Every generation struggles towards a certain self-understanding as its members move from immaturity to adulthood and walk through the trials of growing, thinking, discovering, and confronting responsibility.  This path of maturation cannot be trod by a substitute, nor can it be avoided through deliberate torpidity—time marches onward and compels all men to move forward whether they like to or not.  However, the solitary activity of growing up and growing old need not be performed in isolation.  Travelers further along the path leave messages and instructions for those who follow, and many times they set an example worthy of imitation.  It is in this regard that George Santayana’s famous dictum, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” is a lure and a goad to study the course of human events.

Consider, then, the example of Rome—a great civilization and one of considerable importance to all Western societies.  The Roman Empire covered vast tracts of land, assimilated countless cultures and languages, dominated world affairs for hundreds of years, and fell with a reverberating crash, hollowed out by greed, lust, and vice.  The reasons offered for the fall of Rome are varied, and often reflect the prejudices of succeeding cultures.  However, when the analysis of the degeneration of the Roman Empire is shared by two men who have little in common but their Roman citizenship, it may be worth sitting up and taking note.

Gaius Sallustius Crispus, whose mother most likely affectionately called “Sallust” (apparently the name stuck), is considered the first Roman historian due to his attempt to interpret rather than simply chronicle historical events.  Born in 86 B.C., he lived to be a friend of Julius Caesar and wrote a Histories of the Roman people that was heavily relied upon by St. Augustine in his analysis of the fall of the Roman Empire.

Augustine, writing at the end of the Roman era and minutely examining its history, shares little in common with Sallust other than Roman citizenship.  Where Sallust claims, “Justice and goodness prevailed among [the first Romans] as much be nature as by law,” Augustine sees ambition fed by lust for power and fame.  Sallust wrote his Histories in order to defend Rome and promote action that would restore her peace and prosperity and paints a glowing portrait of Roman virture.  Augustine penned his City of God in defense of Christianity, criticizing the immorality and incontinence of Rome.

However, both men agree upon the basic cause of Roman greatness: Fear.

In his explanation of the cause of Rome’s great expansion after the expulsion of her kings and the rise of the consuls, Sallust states, “The rule of equitable and moderate law lasted, after the banishment of the kings, only until the fear of Tarquin and the grievous war with Etruria were ended.”  Once the fear dissipated, oppression and injustice were the norm, to be checked only by the need for unity in the face of a common enemy during the second Punic War.  Similarly, Augustine acknowledges the unifying power of fear and traces the fall of Rome to the inequity, immoderation, and various vices that arose once fear was removed.
If two men who disagree on almost every point can agree that fear has great power to constrain men and vice, it may be worth taking heed to the warning latent in this analysis of Rome.

If fear gives rise to unity, and unity is necessary to the growth and flourishing of a civilization, then America and the West ought to be inextricably united against the fear of terrorism and growing into a vast, powerful, virtuous and exemplary civilization.  But this is not the case and the implications are profound.

Americans briefly united in common cause following the devastating attack on September 11, 2001.  Banners flew, flags were visible in windows, hanging from porches, snapping from windows of cars zipping down the interstate, and plastered on bumpers, telephone poles, and t-shirts.  Since the initial movement towards unity, however, America has become woefully disunited.  Opinion polls reflect an increase in polarized politics with a large portion of Republicans demonizing Obama and the Left, and an equally large share of Democrats returning the favor with gusto.  Every issue is turned into a politically divisive issue by pundits on both sides and those few politicians who strive for bipartisan cooperation and moderation are villainized by the Left and the Right.  The past two elections were both won on the popular level by slim margins, and states continue to remain split in their constituencies.  The presence of such radical disunity and polarization in the face of the terrorist threat is unsettling.

Are American differences so radical, so deeply divisive, so irreconcilable that even the presence of a common enemy cannot motivate unity?  I’m not sure.  It may be that there are other forces driving the disunity, or at least the apparent disunity, that need be examined.  However, if fear is not motivating America to unite and establish security and protect her position in the world, what will?  If Sallust and Augustine are correct, the end may be at hand.  I’m hoping that a fear of our foolhardy fearlessness might do the trick.

Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry have a response to their critics up at National Review, and they saw fit to include me in their targets.  They write:

Our essay attracted some criticism from the right as well. Matthew Lee Anderson faults us for adopting theological language by referring to an American “creed” and an “economic gospel”; it seems to us that his problem here is a literalism at odds with widespread usage. He writes further that “any claims to American exceptionalism ha[ve] to be tempered and chastened by our own social evils, chief of which is abortion.” The accusation that the two of us have underestimated the evil of abortion makes up in novelty for what it lacks in sense. The injustice of our practice and legal treatment of abortion is a stain on the national character. But in no way does it tell against our argument — which, to restate it, is that the agenda of contemporary liberalism would seriously undermine distinctive and valuable American traits.

Ponnuru and Lowry might be right about my literalism.  But then, my point was in part about the wide-spread usage of such language and how it continues to alienate younger evangelical voters.  We were clearly not the intended demographic for their piece, but their refusal to grant that such rhetoric is at least a little troublesome simply reinforces why most young Christians refuse to read National Review.

But rhetorical strategies aside, Ponnuru and Lowry are simply wrong in asserting that I argue they “have underestimated the evil of abortion.”  I said no such thing.  In fact, I pointed out specifically how odd I found it that two pro-lifers would not take that great evil into account.  My genuine surprise lies in the fact that I know Ponnuru and Lowry have not underestimated the evil of abortion, but that they continue to treat it as an issue distinct from their claims about exceptionalism.

Hence, when they write that their central argument is “that the agenda of contemporary liberalism would seriously undermine distinctive and valuable American traits,” I agree.  But one way of looking at abortion is through the American emphasis on those distinctive and valuable traits. Consider the list:  ”liberty, equality (of opportunity and respect), individualism, populism, and laissez-faire economics.”  It is precisely those values and our inability to move beyond them to the ground of those values, the nature of human personhood, that drive the debate over abortion.

My point, then, isn’t to question whether Lowry and Ponnuru are sufficiently pro-life.  To expand and clarify the case from last time, the very virtues that undergird the American exceptionalism they put forward must also be seen as lying near the heart of our greatest evil.  But to ignore that seems to take a selective view of American history and our “quasi-providential” place in the world, and perpetuates a myth (in a pejorative sense) of our American heritage.

I am interested, then, in a broader view of American exceptionalism, one that situates America not only as having a role on the world’s stage, but as having that role because we own up to our own vices within our self-understanding as a means of eradicating them.   After all, I do plan on meeting God as an American.

But to return to the rhetoric, Lowry and Ponnuru position their article as defending the central tenet of political conservatism. On that score, their refusal to acknowledge that social conservatism’s ultimate concern is at the core of political conservatism ought to give every pro-lifer pause.

The traditional pro-life argument for the centrality of abortion is that our understanding of the human person, which is clearest in how we treat those who have no voice of their own, grounds how we act in the world.  That ’social conservatives’ have had to adopt the qualifier suggests that this view is outside the mainstream of movement conservatism (as exemplified by Ponnuru and Lowry’s article).

But we shouldn’t be.  By defending the human person as created in the imago Dei from birth to death, social conservatives stand beneath movement conservatism, grounding the values that Lowry and Ponnuru identify with American exceptionalism, establishing limits on their implementation, and unifying them in a broader metaphysical and political structure.

In that way, America’s most exceptional role in the world is yet to come, and will not be fully realized until we have eliminated both the need and the reality of abortion from the American scene.

Postscript: See also Matthew Schmitz and Samuel Goldman, the latter of whom offers a similarly structured critique, though in a different direction.

In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates is shown to be very strange. In an episode related by Alcibiades, Socrates is said to have stood all day and night in an army camp—with the other soldiers lying down watching him—considering something. (Near the beginning of the Symposium, Socrates seems to have a similar kind of experience.) And at the end of the Symposium, Plato portrays Socrates as the only one at the party to be awake at its end. Having stayed awake all night, he leaves the party and goes about his daily business until he goes home in the evening. Both of these episodes reveal a kind of strangeness about Socrates.

These two episodes are in my mind related to the Pixar film Ratatouille and, in particular, to the character of Remy. At the end of his most successful evening as a chef Remy has a choice to make: will he go home with Linguini or will he go home with his father and brother? He does neither.

Under the narration of Ego reading his glowing review of his previous night’s dining experience—which narration is really a statement of Brad Bird’s working philosophy—the animation shows Remy ascending to a rooftop in Paris and remaining there until the sunrise. Because of the significance of Ego’s narration, I never really paid attention to Remy’s silent ascent until a few months ago when a friend pointed it out to me: “I don’t like the sequence; it’s too over-the-top,” she said. I’ve been thinking about whether that’s true ever since.

It seems completely appropriate that Remy does not go to live with Linguini. He can work with Linguini, but he cannot live with him. Linguini does not even know Remy’s name. He only refers to him as “little chef,” which is simply a job description. And the film suggests that Linguini and Colette will go on to share a life together. Remy’s presence in their shared home life would be odd.

At first glance, it also seems appropriate that Remy does not go back to live with his father and brother and the other rats. Remy is too exceptional to be part of the pack. It’s true that at the very end of the film after Remy has been reconciled to his father, Remy is shown making food to be served to his rodent friends and family. Their tastes in food have obviously been elevated, literally and not literally. They are now eating on top of a restaurant instead of underground, and they seem to be eating food that isn’t literally garbage. But this doesn’t mean that he lives with his fellow rats.

So it is not clear where Remy lives. Does he live by himself? In one sense, that’s a secondary question because Remy is clearly most alive when he is making food in the restaurant kitchen. (This doesn’t mean that he “lives” with Linguini by working with him. I think Linguini doesn’t understand Remy well enough to live with him while Remy is “working.”) In another sense, though, it’s a question that cuts to the heart of the relation between the artist and society. Where do the great artists live? Can they be at home among regular folk? The film doesn’t answer this question, and I think that’s a bit of a let down. It dodges a hard question.

Return to the earlier criticism of the scene of Remy’s ascent: Is it really necessary? I suppose that depends on whether we understand what Remy is doing up there. Like Socrates in the army camp, Remy seems to be paying attention to something, but we don’t know what that is. And like Socrates after the symposium, Remy does not go directly home. He goes to a rooftop to wait for and watch the sunrise. One thing about that sunrise: It’s beautiful, and Remy seems to be content in the presence of an expansive, subtle beauty. Likewise, having read the Symposium we suspect that whatever it is that Socrates is contemplating, it’s beautiful.

For Plato, the contemplation of beauty is part of what makes life worth living. (Indeed, if some commentators are right, for Plato the contemplation of beauty is the whole of what makes life worth living.) Remy’s awareness of and sensitivity to the beauty of a sunrise over Paris is part of what separates him from everyone else in the film. This distinctive indicates that for Brad Bird (and for Plato) the contemplation of beauty at the highest level is a solitary experience. Both Plato and Bird depict their heroes alone, contemplating some thing—probably beauty itself. If the contemplation of beauty is something that can only be done alone, then there is no way to avoid the necessity of Remy’s solitary ascent. The scene that my friend wasn’t so sure about turns out to be a (perhaps melancholy) necessity.

Two things in closing. First, I don’t know if the Symposium presents Plato’s last word on the contemplation of beauty. There are passages in the Phaedrus that suggest that after death two lovers can, as Socrates say, become “winged together” (256d–e) in a life of shining bliss. Secondly, I don’t know if the Christian view of the contemplation of beauty is any different from the Symposium–Ratatouille account. Certainly there is an emphasis on corporate worship in Christian practice, but I don’t know whether that’s comparable to the contemplation of beauty. If it is, then perhaps there’s a way in which the contemplation of beauty is not solitary.

Francis Watson’s Agape, Eros, Gender is a provocative treatment of Paul’s views of sexuality and gender.

Watson’s analysis is provocative, but uneven.  He is at his best when interacting directly with the Pauline texts, and while I find myself agreeing with him on countless points, his presuppositions hinder me from adopting his position wholeheartedly.  To name one, Watson seems to be channeling the problematic dichotomy between eros and agape that Anders Nygren made famous.  While that allows Watson to read 1 Corinthians 11 in interesting ways, it problematically constrains Watson’s theological vision.

But when he treats Romans 7, he is on top of his game.

Romans 7 isn’t one of the first places interpreters turn to think through Paul’s views of sexuality.  But Watson makes a persuasive case that they should, arguing that the dynamic of the law, the body, and the Spirit are grounded in Paul’s attempt to defeat concupiscence.  Watson writes:

According to Romans 7, ‘the letter’ brought death to the people of Israel because it provoked the very sin it prohibited. The coming of the commandment, ‘You shall not desire’, aroused every kind of desire for forbidden objects, and sin lead to death.

But the body is the locus of misguided desires, and under the weight of the law is transformed into ‘the body of this death.’  Hence Paul can speak about the ‘law of sin that is in my members,’ where the body’s spontaneous desires and impulses need to be subordinated to the regenerative power of the Spirit.  The body isn’t neutral–it too is tainted by the stain of sin.

Paul’s eruption of praise at the end of the chapter, then, is instructive not simply because of the theological point that Spirit provides freedom from the law of sin.  The Spirit’s freedom is a freedom to and through worship.  The answer to concupiscence–what we now call lust–isn’t repression or denial.  Instead, it is a heart that bursts forth, “Thanks be to God!”

Two further points, one textual and one constructive.

First, in Romans 12:1-2, the submission of the physical body is an act of worship, tying together worship with overcoming the ‘law of sin in my members.’  That Romans is a book about worship is clear enough from it’s structure.  That it is about the body has been less discussed, unfortunately, at least within Protestant circles.

Second, lust is a grasping, even in it’s look.  It is a refusal to delight in what’s been given and a striving for more.  It refuses to respect the boundaries of the sacred.  Worship, on the other hand, is a response of thankfulness to what’s been given, and a refusal to take more than what is offered.  Calvin understood this, and so stressed the need for piety in approaching the mysteries of God.

A world where nothing is given, then, and everything has to be taken–Sartre’s radical freedom of self-construction–is a world without worship and a world where lust dominates.

Focusing on the practices of the church is all the rage these days.  Professor Smith’s excellent and thought provoking book is only the latest volley in a long list of theologians attempting to reorient the center of Christianity away from its doctrinal content.

Standing against the tide is Nicholas Healy, who offers some interesting cautions in his article, “Practices and the New Ecclesiology:  Misplaced Concreteness?”  Healy’s article is older–2003–but he does a nice job of highlighting some of the troubles that arise through viewing Christianity as constituted by its practices.

Healy’s leading critique is that the language of practices obscures the central role intentions play in both individual and communal actions.  His central thrust is that the emphasis on practices fails to account for why they fail to shape us in the ways proponents claim they should.  In other words, the Mainline Protestantism problem.

But his more trenchant critique is the theological one:  most accounts of practices (and specifically Stanley Hauerwas) fail to locate the practices of the church beneath the doctrine of God. He writes:

In order that church practices and the theory that supports them may be properly modified for Christian theological use, they need to be brought within a broader theological context. Put another way, we need to recover the traditional notion that, while theology is indeed a thoroughly practical form of inquiry, it must proceed on the basis of contemplation.  We need, in short, as we need from Hütter, a more robust account of the doctrine of God – the triune God – as the starting-point for ecclesiological reflection.

And:

Without such an account, the new ecclesiology may seem too reliant upon an overly abstract and thus flawed philosophical and sociological apparatus. As a consequence, it becomes rather too easy to interpret the emphasis upon the church and its practices as if it reflects the view that Christianity is all about being Christian, and the gospel is broadly identifiable with the church’s practices and doctrines. A Christian is one who is disciplined by the church’s practices so as to be transformed into the visible communal embodiment of the Gospel. The objective component of witness, that to which one witnesses, is thereby confused with the subjective component, the form of witness. It may then seem to those less than charitably disposed to the new ecclesiology that it has made a turn to a communal subject constituted by its particular set of abstract practices. Like the earlier turn to the experience of the individual subject, which it is intended to counter, this turn also threatens to collapse the object of faith into ourselves. Our proclamation becomes rather too much about us and what we over-optimistically think we do. The message becomes rather too easily identified with an ideal account of the medium.

Healy wants to account for embodied practices within the working of the Holy Spirit, but not tie the Holy Spirit’s working to those practices, lest we be unable to account for Mainline Protestantism.

While I think Professor Smith escapes the first critique by focusing on liturgies and not practices, and on what’s done in the practices and not what’s meant by them, I think the second has some force for his project.  Or it at least I think it provides a more promising solution to the Mainline Protestantism progblem than the one he hints at in a footnote.  From page 208:

At this point, I suggest that my account of secular liturgies might be able to provide a framework for explaining why the practices of Christian worship don’t seem to transform those who participate in them.  For instance, I can think of a congregation gathering week in and week out for historic, intentional Christian worship that includes all the elements discussed here; and yet, from the perspective of shalom, some of its parishoners are unapologetic and public participants in some of the most egregious systemic injustices.  Does that falsify my claims here?  I don’t think so, at least not necessarily.  Rather, we will need a more nuanced account of how some liturgies trump others; in this case, we could suggest that though these parishoners participate in Christian worship, their participation in other secular liturgies effectively trumps the practices of Christian worship.  Such a line of investigation might also require that we attend to empirical realities, drawing on a theologically informed psychology, sociology, and ethnography.”

I honestly don’t know what to make of the suggestion that some liturgies could possibly trump a liturgy where we encounter God in Himself, given to us.  But more significantly, Smith’s solution strikes me as a horizontal one–we need to identify and eradicate those liturgies that are stifling the working of the Triune God.  When, in fact, it seems that our problems start at the top.  If our practices are not changing us, we might do best to look at the way we are performing them and our understanding of God that undergirds them.

While I agree with Matthew Anderson’s critique of Lowry and Ponnuru’s article on American Exceptionalism in the latest issue of National Review, I do not believe the article is without merit and applause. Aside from mishandling the items Matt suggested, the article does, in my opinion, lay out a concise history of America’s unique founding. I wanted to share one quote I found timely and indicting.

In Europe, we see a civilization that is not willing to defend itself: nations that will surrender their sovereignty, cultures that will step aside to be supplanted by an alien creed, peoples that will no longer make the most meaningful investment in the future by reproducing. There is a sense that history is over Europeans are just waiting for someone to turn out the last light in the last gallery of the Louvre.

I have always thought that every academic–or wannabe, like me–ought have one or two hypotheses that are held very loosely, are somewhat defensible but impossible to prove, and just fringe enough to make academic parties interesting.

One such hypothesis that I have occasionally advanced is that G.K. Chesterton’sOrthodoxy is the most important work of the twenty-first century, even though it was written in the twentieth.

Though Chesterton attained more fame during his life than C.S. Lewis—he was greeted by massive crowds on his trips around the world—by the beginning of World War II his position as chief apologist and defender of the faith had been taken over by Lewis. In particular, Chesterton’s influence on American evangelicalism has been relatively non-existent compared to Lewis’s.

And no wonder: Lewis’s Mere Christianity, which has influenced numerous evangelical leaders over the past few decades, is a masterfully written apologetic. The discovery of Lewis helped many evangelicals in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s realize the importance of having a faith that was as intellectual as it was spiritual.

Yet the situation within evangelicalism (and without) has now changed, and Mere Christianity is an apologetic suited to its time. While evangelicals have made strides in recovering the life of the mind, it is now en vogue to criticize evangelical Christianity as too propositional. The new generation of post-modern evangelicals is moved more by the story of Christianity than its ideas, and more prone to appeal to the imagination than the intellect.

Such critics would do well to consider Orthodoxy.

Though it was written just over 100 years ago, Chesterton’s finest work is still relevant. In a First Things‘ article, Ralph Wood writes:

Indeed, we might say that the last century belongs to Chesterton–for in that now one-hundred-year-old book, Orthodoxy, he remarkably prophesied the ailments of both modernism and postmodernism, while adeptly commending Christianity as their double cure.

Wood’s article highlights Chesterton’s criticism of the “twin insanities of hyper-rationalism and hyper-emotivism,” and Chesterton’s response to those insanities (imagination and the “Doctrine of Conditional Joy”). But while his analysis of Chesterton’s argument is exactly right, his treatment neglects Chesterton’s method. Chesterton’s poetic-prose articulates a vision of Christianity that is as artistic as it is analytic, and as such is a more effective antidote to the prevailing post-modern sensibilities than any other book I have found.

Before he considers the tenets of Christian theology, Chesterton defends four propositions: “I felt in my bones, first, that the world does not explain itself . . . The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it . . . Third, I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them.”

It is somewhat misleading to call these ideas propositions for Chesterton, or evenideas. Rather, he describes them as the “ultimate attitudes toward life, the soils for the seeds of doctrine.” Earlier, he speaks of the “sentiments of elf-land.”

Chesterton’s case for this ethic is surprisingly poetic—one might even call it artistic. He rejects sociology or even the principles of natural law and instead appeals to child’s experience of fairy stories as his justification. Yet beneath the apparent triviality is a surprisingly sophisticated aim (this dynamic frequently occurs in Chesterton): Chesterton understands that persuasion is as much sentimental as it is rational. By articulating the “Ethics of Elfland,” he lays the poetic foundation for his defense of Christianity, which will come in the following chapters. Chesterton wants to convince your mind—but he wants to woo your heart as well.

Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, then, differs from Lewis’ Mere Christianity precisely in its attempt to ground Christianity not in the propositions of natural law, but in the elemental human and artistic experiences that we begin to neglect as we grow old. It is an attempt, dare I say, to defend and engender a faith that exudes wonder and astonishment at the mystery of reality. But Chesterton had told us as much at the beginning. Orthodoxy is not a “series of deductions,” as he says at the outset, but an attempt “in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures, to state the philosophy in which [he has] come to believe.”

It is this approach that I would argue is perfectly suited for our post-modern age. Chesterton is the anti-Nietsche—a poet-philosopher who understands that unless truth exists, the enterprises of art and beauty are rendered meaningless. What’s more, his method is consistent with his argument: he artistically defends the existence of the truth and grounds Christianity in the pre-rational experience of story without jeopardizing truth’s existence or fallaciously opposing reason and emotion.

In sum, though Orthodoxy has only recently turned 100 years old, it remains the single most effective articulation of a Christianity that is intellectually robust, artistically engaged, spiritually sensitive, and historically grounded that I have yet read.

[Note:  This is a slightly revised version of what I posted previously at Evangelical Outpost.]

David Schaengold has a fascinating post up over at Ordinary Gentlemen (one of the most interesting spots on the internets) that examines the steps our social views on homosexuality have undergone.  He writes:

This response further solidifies the reality of an identity constituted by a permanent, unchosen desire, and in seeking to make the object of hatred an object of compassion brings the object further into being.

With regard to homosexuality we are still undergoing the third step in the process, which is the move from twinned compassion and hatred for a group constituted by pathological desire to tolerance of a group constituted, like racial groups, by a merely superficial difference from the norm.

I haven’t (yet) done an extensive study of history of homosexuality either, but offhand it strikes me that the central argument not only for gay marriage has been grounded in the premise that gay desires are just as “natural” as heterosexual desires–which is to say, biologically determined and hence not culpable.

At least that’s one side of it.  The more popular position in academic circles seems to be the Foucauldian one:  all sexual behaviors are cultural constructs, or ‘discourse all the way down.’  In this framework, homosexual behavior are resisting the ‘normativity’ of cultural heterosexism, the arbitrary nature of which precludes any claim to moral objectivity.

Schaengold’s piece focuses on the former strategy, and he’s right that there isn’t really room for a slippery slope toward pedophilia. But the parallel at least highlights that demonstrating the biological basis of homosexual desires isn’t enough to justify their licitness.

In that sense, biology isn’t morality.  At least not without some additional argumentation.

But this is where the language seems to matter, as the arguments for homosexual marriage depend upon rights, consent, and adults. And ‘adults’ almost always takes on some sort of biological explanation, which there is some evidence to suggest may be more dictated by cultural norms than any of us might like to accept.

The confluence of rights-language with the stripped down biology is near the core of the failure of natural law arguments against gay marriage (and against gay sex).  Fundamentally, natural law arguments depend upon the existence of a third thing which isn’t biology and isn’t culture or society.  For the Robert George crowd, that third things are principles that are self-evidently known and are tied to the structure of creation.  More traditional natural lawyers point toward non-reductive accounts of natures.

But both of those point to something beyond individual rights that ground moral behavior (and social norms).  Without them, rights-language becomes untethered from its moorings and is reduced to the assertion any desire we have should be protected.

There’s more to be said on this, to be sure.  But that’s enough for tonight.  Mostly, I was trying (in vain, no doubt) to keep you around for a while before moving on to other exciting and intelligent confabs.

The substance of Dyrness’ essay highlights the Protestant emphasis on the brokenness of the world, and on the crucifixion as the only remedy for that brokenness.  But Dyrness points out that the emphasis on Jesus’ crucifixion isn’t on the event per se, but rather on its meaning for us.  He writes:

For all the importance the cross plays for Protestants, they have spent little time focusing on the actual event of the cross – the Catholic imagination evident in Mel Gibson’s film ‘The Passion of Jesus Christ’ has traditionally been alien to them. It is more important for Protestants to interpret the cross, to see their life as cross-shaped. Calvin, for example, spends barely a page in his Institutes describing the actual event of Christ’s death. But he writes a long chapter on what this death means for the Christian – that since Christ suffered this way we should not expect our lives to escape such hardship, that our lives should be characterized by this willingness to suffer for Christ and so on (this is to say nothing of the great sections he uses to develop the theological meaning of that event). The event of the cross finds its real meaning in this typological extension in the life of the believer.

Via my brother, but it’s so awesome it needs to be posted here as well.

Whether a Protestant aesthetics is possible remains, unfortunately, a question which Protestants must answer.

In “Dante, Bunyan, and a Case for Protestant Aesthetics,” William Dyrness  argues that not only do Protestants have an aesthetics, but have one that is shaped by the distinct contributions and emphases of the Reformation.

It’s a rich essay, and I don’t want to address the substance of his argument here.  But in light of recent postings about vision, this excerpt caught my eye:

Whereas the dominant trope for Dante is seeing light, for Bunyan it is reading a text. The light is meant to elicit love; the text calls for interpretation. Of course this distinction should not be overstated. After all, Dante’s descriptions appear in a text and Bunyan’s text appears in the form of a vision or a dream, and both call for interpretation. But there is an important difference between them. For Dante objects and persons become an interpretation and elaboration of Christian truth; for Bunyan scriptural texts illumine the persons and objects of his journey. Matilda embodies and explains in her appearance the felicity of life in the world for Dante; the furnishings in Interpreter’s House are for Bunyan object lessons of a world ordered according to the Word of God. As Barbara Johnson says: ‘For the Protestant reader, texts are instruments rather than objects, and they are viewed in salvational rather than recreational terms.’  This difference leads to engagement with the world in vastly different ways. For Bunyan, as Thomas Luxon points out, ‘looking at things is presented under the metaphor of reading and interpreting them’.  Reading and rightly interpreting these living words stand in contrast to Dante’s practice of seeing things as images of divine love, seeing images as words. The one sheds meaning, Bunyan believed, while the other obstructs it. But the trope of reading does nothing to diminish the emotional impact of what is read and understood. If anything this impact is increased. ‘Words, we see, are to be preferred to images,’ Luxon argues, ‘but faith in the word plants a new image on the heart, a lively image that speaks far more clearly than mere words notionally understood.’

I’m sympathetic to the point that the words don’t diminish the power of images, but enhance them.  For as affective as movies are, we forget sometime how limited they can be.  We might empathize with Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennett, but only Jane Austen’s original script gives us all the nuances and introspective insights that the movie format prohibits.

But I don’t want to press the point too much, and it’s worth pointing out that this emphasis works against the possibility of a Protestant aesthetics.  It’s hard to justify making images if we give them a secondary place to words.

But what’s clearly at stake when we think about the arts is eschatology.  According to Dyrness, for Dante the world is felicitous.  For Bunyan, the world’s an object lesson of what’s to come.

In other words, “already,” meet “not yet.”  The tensions that undergird Christian theology collide in our appreciation and cultivation of the artistic life.  We might say, then, that Thomas Kinkade’s art isn’t simply bad–it’s theologically wrong.  Regardless of where we fall on the Dante/Bunyan spectrum, his sentimentalization of creation owes more to Romanticism than either Protestant or Catholic theology.  A healthy dose of Dante or Bunyan would help him out considerably.

Friends,

Just a quick note this evening.  Some of the our most recent posts have disappeared through no fault of the authors.  Our site has been hacked, and we are working furiously to correct it.  One of the attempted solutions was to reset our files to a previous date…which doesn’t appear to have worked, taking us back to the drawing board.

One of the byproducts of this nefarious action is that all our user accounts have been deleted…which means I have taken this opportunity to turn off registration for commenting.

Our goal for 2010 was to do a full redesign and rebranding of Mere-O, and these latest difficulties have only increased the push to complete that.  We’ll try to keep the problems to a minimum in the meantime, but be aware that if you have problems using the site, that could be to blame.

Thanks for reading, as always.

Matt

Addendum:  I forgot to mention that comments posted in the last 5 days were also deleted.  That pains me, but was in this case unavoidable.  We hope that will not prevent you from commenting again in the future.

When Thomas Hobbes wrote his Leviathan, the English were in the midst of a series of civil wars, battling their brothers over religious and political issues.  Charles I struggled with a Puritan Parliament that, among other things, aimed to build a polity sharply shaped by the Scriptures.  The civil war was so odious to Hobbes and detrimental to life in England that he determined to re-think the political theories that were in vogue; he set out to write a political treatise that dispensed with religious considerations completely and rested upon a universally available deductive logic.  The appeal of such a position is readily apparent to anyone who has lived through the events and consequences of religiously motivated conflicts and wars.

It often seems that the world would be a much better place, and more peaceful, if men were not divided by religious sentiments and diverse opinions.  Of course, one of the great and sobering lessons of the 20th century is that the common ground of reason is itself a tenuous foundation upon which to build an edifice of human solidarity and community.  But more of that later.

Hobbes deductive approach to anthropology and political theory began with a theory of language.  Briefly, this theory states that all that we know is what we say.  Our concepts, understanding, and knowledge are wrapped up in the words we use and, by carefully defining our terms, we come to know things more fully.  Reasoning is the activity of defining our terms.  “For Reason, in this sense, is nothing but Reckoning (that is, Adding and Substracting) of the Consequences of generall names agreed upon, for the Marking and Signifying of our thoughts.”

All this might seem quite vague and irrelevant, the meandering thoughts of an irrelevant old Englishman.  However, it becomes quite exciting when this linguistic and ontological theory is played out in ethical considerations. (more…)