It gives me no pleasure to have (exclusively in private) accurately “predicted” the outcome of this election. Nor do I take it as an indicator of any special prescience. Elections — especially national elections — are complex, highly contingent things. Nevertheless, I think my basic heuristic has been confirmed:
There are (at bottom) two types of elections, and similarly two types of candidates: turnout and persuasion. The type of election is dynamically determined by the candidates running, general background factors, etc., in ways too complicated to get into here; but a clear narrative emerges relatively early about which sort it is.
To be a successful persuasion candidate, a candidate must be remarkably gifted in rhetorically positioning him or herself to draw a margin of victory from voters who might otherwise vote for their opponent.
To be a successful turnout candidate, a candidate must possess a deep personal connection to his or her base of support, such that the margin of victory is secured by turning out a greater proportion of their supporters than their opponent.
Regardless of his or her persuasive gifts, a persuasion candidate is quite unlikely to win a genuine turnout election — it actually depresses energy among one’s existing supporters, because they won’t feel as important. This is the electoral equivalent of bringing a knife to a gun fight.
Donald Trump, especially at this point in his political career, is a turnout candidate par excellence.
The Democrats, to face him, chose… Kamala Harris, a profoundly unpersuasive, remarkably impersonal politician: in other words, neither an effective persuasion candidate nor an effective turnout candidate.
A Trump victory was not inevitable against “Generic Democrat,” or even against a relatively extreme Democrat — indeed I continue to suspect that Bernie Sanders could have won against Trump in any of the last three general elections.
But with the specific Democrat who is Kamala Harris, whom voters consistently said they “didn’t know enough about” and found impersonal, artificial, and distant — a Democratic win in that scenario was almost always next to impossible.
The fundamentally unserious approach to politics which the Democratic Party has taken for the last eight years has now been given (what should be) its decisive rebuke. In that period Democrats have insisted, wall-to-wall, that Trump was a fascist; that he represented a unique threat to democracy; that their opposition to him was specifically about him and not about their distaste for his constituents’ values (this last was always far and away the hardest to believe and the least persuasively presented). At almost no points have they actually behaved as though they believed any of this.
Consider some counterfactuals. If Democrats really thought that Donald Trump were, say, America’s Mussolini, what differing decisions would they have taken?
They would have sought grounds to impeach him early in his first term, when their public ability to hold the moral high ground was far stronger and his hold on American voters — as well as his own personal attachment to the presidency — was far weaker, rather than waiting nearly three years to build an exceptionally complicated and laughably unpersuasive case that was rightly shot down in the Senate;
They would have taken serious account of the economic and political concerns of Trump’s voters, rather than dismissing those voters variously as “a basket of deplorables,” “garbage,” “flyover country,” etc. — the kind of multigenerational condescension that had primed many of these voters to embrace Trump in the first place;
They would have refused to allow Joe Biden to choose, for nakedly ideological reasons, so inept and untested a vice-presidential candidate as Harris, given that Biden was clearly only ever going to be — and ran in 2020 as — a one-term president restoring normalcy and setting up a succession plan;
They would have moved quickly to impeach and convict Trump immediately following the débâcle of January 6, 2021, when there was serious urgency and near-universal agreement that he had committed high crimes and misdemeanors — rather than waiting until he was nearly out of office, once there was not time to complete the process before he left office, raising legitimate constitutional questions about whether a no-longer sitting President could be impeached at all;
They would have taken seriously the Trumpward shift of ethnic minorities, especially among non-white Hispanic and African-American men, that was already on display in the 2020 results and has just cooked their goose in 2024;
They would not have [checks notes] lavishly funded Trumpier candidates in Republican primaries in 2022, on the theory that such extreme candidates would be easier to defeat in general elections (yes — I still can’t quite believe this actually happened);
They would have refused to permit Biden to run for a second term when his cognitive decline was already on display and would obviously be mercilessly exploited by Trump (who could almost hardly believe his good fortune);
They would have taken voters’ concerns about inflation seriously and sought to communicate sympathetically (not to mention listening to the economists who warned in 2021 that inflation was on its way and was being exacerbated by federal policies), rather than dismissing it with the (lamentably accurate but immensely condescending) message that “uneducated voters don’t understand the difference between price level and inflation;”
And so on and so forth.
Americans — and many men and women around the world — are about to pay, I think, a serious price for the Democrats’ unseriousness. Not that I wish Harris had won the election, exactly. I did not vote for her, could not have done so in good conscience, and do not wish her to be president. I would be deeply disturbed by many of the policies which a Harris administration would enact (just as I expect to be under a second Trump administration). In either case, I would and do fear for the peace of the world. Republicans’ unseriousness as well deserves now, and has deserved for nearly a decade, a profound rebuke which it has not received — or perhaps which, in the complete desiccation of public conservatism and the total remaking of the Party of Lincoln according to the image of Trump, it has received in full. If at any point I thought the Republican Party qua party ought to be saved, I do not think so now and have not thought so for several years. Nevertheless it is the Democrats whom I consider responsible for where we are now, more even in a way than Trump himself, who possesses fearsome political showman instincts but clearly did not expect to win in 2016 and even seemed surprised last night to be winning again in 2024. The Democrats, faced with Candidate, then President, then Candidate Trump again, had and should have taken opportunity after opportunity to demonstrate they really were the party of the people, the party in touch with reality, the party of national unity: the party willing to pitch a big tent and pursue a broadly constructive vision together. Instead they have been persistently reactive, elitist, divisive, ideologically purist, and deconstructive.
Eight years ago, I woke up the morning after the election and wrote a private journal entry expressing my deep sense of shame that so many people like me — white, male, theologically conservative Christian — had voted for Donald Trump to be president of the United States. I do not repudiate that now. I still feel ashamed, for both my “tribe” and the whole nation, that Trump has been and most likely will again hold the highest office: that is a deeply shameful state of affairs. I similarly am deeply dismayed at the ongoing rationalization by (mostly white and male) Christians that Trump is (e.g.) a contemporary King David, or Cyrus, or what have you, though such rationalizations have faded in force and frequency as Trump has shown increasingly less and less interest in maintaining a pretense of sympathy to evangelical Christianity or even pro-life positions. (As far as I can tell, Trump understands that with the fall of Roe his “beautiful Christians” have now received their reward in full, and are thus permanently beholden to him; it mystifies me that so many of my fellow Christians apparently cannot see how nakedly transactional Trump’s commitment to the pro-life cause always was, despite the remarkable degree to which he was willing to deliver on that transaction.) Nevertheless, shame is no longer my dominant sensation. Think of the business axiom: “Your system is perfectly designed to produce the results it is producing.” America’s Democrats are an essential part of that system. They may not like the outputs, but they have spent the last eight years and more oiling the machinery to perfection. Now comes their reckoning: Donald Trump (and J.D. Vance) in the White House, a Republican-controlled Senate, most probably a Republican House as well, and a remarkably youthful six-seat conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Will they learn? Will they bear fruits in keeping with repentance?
Addendum: I am not an anarchist, nor a leftist (neither of which, furthermore, are coextensive). Nevertheless the two reactions which have seemed most effectively to put their finger on the matter at hand are those of the anarchist-ish Justin Smith-Ruiu (though you’ll have to pardon the somewhat self-consciously erudite prose) and of the leftist-ish Tyler Austin Harper. Somewhere in the overlap of these two takes, I think, is the heart of the matter.
Addendum secundo: Jake Meador, as usual, is bang on as well.
A strong co-sign to this from Matt Martens, on “The Problem of Voting for Candidates who Promise to Do Evil”. To his final paragraphs about the “lesser of two evils” and “throwing your vote away” questions with which weirdos like me (and him) are ceaselessly plagued I would like to add two things.
Christians are resurrection people. That is to say, the non-negotiable ground of our faith — and therefore also of the whole of our lives — is the belief that Jesus of Nazareth, having been quite definitively condemned by His own people’s leaders and shamefully executed at the hands of the occupying Roman state, was raised from the dead on the third day in cheerful defiance of those verdicts. (“He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh them to scorn!”) From the earliest days, as soon as His friends had got over their initial shock, they came to reflect upon His resurrection as the singular and definitive demonstration that in His death God had triumphed over not only all earthly and spiritual principalities and powers but also the deeper corrupting principles of Sin and Death from which those principalities derived their authority. This meant that the Christians had a sure ground for hope — both beyond and within their earthly lives — precisely from beyond the horizons of earthly power. Bishop Lesslie Newbigin is supposed to have remarked, “I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!” Here is the point: A resurrection person ought not constrain his or her horizons of hope — and therefore of evaluation, of judgment, of choice — to those provided by earthly powers and principalities. They are simply too small, too narrow, too weak, to contain the immense possibilities that are disclosed and promised by Life sprung from the tomb. The kingdom of God is (as Jesus taught us) like a mustard seed. It appeared small and insignificant when it was planted. But after nearly two thousand years of growth, it has become a great tree that shades the whole world, and its leaves are for the healing of the nations.
Being resurrection people therefore comes with a remarkable freedom with respect to the powers and principalities, and the whole cultural-symbolic-religious structure that keeps them in place. We serve them not. There are indeed many ‘gods’ and many ’lords’ in heaven and on earth — but for us, One God and One Lord! They wish to occupy the center of our lives, thoughts, decisions, fears, anxieties — but Jesus, enthroned in heaven and reigning here through the Holy Spirit (Whose power raised Him from the dead), has already displaced them. They wish us to submit to them, to accept their terms of service, to make their devils’ bargains — but we have already and exclusively submitted to Jesus, Who has overthrown them. What this means in the context of this election is that I am supremely unconcerned about “throwing away” my vote by withholding it from either major-party candidate (in a swing state no less!). If you see the devil, as Luther may have remarked, spit in his face and go on your merry way.* The bipolar political system has set itself up as an idolatrous orthodoxy, and the only thing to do with an idol is to desecrate it however you can. I will not cast my vote for a candidate whom I understand to be the “lesser of two evils” merely because he or she is the “lesser” one. Think about what the “lesser of two evils” language assumes: two options, both evil, no alternatives. Jesus came to set me and you free from such false dichotomies! How can those of us who died to sin still live in it? What does it profit a man if he gains the world — or at least his preferred presidential candidate in office for a few years — but loses his soul? I do not accept the terms and conditions.
None of this means that I am not — that Christians ought not be — deeply dismayed by the evils of the world; indeed, those who live by the resurrection should be most dismayed by and most tireless in opposing the principles of crucifixion. Neither am I blind to the real effects that this election will have on me, on my neighbors, on my future children, on those who live (unlike me) far from the heart of the American Empire; both, I think, lesser and greater effects than is generally supposed. In a way I am less concerned about whom I, or anyone else, may vote for than how I approach the task of voting for someone — and of living: in the full fear and love of God, and according to the dictates of the conscience that fear and love shape. I am, like St. Paul, not aware of anything against myself in this matter, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is God who judges me. Therefore do not pass judgment before the appointed time, before the Lord comes, when whatever has been in darkness will be brought into the light and the secrets of the heart will be revealed. On that day I will give account to God for every careless word. So vote for a major party candidate if you like, if your conscience permits you to do it — but do it in fear and trembling for the reckoning that is coming. For our nation, yes: but also for your soul.
* Admittedly, Luther probably said “fart in his face” instead — or something even more pungent. He was Christendom’s greatest scatologist.
Despite the many errors and evils wrought by modern-ism in theology, I suspect that modern-ity† has in many ways, and perhaps on balance, been good for the discipline of theology. If I were trying to make this case, it would include at least some of the following reasons:
There are more theologians writing and reflecting from the different Christian perspectives than ever before. This is of course a mixed blessing at scale — but close to an unalloyed good for any given aspiring theologian. Some of the gatekeeping imposed on the discipline by the combination of medieval technology and institutions was good, and some was bad, or at least counter-productive, for the discipline’s health. Broadly speaking, before the technological and institutional revolutions of modernity, only the bishops (or those in their favor) could produce works of theology, which unavoidably limited the scope of theological writing (ruling out many heresies) and put any aspiring theological writer more or less at the mercy of his or her bishop’s opinions (on whether a certain heresy might or might not be latent in their work). Without in any way wishing to disavow the Church’s proper role as convener and authorizer of theologians, a certain freedom from scrutiny is of course necessary for really creative thought to come to full flower, and it seems to me hard to dispute that the Church’s bishops have not always scrutinized correctly or had sufficient patience with budding theological minds. (To take the most extreme example: one can only imagine how the early years of Reformation might have proceeded differently had the already hot-headed Luther been met by less intransigent bishops and papal emissaries.) There is no past golden era of free-flowing thought in theological education, not even when an Albertus Magnus taught in the University of Paris; that golden era in a way really is now, for some of the reasons that follow.
Along with this goes the possibility of a better, richer mutual understanding of those different Christian perspectives. It really is remarkable, when reading pre-modern theological writers, not just the degree of vitriol they often exhibit against their opponents (especially in Reformation-era polemics) but how frequently they misrepresent or indeed misunderstand them as well. This, like most of my other observations, applies less often to the genuinely top echelon of theologians — Sts. Augustine, Thomas, Gregory, et al. — as to those closer to the middle of the bell curve; compare Richard Hooker’s generally temperate and perceptive (even, occasionally, sympathetic) approach to the arguments of his presbyterian opponents, to his forerunner John Jewel’s rather more vehement approach to the arguments of his Romanist opponents! But those in the middle of the bell curve are still often influential in their own days, even if they are later remembered only as foils to the greater thinkers who moved beyond and reacted against them; think of the way that Gabriel Biel is now utterly forgotten as a theologian in his own right and his thought is only taught as the background (for good or ill) to Martin Luther’s theology. It is better if those generationally, if not millennially, influential theologians have a more rigorous and a more charitable understanding of their opponents’ positions. One of the great accomplishments of the ecumenical movement has been the reversal of sweeping anathemata against those Christians outside one’s own tradition, and the recognition that, say, Roman Catholics and Lutherans genuinely have much to learn from one another about justification (aside from not being as far apart in the first place as the rhetoric suggested).
This has partly resulted in, and partly been begotten by, the modern revolution in hermeneutics: hermeneutics considered not in its pre-modern sense as the set of rules for reading and interpretation, but in its contemporary philosophical sense as deep reflection on the act of reading, the problem of historical understanding, and the construction of meaning. To be sure, “revolution” really might overrate the degree of discontinuity; much of what is apparently new in Schleiermacher and Gadamer can also be found, in at least inchoate form, in, say, St. Augustine. Nevertheless, we have now in the contemporary world these significant hermeneutical possibilities: a chastened understanding of the “literal sense” that admits the unfixedness and unparaphraseability of textual meaning while simultaneously accepting its reality and its real effects; an appropriately moderated view of what can and cannot be established about a text on the basis of allegorical readings (as well as the fluidity of what constitutes “allegorical reading”); a proper admission of the inescapability of personal prejudices in interpretation and the indissoluble role of trust in knowledge; a fuller, if never full, perception of how a text’s “history of effects” (Wirkungsgeschichte) influences how it is read by me today; a recognition of the dialectic structure of thought and the complexity of acceptance. It has taken several centuries, but modernity has provided us with this methodological foundation — a methodological foundation which, ironically, should free us from too great a concern for closely observing properly “historical” methodology.
To the hermeneutical — if not “revolution” at least “evolution” — may be added what should fairly be called the text-critical revolution. We have more widespread and straightforward access to more theological works, from more perspectives and periods of Christian history, in ever more accurate texts, than at any previous point in Christian history. This has opened up genuinely new frontiers for theological interactions that would have faced exceedingly greater obstacles, or simply did not exist, hundreds of years ago. (One wonders, for example, how Calvin’s theology might have differed had he read St. Thomas without mediation, or for that matter St. John of Damascus at all.) You really can bring Karl Barth and Pseudo-Dionysius into conversation, and you might find that you want to — and when you do, you have the benefit of the most accurate texts of the Areopagite, freed through long scholarly labor from the corruptions that unavoidably creep in as texts are manually copied and recopied over centuries. Not to mention that we have an enormous text-critical apparatus for that Book which is the fountainhead and norma normans of all theology, that is, the Bible; though much of the value of that apparatus is found in recognizing (cf. Brevard Childs) the theological judgments that accompanied the Bible’s transmission, beyond questions about its most accurate or probably original text (we should, of course, have an appropriately chastened view of such historical judgment calls).
My last reason — for now! — may seem a curious one. In displacing Christendom, the secularity of modern civilization re-awakens the urgency of many crucial theological questions which could be taken for granted in an era of greater assumed cultural consensus. Today there is a critical need for a thick theological anthropology and doctrine of creation (almost the same thing) precisely because what it means to be a human creature is so contested in the secular world. Similarly there is a great need for a theological reckoning with the fact and reality of cultural and theological plurality. Or — take issues where the Church’s historical record is more lamentable. One of the only good effects from the unmitigated disaster that was the Shoah has been the long-overdue Christian reckoning with the degree to which reflexive anti-Judaism and its racialized descendant anti-Semitism had infiltrated our civilization and thinking; hardly any Christian preacher would today be willing to deploy the invective which a St. John Chrysostom or a Martin Luther hurled at the Jews. Similarly, the crisis of “gender roles” brought on by first industrialization and then feminism has, for all its enormous fallout, helped to illumine how remarkably sloppy has been much historic Christian reflection on what it means to be, and what is possible/permissible for, a woman — that is, when it has been reflected upon at all, rather than simply taking up unbaptized and unconverted notions from pagan culture or philosophy. For the Church to consider more deeply than before what is really true about God, the world, and herself is always an unalloyed good, even when this consideration is (as it usually is) for reasons of controversy and tragedy. Secularity is in countless ways a great (and occasionally self-inflicted) tragedy, but the Church’s business is discovering the redemptive effects of tragedy — just as it is her God’s business.
For all these reasons, and no doubt more I have not articulated here, I am grateful to live in modernity, despite wishing I could do away with the bad fruit of modernism in myself and in others. The correct answer to “When in history would you like to live?” should always be “Right now.” This is in part a simple matter of the honor that is due to Providence. But it is also a matter of recognizing the particular gifts of Providence in and for this time: as long as it is called “today.”
† At least, modernity in its “first watershed,” to crib Ivan Illich’s opening gambit in Tools for Conviviality.
There is currently a discussion going on about the supposed contrast, and transition, between the “gospel-centered” “third wave” of evangelicalism (associated with figures like John Piper and the late Timothy Keller) and the “spiritual formation” “fourth wave” of evangelicalism (associated with figures like John Mark Comer and the late Dallas Willard). I am suspicious of over-relying on this periodization, partly because like all periodizations it conceals as much as it reveals about its subject matter; from my acquaintance with Piper’s and Keller’s works, they are by no means soft on the need for spiritual transformation as not only a result of coming to know the gospel but as a means of more deeply apprehending the gospel itself, and from my acquaintance with Willard’s and Comer’s works they are by no means soft on articulating the substance of the gospel or the importance of recognizing it as a gift of pure grace. (Do not take anything I say below as a judgment for, against, or even particularly about any of these particular teachers.)
But if there is any use in this periodization for general heuristic value — as describing “normative moods” or “characteristic emphases” and not classifying individual teachers or intellectuals — my sympathies generally lie with the normative moods and characteristic emphases of the spiritual formation wave. This is for a very straightforward reason. We do not come to “know” anything at all without already holding and giving at least tacit commitment to it, and we do not acquire more than a tacit commitment to anything we “know” without purposely apprenticing ourselves to it — a kind of apprenticeship that entails our trust in the Master of our apprenticeship, which is to say a submission to His purposes in our learning and training and a corresponding abandonment (at least in principle) of our own purposes. (Lewis’s remarks about this in “The Weight of Glory” are unsurpassed for clarity, even if there are more philosophically sophisticated treatments available in print — hello, Polanyi!) In other words, the gospel has to be lived to be understood, just as it has to be understood to be lived.
The spiritual formation wave recognizes and receives this core phenomenological insight as its basic impulse. Squabbles about how precisely articulated certain doctrinal commitments of the spiritual formation movement and its leaders are (or are not) miss the basic point. Yes, faithfulness to the teaching of Holy Scripture is of utmost importance; but how will they know how to faithfully rearticulate what Holy Scripture says if they have not understood it, and how can they understand it without living it, and how can they live it without obediently imitating the One Who speaks its words in the first place? An accurate, if of course not maximally precise, summary of the Gospel really is “Jesus loves you and wants you to be like him.” Absent a real emphasis on spiritual formation as discipleship — as apprenticeship to Jesus — there is a real danger of “gospel-centrality” morphing into a Tillich-style “accept the fact that you are accepted!” gospel proclamation accompanied by what can only be experienced as disconnected legalism in the realm of, you know, actual lived behavior (the very thing that, after allegiance to Him, the Jesus who meets us in the New Testament makes it eminently clear He cares about).
Of course there are characteristic and formally similar dangers inherent to the spiritual formation movement — “it doesn’t matter what you believe, it’s all about how you live!” readily slips into an equally legalistic “if you don’t live this exact way / practice this specific discipline / have this precise emotional experience you are No True Christian.” (It was, of course, necessary for John Piper to write a book entitled When I Don’t Desire God.) I know of no paradigm that lacks such dangers. No approach to Christian faith is guaranteed proof against misunderstanding or hypocrisy. But the spiritual formation emphasis begins with the premise that, as St. Augustine taught, the human being is homo amans precisely before she is, and in order to be, homo cognens. It is not merely that faith seeks understanding; it is that understanding depends on faith.
Aim, truly aim, for spiritual formation into the image of Christ, and the whole knowledge of the gospel — which is Christ Himself — will be added unto you; even as indeed in this life you struggle to imitate Him and will never finally reach the fullness of His likeness (yet, perhaps, much more than you think!). Aim for the knowledge of Christ without expressly seeking the power that kindles that knowledge into love, and you may well find that you get Christ anyways — He is, after all, notoriously gracious like that; or you may, more tragically and horrifyingly, ultimately find that you have not gotten Him after all, and that His words to you and your ilk are not “Enter now into the joy of your Master” but “I never knew ye; depart from me.” Both waves may get you where you want to go; but I know which I would prefer to ride.
This column / book review by N. S. Lyons is worthwhile — as much for its ultimate affirmation that this may be “neither the best nor the worst of times, but simply the time we have been given” as anything else. There is one feature I find odd. Toward the end of the piece, Lyons cites Jordan Peterson’s recent proclamation that we are living on the cusp of (or indeed in the early moments of) the Counter-Enlightenment. He then goes on to cite Oswald Spengler’s suggestion in The Decline of the West that the collapse of the “age of theory” might give way to a “sweeping re-Christianization” (Lyons’s term, not Spengler’s). The effect is to suggest that “the Counter-Enlightenment” and the “sweeping re-Christianization” will be, if not perfectly co-constitutive, at least a 90% overlapping Venn diagram.
But, as Lyons (and Peterson) surely know, there have been many Counter-Enlightenments before, and likely will be again before Enlightened modernity has run its course. Probably a majority of the most celebrated philosophical thinkers active since 1800 have been, in some sense, Counter-Enlightenment figures: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Spengler (!), Scheler, Gadamer, Derrida, Foucault are the first ten names that come to my mind, and obviously there are others — Wittgenstein, anyone? (Crack open the bibliography of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things for many more!) The interwar German philosophical coterie of which Heidegger was the most prominent figure even seems to have self-consciously identified as a new Counter-Enlightenment school. None of these figures, whatever their individual religious beliefs, can really be said to have contributed to any sort of sweeping re-Christianization, though in my estimation some are more readily appropriated for the tasks of Christian philosophy and theology (Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and — in a roundabout way — Nietzsche) than others (Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Foucault, and probably Derrida too, whatever Jamie Smith says).
And — to turn the screw further — what could be more quintessentially Enlightenment in its underlying attitude than, say, a project to refound all of metaphysics from first principles? Every Counter-Enlightenment inevitably has a great deal of Enlightenment still in it. That is because the Enlightenment is not a philosophical school — Wolffian deductive rationalism, Kantian transcendental idealism, Benthamite utilitarianism, or whatever it is that Steven Pinker and Peter Singer have in common — so much as a set of postures, habits, and — for lack of a better word — vibes. An extremely persistent and evolutionarily successful set of postures, habits, and vibes, no less, which has spent the better part of three hundred years displaying an extraordinary capacity to adapt and co-opt opposition. The Enlightenment mold, it seems, cannot be shattered from within: now that Kant’s “sapere aude!” has become conventional wisdom, anyone who self-consciously tries to break with it is still, by definition, daring (in some measure) to use their own understanding. Once one has grown up and been educated under the plausibility structures of post-Enlightenment modernity, it is extremely difficult to shake them off and abandon them entirely. (See also: theologically educated Protestants converting to Roman Catholicism.) Neither can the dialectic of Enlightenment be simply ignored; its embodiment in modern technologies and technological society shows it is almost no use deciding you are simply uninterested in the dialectic, since the dialectic remains just as rapaciously interested in you. The rise of a purportedly Counter-Enlightenment movement in Western public life neither guarantees a sweeping re-Christianization of society nor promises a breaking out of the Enlightenment mold.
This essay was originally written for Professor Kavin Rowe’s Spring 2023 seminar on New Testament Theology. I am posting it without edits or revisions other than reformatting; while I do not see the substance as needing any significant revision, there are no doubt minor word choices I would make differently if writing today. No doubt, also, I would expand on some topics more — particularly the Christian understanding of history — if I were writing to a less restrictive page count than Professor Rowe imposed upon us! But such a restriction was an immensely useful exercise, and I am a sharper thinker and writer for it. — TBC
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New Testament Theology is the synthetic, canonical interpretation of the New Testament according to the principle of faith, from the perspective of faith, for the purpose of faith. Without the perspective and purpose of faith there is no canonical collection to be called “the New Testament” in the first place — to say nothing of the writings in that collection — and without the principle of faith there is no defending the concept of “theology” (or “canon”). A definition of the discipline without faith is implausible — perhaps even impossible.
Obviously, all three of these prepositional phrases — according to the principle of faith, from the perspective of faith, for the purpose of faith — must be elucidated, as must be the terms “synthetic” and “canonical” along the way. Accordingly, that task will occupy the bulk of this essay. In the concluding pages I will outline the shape of the constructive proposal implicit in the above definition.
I.
Interpreting the New Testament according to the principle of faith is the most important element and depends on making the movement of faith or trust. Every act of interpretation presupposes an act of trust. Trust can never be reduced to an abstract affirmation of “the facts” but is always, inescapably, trust in a person. The question is therefore never “what do you believe?” so much as “whom do you trust?” — and New Testament Theology consists essentially in interpreting the New Testament according to its own answer to this question.
In a sense the great achievement of twentieth-century science and philosophy is to demonstrate the inescapability of trust in all knowledge. What Ernst Troeltsch identified in historiography as the principle of criticism — the necessity of making probabilistic rather than binarily definitive judgments about past events — was shown within decades of Troeltsch’s death in 1923 to go, like Bertrand Russell’s turtles, all the way down. Starting in 1927, Werner Heisenberg’s famous “uncertainty principle” showed the limit to precision and completeness in observation to be unavoidable — part of the quantum mechanics revolution demonstrating an inescapable randomness and indeterminacy at the deepest layer of physical reality. By 1931 Kurt Gödel had definitively proved his “incompleteness” theorems demonstrating that no mathematical-logical system could be constructed so perfectly as to not require at least one axiom underivable from within that system. And Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation, articulated in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), that the meanings of words depend substantially on their function within certain “language-games” spelled the death of a logical-symbolic understanding of language. Karl Barth spoke more rightly than he could have known in 1921 when he insisted on being more critical than the critics.
Postwar philosophical and sociological developments extended the scope of this fundamental principial uncertainty to all of daily life and thought. The hermeneutic tradition in philosophy extending back to Schleiermacher through Dilthey and Heidegger reached its apex in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960), which definitively exposed the Enlightenment’s scientistic “prejudice against prejudices” as a methodological fantasy in the humanities. No interpretation is possible without the interpreter bringing him or herself into the “fusion of horizons” which constitutes the act of interpretation. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) similarly upended the notion of linear “scientific progress” as a modernist myth: “settled” science does not evolve like the Ship of Theseus, seamlessly replaced bit by bit until it is entirely updated and overhauled, but rather occasionally finds itself shipwrecked on new kinds of data and in need of total reconstruction using new materials. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s influential The Social Construction of Reality (1966) described the extent to which the first-person experience of reality is influenced by “society” even as that same society is acted on by persons — a line of reasoning startlingly confirmed in subsequent decades by experiments in neuroscience demonstrating “intersubjectivity”: I really am something like the sum of the five people with whom I spend the most time.
All these insights, of course, can be and have been horrendously misapplied, particularly in the Nietzschean-Freudian style of certain postmodernists, who took them as license to unleash a sweeping relativism of values and adopt a suspicious posture toward all claims of truth. This application, however, is exactly wrong. What they really represent — particularly germane, and suggestive, for questions of theology — is the indissolubility of trust within knowledge. If no text can be “objectively” interpreted, if no interpreter can avoid being influenced by persons and social constructs, if the experience of reality is itself in a way dependent on how one seeks to observe it — then it becomes supremely important whom one chooses to trust or take to be reliable. I cannot choose by fiat how I construe reality, nor can I verify every point of my construal by direct experience; my life is too fragile and potentially short for that. Accepting that there is no singularly, objectively “right” way to construe reality does not guarantee that I cannot hit on a wrong way to construe reality, with potentially tragic results. I have never been hit by a car, nor seen anyone else hit by a car; my construal of reality is lacking (a radical empiricist, or someone wishing for my death, might say) key data; I must nevertheless trust my parents, my friends, and my fiancée who implore me to heed the danger of vehicular homicide and stay attentive while out on my road bike, rather than performing an experiment (on) myself with potentially deadly results. To wrong ways of construing reality, reality itself responds with cold, hard, frequently painful resistance.
There is therefore finally no alternative between a hermeneutic of suspicion and a hermeneutic of trust — and while the hermeneutic of trust may still get me killed if I trust foolishly, the hermeneutic of suspicion is all but guaranteed to lead to my destruction. So why should I not admit to myself whether or not I trust the New Testament and — if yes — embrace a comprehensive hermeneutic of trust for it? Trust “the New Testament,” I say, but I am really trusting a whole array of persons. Some of them translated and edited the Bibles and Greek New Testaments in which I read the text. The trustworthiness of their product depends in turn on a long history of ecclesiastics and caretakers who recognized these books as texts in and through which God speaks, and who collected them together as the definitive, normative textual corpus of the word of God. Those churchmen (and women) trusted both that the apostles, or their trusted assistants and associates, had written these books, and trusted the authors themselves to have written faithfully — to have been trustworthy witnesses to what they had seen and heard, to what God wanted them to write. Text-critical history can with real confidence establish the most probably original form of the text, for errors do creep in and persist even among persons of good faith; it can tell us all sorts of interesting and potentially useful things about the history of those texts’ transmission; it can even provide good evidence that certain persons are not trustworthy tradents — but it cannot finally determine whether an author is positively trustworthy.
At bottom — as at the top — is the person of Jesus. Deciding whether I trust the apostles’ portrayal of Jesus presses inexorably the question of whether I trust Jesus himself: for the Jesus of apostolic history demands to be received as the Christ of faith. A Jesus of suspicious, critical historical reconstructions may make less-sweeping claims — or no claims at all. The Jesus who emerges from a hermeneutic of trust does not and cannot make less than the absolute claim of faithful allegiance. “Choose this day whom you will serve…”
Interpreting the New Testament according to the principle of faith means that I first accept the absolute claim of this Jesus on my faith and trust, and then accept the claims of the apostolic writers about the immediate material implications of my faith in Jesus. It means that I interpret their writings on the presumption of coherence and sensibility, rejecting interpretations that assume they did not know what they were talking about or failed to communicate their meaning effectively. It means also that I interpret them synthetically, not seeking to make points of different emphasis or expression between writers (e.g., Galatians 2 and James 2) into principles in ultimate and irreconcilable tension — adherence to one of which must become the real badge of faith — but rather to discover a capacious, inter-canonical coherence between their writings. It similarly means that when seemingly intractable problems of history emerge from the text, I seek the maximally charitable and trusting interpretation. It means that I accept the possibility of divine causality as the simplest explanation for the miraculous, rather than bracketing it because, like Lessing, I (alas) no longer experience such miracles in daily life. Most of all it means that I accept, as a presumption of my exegesis, the whole chain of reasoning that runs from “he is not here; he is risen, just as he said!” through “God has made him both Lord and Christ” to “I am the first and the last, and the living one” — an inescapably theological chain of reasoning; which is to say that in doing New Testament interpretation I should and will always find myself at least embroidering a corner of the glorious garment of New Testament Theology.
II.
Interpreting the New Testament according to the perspective of faith, therefore, means situating myself in the community of interpretation that is formed by faith in Jesus: the church. This is true in two dimensions (if not more). For one thing, if I adopt a hermeneutic of trust toward the Jesus who speaks to me in the pages of the New Testament, I will discover that his proclamation of the kingdom (Matt. 4:17) led immediately to gathering a band of disciples around him (Matt. 4:18ff) to listen to his teaching (Matt. 5:1ff) and live according to it (Matt. 7:24ff). There is no individualistic response to “repent and believe the good news” that satisfies how Jesus expects my faithful allegiance to be expressed. For another thing, if I understand myself to be interpreting “the New Testament,” I am immediately under the rule — the κάνων — of the church. The community of Jesus’ followers has selected — or better, recognized — in advance for me that set of writings which enjoy authoritative status in it, and given it the name “the New Testament.” They did so according to the principle of faith: on the basis of trust in Jesus and the apostles who wrote about him. The enduring existence of this community, formed by faith and operating according to the principle of faith, is the only reason to interpret the New Testament as a “New Testament” rather than as the (no doubt very interesting) “early Christian literature” which William Wrede preferred to interpret. In combination, the Christian community and the New Testament canon in which it functions authoritatively form the perspective of faith.
At this point, some — paradigmatically Wrede — might object that the Christian community is far too much of a mess, historically and contemporarily, for the ecclesiastical judgment of canonicity to have any enduring value. The so-called “process of canonization” was a polemical and exclusivist exercise from the beginning, meant to draw sharp boundaries between “orthodoxy” and “heresy” that are historically unjustifiable. Furthermore, the “canonical” literature itself underwent a process of development and alteration as the post-apostolic communities sought (and created) authoritative guidance on issues that could not have been foreseen by Jesus or his apostles. How can such a self-evidently flawed rule remain not only valuable but indeed authoritative?
These standard objections are in part answered — or at least responded to — by the principle of faith. A posture of suspicion will always be inclined to interpret any evidence of the church’s messiness as warrant for the church’s invalidation, as much when it comes to the first as in the twenty-first century. Many of the scholarly judgments about the development and alteration of the canonized writings rest — at some level in their own genealogies — on maximally suspicious interpretation of odd details in the texts, presuming that the various redactors and editors were simultaneously so brilliant as to hide their work from subsequent generations and so incompetent as to leave self-evidently contradictory and messy texts for nineteenth-century historical critics to discover. (The notion that pre-Enlightenment exegesis was wholly “pre-critical” and naïve is undermined by reading Origen, Jerome, or Augustine and seeing them employ — sometimes advance upon — the critical tools of their days. The difference is in the first place a hermeneutic of suspicion rather than trust.)
But equally important is the institutional analogy to the principle of faith: the perspective of faith. Any community that orients itself around reading has judgments about what texts are central to its life and thought, as well as what kinds of readings are acceptable and appropriate. The question is how implicit or explicit those are. And though the history of the canon is as messy as that of the church, the judgments about central texts and acceptable readings appear to emerge quite early and straightforwardly. The “rule of the truth” identified by Irenaeus at the end of the second century was not a criterion for canonizing the New Testament writings; rather it was a kind of aural lens through which the church focused its habits of listening to divine truth, and through which it listened to “early Christian literature” to discern the voice of God instructing them in a living and active way. Here is the place for the crucial insight of Brevard Childs that the canonical process included the transmission, even editing, of the canonical writings, precisely because those who transmitted them did so in response to hearing the living voice of God speaking in them. The rule of the truth and the canonical writings formed a hermeneutical spiral that invited deeper recognition and better comprehension of both as true and canonical. The church is the community that lives in — lives out — that hermeneutical spiral.
Of course, in the present situation there is not one “church.” The prayer of Christ in John 17 that all his followers would be one has so far been answered only in a mystical sense if at all. Which church am I to trust to provide the perspective of faith from which I interpret? While no answer seems likely to be truly satisfactory this side of the eschaton (one thinks of Robert Jenson’s remark about the “impossibility” of doing theology in the situation of a divided church), a few principles seem to flow from the above. Trust the providence of God placing one in a particular tradition. Trust a church that seeks basic doctrinal and ethical conformity with the generations that recognized the canon of Scripture: orthodox Trinitarianism, Chalcedonian Christology, the basic pattern of New Testament ethics. Trust a church that seeks to submit itself to the New Testament and live out what it hears the voice of God speaking. Most of all, trust a church that preaches Christ, the crucified and risen One.
Interpreting the New Testament from the perspective of faith means that I am freed to begin my investigation of the canonical writings with the deposit of theological teaching laid down in the rule of the truth. It means that I accept the church’s historic judgment about ruling out — and ruling in — certain categories of readings on explicitly theological grounds; Marcion’s read of Paul is right out. It means joyfully identifying my scholarship as from (and for) the church, rather than some other, less cosmically significant community of interpretation. The beginnings of New Testament Theology are in the basics of Christian theology, not in some other discourse; and the basics of Christian theology are found in the Christ’s church.
III.
The third phrase flows directly out of the second. Interpreting the New Testament according to the purpose of faith means not only situating my interpretation in the church but for the church. What is the church’s task in interpreting the New Testament? It is listening to the voice of God in order to be given life and governed by it. It is the unfolding of the sacred text for the upbuilding of the members of the body in faith.
The Kantian ideal of the disinterested scholar, excising her own interests when coming to a text in bold pursuit of the truth wherever it might lead, was in its best form a noble fiction. Even a valuable fiction, perhaps; there can be no doubt that the historical-critical posture uncovered real insights into the text and history of Scripture, with which all who seek to be intellectually honest must reckon. Yet far more often the fiction was exposed within a generation or two as a vicious lie. The “life of Jesus” research of the nineteenth century produced (in the memorable image of Albert Schweitzer) a succession of scholars staring down deep wells, seeing their own faces dimly reflected, and triumphantly declaring that they had discovered the real Jesus — Who looked, after all that labor, just like them. The enormous philological and linguistic scholarship that produced Kittel’s Dictionary turned out to be not only based on disastrously misguided semantic theory (memorably skewered in James Barr’s 1961 The Semantics of Biblical Language) but also shot through at numerous points with the pernicious strain of racialized anti-Judaism that infected German biblical scholarship from at least the late nineteenth century right up to 1945. Because it is done by human beings and not by God, scholarship usually turns out to have an “interest” — especially when it is declared most energetically, as in the classic historical-critical mode, that all interests have been put aside.
What use then for the historical-critical method in Christian scholarship, or indeed in New Testament Theology? The proper analogy is the one St. Augustine recommended with respect to pagan philosophy: the Egyptian goods asked of Israel’s neighbors on the night of the Exodus. Carried — baptized, even — through the Red Sea, the precious metals and beautiful things can be righteously put to the task of building and beautifying the Tabernacle. The Bezalels and Oholiabs of the Christian academy are free to use whatever materials and tools they find God commanding them to use in their work; God even promises that His Spirit of wisdom and understanding will guide them. But the Egyptian gold can also be molded into a deadly idol. Wrede and Troeltsch were merely being honest: if Moses delays in coming down from the mountaintop, Aaron is ready to submit to a very different spirit and replace New Testament Theology with the history of religious ideas found in early Christian literature. “Look, I threw the gold into the fire, and out came this calf!” is the time-worn protest of scholars affecting shock that their deliberately faithless investigations of the New Testament have produced the dissolution of faith in the pews. That idolatry is nonsensical and self-defeating is, historically speaking, no proof against its indulgence.
Interpreting the New Testament for the purpose of faith means that I pursue biblical scholarship that serves the people of God — and God Himself. It means that I seek interpretations and angles on the text that glorify God and are, to use the patristic language, “fitting” of God’s character and attributes. It also means that I avoid tearing down and plucking up the faith of my brothers and sisters in the church by my scholarship, seeking rather to build up and to plant — understanding myself as at best God’s worker and craftsman; they are God’s field and building. Likewise, it means that I interpret with an eye to the practical effects of similar interpretations that have come before — which necessitates knowing the history of interpretation and accepting that it is possible that earlier, churchly interpreters may have understood the text better than me despite my being “up to date.” It means, I submit, that I accept something like the medieval understanding of multiple senses of Scripture, rather than restricting my investigations to a probably nonexistent singular sense — even as I seek to keep myself and my interpretations more rooted in the “plain sense” than at least some medieval exegetes were willing to do. New Testament Theology necessitates an expansive understanding of the interpreter’s task along some lines; historical and grammatical exposition will not be sufficient, and no scholar has the self-control necessary to stick exclusively to those tasks anyway. Better to expand the task along such lines, then, that explicitly seek to serve and strengthen the church.
IV.
All this has so far resulted in only principles of interpretation. What would a work of New Testament Theology produced according to this proposal, functioning on the principles we have outlined, actually look like?
It would first of all be shaped canonically: not seeking to track a theological idea’s development from historically earlier to later sources, but from canonically earlier to later texts. Start with the teaching of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. Look from the differing angle of the Gospel of John. See how the Spirit-empowered followers of the Way apply and teach about it in the Acts of the Apostles. Watch how the apostles and their friends — Paul, James, Peter, Jude, John, the writer of Hebrews — discuss it in their letters. Observe finally how it is transfigured in the Apocalypse. To be sure, there is (as Childs recognized) a necessary place for discussing the historical development of the ideas, but let it be done within the context of each text, rather than as a control on which texts are discussed and in which order. Leave the “history of religious ideas” to the departments of religious studies, which are better-versed in that sort of thing anyways; let scholars — theologians — of the New Testament be unapologetically theological.
Then, with the differing canonical perspectives on that theological idea expounded, they should be synthesized. Let coherence emerge between the differing perspectives; not a root coherence that best explains the historical development of the various perspectives, but an apex coherence that best draws their gaze up to a single focus. Such a coherence may not be explicitly found in any of the New Testament texts, nor be plausibly identifiable as what any of the New Testament writers might have specifically thought they meant. Its discernment may require the Scriptural imagination of the theologian or the application of insights from the history of interpretation and theology. (It may even take prayer to discern.) None of this should be cause for theological concern: “For now we see in part and we prophesy in part…”
As the Pauline dictum suggests, New Testament Theology may ultimately be an eschatological discipline. The promise of the historical-critical method was originally that the one true meaning of the text and an accurate, coherent history of development could be arrived at and universally agreed upon, so that a more solid foundation might be laid for Christian reading of the New Testament than was supplied by the New Testament itself. That turned out to be a pipe dream which eroded its own foundations. Turning away from this dream in pursuit of the above vision of New Testament Theology may be better-founded — upon divine promises rather than human self-assurance — but the kind of apex theological coherence described above will certainly be impossible to achieve in a manner that satisfies everyone. This should be no counsel of despair, but rather a spur to perpetual, eager investigation of the canon’s theological import: “For when the perfect comes, the partial shall pass away… Therefore, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”
The testimony of history suggests that the phenomena of “nation” and “empire” are both equally ineradicable from human political life. There is a chicken-and-egg aspect to the relation, albeit with (over the course of millennia) both chickens and eggs getting larger and larger, and with the caveat that historically the egg of the nation really did come first. To (over)simplify: imperial projects emerge out of national projects that reach beyond their “national” boundaries, either in response to a regional power vacuum of some sort or as a desire to take over an existing imperial project, while national projects emerge (or re-emerge) from the desire to self-define over against a broader imperial project and/or the other national projects uneasily coexisting within that imperial frame. Once you have the first empire, all nations’ self-definition is somehow reacting to the context of empire. The modern exemplar of this dynamic is the rise of 19th century European nationalisms within and without the Habsburg empire: the nations and nationalisms in question positioned themselves and their national projects relative to (i.e., over against) the Vienna system, whether or not they had really been ruled by Vienna for some time. There are ancient exemplars, too: the empire incorporated by the Assyrians (who had a robust national project if ever there was one!) was taken over and expanded by the Babylonians, then by the Medes and the Persians, then by Alexander the Great.
The specialist in the history of either period might now protest that there are many salient and irreducible differences between Alexander’s empire and the Habsburgs’. Certainly, I am oversimplifying: a nation is not a nation is not a nation, and an empire is not an empire is not an empire. Such forms inhere only imperfectly in this crude matter. But if there is not such a thing as a “nation” or an “empire” (and the permanent squabbling over how to define these terms suggests this is in fact the case), there are such things as “nationalism” and “imperialism.” Not things, exactly. Rather, they are basic political impulses or desires: not, in themselves, goods or virtues, but tendencies of political aspiration that exist in a permanent and uneasy dialectic.
And these desires have, as have all human aspirations and efforts here under the sun, virtuous and vicious aspects to them. The virtuous aspects of nationalism stem from the love of and gratitude for what is immediately given to me: it is good to be grateful for one’s own place and family and history and traditions, and to be in a sense protective of the goodness and justice of their continued existence (insofar, of course, as these traditions are good and just!), and to feel a sense of solidarity with all those who share those goods. The vicious aspects come in as soon as one says, “Oh Lord, I thank thee that thou hast made me a $NATIONALITY — not one of those $OUTGROUP-NATIONALITIES over there, whom I hate and assuredly You hate too.” The good of nationalism is the love of the particular, and the evil of nationalism is the hatred of other particulars as threats to my particular. It needs to be leavened by the genuine love of the universal.
For the virtuous aspects of (what one might call) imperialism stem from the love of and gratitude for those who are not immediately given to me: it is good to love and feel solidarity with those who do not share my place and family and history and traditions, because what we do share is humanity, is personhood. It is good to grieve when other persons, even those distant from me, do not enjoy the goods and fruits of justice and cultural flourishing. It is also good to want to share one’s own goods with those who lack those goods, and to want to share in the goods that others have. The vicious aspects come in as soon as one says, “And because we here must have the goods that they have there—” or “they must be given the goods that we have here” — “we are justified in dominating them, for the good of all parties.” The good of imperialism is the love of the universal, and the evil of imperialism is the hatred of other particulars as threats to the universal. It needs to be leavened by the genuine love of other particulars.
I said above that these basic political desires and aspirations exist in a permanent and uneasy dialectic; that nationalism and imperialism beget one another in a perpetual cycle. This is, I think, because we humans are easily dissatisfied — it is easiest to see the failings of whatever desire dominates one’s own political situation, nationalist or imperialist, and to thus overlook the failings of the alternative — and also because we are vicious. It is hard — maybe impossible? — to hold a pure nationalism or a pure imperialism without being consumed by the vicious aspects of either. The worst state for any person is probably to be a vicious nationalist and a vicious imperialist at the same time, as many (most?) empire-builders in history have probably been. But the best state would be to desire the virtuous form of both: a universal kingdom, with no geographical or temporal borders to compromise its perfection, ruled with perfect justice by a righteous king, so that every particular — every person — under the reign of this universal may flourish as itself, becoming the most glorious version of itself.
Nationalists and imperialists both, in their own ways, long for this kingdom. Their desires are incomplete, malformed versions of this longing: they are unable to hold together loving both the particular and the universal. Their last state will be worse than their first. But there is One who can.
Jesus of Nazareth raised bodily from the dead [resurrection accounts, post-resurrection appearances]
The bodily, human life of Jesus vindicated by his resurrection as enacting true humanity [all over the Gospels]
Part II: True Humanity, Creation, and Sin
Jesus: the true image of the invisible God [Colossians 1 and intertexts]
The image of God as royal status [Genesis 1 and the rest of the Bible]
Sin I — irresponsibility: rejecting the responsibilities that come with royal status [lots that can go here]
Jesus: the second Adam [1 Corinthians 15, Romans 8]
The Church: bride of the Lamb, second Eve [Revelation 21 and intertexts]
The first Adam and the first Eve [Genesis 2]
Sin II — idolatry: choosing knowledge of good and evil apart from life, leading to death and corruption [Genesis 3]
Jesus: the temple of the Holy Spirit [man, it’s just everywhere]
Christians: temples of the Holy Spirit [1 Corinthians 3 & 6, Romans 6]
Sin III — sacrilege: offending against the presence of God [Leviticus, Romans 6, 1 Corinthians 3 & 6, Ephesians 5]
Part III: The Shape of True Human Life
Human companionship: friendship and marriage
Human fruitfulness: discipleship and procreation
Unavoidably long excursus chapter on sexual behavior, human sexuality, and sexual bioethical issues which nevertheless has to be framed by (14) and (15)
Human vocation: rest and work
Human uniqueness: relation to other living creatures and to machines
Possibly (alas) another unavoidably long excursus chapter on technology and medicine
Human teleology: resurrection life and end-of-life bioethical issues
Obviously 3–5, 6–9, and 10–12 would be key individual units of argumentation. Having now made the sketch, it occurs to me that as a whole that section would map, albeit imperfectly, onto the traditional “threefold office” of Christ: 3–5 corresponds straightforwardly to the royal office, 6–9 (somewhat less straightforwardly) to the prophetic office, and 10–12 to the priestly office. Of course, the traditional order is prophet, priest, king, so maybe some reordering is called for. But the value of this order, I think, is that it anchors the whole testimony about humanity in the status with which it is created, the status that produces the subsequent vocations. That may be the wisest apologetic move, since most people (at least in the ex-Christian West), Christian or not, now come programmed with an intuitive sense of the dignity and worth of every person. That sense often lacks controls, but it may be the most natural starting point.
EDIT: Thinking more about this, it seems really important to have established multiple ways to talk about sin when we come to Part III and the different “ethical” topoi. Irresponsibility, idolatry, and sacrilege are far from perfect terms for Sin I, II, and III (for one thing, they aren’t all alliterative!), but they get at the need for multiple axes of evaluation. Some things that defy a Christian view of the human person in the realm of medicine, for instance, are not sacrilegious exactly… but still idolatrous and irresponsible. I want better terms for these categories. But one needs some such categories.
Of course, I’m not actually against citation, in the sense of needing to show your work and avoid plagiarism. But what I am against is citation as a substitute for persuasive argument or citation as demonstration that one is In the Know about the scholarly canon for a field.
Is your case dependent on previous scholarship? Of course it is. So tell me that you’re dependent, but spell out the nature of your dependence. The best practice here is to re-present to me, in your own words, the part of their argument that influenced or persuaded you, as clearly as possible. If you can’t clearly draw the lines of dependence, at least give me your own articulation of your position and mention, in the footnotes, “Here (and throughout) I am undoubtedly dependent on $AUTHORNAME; cf. $WORK, $PAGENUMBERS.” This gives me the ability to evaluate the strength of your foundations myself, and the opportunity to be persuaded that you are right. Citing, however, someone else’s methodological work — even if it is a standard work in the field — without re-presenting the relevant aspects takes those opportunities for persuasion and evaluation away from me. I simply have to take for granted that you have a) read and represented $AUTHORNAME properly and b) that $AUTHORNAME is a trustworthy guide to these issues.
And what if I have no access to this author’s works? What if I don’t yet have the technical background to evaluate either of the above questions? In this case, the unexplained citation functions to shore up the boundaries of the guild, with your place within and mine without: “If you haven’t read $AUTHORNAME on this, I really don’t know how to talk to you.” It’s a gesture in the direction of an Important Book as an appeal to authority — in the logical fallacy sense. Of course there is always authority. But as a writer, especially in a scholarly mode, it is critically important that you a) assess what authorities you are placing yourself under and b) show your readership why they are good authorities. There is a way to cite Important Books that invites the novice reader into the scholarly conversations whose terms have been set by the Important Books, rather than shutting them out of the conversations until such times as they have read and understood the Important Books.
Scholarship is always iterative and cumulative. Even Socrates — a figure of practically immeasurable importance! — is, in a sense, just the first philosopher to have his teachings recorded in a large, well-preserved corpus; not the first person ever to think in quite the way that he did. Everyone is, like Newton, standing on the shoulders of giants. A major contemporary biblical scholar (to take the field I know best) will cite in perfunctory fashion a great authority of the previous generation, a pioneer of the field. Okay, I say to myself: I am a novice in this field; if I want to understand, I must row back up the stream of influence. I read the great authority, and find that he (in biblical scholarship it is practically always a he) is himself claiming dependence on a prior pioneer. I climb further and see that there are competing interpretations of the prior pioneer’s legacy, and that the great authority may have subtly transmuted his forerunner’s thought to be more congenial to his project. And repeat ad infinitum — well, not truly infinitely; but if I can ever make it to the source of this large river of impressive, learned scholarship, which has become its own canon of authority, what I may find as the wellspring is — in a surprising number of cases — a wild speculation in a footnote by a nineteenth-century German biblical scholar. And I find that this scholar’s own methodological presuppositions are practically impossible to assess without understanding Hegelian philosophy, and that the core biblical insight that launched a thousand dissertations had actually been inspired by a remark of Hegel’s. Which then requires its own understanding — and I cannot understand Hegel.
Did my original major contemporary biblical scholar, not herself presupposing Hegelianism, take care to know what meat she was chewing and what bones she was spitting out? Quite possibly. But if she did not bother to show me the foundations and persuade me that they are solid, a great part of my own assessment of her work is foreclosed in advance. I am increasingly sensitive — allergic — to sloppy appeals to external authority in biblical and theological scholarship. Show me your hermeneutical presuppositions in your exegesis, yes; but also tell me what they are and why you presuppose them. And if you implicitly protest, by citation rather than explanation, that the telling would take too much time and too many pages, and really I should just read your other book — or this journal article you wrote, or your mentor’s journal article or book — to understand them… then I’m increasingly inclined to put your book down, and I will probably not cite you in the future.
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]