 21st century, be a socialist? I think not. 69
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his brings to mind something that recently happened at my church. The congregation was asked to pray that the president and Congress would succeed in “eliminating poverty.” I’ve heard such requests and probably prayed along similar lines before; but this time, the prayer troubled me, since it seemed to make several unjustifiable assumptions. The first assumption is that it’s even possible for human beings, on their own, to “eliminate poverty.” Sure, we have ways of reducing poverty and creating wealth. And it’s always possible that God will work a miracle; but insofar as poverty is part of the fallen human condition—like sin, death, and disease—perhaps it’s presumptuous to think that anyone can literally eliminate it on this side of the kingdom of God. But the more troubling, and unquestioned, assumption in the prayer is that it is within the competency and responsibility of the president and Congress to eliminate poverty. What’s the basis of that assumption? Certainly, there’s nothing in the Constitution that so much as suggests that this is one of the responsibilities of the executive and legislative branches of government. And there’s nothing in Scripture or Christian theology, so far as I can tell, to justify the assumption. We should pray that our public servants will act wisely and justly. But why think they have some decisive role to play in eliminating poverty? To see how odd the assumption is, try replacing “president and Congress” with some other professions—has anyone ever prayed that, say, bakers, firefighters, sheriffs, biologists, Supreme Court Justices, ophthalmologists, or first violins should succeed in eliminating poverty? Probably not, since we all know that eliminating poverty is not one of the core responsibilities of any of these professions. So why do we not flinch when such power is conferred on the president and Congress? Of course, we should pray that the poor will have their needs met, and that poverty will diminish. But if we want our prayers to get beyond such vague generalizations, we need to think about how those things normally happen in the world. The only cure for material poverty is, obviously, wealth. So how is wealth created? Well, it takes place under the right cultural and institutional conditions—the rule of law, a minimally virtuous population, economic freedom, and so forth. While the government can help 70
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maintain the conditions under which wealth is created, wealth is actually created in the private sector, by entrepreneurs, inventors, and businesses. Now, how many times have you heard someone pray that entrepreneurs might be free to exercise their creativity, that the government might allow businesses a hospitable environment in which to flourish, that engineers might create new technologies, or that agricultural scientists might develop more productive methods of cultivation? All of these things would actually reduce poverty, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard any prayers like that. We live in an age when the missions of government are often conflated with the missions of the church—and we should reject, as educated Christians, the idea of Christian socialism or “eliminating poverty” as something we should pray for as an aim of earthly government. In so doing, we fall into the trap of allowing the false promise of compassionate political rhetoric to serve as a substitute for real compassion.
Jay Richards is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy and theology from Princeton Theological Seminary, where he was formerly a teaching fellow. A contributing editor to The American, a publication of the American Enterprise Institute, he is the author, most recently, of Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem. 71
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Aubade Catherine Tufariello Here, where it is always noon, Where noon and midnight are the same, You wake, who will be leaving soon. You will put on your strange new name And learn to call the roundness moon That shimmers in the window frame. Here, where it is always noon, You wake, who will be leaving soon. Your language has no consonants. No babble but a sirenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cry, Imperious as an ambulance, Yanks me upright, drains me dry, Returns me to the languid trance Of timelessness in which we lie. Your language has no consonants, Imperious as an ambulance. Stranded on this shoal of time, Abandoned by the ferryman, You feel the way your fingers rhyme Or swim in sleep, amphibian. The nodding bells forget to chime, The minutes halt their caravan. Stranded on this shoal of time, You feel the way your fingers rhyme.
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Your gaze wanders the room and finds— Alighting momentarily— A mobile that the wind unwinds, The shifting summer filigree Of maple leaves behind the blinds, My earrings gleaming. Dreamily, Your gaze wanders the room and finds A mobile that the wind unwinds. You snatch at something bright and miss, Watching it float beyond your reach. You will remember none of this Brief idyll on a desert beach That curves, like a parenthesis, Between the worlds of sea and speech. You snatch at something bright, and miss. You will remember none of this. Mothers of older children say I’ll drink the milk of Lethe too— That soon I will have lost the way Your scalp and belly smelled brand new, The heft and texture of each day, Your eyes’ opaque Atlantic blue. Mothers of older children say That soon I will have lost the way. One day I’ll wake and you’ll be gone. A sturdy stranger in your place Will shake the bars and call at dawn, Or stagger, laughing, while I give chase Under these trees. But not the one Who lay for hours, the windblown lace Of sky and clouds, branches and sun Reflected in her changing face.
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S OULS IN T RANSITION ]the0emerging0adults} R. Albert Mohler, Jr. Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, by Christian Smith with Patricia Snell. Oxford University Press, 2009. mean, I have my beliefs in my head,” the young man said. “But I don’t enjoy the whole religious scene. I’m not really into it like some people are. I have my beliefs, I believe that’s the way it is, and the way it should be, and I go to church every once in a while. But it’s kind of low-key.” Anyone who knows today’s generation of young adults recognizes that language immediately. It is the language of religious detachment and institutional alienation. But, as the careful observer will quickly recognize, it is not the language of hostile alienation or ideological detachment. It is the language that marks a generation of souls in transition. In the early years of this decade, sociologist Christian Smith (then of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and his colleagues conducted over 3,000 interviews with American adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17. Their massive study of adolescent religion in America was published in 2005 as Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press). That study, now recognized as a landmark in the sociology of religion, found that most American adolescents were not irreligious, did not see themselves in rebellion against their parents, and did not fit the popular designation of the coming religious tenor as being “spiritual but not religious.” 75
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What Smith and his associates did find was that the mainstream belief system of American teenagers took the form of what the team identified as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”—a faith in a moralistic deity who expects his human creatures to behave, to feel good about themselves, and to run their own lives without too much divine interference or intervention. In other words, Smith argued that the nation’s teenagers looked and sounded much like their parents and the larger culture. They are vaguely and self-consciously spiritual, engaged in some sense of religious identity, but absolutely committed to the larger cultural ethos of autonomous individualism. Though a fairly significant percentage of these adolescents identified with traditional and even orthodox forms of Christianity, and a much smaller percentage identified with forms of self-conscious unbelief, most placed themselves under the umbrella of the Moralistic Therapeutic Deism that Smith and his team of researchers described so memorably. Now, less than five years after the publication of Soul Searching, Smith and another team of associates are out with another study. In Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Oxford University Press, 2009), Smith, along with Patricia Snell, offers a study based on follow-up interviews with 230 of the same individuals included in the first study. The difference is that these young people were no longer 13-17-year-olds, but were instead ages 18-23. Would the age difference also mean a significant shift in religious practice and beliefs? s Souls in Transition reveals, the answer to that question is both yes and no. In Soul Searching, Smith asserted that “American teenagers can embody adults’ highest hopes and most gripping fears.” Indeed, it seems that every generation of teenagers becomes a consuming concern of adults, as well as a target population for sociologists, psychologists, and other researchers. But Smith now argues that the more significant research population— and the more determinative age cohort for the future of American religion—may well be the “emerging adults” of their most recent study. What to call them? These young people and their life stage have been labeled as “twenty-somethings,” “youthhood,” “adultoles76
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cence,” and “extended adolescence.” Smith chose to use the term offered by psychologist Jeffrey Arnett—“emerging adulthood.” “What is it like to be an 18- to 29-year-old in America?” Smith and his team asked. “What are the major strengths and problems of emerging adults today? How are they faring on their journey to full adulthood?” To these questions they added the religious and spiritual dimensions of the generation. Who are they and what do they believe? In the first place, they really do represent something new in lifestage experience. Their emergence into full adulthood is coming, in the main, considerably later than their parents and virtually every earlier generation after the dawn of modernity. Their emergence into adulthood has been delayed by higher education, by the delay of marriage, by economic instability, and by the continued financial support of their parents. Thus, this generation of young adults has experienced “a historically unparalleled freedom to roam, experiment, learn, move on, and try again.” ollowing the pattern set by Soul Searching, Souls in Transition includes profiles of several representative young people. They range from the highly conventional and orthodox to the agnostic and atheistic, but most are clustered into a far more ambiguous mediating category. What has changed since their teenage years? Perhaps the most significant impression presented in the project is that these young adults have distanced themselves from their parents and from their parents’ religious faith to a greater degree, though they remain positively related to their parents (and economically dependent upon them) and hopeful about the future of this relationship. They are now preoccupied with life tasks and are struggling to retain optimism amid the baffling array of adult responsibilities before them. They see themselves as broke but are eagerly committed to a consumerist culture. Above all, they are preoccupied with the concerns of the self. As a matter of fact, Smith, now William R. Kenan Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, argues that this generation actually has difficulty imagining any objective reality beyond the self. As he explains, “Most have great difficulty grasping the idea that a reality that is objective to their own awareness or construction of it may ex77
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ist that could have a significant bearing on their lives.” To all this he adds that these emerging adults are actually soft ontological antirealists, epistemological skeptics, and perspectivalists, “although few have any conscious idea what those terms mean.” This is a breathtaking observation, yet even Smith seems to underplay what this means for this generation and for the future of American Christianity. These emerging adults are not hardened ideological postmodernists, but their belief systems reveal that a soft form of postmodern antirealism has become part of mainstream culture. This observation goes far in explaining the religious and spiritual profiles of these young people. In the main, they do not see themselves as secular, much less do they see themselves as committed to a secularist ideology. Like Brad, the young man whose comments are cited in the opening paragraph of this essay, they just do not see themselves as related in any formal or binding sense with churches, formal beliefs, or religious institutions. As Amanda, a young woman highly involved in an evangelical congregation, explains, “Religion is not made for young people.” They are postponing marriage and family formation—a pattern with vast consequences in light of the experience of previous generations—but they are definitely not postponing sex. They are playing around, hooking up, and cohabiting. They know that the Bible condemns these behaviors, and they promise themselves that they will one day settle down and adopt a more conservative sexual morality. Like Augustine in his early years, they want chastity ... but not yet. In a haunting and powerful paragraph, Smith explains how this tension between sexual behavior and moral expectation actually distances these young people from their religious and spiritual roots:
Therefore, emerging adults who are serious about their faith and practice have to do one of three things: choose to reject heavy partying and premarital sex; dramatically compartmentalize their lives so that their partying and sexual activities are firmly partitioned off from their religious activities in a way that borders on denial; or be willing to live with the cognitive dissonance of being committed to two things that are incompatible and mutually denying. Not many emerging adults can or will do any of these things, so most of them resolve the cognitive dissonance by simply distancing from religion.
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Accordingly, these young adults are considerably less religious than their parents, less committed to formal doctrines, and less involved, not only in church life, but even in such activities as volunteering in charity work and social organizations. As for Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, commitment to this belief system remains “alive and well.” The main difference between these young people at this stage of life, as compared to their adolescence, is that they now have a larger frame of reference and set of concepts with which to flesh it out. At the same time, they do not register markedly higher levels of attachment to many liberal doctrines. They claim to believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible, in heaven and hell, and in any number of orthodox doctrines. Clearly, they are not theological liberals in any classic sense. At the same time, they are apparently living without any direct cognitive commitment to these orthodox beliefs. On one measure of doctrinal orthodoxy, however, they are decidedly and overwhelmingly liberal. They have abandoned any belief in the exclusivity of the gospel. Religion is seen as a social phenomenon, claims of exclusivity are seen as intolerant, and heaven is seen as “one big party” where all basically good people go after death.
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riting over twenty years ago about evangelical young adults in that era, sociologist James Davison Hunter of the University of Virginia warned in Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation that the generation then in young adulthood—the parents of the generation profiled in Souls in Transition—was moving away from the belief that only those who believe in Christ will go to heaven. As he explained, “In the face of intense religious and cultural pluralism in the past century, the pressures to deny Christianity’s exclusive claims to truth have been fantastic.” Among today’s emerging adults, accommodation to that pressure is the rule rather than the exception. Helpfully, Smith and co-author Patricia Snell point to several factors that encourage emerging adults to remain connected and committed to churches and beliefs—and these have mostly to do with the roles played by parents and other adults in their lives. Young adults who remain closely related to their parents, and who have parents who put a premium on maintaining that relationship, are far more likely to remain both connected and committed. Significantly, their 79
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continued commitment also has a great deal to do with the roles played by other adults in a congregation. Put simply, this is a generation of emerging adults who are struggling to reach full adulthood in the culture of late modernity. They see themselves as needing older adults as allies, mentors, and friends. They know they need help, and they see themselves as facing greater challenges than those faced by their parents. They are not hostile to the faith of their parents, but they are swimming in a very different cultural sea. They are indeed souls in transition, and they seem to know that they are. Christian Smith and Patricia Snell have offered the church and today’s generation of evangelical leaders, pastors, educators, and parents an invaluable portrait of today’s emerging adults in Souls in Transition. This generation is looking for help, guidance, and friendship. They reflect the culture into which they have emerged and the tensions of modern life. They are remaking the world even as they are being made by it. They know that they are emerging into adulthood later than did their parents, and they know that they are engaging the world of adulthood in their own awkward way. As Smith and Snell assert, these emerging adults cannot be reached by “ramping up” religious programs. They are reached mainly, if not exclusively, by relationships with others, especially older adults. In other words, the real question for today’s evangelicals is not what this emerging generation will mean, but what we are prepared to do. We can sit idly by and watch these young people emerge on their own, or we can step in as friends, guides, and fellow strugglers. The stakes, as this important study makes clear, could not be higher.
R. Albert Mohler Jr. serves as president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention and one of the largest seminaries in the world. You can read more of his work at his website, AlbertMohler.com. 80
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AYN R AND : A N E G OTISTICAL L IFE ]promethean0or0tyrant} Micah Mattix Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns, Oxford University Press, 2009. Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller, Nan A. Talese, 2009. hile at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I taught a number of introductory courses in fiction. In two of these, I included Ayn Rand’s Anthem with a mix of staples—Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre, and Absalom, Absalom!, among others. At the end of each semester, I took an informal poll asking students which work they liked best. Rand’s Anthem won each time, and overwhelmingly so. This surprised me given the political leanings of most of my students. I did not inform them of Rand’s political commitments, preferring Anthem and the other novels to stand or fall on the basis of their merits or faults alone. It could be that the students chose Anthem because of its length—it was the shortest novel assigned for the class, and far shorter than Rand’s thousand-paged Atlas Shrugged. Yet I doubt this was the case for all or even the majority of them. When I asked them why they preferred Rand to the other works, the two most common responses were that they liked the style of the novella—the quirky use of the pronoun “we” and the compression—and they liked the "happy ending." 81
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The novella does end happily, I suppose. Prometheus (formerly Equality 7-2521) and his mate, “the Golden One,” escape the backward, dystopian Communist state in which they live and start a new life in an abandoned chalet with a well-stocked library. While reading, Prometheus discovers the formerly forbidden word, “I,” which allows him to express the full range of his great, individual mind. At this point, the constraint is shed as Prometheus explodes in a linguistic anthem to the self. “I am. I think. I will,” he begins as he traces the foundational notions of his philosophical system. For Prometheus, and for Rand, personal happiness is the ultimate end of life and is found in the free exercise of reason, which alone determines one’s actions. Though, in a somewhat chilling and ironic example of Prometheus’s strong sense of moral obligation to free his “brothers,” the novella closes with a call to arms:
Here, on this mountain, I and my sons and my chosen friends shall build our new land and our fort. And it will become as the heart of the earth, lost and hidden at first, but beating, beating louder each day. And word of it will reach every corner of the earth. And the roads of the world will become as veins which will carry the best of the world’s blood to my threshold. And all my brothers, and the Councils of my brothers, will hear of it, but they will be impotent against me. And the day will come when I shall break all the chains of the earth, and raze the cities of the enslaved, and my home will become the capital of a world where each man will be free to exist for his own sake. Prometheus’s expressed hope to free his “brothers” is noble and good—one might even say altruistic. His claim that his home “will become the capital” of the world is somewhat more worrisome. In the 1938 version, which was published in England, Prometheus goes on to characterize his struggle to free his “chosen friends” as a “holy war”: “We shall know no fear and no doubt. Ours will be the holy war, the holy, the blessed and the last.” Upon completing two new biographies of Rand—Jennifer Burns’s excellent Goddess of the Market and Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made—I was struck by the parallels between Rand and Prometheus’s lives. Some of these were no doubt intentional on Rand’s part. Some, I am sure, were not.
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ike Prometheus, Rand escaped a Communist state to begin a new life elsewhere. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg on February 2, 1905, Rand left Russia for America in 1926. She would never return. Yet, unlike Prometheus, who escaped by force of intellect and determination, Rand’s escape was made possible by the help of relatives in Chicago who sponsored her visa and by the financial support of her parents, who paid for her long trip to America. She stayed in Chicago six months before leaving for Hollywood, where she was supported by a number of small loans from her family in Chicago. She eventually landed a job editing screenplays for Cecil B. DeMille. She never repaid relatives, and, in what would become an all too common habit of revising her own past, she would often fail to mention the help she had had from her parents and her relatives in coming to America, presenting her escape Prometheus-like. Many people were unaware that she had any living family members left in Russia and were surprised by the sudden visit of her sister later in life. While in California, Rand met Frank O’Connor—a strikingly handsome and witty aspiring actor who played mostly minor roles in small to medium budget films. O’Connor was no intellectual heavyweight, but Rand was infatuated with his good looks from the moment she saw him on the set of King of Kings in 1927. The two were married on April 15, 1929, just before Rand’s visa expired. Ultimately dissatisfied with the lack of creative control in screenwriting, Rand began working on what would become We the Living and a play, later retitled The Night of January 16th. The play, which was produced in 1934 at the Hollywood Playhouse, would eventually take Rand and O’Connor to New York City, where Rand had longed to return since her arrival in the States. But it was the novel, published in 1936 with Macmillan, that attracted the critical interest and, later, the disciples that her screenplays and stage plays did not. By 1938, it was clear to Rand that she would wage her “holy war” against Communism through fiction, not film. When she and O’Connor returned to California following the publication of The Fountainhead to work on a screenplay for the novel, the first of what would be numerous disciples arrived at her door, and Rand began to build her “fort” of individualism in the aftermath of Roosevelt’s New Deal America. 83
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One of the many ironies of Rand’s life—as both Burns and Heller tell it—is the extent to which her treatment of others exemplified some of the very practices of Communist Russia she despised so much. As Rand developed from screenwriter to novelist to political activist and public philosopher, she became less and less tolerant of any dissent from those in her inner circle. Those who refused to be “corrected,” often after marathon interventions, were excommunicated. Some of these were ugly—such as Nathaniel Branden’s outing in 1967 following his refusal to continue his affair with her, or Rand’s break with her sister. f Rand, like Prometheus, waged a holy war against communism in the name of individual freedom, it was a very constrained notion of freedom—hers. After all, as Prometheus makes clear in his call to arms at the close of Anthem, after he breaks “all the chains of the earth,” razes “the cities of the enslaved,” and establishes his home as the capital of the free world, no one would be free to remain a Communist or even religious. So it was in Rand’s world, where she was clearly goddess, worshipped unconditionally by a select group of acolytes. In her journal, Rand distinguished between the true egoist who would put “his own ‘I’, his standard of values, above all things, and [conquer] to live as he pleases” and the tyrannical dictator who lives to dominate others and, thus, for others—because he needs them to dominate. Yet despite this somewhat sophistical distinction, there is little doubt that Rand ended life an intellectual tyrant. How did a woman who experienced first-hand the coercion and oppression of a dictatorial regime become a little dictator herself? Neither Burns nor Heller answer this question directly, though Heller at one point seems to chalk it up to ethnicity and nationality--as if Russian Jews are somehow predisposed to tyranny. In the end, it seems Whittaker Chambers said it best in his famous skewering of Atlas Shrugged in a 1957 piece for the National Review. Without God, Chambers wrote, “Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.” Altruism is not the root cause of tyrannical oppression—though Rand was right that it is often used to usher in radical constraints in personal freedom: atheism is. Without a transcendent God, there is nothing to constrain one’s will to power. 84
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In the end, I suspect it was Prometheus’s example of unconstrained freedom and his stated purpose to become the center of the world that most attracted my students at Chapel Hill to Anthem. This is the secret dream of all adolescents, no doubt, but also of many others, Rand included. Yet, as Rand’s life attests, the end for all who follow this dream is not happiness, but a deep-rooted dissatisfaction. While she accomplished much good in her life, she lived a paranoid, vindictive existence, and ended it estranged from almost all of her remaining family and friends, dying in her home in New York under the care of her lone remaining disciple.
Micah Mattix is Assistant Professor of Literature at Houston Baptist University and Reviews Editor of The City. His forthcoming book is Frank O’Hara and the Poetics of Saying ‘I’ (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press). 85
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T HE M ANY B ONHOEFFERS ,the0misunderstood< Jordan Ballor Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Metaxas. Thomas Nelson, 2010. was discussing Dietrich Bonhoeffer once with a Dutch friend of mine, and he remarked that Bonhoeffer was very wellrespected on the European continent, especially for his academic learning. Most readers, he said, never could get beyond the depth and complexity of his early work, Act and Being. I opined that the perception is basically different here in America, where Bonhoeffer is principally known for his resistance to Hitler and his somewhat more pious works, especially Discipleship and Life Together. In his new biography, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, Eric Metaxas provides special insight into how these differing perspectives on Bonhoeffer came about. For in addition to Life Together and Discipleship, the latter in which we find Bonhoeffer’s well-known concept of “cheap grace,” America’s first popular introduction to Bonhoeffer came through the publication of Letters & Papers from Prison, which contained his reflections during his imprisonment in the final years of World War II. These letters are characterized by deep intimacy, soul-searching, and theological exploration. They contain references to strangesounding ideas like the “arcane discipline” and “religionless Christianity.” This latter phrase, as Eric Metaxas observes, became the motto of many radical theologians in the 1960s. In other cases Bonhoeffer would add rhetorical flourishes, like the claim that every sermon must have a touch of heterodoxy. “Many seized on that phrase to claim that Bonhoeffer was unconcerned with orthodox theology,” writes Metaxas. “Bonhoeffer often fell into such traps, and for this 86
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reason he might be the most misunderstood theologian who ever lived.” Because he is so largely misunderstood, where he is even really known at any depth at all in America, Metaxas has taken on the praiseworthy task of delivering a biographical study of the German theologian and pastor. Metaxas’ work is comprehensive and thorough, with a level of close examination that most other biographical works on Bonhoeffer have not achieved, and certainly not with this level of readability and accessibility. n pursing this comprehensive agenda Metaxas turns out to be a reliable guide to the often-confusing and paradoxical life and work of the German pastor. Even though Metaxas’ work is not a theological study, it shows remarkable theological sensitivity. In the case of Bonhoeffer’s relationship to Karl Barth, for example, Metaxas provides a level of nuance and depth that is often lacking even in more scholarly theological accounts. Thus, Metaxas correctly notes (almost in passing!) that Bonhoeffer was pursuing natural law in his Ethics, a concept that “was absent from Protestant theology and which absence he meant to correct.” This is, of course, a point of great divergence from the program of Karl Barth, who had so fiercely disagreed in 1934 with Emil Brunner’s claim that the theological task of the current generation was to reclaim a truly evangelical and Christian theologia naturalis. In general the tone of the biography is respectful, and with a person of the quality and mettle of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it’s easy to see why. There are hints, however, of Bonhoeffer’s flaws, so that the account is not simply hagiographical. Bonhoeffer seems to have done a fair bit of self-reflection, and noted his own shortcomings consisting in a disposition of impatience with others and having a temper. Metaxas also deals with instances of bad judgment, or even cowardice, on Bonhoeffer’s part, as in the case of his refusal to preach at the funeral of his Jewish brother-in-law’s father. Later Bonhoeffer would express heartfelt regret at this decision. He also struggled with acedia, a kind of spiritual malaise consisting of sorrow at the world and temporal existence. Often associated with the solitary life of monastics in the Middle Ages, Bonhoeffer’s experience of acedia is outlined compellingly in his prison letters. 87
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This kind of worldly mourning is intriguing given Bonhoeffer’s consistent and vociferous exhortation to embrace worldly concerns, that an otherworldly faith is disobedient to God’s care for his creation as expressed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is the radical this-worldliness of the Christian faith in Bonhoeffer’s view that galvanized him early on in his resistance to the Third Reich. It is on the complexity of Bonhoeffer’s various worldly concerns that Metaxas’ biography also provides a compelling and reliable narrative. Metaxas does not shy away from examining and even providing answers for the tough questions of Bonhoeffer’s life and work. We have noted already how Metaxas weighs in on the question of Bonhoeffer’s relationship with Barth. He does this in terms not only of Bonhoeffer’s theological project but also in terms of their churchpolitical engagements. In terms of Bonhoeffer’s engagement with the German church struggle (Kirchenkampf, the resistance of various figures and groups to the Nazification of the German evangelical church), Metaxas provides great insight into Bonhoeffer’s disagreement with Barth and others within the Confessing movement about the problem posed by the attempts by the Nazis within the church to ban non-Aryans from Christian ministry. But as the church struggle wore on throughout the 1930s, and the Confessing movement cum church, as well as the broader ecumenical movement, became increasingly impotent in the face of Nazi tyranny, Bonhoeffer became involved more deeply in active resistance to Hitler with the so-called Abwehr conspiracy. Some scholars, like Stanley Hauerwas, have attempted to bracket Bonhoeffer’s motivation for his involvement in the assassination plots as inscrutable. Metaxas, on the other hand, does admirable work in describing in great detail how Bonhoeffer viewed his activities as an obedient (albeit imperfect) response to his own personal call to be faithful to Jesus Christ. As Metaxas writes incisively, “Through Christ, God had shown that he meant us to be in this world and to obey him with our actions in this world. So Bonhoeffer would get his hands dirty, not because he had grown impatient, but because God was speaking to him about further steps of obedience.” Despite a firm endorsement of Metaxas’ biography as comprehensive, clear, reliable, and readable, a few words of minor criticism are in order. The subtitle of the book characterizes Bonhoeffer as a “righteous Gentile” against the Third Reich. But this language is nev88
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er explained in the book, despite the fact that Bonhoeffer has not been formally recognized as a “righteous Gentile” or one of the “Righteous Among the Nations,” which is “an official title awarded by Yad Vashem on behalf of the State of Israel and the Jewish people to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.” Such a description of Bonhoeffer might be cause for some confusion, to say the least. In Metaxas’ account of Bonhoeffer’s death, he relies on the description provided by the camp doctor at Flossenbürg, H. FischerHüllstrung, which describes Bonhoeffer as a pious pastor being led naked to the gallows. It is an image that has had some resonance and has been popularized in film and other literary accounts. But it also may well be false. The journalist and theologian Uwe Siemon-Netto has described an alternative account of Bonhoeffer’s execution, which involved not gallows but an iron hook. As Siemon-Netto writes of the execution of Abwehr conspirators at Flossenbürg, “They were slowly strangled to death by a rope snapping up and down from a flexible iron hook that had been sunk into a wall. When they lost consciousness, they were revived so that the procedure could be repeated over and over again.” This is, in Siemon-Netto’s words, a rather more “ghastly” death, but one that must be accounted for in our more stylized and perhaps more comfortable reception of Bonhoeffer’s legacy. Metaxas’ book provides a popular and accessible, yet serious and thorough, account of Bonhoeffer’s life and work. It does not replace, but rather complements, the more scholarly biography by Bonhoeffer’s close friend Eberhard Bethge (recently made available in a newly updated and revised edition in 2000). But if the broader American church is to gain greater insight into the compelling story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and move beyond the sometimes pious platitudes to his serious theological work, it will be in no small part due to the merits of Metaxas’ careful and worthy endeavor.
Jordan J. Ballor is a research fellow at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty in Grand Rapids, Mich., and a doctoral candidate in Reformation history at the University of Zurich and historical and moral theology at Calvin Theological Seminary. He is the author of Ecumenical Babel: Confusing Economic Ideology and the Church’s Social Witness (Christian’s Library Press, 2010). 89
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S TILL C HOSEN : E VANGELISM AND THE J EWS [the0covenant0people{ Louis Markos To the Jew First: The Case for Jewish Evangelism in Scripture and History, edited by Darrell L. Bock and Mitch Glaser. Kregel, 2009. hough most Christians are aware of the Jewish revolt against Rome that led to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, most are not aware that the Jews who remained in Jerusalem revolted again in 132 under the messianic leadership of Bar Kokhba. It was the defeat of this rebellion in 135, rather than the defeat of 70, that led the Romans to expel the Jews from Jerusalem and change the name of the province from Judea to Palestine. It was also this defeat that convinced the church that God had rejected and abandoned the Jewish people. For a millennium and a half, the central church position on the defeated and scattered nation of Israel would remain fairly consistent. Israel had lost her status as the Chosen People and Nation and been superceded—or replaced—by the Gentile Church. Advocates of supersessionism—or replacement theology—held (and still hold) that the covenant promises made to the Jews in the Old Testament were either fulfilled before Christ came or passed to the church. Henceforth, though individual Jews might find salvation in Christ, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had finished his work with the historical people of Israel. 90
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Supersessionism, by its very nature, tends toward a more allegorical (as opposed to literal) reading of biblical prophecy, especially as regards the Jews and the land of Israel. Accordingly, most supersessionists read the prophecy of a coming millennial kingdom of peace recorded in Revelation 20 in an allegorical fashion, referring not to a literal kingdom ruled by Christ but to the present church age. Beginning in the seventeenth century, however, small pockets of pietistic believers were inspired with a millenarian hope that God would soon establish an earthly kingdom. These scattered hopes reached a culmination point in the late nineteenth century, where they combined with a more literal reading of biblical prophecy to form the still influential evangelical schools of dispensationalism and premillennialism. Central to dispensational premillennialism is the belief that Israel is not the church—that, in fact, God still has a purpose for his historical Chosen People. In keeping with the dry bones prophecy of Ezekiel 37, they predicted that God would soon regather his people in the Promised Land, thus setting in motion the eventual conversion of the Jewish people to faith in Jesus Messiah and the establishment of the millennial kingdom. The world may have been shocked when, in 1948, Israel was miraculously reborn as a Jewish state, but the premillennialists merely smiled, nodded, and said, “We told you so.” lthough Darrell L. Bock and Mitch Glaser, editors of To the Jew First: The Case for Jewish Evangelism in Scripture and History, owe a great debt to modern premillennialism, they wisely maintain a distance between premillennialism as a theological system and their own goal to issue a wake-up call to a church that has, in great part, abdicated its responsibility to evangelize the Jews. Most people today associate premillennialism, not with the work of scholars like Bock—who is a research professor of New Testament studies at the “headquarters” of dispensationalism, Dallas Theological Seminary—but with such trendy books as Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind series and with overly-enthusiastic preachers making overly-enthusiastic predictions. Worse yet, premillennialism often gets wrapped up with the ever incendiary politics of the Middle East, something that Glaser—a Messianic Jew who serves as the President of Chosen People Ministries—knows he must avoid if he is to gain a fair and objective hearing. 91
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Bock, Glaser, and the other twelve scholars who contributed essays to this excellent volume ground their defense of Jewish evangelism not in current events or popular trends or even a single theological school, but in a close reading of the scriptures, particularly Acts and Romans. Before even considering the historical relationship between the church and Israel, To the Jew First offers three carefully reasoned exegetical essays that present a compelling case that the apostles and biblical writers fully intended for Jewish evangelism to remain a priority. And later essays continually cycle back to this central claim. The title of the collection is taken from Romans 1:16: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (ESV). Arnold G. Fruchtenbaum, director of Ariel Ministries, argues convincingly that the “is” in the verse expresses ongoing action and that if we claim, as all believing Christians must, that the gospel continues to be “the power of God for salvation,” then it must also continue to be true that the gospel is meant “to the Jew first.” Fruchtenbaum substantiates his reading of Romans 1:16 by comparing it with the missionary practice of the apostles. In Acts, he writes, “there are two basic missions: they are not home and foreign missions, but are Jewish and Gentile missions ... But even the Apostle to the Gentiles [Paul] always went to the Jew first.” Of course, many supersessionists point to the last chapter of Acts, where Paul angrily dismisses the bickering Jewish leaders and focuses instead on the Gentiles, as proof that Paul intended for the church to abandon intentional evangelism to Jews in favor of treating all nations and peoples equally. But that position is untenable, argues Fruchtenbaum, since several times earlier in Acts, Paul had, with equal vigor dismissed his Jewish audience and turned instead to the Gentiles. Paul’s true and consistent pattern throughout Acts is to go first to the synagogue and seek to convince his fellow Jews that Jesus was the Messiah promised in scripture. Only when he is rejected by the Jews does he turn to the Gentiles—until he moves on to another city, where, again, he begins first with the Jews. In the opening essays by Mark A. Seifrid, professor of New Testament Interpretation at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Walter C. Kaiser Jr., professor of Old Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, close attention is paid to Romans 9-11, where Paul not only asserts forcefully that God will remain faithful to his 92
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covenant promises to the Jews but that God intends for the grafting in of the Gentiles to provoke Israel to jealousy and, by so doing, lead her to salvation. Far from claiming Israel has been rejected, writes Kaiser, Paul insists that “the church is built on the shoulders of the ancient promises to Israel and the future restoration of all Israel.” To embrace replacement theology is to cut the church off from its roots. Seigfrid makes a similar point, but from a different perspective: “the entrance of Gentiles into salvation does not ... result in an indiscriminate, and therefore bland, universalism in which all cultural distinctives are leveled. Rather, it represents a dramatic joining of highly fissile peoples, Jew and Gentile, who are held together solely by the risen Messiah.” God’s plan is not to absorb the Jews into the Gentile church, but to make the two into one. Though Seifrid does not make the connection, his vision of Messianic Jewish and Gentile congregations existing side by side in a rich complementarity may be unintentionally strengthened by the recent growth of multiethnic churches. Just as these churches have sought to build racially diverse congregations in which different people groups can blend together without sacrificing their ethnic identity, so Seigfrid believes that Messianic Jews can be full members of the Christian faith without assimilating into the church’s dominant Gentile culture. Craig A. Blaising, professor of theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, seconds Seigfrid’s belief and takes it one step further. By preserving Israel’s distinctive place within God’s plan, we confront the “myth of an undifferentiated humanity.” God intended for the human race to be racially diverse, a truth attested to by his careful preservation of Jewish identity and ethnicity. Unfortunately, supersessionism robbed Israel of her ethnic distinctiveness; worse yet, it robbed Jesus of his ethnic distinctiveness. Though most scholars today, thanks in great part to the theological recovery of Israel, study Jesus through the lens of first century Judaism, one of the baneful effects of post-135 supersessionism was, argues Blaising, “the effacement of the Jewishness of Jesus from Christian confession.” In a moment of great insight that should cause all Gentile Christians, whatever their denomination, to catch their breath, Blaising reminds us that “the incarnation is not just the union of God and humanity; it is the incarnation of the Son of God in the house of David as the Son of covenant promise. From a human standpoint, Jesus is not just a man, or generic man; he is that Man—that descendant of 93
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David who has a great inheritance and a future set forth in the eschatological fulfillment of God’s plan for Israel.” Apart from the Jewishness of Jesus, we cannot fully know either Jesus himself or the historical plan that the Father enacted through him.
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ere supersessionism the only obstacle to Jewish evangelism, To the Jew First could have been a much shorter book. Today, however, those who would inspire the church to target the Jews for special missionary focus face a newer, more daunting foe. Over the last century, an increasing number of people outside and inside the church have adopted “two covenant theology,” the belief that while God saves Gentiles through Christ, he saves Jews through Torah. Those who adopt this view, explains Seigfrid, “have repudiated Christian evangelism and mission to Jews not only as an affront but as a theological violation of God’s covenant with Israel.” While remaining sensitive to the post-Holocaust realities that have fueled two covenant theology, To the Jew First exposes the scriptural, historical, and theological flaws behind a system that would posit the sacrifice of the Jewish Messiah as being effective for all people but the Jews. Kai Kjær-Hansen, international coordinator of the Lausanne Consultation on Jewish Evangelism, shows that these flaws date back to one of the architects of two covenant theology, Franz Rosenzweig. In answer to Rosenzweig’s argument that the elder son in the Parable of the Prodigal Son represents Israel, who remains in the father’s house while the prodigal Gentiles must be rectified to God through Jesus, Kjær-Hansen reminds us that the context of the parable is fully Jewish—it contrasts not Jews and Gentiles but self-righteous Pharisees and Jewish “sinners.” Balancing top-notch scholarship with a high degree of lucidity, To the Jew First is a must-read for all who love God’s Chosen People.
Louis Markos (www.Loumarkos.com), Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His two newest books, Apologetics for the 21st Century, and Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis will be published in October. An abbreviated version of this review previously appeared in First Things. 94
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A R EPUBLIC OF L ET TERS ]thoughts0on0the0age} Hunter Baker hen watching the Food Network on television, the viewer focuses on a number of things. What technique does the celebrity chef use in dicing an onion? How is her hair highlighted? What kind of appliances has the network placed in the kitchen set? How does the food look? The attention is everywhere except on how the food will taste because that part of the process is too difficult to convey through a glass screen. A celebrity cooking program could be made in such a way that the viewer would be fully entertained and ready for another episode even if the dish were an absolute failure. Audiences lock in on everything other than the actual eating because they are culinary voyeurs. American politics resembles cooking on television because our palate has been out of practice. We’ve eaten a relatively unseasoned mash of policy for a long time with little variation based on the chef. With the taste of the food varying so little, we have focused more on the politician as a celebrity. How does the prospective office holder look? What obstacles has the candidate overcome in childhood? Who makes for the best profile in People Magazine? David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times, memorably swooned at the sight of President Obama’s “perfectly creased” pant leg. The presentation has taken precedence over the taste. But things are changing. The unseasoned mash is getting a bit spicier (maybe enough to cause a little health care related heartburn?) and the sheer amount of it threatens the ability of even a championship eater to digest. And the bill at the end of the meal, by the way, is starting to look intimidating even for those carrying the fancy black 95
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American Express cards. With the change, the focus of the diners will also move. They will devote less attention to the image and more to what exactly it is they are putting into their mouths. A test case is in New Jersey. Governor Chris Christie, part Sicilian and part Irish, is no threat to cause anyone palpitations over the perfect cut of his big and tall suit. But he has managed to make major changes to budget policy in a reliably liberal state. The Garden State, with taxes high and coffers empty much like the Roman Empire at the end of its existence, turned to the no-nonsense prosecutor. He has proved to be a serious man by successfully taking on public unions and attacking budget liabilities. The type of leadership he has provided has been little valued during the last twenty years, but it is coming back in vogue. Anyone can spend money and make vague promises about how to pay the promissory notes. It takes a leader who recognizes the moral responsibilities of governance to work through the ledger and decide where cuts must be made. Debt-wise, we are now in a situation similar to the one America faced at the halfway point of the 20th century. We’d fought a hard, expensive war against the Nazis and the Japanese empire and needed to help rebuild Europe to forestall the victory of aggressive totalitarianism from the Soviets. The scandal is that we’ve reached a similar ratio of debt to GDP without anything approaching the kind of civilizational crises we battled through earlier. Western nations at that time chose able leaders to rebuild the world: Winston Churchill. Konrad Adenauer. Dwight Eisenhower. They had to be good, wise, and credible. Not only were they bringing the west out of the ashes, they were facing Stalin and Mao. As good as those leaders were, they had an advantage we don’t have. Their people had been on rations for years and were ready to consume. Our citizenry, in contrast, has matched the habits of our government. But things have changed. The people have become wiser in the wake of financial meltdown in the real estate markets and on Wall Street. We are loaded with debt, but are now looking to save. As the government rolls out increasingly shocking deficits, we react by salting away more money against the possibility of dark days. Profligate spending by Washington undermines the confidence needed to fuel expansion. We realize that our political leaders are taking us on the path of greater spending accompanied by more debt service and higher taxes. The bill is going to come due and we know it. 96
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Like a wife hiding funds from an unreliable husband with grandiose visions and a record of failure (the War on Poverty), we are stewarding our resources and hoping for more responsibility. Aristotle said the best judges of whether a chef has succeeded in his craft are the diners rather than his fellow chefs. No matter how much other politicians may laud their peers who effortlessly spend other people’s money without worrying about tomorrow, the citizens (the diners) grow restless. We need leaders who want no better legacy than to have applied the brakes on a runaway locomotive and who have the intestinal fortitude for the task.
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ne of the debates that emerges regularly on the field of internet argumentation—particularly on Twitter—is from those strongly self-assured that Jesus never lived. I have shamelessly borrowed the following excerpt from the very valuable Bede’s Library in the United Kingdom, where secular scholar Will Durant eloquently dismissed the idea Jesus never lived in Caesar and Christ (the third volume of his Story of Civilisation):
The Christian evidence for Christ begins with the letters ascribed to Saint Paul. Some of these are of uncertain authorship; several, antedating A.D. 64, are almost universally accounted as substantially genuine. No one has questioned the existence of Paul, or his repeated meetings with Peter, James, and John; and Paul enviously admits that these men had known Christ in his flesh. The accepted epistles frequently refer to the Last Supper and the Crucifixion…. The contradictions are of minutiae, not substance; in essentials the synoptic gospels agree remarkably well, and form a consistent portrait of Christ. In the enthusiasm of its discoveries the Higher Criticism has applied to the New Testament tests of authenticity so severe that by them a hundred ancient worthies, for example Hammurabi, David, Socrates would fade into legend. Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that mere inventors would have concealed the competition of the apostles for high places in the Kingdom, their flight after Jesus’ arrest, Peter’s denial, the failure of Christ to work miracles in Galilee, the references of some auditors to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions 97
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of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, his despairing cry on the cross; no one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them. That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so loft an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospel. After two centuries of Higher Criticism the outlines of the life, character, and teaching of Christ, remain reasonably clear, and constitute the most fascinating feature of the history of Western man.
: have always hated the mullet. I have never had a mullet nor have I aspired to have one. However, a recent move by the authorities in Iran to ban the mullet hairstyle has caused powerful protective feelings to rise from within my soul. I recall Nicholas Cage in the David Lynch film Wild at Heart wearing a bizarre jacket to which he is very much attached. At various points in the story, he is moved to speechify: “This is a snakeskin jacket. For me it is a symbol of my belief in individuality and personal freedom.”Cage’s character proceeds to beat up whoever made fun of it. So, too, the mullet. In this case, I am ready to stand up for the mullet in the face of this outrageous blow against “individuality and personal freedom” set up by the petty tyrants in Persia. Don’t they know that the mullet can never be destroyed by law? It can only be conquered by good taste and proper breeding.
: recently read a biography of Henry Luce. He was the co-founder of Time magazine and founded Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and other prime American media properties. He co-founded Time with a Yale classmate who died young. The book, Henry Luce: His Time, Life, and Fortune, by John Kobler (MacDonald, 1968) probably doesn’t do justice to its subject, but Luce is so interesting I found myself hungry to know more. The author of 98
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this volume clearly disagreed, to some extent, with Luce’s conservatism—I suspect Kobler saw Luce as a retrograde businessman with a genius for publications. Luce grew up as a missionary kid in China. His father was a Presbyterian with a vision for a Christian university in China. As a child, Luce grew up with a powerful sense of the value of American culture and, as he called it, the American proposition which was a mixture of “courage, private initiative, responsibility, honesty, and independence from government aid and interference.” His country had a destiny to fulfill in providence and had “a constitutional dependency on God.” His first prospectus for Time (in the early 1920′s) contained the following “catalogue of prejudices”: 1. A belief that the world is round and an admiration of the statesman’s view of all the world. 2. A general distrust of the present tendency toward increasing interference by government. 3. A prejudice against the rising cost of government. 4. Faith in the things which money cannot buy. 5. A respect for the old, particularly in manners. 6. An interest in the new, particularly in ideas. Luce was especially repulsed by the philosophy Oliver Wendell Holmes espoused when he suggested men had little more significance than “baboons or grains of sand” or that truth is defined by the nation with the ability to “lick all the others.” He rejected Holmes’ cynical “materialism, militarism, relativism, and agnosticism” and he worked hard to see that his publications promoted a different set of values. Growing up in China formed him in ways other than ideology. He ate substandard food so many years that even when he became wealthy, he had little interest or enjoyment in eating. He looked at food as fuel necessary for life and ate whatever was brought to him. He also maintained an interest in global events. Having grown up on the other side of the world kept him well aware that the United States was not the only theater for news. It is also fascinating to consider his personal and spiritual life. Luce grew up with a strong family all of whom sacrificed a great deal to promote the gospel in China. He kept that faith all of his life, work99
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ing to the glory of God, giving every ounce of energy to personal industry and excellence. Yet, he casually divorced his wife in order to marry the beautiful and talented Clare Booth. She later became a committed Catholic and never won him away from his devout Presbyterianism. They shared a great love of America and worked hard in the fight against Communism. The chapter about Clare’s work as the American ambassador to Italy is particularly interesting. She worked to kill American contracts for companies that had a majority of workers affiliated with the Communist party. There is something else, too—Luce was able to generate great publishing successes by thinking deeply about what the magazines would be about. As an example, he insisted that Sports Illustrated couldn’t be a reality until the team had a handle on the philosophical foundation for their coverage of sports. What is the philosophy of leisure? Luce wanted to know. He was incredibly curious about everything.
: f you could have a totally honest conversation with President Obama, I believe he would probably admit that he just wants to put as much of the economy in the government’s hands as possible. He thinks government is fair, while the real world is not. The problem is that sinful human beings operate both realms. And in the governmental realm, they have more power to abuse.
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e all know the circumspect pro-lifers who will endorse restricting abortion only to rapidly follow their statement with a modifier. It goes like this: “But if you plan on telling women they can’t abort babies, then you’d better be ready to establish orphanages, pay for healthcare, add welfare benefits, etc.”
For a long time, I accepted this as sage advice. On first blush, it seems to be clearly true. A friend brought up that point to me recently, and I suddenly realized it is in many ways a cop out.
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Consider a similar position on theft, which does not of necessity entail the ending of someone’s life. Here we go: If you plan on making theft illegal, then you’d better be ready to remove the sources of material deprivation. You’ll need to be ready to provide healthcare, food stamps, welfare, etc. Until you remove the incentives for theft, you had better be ready to live with theft. Do you see the problem? Abortion is an evil. Theft is an evil. Both are sometimes resorted to because people are desperate and don’t know what to do. At other times, the act is chosen in a more cynical fashion and without the tragically beautiful wrapping of travail. I think we should do things to make abortion less attractive to women. But I do not think that we should propose to people that they may not legitimately oppose abortion until they are willing to enact a host of social welfare reforms. The evil is the evil. We can seek to prevent the evil by making it less attractive through palliative measures, but we may also seek to prevent the evil by making it unlawful. The second does not logically depend on the first.
: olitical books by major radio personalities are like candy bars. Consume and throw away the wrapper after you are done. You won’t need it again and it probably didn’t do you much good.
: ike the vast majority of southern kids during the 1970′s and 80′s, I went to church from time to time. My parents took us to an Episcopal church for several years and then sporadically attended Baptist churches. For the most part, I was bored. The one outlier was a Sunday school class in middle school with a teacher who talked almost exclusively about the coming Armageddon. He had little difficulty keeping the attention of his group of boys. Like most people, even those who think they are Christians, I was not one. But when I went to college, I came to understand the Lord. It happened at Florida State University. Without giving you my testimony, I can just say that it began with the meetings of InterVarsity 101
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Christian Fellowship on campus. I experienced worship and teaching, but it wasn’t like church. We didn’t dress up. We met in a room in the student union. Music varied in quality with students playing any instruments they could, especially during my first year. We sang words from an old overhead projector and shook keys and made noise. Once I learned not to be self-conscious, it was fun. The teaching wasn’t like the sermons I remembered (or didn’t remember) from church as a kid. Speakers connected with us, reached out to us, talked about very practical things. The persistent theme was the ways being a Christian should affect your life. But what made it all work was probably less the programming and more the community. I learned to love the students in our chapter. They became like a new family to me. I was so happy to see them. We met as a group and became part of each others lives the rest of the time, too. They were my social group, my worship group, my homework group, my neighbors, my community. We practically colonized one of the apartment complexes near campus. On top of it all, they were the people who supported my wife Ruth and I by attending our wedding, wishing us well, desecrating my car as a honeymoonmobile, and giving us gifts. When I left that group, it was hard for me to find a church. Ruth and I tried a number of places, but I was never satisfied. I couldn’t find anything to match what we’d had before at FSU. I looked for the worship experience that would make it worthwhile to attend, but was rarely happy with that. I tried to find a superstar preacher to amaze me with talent and wisdom. But that wasn’t enough. I sampled churches, found them wanting, and discarded them. In other words, I was spiritually immature. You may hear of individuals who are so disenchanted with the church that they practice Christianity on their own as if they are advanced Christians. I think that’s the wrong interpretation. A failure to find a church and invest yourself in it is a sign of spiritual immaturity. Here’s what I found. If you go to a church—a Bible-believing one close to where you live so you will be worshipping with your neighbors—and become part of the community, you will discover that church will become delightful to you.
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Don’t go with a consumer mindset. Don’t go thinking that you have to be entertained or amazingly taught or lifted into a higher plane by an ultra-talented worship team. Don’t sit back and judge the person teaching Sunday school as though you are Simon Cowell and the teacher is a performer. Pay attention. Look for opportunities to contribute. I am teaching now and have no illusions that I am a great authority on the Gospel of John. I am grateful every time the other members of the class help me out. Just go, week in and week out, and get to know the people in your church. It may take a while, but eventually you will form relationships and the people in your church will become to you what the people in InterVarsity were to me. Then, when you go to church you will be going to a reunion that happens once or twice a week. It will be an occasion for joy. The secret of the church is not that it is some business to be run or a show designed to catch curious onlookers. The secret of the church is that is a community. It is a place where you belong and where people know you. In other words, it is a lot like the old bar on the television show Cheers. And it helps you to live the Christian life. In the church, you will become aware of what is going on in other people’s lives and they will learn about your life. You will pray with each other and minister to needs. Christianity is not meant to be practiced in isolation. So, stop shopping for a church. Stop sampling. Don’t fall for all the hype of a Disneyworld experience with a Christian aura around it. Don’t chase after a superstar preacher. You can hear that on your iPod. Feel free to contribute to that ministry. But find a church where you can be part of a community of people who know each other and will help one another live the Christian life, sometimes as helpers and sometimes by being in need and providing an opportunity for others to help.
: recently had half of my day blocked out for the kind of assignment at Houston Baptist University I would normally avoid. Our student life director wanted me to help interview candidates for “Mr. and Ms. HBU.” When I was an undergraduate, I avoided stu103
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dent life activities and spent most of my time with Intervarsity Christian Fellowship or friends from Landis Hall. This sort of competition was, in my mind, likely to be a contest of resume builders. How wrong I was. The students I met through the interview process stunned me with their poise, records of accomplishment, desire to experience community with their fellow students, and their spiritual insight. One young man had overcome a stuttering problem to become the determined editor of the college newspaper. The kid is tough. Despite the bad economy, he had a job lined up ready to go when he graduates. Another one has studied to be a pastor. When we asked about his legacy at the institution, he wept as he recounted his experience of reaching out to others and finding them ready to reciprocate. His record at the university showed he had taken up almost every helpful task he could find. One young woman talked about being a leader for other students. She explained that she understood the role of leader to be striving to follow Jesus so that when others follow her, they will be following him. When I asked her which outside speaker had made the biggest impact on her, she mentioned Archbishop Chaput of Denver. She was impressed by his “humble boldness.” As she was speaking, I was taking notes. Spiritual wisdom seemed to flow from her like water from a spring. I could imagine her as a great English professor. We interviewed a girl who trained at our school to be a nurse. She discussed her determination to learn the liberal arts in addition to nursing so that she would avoid a narrow, professionalized view of the world. With regard to her faith, she insisted on the need to embrace a “God-centered reality.” Still another talked about her failures, but distinguished herself through an indefatigable commitment to maintaining a great attitude and working to succeed. I felt so proud listening to her. I can’t know the mind of God, but I can’t help feeling that he would observe her and smile. I could go on. Each student did something that touched me personally. How long will it be before I forget the girl who went to Mission Waco to learn about being homeless and who gave up her senior cruise to witness to kids on the beach at spring break, instead? 104
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Interviewing the candidates for Mr. and Ms. HBU turned out to be the most encouraging thing I have seen in a long time. It’s the kind of experience in a university where you wish you could have had ten good donors sitting there with me, taking it all in. They would have realized that their money has been well spent. I learned something else as I talked with these kids. The entire group, ten kids or so, had something in common. Without exception they put themselves forward among their fellow students. They volunteered. They got involved. They reached out, risked rejection, weren’t afraid of looking like eager beavers. Many young students think that just being in school is enough. They go through the prescribed motions. They want grades to be given to them. They want someone to give them a job. They want to be given a really good salary. This group of students I met today could show their friends something about living.
: rnest Hemingway once wrote a short one act play about Jesus. Very few people know about it. The title is “Today is Friday.” The play opens with three Roman soldiers are in a bar drinking away the stresses of a long, brutal day of crucifixion. The third soldier is sick and rueful. He complains about something being wrong with his stomach. It is clear something has gotten to him. The second soldier tries to make him feel better by minimizing what has happened and by running down the victim as nobody special. But the first soldier refuses to go along. The second soldier mocks the crucified man by saying it was obvious he was a poser because he couldn’t come down off the cross. But the first says, “He didn’t want to come down from the cross. It wasn’t his play.” The first soldier goes on to recount in a somewhat tragic and admiring fashion, “He was pretty good in there today.” In Hemingway’s vision, Jesus is the bad conscience of the world, the mistreated and martyred man of peace, but not necessarily its savior. There is no hope in these men drinking to get rid of their ugly 105
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memories after a day of torture. The haunting and memorable line is repeated throughout the scene, “He was pretty good in there today.” Hemingway only grasped part of the picture. Let’s turn to Frederick Buechner, the novelist, preacher, and memoirist. Buechner once had a conversation with his aging mother in her later years in which she asked him, “Do you really think anything happens after you die?” He was surprised because she usually didn’t want to talk about death. He responded loudly, against her usual deafness, “YES.” He said he believed, “SOMETHING HAPPENS.” Buechner ended up writing his mother a letter because he didn’t feel he could get what he wanted to say past her deafness and general fear of discussing spiritual matters. In his letter he reasoned with her about the mind of God and our intuitions about eternity, but the key point he made was “I believe that what happens to us after we die is that we aren’t dead forever because Jesus said so.” Now, why did a learned and sophisticated man like Frederick Buechner think that would matter? Look at The Gospel of Mark, Chapter 8 starting at verse 27:
Jesus went out, along with His disciples, to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way He questioned His disciples, saying to them, “Who do people say that I am?” They told Him, saying, “John the Baptist; and others say Elijah; but others, one of the prophets.” And He continued by questioning them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered and said to Him, “You are the Christ.” What makes the Christian faith different is the resurrection of Christ. The resurrection is the reason it matters what Jesus says about life and death. The resurrection is the reason martyrs endure. Let’s examine the way it is presented by Paul as he speaks to the Athenian philosophers at Mars Hill where he made a spectacular entrance into their debating society. We all remember how he takes note of their statue to an unknown god and how he describes the true God, not made by human hands or living in a temple. It is less common to recall the way Paul finishes in Acts Chapter 17.
Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness 106
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through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead. The reason the church persisted under persecution and attempts at outright extermination is that it was built upon a claim of historical fact. The tomb was empty and many people saw Jesus after he was supposed to already be moldering in the crypt. In the 1960s, two astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, discovered that when they used a radio telescope, they heard a constant sound in the background. It seemed to come from everywhere, and they couldn’t get rid of it. Eventually, they came up with the theory that the sound was the reverberating echo of radiation created by the massive explosion associated with the creation of the universe. Think about that. The moment of creation still with us even now—a sound so incomprehensively powerful that it continues to be heard. The resurrection of Christ is like that. It is the biggest event of all human history and the booming power of it echoes throughout our civilization. Everything changed. Everything is still changing. The kingdom of Christ lies before us. And the question remains: And who do you say that I am?
: have been leading a study of John’s Gospel at church. Something interesting occurred to me yesterday as we went through the fourth chapter, something I had not noticed before. Nicodemus, who is described as a Jewish ruler, comes to see Jesus. The gentile official, who hopes for his son to be healed, comes to see Jesus. The woman at the well, the one who is a sinner with five former husbands and a live-in boyfriend, gets a different treatment. Jesus comes to see her.
Hunter Baker recently left Houston Baptist University to become Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of Political Science at Union University. He is the author of The End of Secularism (Crossway Books). You can read more at his website, endofsecularism.com. 107
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4THE`WORD`SPOKEN$ Cyril of Alexandria In each volume of T H E C I T Y , we reprint a passage or remarks from great leaders of the faith. Here is an excerpt from a sermon on the Gospel of Luke, given by Cyril, Pope of Alexandria from 412-444 A.D., and central figure of the First Council of Ephesus. nce again draw near, that as with the Psalmist’s harp we may cry aloud: “I will bless the Lord at all times: and at all times shall His praise be in my mouth.” For He ever doeth wonderful things; and giveth occasions thick and closely pressing one upon another for His praise: and every word falls short of His power, and of His majesty far exalted above all. For true is it that “the glory of the Lord covereth over the Word.” But we must not on this account forget the glory that is His due and fitting right: but rather must hasten joyfully to offer such fruits as are proportionate to our power. For certainly there is nothing whatsoever that a man can affirm to be better than praise, even though it be but little that we can offer. Come, therefore, and let us praise Christ the Saviour of all: let us behold the supremacy of His might, and the majesty of His godlike dominion. For He was sailing, together with the holy Apostles, across the sea, or rather lake of Tiberias, and an unexpected and violent tempest arose upon the vessel; and the waves, piled up high by the gusts of the winds, filled the disciples with the fear of death. For they were terrified not a little, although well acquainted with seamanship, and by no means inexperienced in the tumults of the waves—but inasmuch as the greatness of the clangor made their terror now unendurable, as having no other hope of safety except Him only Who is the Lord of powers even Christ, they arouse Him, saying, Master, Master, save us, we perish: for the Evangelist says that He was asleep.8 With most wise purpose, as it seems to me, was this also done. For some one, I imagine, may say, “Why did He fall asleep at all?” To which we reply, that the event was so arranged as to be good and profitable. For that they might not ask aid of Him immediately when the tempest began to dash upon the ship, but when, so to speak, the evil was at its height, and the terrors of death were troubling the disciples; that so the might of His godlike sovereignty might be more 109
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manifest, in calming the raging sea, and rebuking the savage blasts of the wind, and changing the tempest to a calm, and that the event might thus become a means of improvement to them that were sailing with Him, He purposely fell asleep. But they, as I said, wake Him, saying: “Save me, we perish.” See here, I pray, smallness of faith united with faith. For they believe that He can save; and deliver from all evil those who call upon Him. For had they not so far had a firm faith in Him, they certainly would not have asked this of Him—and yet as having but little faith, they say, “Save me, we perish.” For it was not a thing possible, or that could happen, for them to perish when they were with Him Who is Almighty. he vessel, then, was severely tossed by the violence of the tempest, and the breaking of the waves: and along with the whip the faith of the disciples also was tossed, so to speak, by similar agitations. But Christ, Whose authority extends over all, immediately arose, and at once appeased the storm, restrained the blasts of wind, quieted their fear, and yet further proved by deeds that He is God, at Whom all created things tremble and quake, and to Whose nods is subject the very nature of the elements. For He rebuked the tempest: and Matthew says that the manner of the rebuke was with godlike authority. For he tells us, that our Lord said to the sea: “Peace, be thou still.” What can there be more grand than this in majesty? Or what can equal its sublimity? Right worthy of God is the word, and the might of the commandment, so that we too may utter the praise written in the book of Psalms: “Thou rulest the power of the sea: and stillest the turbulence of its waves.” He too has Himself said somewhere by one of the holy prophets: “Why fear ye not Me, saith the Lord? Nor tremble at My presence? I who have set the sand as the bound of the sea, a commandment for ever, and it hath not passed it.” For the sea is subject to the will of Him Who made all creation, and is, as it wore, placed under the Creator’s feet, varying its motions at all times according to His good pleasure, and yielding submission to His lordly will. When, therefore, Christ had calmed the tempest, He also changed into confidence the faith of the holy disciples, which had been shaken along with the ship, no longer permitting it to be in doubt; and wrought in them, so to say, a calm, smoothing the waves of their 110
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weak faith. For He said, “Where is your faith?” Another Evangelist, however, affirms of Him, that He said, “Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?” For when the fear of death unexpectedly befals, it troubles sometimes even a well-established mind, and exposes it to the blame of littleness of faith; and such also is the effect of any other trouble too great to boar upon those who are tried by it. For this reason there once drew near certain unto Christ, and said: “Increase our faith.” For the man who is still exposed to blame for littleness of faith falls short of him who is perfect in faith. For just as gold is tried in the fire, so also is faith by temptations. But the mind of man is weak, and altogether in need of strength and help from above, in order that it may be well with him, and that he may be able to maintain a steadfast course, and be strong, manfully to endure whatsoever befal. And this our Saviour taught us, saying; “Without Me ye can do nothing.” And the wise Paul also confesses the same, where he writes; “I am able to do all things through Christ, that strengtheneth me.” The Saviour, therefore, wrought miracles, changing by His allprevailing nod the tempest into a calm, and smoothing the raging storm into a settled peace. But the disciples wondering at the divine sign, whispered one to another, saying: “Who, then, is This, that He commands even the winds and the waters, and they obey Him?” Did the blessed disciples, then, thus say to one another, “Who is This?” from not knowing Him? But how is not this utterly incredible? For they knew Jesus to be God, and the Son of God. For also Nathaniel plainly confessed, “Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God, Thou art the King of Israel.” Yes, and Peter too, that chosen one of all the Apostles, when they were in the neighbourhood of Caesarea Philippi, and Christ put a question to them all, and said, “Whom do men say that the Son of man “is?” and certain had answered, ‘‘ Some, indeed, Elias; but others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets”—made a correct and blameless confession of faith in Him, saying, “Thou art the Christ the Son of the living God.” And Christ praised him for thus speaking, honoured him with crowns, and counted the disciple worthy of surpassing honours: for He said, ‘‘Blessed art thou, Simon, son of Jonah: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but My Father in heaven.” And how could Peter, who was taught of God, not know Him Whom he plainly said was the Son of the living God? It was not then as being ignorant of His glory, that the wise disciples say, “Who 111
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is This?” but rather as wondering at the immensity of His power, and at the lofty and incomparable greatness of His sovereignty… God was in visible form like unto us: the Lord of all bore the likeness of a slave: He Who is high exalted was in lowliness: and He who surpasses all intellectual comprehension, and transcends every created being, was in the measure of us men. And as the disciples knew this, they wonder at the glory of the Godhead; and as they view It present in Christ, and yet see that He was like unto us, and visible in the flesh, they say, “Who is This?” instead of, “How great He is! and of what nature! And with how great power, and authority, and majesty, He commands even the waters and the wind, and they obey Him!” There is also in this much for the admiration and improvement of those who hear: for creation is obedient to whatsoever Christ chooses to command. And what excuse can avail us, if we do not submit to do the same? or can deliver from the fire and condemnation him who is disobedient and untractable, setting up, so to speak, the neck of his haughty mind against Christ’s commands, and whose heart it is impossible to soften? It is our duty, therefore, understanding that all those things that have been brought into existence by God entirely agree with His will, ourselves to become like the rest of creation, and avoid disobedience as a thing that leads to perdition. Let us rather, then, submit to Him Who summons us to salvation, and to the desire of living uprightly and lawfully, that is, evangelically. For so Christ will fill us with the gifts that come from above, and from Himself: by Whom and with Whom to God the Father be praise and dominion, with the Holy Ghost, for ever and over, Amen.
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