We may… assert that the ontological judgments of the early ecumenical creeds were the only satisfying and indeed logical outcome of the claims of the [New Testament] read together with the Old. That is to say, for a Christian faith that upholds the unity of the Bible and the continuing authority of the [Old Testament], the one God is Trinity in himself, affirmed on the basis of his economic expression. There is no other way to justify the claims about and worship of the fully human Jesus Christ within an OT framework. It is likewise with the Spirit: given the authority of the OT, to recognize the “personhood” of the Spirit in coordination with the claims of the NT regarding the Spirit’s inseparability from Jesus Christ in worship and in presence is to affirm that the Spirit, too, is of the “same essence” as the Father and the Son. For the church to turn its back on the creeds is to turn its back upon the OT. So, too, to turn its back upon the OT is to loosen entirely the restraints that operate in the creedal formulations of the Trinitarian nature of the one Lord God. To speak about the one Lord God of the OT as Father, Son, and Spirit requires that this one God is in fact triune and, conversely, that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are of one and the same essence with respect to their reality, which, in turn, is the ground of worship.
— C. Kavin Rowe, “Biblical Pressure and Trinitarian Hermeneutics,” reprinted in Method, Meaning, and Context in New Testament Studies, 147
Why, then, the unscientific scorn for practical knowledge? There are at least three reasons for it, as far as I can tell. The first is the “professional” reason mentioned earlier: the more the cultivator knows, the less the importance of the specialist and his institutions. The second is the simple reflex of high modernism: namely, a contempt for history and past knowledge. As the scientist is always associated with the modern and the indigenous cultivator with the past that modernism will banish, the scientist feels that he or she has little to learn from that quarter. The third reason is that practical knowledge is represented and codified in a form uncongenial to scientific agriculture. From a narrow scientific view, nothing is known until and unless it is proven in a tightly controlled experiment. Knowledge that arrives in any form other than through the techniques and instruments of formal scientific procedure does not deserve to be taken seriously. The imperial pretense of scientific modernism admits knowledge only if it arrives through the aperture that the experimental method has constructed for its admission. Traditional practices, codified as they are in practice and in folk sayings, are seen presumptively as not meriting attention, let alone verification.
And yet, as we have seen, cultivators have devised and perfected a host of techniques that do work, producing desirable results in crop production, pest control, soil preservation, and so forth. By constantly observing the results of their field experiments and retaining those methods that succeed, the farmers have discovered and refined practices that work, without knowing the precise chemical or physical reasons why they work. In agriculture, as in many other fields, “practice has long preceded theory.” And indeed some of these practically successful techniques, which involve a large number of simultaneously interacting variables, may never be fully understood by the techniques of science.
— James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: Why Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 305–06
[Lenin] was famous for claiming that “Communism is Soviet Power plus the Electrification of the whole countryside.” Electricity had, for him and for most other high modernists, a nearly mythical appeal. That appeal had to do, I think, with the unique qualities of electricity as a form of power. Unlike the mechanisms of steam power, direct waterpower, and the internal combustion engine, electricity was silent, precise, and well-nigh invisible. For Lenin and many others, electricity was magical. Its great promise for the modernization of rural life was that, once transmission lines were laid down, power could be delivered over long distances and was instantly available wherever it was needed and in the quantity required… Man’s work and even the work of the steam-driven plow or threshing machine were imperfect; the operations of an electric machine, in contrast, seemed certain, precise, and continuous. Electricity was also, it should be added, centralizing. It produced a visible network of transmission lines emanating from a central power station from which the flow of power was generated, distributed, and controlled. The nature of electricity suited Lenin’s centralizing vision perfectly.
— James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 166
Like planned cities, planned languages are indeed possible. Esperanto is one example; technical and scientific languages are another, and they are quite precise and powerful means of expression within the limited purposes for which they were designed. But language per se is not for only one or two purposes. It is a general tool that can be bent to countless ends by virtue of its adaptability and flexibility. The very history of an inherited language helps to provide the range of associations and meanings that sustain its plasticity. In much the same way, one could plan a city from zero. But since no individual or committee could ever completely encompass the purposes and lifeways, both present and future, that animate its residents, it would necessarily be a thin and pale version of a complex city with its own history. It will be a Brasília, Saint Petersburg, or Chandigarh rather than a Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, or Calcutta. Only time and the work of millions of its residents can turn these thin cities into thick cities. The grave shortcoming of a planned city is that it not only fails to respect the autonomous purposes and subjectivity of those who live in it but also fails to allow sufficiently for the contingency of the interaction between its inhabitants and what that produces.
— James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 143–44
We have together produced a type of university in which teaching and enquiry in the humanities (and often enough also in the social sciences) are marked by four characteristics. There is first a remarkably high level of skill in handling narrow questions of limited detail: setting out the range of possible interpretations of this or that short passage, evaluating the validity of or identifying the presuppositions of this or that particular argument, summarizing the historical evidence relevant to dating some event or establishing the provenance of some work of art. Secondly, in a way which sometimes provides a direction for and a background to these exercises of professionalized skill, there is the promulgation of a number of large and mutually incompatible doctrines often conveyed by indirection and implication, the doctrines which define the major contending standpoints in each discipline. Thirdly, insofar as the warfare between these doctrines becomes part of public debate and discussion, the shared standards of argument are such that all debate is inconclusive. And yet, fourthly and finally, we still behave for the most part as if the university did still constitute a single, tolerably unified intellectual community.
— Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, 7–8
Technology is the human’s achievement, not his failing even though the use he chooses to make of it may be fallen indeed. If the products of human technē become philosophically and experientially problematic, it is, I would submit, because we come to think of them as autonomous of the purpose which led to their production and gives them meaning. We become, in effect, victims of a self-forgetting, losing sight of the moral sense which is the justification of technology. Quite concretely, the purpose of electric light is to help humans see. When it comes to blind them to the world around them, it becomes counterproductive. The task thus is not to abolish technology but to see through it to the human meaning which justifies it and directs its use… not to abolish the works of technology but to bracket them, to escape their fascination in order to rediscover their forgotten meaning.
— Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, 24–25
In a technological age, philosophy, too, tends to conceive of itself as a technē. To some writers, it has come to appear as one of the special sciences, whose subject matter is language, whose task is the analysis of arguments, and whose virtue is technical proficiency. Others take philosophy to be a metatheory whose subject matter is the theories of other philosophers and scientists, whose task is speculative construction, and whose virtue is sophistication in the peculiar sense of maximal remoteness from lived experience, so that the author who writes fifth-generation commentaries thinks himself more advanced than the preceding four generations of commentators—and far more so than the naïve observer upon whose original insight they all comment. Both linguistic analysis and theoretical construction are, surely, legitimate tasks. Yet the thinkers whose insight withstood the test of time, from Socrates to Husserl, were of a different breed. They were the perennial beginners, taking the sense of lived experience in its primordial immediacy for their subject matter. Their stance was one of wonder, not of sophistication; the task they undertook was one of articulation—and their virtue was naïveté, a willingness to see before theorizing, to encounter the wonder of being rather than enclose themselves in cunningly devised theories.
— Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, xi
William Baird’s three-volume History of New Testament Research is enormously helpful as a description of the, well, history of New Testament research; he gives short summaries of key figures' careers and works, followed by descriptions of their key contributions to the history of scholarship. I am less enthused by his evaluations. Commenting, in the first volume, on the “Pietists” Francke, Bengel, and Wesley, he writes: “When they conclude… that the Bible is not to be interpreted like any other book, the Pietists align themselves with the past and not the future” (90). It is hard to know what to make of a judgment like this, which contextually it is clear Baird intends as a criticism. Obviously, as a matter of the progress of history (within the horizon of the 16th to 19th centuries), this is true; these writers would have been horrified by the dictum of Jowett’s which Baird quotes (strangely without quotation marks!). But whether the progression of that history, within that 400-year horizon, was good is another matter entirely; and indeed the third volume of the work opens with a discussion of the work and influence of Karl Barth, whose career derived its initial impetus from forcibly rejecting many of the evaluative assumptions that had evolved during that historical progression. Surely there are valid hermeneutical critiques, even criticisms, of Francke, Bengel, and Wesley to be made — but is a vague appeal to the past and the future the best that can be done?
Historical researchers always have before them the temptation of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” It is in their best interest never to take it.
The church’s continual struggle in understanding the literal sense of the text as providing the biblical grounds for its testimony arises in large measure from its canonical consciousness. On the one hand, it recognizes that textual meaning is controlled by the grammatical, syntactical, and literary function of the language. On the other hand, these formal criteria are continually complemented by the actual content of the biblical texts which are being interpreted by communities of faith and practice. The productive epochs in the church’s use of the Bible have occurred when these two dimensions of scripture constructively enrich and balance each other as establishing an acknowledged literal sense.
— Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, 724
We come, then, to a first paradox of modernity… that its own drive has often been toward forms of political repression far worse than most things perpetrated in despised Christendom. … [The] assertion of the rights of the many has paradoxically, dialectically perhaps, achieved the opposite, the subversion of the many by new and in some cases demonic versions of the one.
— Colin Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many, 33.
The early church’s theological reflection on the God of Israel did not turn on certain isolated Old Testament passages from which to find a warrant for a developing christology, but rather it turned on the issue of the nature of God’s presence within the life of Israel in all its historical specificity. The God of the covenant who had bound himself to a people in love, had revealed himself as both transcendent and immanent, seen and unseen, the God of the Patriarchs and of all nations. The church confessed to know a totally sovereign creator who yet chose to reveal himself in the forms of his creation, who entered time and space in order to redeem the world. In short, the church’s reflection on God found itself inexorably drawn into Trinitarian terminology in order to testify to God both as the revealed and revealer, the subject and object of self-manifestation.
— Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible, 369.
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is a great and important philosophical work, of course; but nobody had ever told me that it was funny. Savagely funny, even. The discourse of Johannes de Silentio skewers at every point those self-consciously modern persons who are “unwilling to stop with doubting everything but [go] further” (5). I am helpfully informed by the endnotes that this refers to certain Danish Hegelians — and given the role of Hegel’s philosophy in the more technical part of the book, that is a perfectly defensible historical reading; but the irony with which the text is saturated cuts at those in every generation who hold that they have acquired full “proficiency in doubting” (6) from their very beginning. The work, for all that Kierkegaard is genuinely interested in exploring the philosophical problemata of Genesis 22, uses humor as its sharpest surgical tool to cut away the audience’s layers of self-conscious Rationality and Skepticism and expose the comical, self-deluding pretense that Reason is ever able to surpass Faith and “go further.”
You would hardly know any of this from the scholarly introduction, the myriad references and summaries in other philosophical/theological works, or the Wikipedia article. These generally fundamentally — and I presume not inaccurately — historicize it, one way or another: as Kierkegaard wrestling with and justifying his decision to break his engagement to Regine Olsen, as a riposte against the Hegelian treatment of ethics, or the like. But the historical element cannot be permitted to take the sting out of the irony that is so essential to its effect as a work of philosophy, classically construed as an enterprise in convincing the reader that (as in Rilke’s poem) “you must change your life.” The humor is that unparaphraseable, unextractable aspect that makes it great.
It seems utterly clear to me that, for instance, the last lines of the Exordium before the “four paraphrases” are pure irony: “That man was not an exegetical scholar. He did not know Hebrew; if he had known Hebrew, he perhaps would easily have understood the story and Abraham” (9). For what follows are, judged by the rest of the work, four failed exegetical paraphrases of the story: proof that the story is not “easily understood” by any means, proof that no rationalization adequately captures the movement of faith.” Lest anyone be tempted to think that the simple man in the Exordium was merely lacking in learning, was not actually entering more closely than the Hebrew scholars into the experience of faith and of Abraham, Kierkegaard demonstrates — with brilliant mockery — that the basically paraphrastic resources of the “exegetical scholar” are insufficient to the task. The proverbs about the mother and the weaned child that conclude each paraphrase offer a kind of demonstrated rebuttal to the possibility of paraphrasing, of explaining and principlizing, such a story; exactly what Johannes de Silentio goes on to demonstrate in the rest of the work. What matters is the reader’s confrontation by the text of Genesis 22 — by the incomprehensibility, the miraculousness, of Abraham’s faith in God; what matters also, mutatis mutandis, is the reader’s confrontation by the text of Fear and Trembling — to feel one’s own pretenses to complete rationality caught, exposed, even flayed.
UPDATE: I forgot about this passage, which — rich irony! — captures this dynamic marvelously:
There is a lot of talk these days about irony and humor, especially by people who have never been able to practice them but nevertheless know how to explain everything. I am not completely unfamiliar with these two passions; I know a little more about them than is found in German and German-Danish compendiums. Therefore I know that these two passions are essentially different from the passion of faith. Irony and humor are also self-reflective and thus belong to the sphere of infinite resignation. [51]
[The] history of interpretation serves as a major check against all forms of biblicism in showing the distance between the biblical text and the interpreter and the degree to which the changing situation of the reader affects one’s hearing of the text. This observation should not lead to cultural relativism, but to a profounder grasp of the dynamic function of the Bible as the vehicle of an ever fresh word of God to each new generation. It is a strange irony that those examples of biblical interpretation in the past which have truly immersed themselves in a specific concrete historical context, such as Luther in Saxony, retain the greatest value as models for the future actualization of the biblical text in a completely different world. Conversely those biblical commentators who laid claim to an objective, scientific explanation of what the text really meant, often appear as uninteresting museum pieces to the next generation.”
— Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible, 88
A less critical remark about the Reformation section of The Master and His Emissary. One intriguing feature of this section is a passing comparison of those two great Martins, Luther and Heidegger, as both being “somewhat tragic figure[s]” whose work was “hijacked” and ultimately unleashed “an anarchic destruction of everything [they] valued and struggled to defend” (314). This is an interesting parallel, and I think reveals more than McGilchrist recognizes in the moment.
Luther’s great flaw — a flaw that he inherited from 1300 years of Christian tradition, radicalized by his apocalyptic self-understanding, knit uncomfortably close through his theology, and bequeathed to later generations with horrendous and anti-Christian consequences — was his personal and theological anti-Judaism. On the Jews and their Lies is of course the most (in)famous and horrifying expression of this flaw, and is admittedly a document that requires some historical contextualization — Luther, like practically everyone else in the sixteenth century, thought the Second Coming was close at hand, which meant a mass conversion of Jews to Christianity was imminent; when it became clear that this was failing to happen, his bitter reaction was expressed with the most splenetic language he could muster. But really (as we can see more clearly now in the wake of the Shoah) even the most robust Protestant must admit that Luther’s formulation of justification — not to mention some of his more polemic statements in defense of it — depends on such a sharp antithesis, even opposition, between Law and Gospel that it has historically proved difficult for Lutherans (other than Luther himself, an Old Testament scholar extraordinaire) not to see progressively greater and greater justification for casting aside Torah, Moses, and Israel entirely. Lutheranism’s theological failure mode is Marcionism (as seen in Adolf von Harnack), and Marcionism bears more than a passing family resemblance to Christian anti-Judaism; which, with the modern invention of racial essentialism, was radicalized into Christian anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile, The Master and His Emissary was published in 2009, and is absolutely dependent on Heidegger’s philosophy; somewhere McGilchrist calls him the most comprehensive expositor of the right hemisphere worldview in intellectual history. (In my view, the book’s real muse — the Beatrice to McGilchrist’s Dante — is Hegel, but Heidegger plays the part of Virgil throughout.) As scholars have been discovering since Heidegger’s Black Notebooks began to be published in 2014, Heidegger embraced and creatively rearticulated the Nazi ideology during its period of ascendancy and regnancy, and remained — at least in private, once it was no longer permissible to be public about it — a defender of Nazism until his death, long after the exposure of Nazi Germany’s numerous crimes against humanity and above all the Jews. (Apparently Richard Wolin’s recent Heidegger in Ruins (Yale, 2023), is the important book on this topic, though I haven’t read it… yet.) McGilchrist’s book evinces none of this — and it is hard to blame him for it, given the genuine importance of Heidegger to all subsequent twentieth-century thought and the timing of the Black Notebooks' publication; but I am, to say the least, intrigued to see how, if differently, Heidegger may be treated in The Matter with Things (2021).
So, if Heidegger is the prophet of the right hemisphere — does that make Nazism the right hemisphere’s most seductive, and most horrifying, failure mode?
Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary is a refreshingly ambitious, generally idiosyncratic, and colossally erudite work, but its brief (ten out of 462 pages) treatment of the Reformation is not one of its high points. This is, I think, signaled by his citing Friedrich Schleiermacher’s comparison of Reformation and Enlightenment as sharing the animating principle “everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed” (315) — a very Enlightenment perspective on the Reformation, always seeking to ally the Reformers to a cause which the Reformers would not have recognized! McGilchrist is selective, as he must be in a book of this length, and focuses on the change in hermeneutics of image vs. word (and the accompanying spasms of iconoclasm); but here I think the simplicity of that heuristic betrays his reading of the period as a whole. It’s a phenomenological reading which is straightforwardly read up into the theological frameworks of the Reformers, rather than engaging the right-to-left-to-right intellectual motion that would actually incorporate (aufgehoben?) the animating theological concerns of the period. The only substantive discussion of Reformation theological concerns is a paragraph which makes Luther sound almost like a proto-Heidegger in his concern for the outer authentically presenting the inner (needless to say, this is not how Luther conceived of his theological revolution).
In general, the Reformation is blamed for all that is left-hemispherical in this period, when it is far from clear that the “real” culprit (if such can actually be identified) in accelerating left hemisphere dominance during the sixteenth century is not in fact the habits of mind and scholarly methods of Renaissance humanism. Erasmus was as fond of the sensus literalis as Luther or Zwingli, and before the century was up Richard Hooker was retrieving “participation” as the essential doctrinal category. (Frankly, I think the preceding twenty pages on the Renaissance, which are often uncritically laudatory, would probably have benefited from interacting with C.S. Lewis’s hilarious excoriation of so-called Renaissance humanism in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.) Somewhat bizarrely, the doctrine of transubstantiation is conscripted to his Reformation narrative as a left-hemisphere rationalization and hyperspecification of the right-hemisphere Eucharistic mystery; but this, being a creature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he cannot possibly blame on the Reformers or the Reformation, and thus he is forced to say that “At the Reformation this problem re-emerged” (316). That it did, and yes, the memorialist view of the Lord’s Supper looks awfully like left-hemisphere rationalization; but it is, crucially, an equal and opposite reaction against an existing and well-established of left-hemisphere rationalization. The replacement of presentation with re-presentation in Christian theology significantly antedates 1517, which suggests that “Reformation” as popularly understood is the wrong category. The most significant omission from McGilchrist’s description (does such an omission rise to the level of an outright error?) is the whole phenomenon of the Counter-Reformation, which radicalized the standardization and schematization of scholastic theology in Rome no less than took place in Geneva, for all that the Roman church hung onto images.
To be clear: many of McGilchrist’s critiques of the Reformation churches and theology are worth pondering. I find the Reformed iconoclasm of the period profoundly distasteful (St. John of Damascus was right about images, people! it’s time to admit it!), and the schematizing, diagrammatizing tendency in second-generation Calvinist theology (Perkins, Beza, etc.) is an undoubtedly striking exemplum of left hemisphere thinking! But I am unconvinced by McGilchrist’s sweeping diagnosis that the Reformation “reversed” the “cardinal tenet of Christianity:” that “the Word is made Flesh” became “the Flesh is made Word.” As Athanasius teaches in the evergreen On the Incarnation, the Logos became sinless flesh so that our sinful flesh might be restored to its original glory as logikos. Flesh and Word are, ultimately, made for one another. The truly “cardinal” tenet of Christianity is not, after all, the Incarnation of the Word (which runs it a close second) — it is the resurrection of the Word’s crucified Flesh, and the promise of resurrection to all flesh that is infused with the Word’s power.