[While] the Enlightenment — heterogeneous, contradictory, and complex as its ideas may have been — did gradually come to establish the concept of the self-determined way of life as an effective cultural benchmark in the realms of politics and pedagogy, religion and aesthetics, the economy and everyday practice, it generally tended to supplement this concept with the idea that reason, nature, and the (political) common good would come to provide a “natural” limit to the spaces opened up by the ideal of self-determination and thus a more or less generalizable, socially acceptable way of life and concept of happiness. Over the course of the nineteenth and especially the twentieth century, the demand for self-determination expanded into ever more spheres of life, while the idea that this demand could be substantially or essentially limited by reason, nature, and community became increasingly less plausible and lost much of its binding force. At the same time, social institutions were gradually reshaped to become dependent on anonymous actors. From education to the professions [19], from the supermarket to party democracy, from the religious constitution to the art market to the use of media, subjects capable of acting and making decisions in accordance with individual preferences have become a functional requirement of modern institutions.
— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (London: Polity, 2019), 18–19
A truly stunning passage — nay, demolition job — on the whole historical-critical project from Albert Schweitzer, which deserves and demands to be quoted in full:
For the last ten years [i.e., the first decade of the 1900s] modern historical theology has more and more adapted itself to the needs of the man in the street. More and more, even in the best class of works, it makes use of attractive head-lines as a means of presenting its results in a lively form to the masses. Intoxicated with its own ingenuity in inventing these, it becomes more and more confident in its cause, and has come to believe that the world’s salvation depends in no small measure upon the spreading of its own “assured” results broad-cast among the people. It is time that it should begin to doubt itself, to doubt its “historical” Jesus, to doubt the confidence with which it has looked to its own construction for the moral and religious regeneration of our time. Its Jesus is not alive, however Germanic they may make him.
It was no accident that the chief priest of “German art for German people” found himself at one with the modern theologians and offered them his alliance. Since the ‘sixties [i.e., the 1860s] the critical study of the Life of Jesus in Germany has been unconsciously under the influence of an imposing modern-religious nationalism in art. It has been deflected by it as by an underground magnetic current. It was in vain that a few purely historical investigators uplifted their voices in protest. The process had to work itself out. For historical criticism had become, in the hands of most of those who practised it, a secret struggle to reconcile the Germanic religious spirit with the Spirit of Jesus of Nazareth. It was concerned for the religious interests of the present. Therefore its error had a kind of greatness, it was in fact the greatest thing about it; and the severity with which the pure historian treats it is in proportion to his respect for its spirit. For this German critical study of the Life of Jesus is an essential part of German religion. As of old Jacob wrestled with the angel, so German theology wrestles with Jesus of Nazareth and will not let Him go until he bless it—that is, until He will consent to serve it and will suffer Himself to be drawn by the Germanic spirit into the midst of our time and our civilisation. But when the day breaks, the wrestler must let Him go. He will not cross the ford with us. Jesus of Nazareth will not suffer Himself to be modernised. As an historic figure He refuses to be detached from His own time. He has no answer [311] for the question, “Tell us Thy name in our speech and for our day!” But He does bless those who have wrestled with Him, so that, though they cannot take Him with them, yet, like men who have seen God face to face and received strength in their souls, they go on their way with renewed courage, ready to do battle with the world and its powers.
But the historic Jesus and the Germanic spirit cannot be brought together except by an act of historic violence which in the end injures both religion and history. [Note: !!!!!!!!!] A time will come when our theology, with its pride in its historical character, will get rid of its rationalistic bias. This bias leads it to project back into history what belongs to our own time, the eager struggle of the modern religious spirit with the Spirit of Jesus, and seek in history justification and authority for its beginning. The consequence is that it creates the historical Jesus in its own image, so that it is not the modern spirit influenced by the Spirit of Jesus, but the Jesus of Nazareth constructed by modern historical theology, that is set to work upon our race.
Therefore both the theology and its picture of Jesus are poor and weak. Its Jesus, because He has been measured by the petty standard of the modern man, at variance with himself, not to say of the modern candidate in theology who has made shipwreck; the theologians themselves, because instead of seeking, for themselves and others, how they may best bring the Spirit of Jesus in living power into our world, they keep continually forging new portraits of the historical Jesus, and think they have accomplished something great when they have drawn an Oh! of astonishment from the multitude, such as the crowds of a great city emit on catching sight of a new advertisement in coloured lights.
— Albert Schweitzer (tr. William Montgomery), The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1910), 310–11.
In John 12:41, the narrator of the Fourth Gospel remarks, “Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him.” There is no question that the referent of the pronouns “his” and “him” is Jesus. Similarly there is no ambiguity about the episode in which Isaiah “saw his glory”: it is the vision of Isaiah 6 in which the prophet sees the Lord “high and lifted up.” (The quotation from Isaiah 6 which immediately precedes this verse all but proves this.) John is making a simple exegetical point, with weighty theological ramifications: when Isaiah saw the Lord, the Lord he saw was Jesus, the Logos, the eternal Son, in his eternal heavenly glory.
(John also clearly believes that the “suffering servant” of Isaiah 53 is likewise Jesus; but that is a point upon which to expand another time.)
This helps to clarify what, from the trinitarian perspective of the New Testament (yes, I said it!), is the exact nature of the testamental discontinuity — and continuity. It is not that the Old Testament exclusively reveals the Father as God, while the Son is previously “unknown” as also being God. (A fortiori regarding the Spirit!) Neither, therefore, is it that God was known as One in the Old Covenant, and is now known as Three in the New, and these must somehow be reconciled by a complicated theological grammar. Rather, John’s remark implies that when the One God has been seen and heard and worshipped in the Old Covenant, it is as the eternal Son that He has been seen and heard and worshipped. The Logos is always characteristically the one who makes the invisible God visible — audible, perceptible, thinkable, knowable. (Consider John 1:18: “No one has ever seen God.") There is for John thus, at the divine level, an absolute continuity of both revelation and worship between the covenants. The discontinuity — and therefore the scandal — of the New Covenant is merely (!) that God the eternal Son is revealed and worshipped as a man: “the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.” This is the scandal which is too great for the Pharisees in the passage to accept — “to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”
Relativ-ism, plural-ism, modern-ism, secular-ism — these are agendas, characteristic to the ethos of the present age, which we must resist accommodating or tacitly embracing in our thoughts, plans, and decisions; such resistance depends on carefully cultivating our core commitments and pruning the habits that express those commitments.
Relativ-ity, plural-ity, modern-ity, secular-ity — these are brute facts, descriptive of the reality of the present age, which will provide friction and resistance to our thoughts, plans, and decisions unless we deliberately shape our plans and decisions to them; such shaping depends on carefully observing how these facts work in and on us and our neighbors.
Polanyi has the rationalists’ number, a decade before Foucault et al:
I do not suggest, of course, that those who advocate philosophic doubt as a general solvent of error and a cure for all fanaticism would desire to bring up children without any rational guidance or contemplate any other scheme of universal hebetation. I am only saying that this would be what their principles demand. What they actually want is not expressed but concealed by their declared principles. They want their own beliefs to be taught to children and accepted by everybody, for they are convinced that this would save the world from error and strife. In his Conway Lecture of 1922, republished in 1941, Bertrand Russell revealed this in a single sentence. After condemning both Bolshevism and clericalism as two opposite dogmatic teachings, which should both be combated by philosophic doubt, he sums up by saying: ‘Thus rational doubt alone, if it could be generated, would suffice to introduce the Millennium.’ The author’s intention is clear: he intends to spread certain doubts which he believes to be justified. He does not want us to believe the doctrines of the Catholic Church, which he denies and dislikes, and he also wants us to resist Lenin’s teaching of unbridled revolutionary violence. These disbeliefs are recommended as ‘rational doubts’. Philosophic doubt is thus kept on the leash and prevented from calling in question anything that the [sceptic] believes in, or from approving of any doubt that he does not share. … Since the sceptic does not consider it rational to doubt what he himself believes, the advocacy of ‘rational doubt’ is merely the sceptic’s way of advocating his own beliefs.
— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy, 297
Ultimately, I do want to tell people to please try and chill out, yes. No, I don’t think AI Jesus is about to come and initiate the Rapture, and the desire for that to be true seems to be derived from very naked psychological needs. We live in a mundane world, a world of homework and waiting for the bus and sorting the recyclables and doing the laundry and holding your shirt over your nose when you enter a public bathroom and trying to find a credit card that offers a slightly better points program. It just keeps going, day after day after grinding day. You never get removed from it, never escape it. And yes, there’s transcendence and beauty and fun and satisfaction and growth and meaning, all of it! But you find that all in the mundane, generally; those few who spend their lives in a state of constant stimulation and novelty, well, God bless them. Most of the time they didn’t get there through their choices but through random chance. I’m saying all of this because I think a lot of people spend their time yearning for some great fissure in their lives where there’s a massive and permanent division between the before and the after, and all of this AI stuff is giving rational people an excuse to be irrational. (Of course, this is the number two fantasy behind the great American civic religion, “Someday, I’ll be a celebrity.”)
You have to imagine a life you can live with, where you are, when you are. If you don’t, you’ll never be satisfied. Neither AI nor anything else is coming to save you from the things you don’t like about being a person. The better life you absolutely can build isn’t going to be brought to you by ChatGPT but by your own steady uphill clawing and through careful management of your own expectations. You live here. This is it. That’s what I would tell to everyone out there: this is it. This is it. This is it. You’re never going to hang out with Mr. Data on the Holodeck. I know that, for a lot of people, mundane reality is everything they want to escape. But it could be so much worse.
I’m continuing to be amazed by the depth and prescience of Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge. Here is a sequence of quotations from (really, the bulk of) chapter 8, “The Logic of Affirmation,” section 12, “The Fiduciary Programme”:
The critical movement, which seems to be nearing the end of its course today, was perhaps the most fruitful effort ever sustained by the human mind. The past four or five centuries, which have gradually destroyed or overshadowed the whole medieval cosmos, have enriched us mentally and morally [TC: morally? somewhat dubious] to an extent unrivalled by any period of similar duration. But its incandescence had fed on the combustion of the Christian heritage in the oxygen of Greek rationalism, and when this fuel was exhausted the critical framework itself burnt away. [pp. 265–66]
We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of the idiom and of a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded community: such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely for our mastery of things. No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework.[p. 266]
Our mind lives in action, and any attempt to specify its presuppositions produces a set of axioms which cannot tell us why we should accept them. Science exists only to the extent to which there lives a passion for its beauty, a beauty believed to be universal and eternal. Yet we know also that our own sense of this beauty is uncertain, its full appreciation being limited to a handful of adepts, and its transmission to posterity insecure. Beliefs held by so few and so precariously are not indubitable in any empirical sense. Our basic beliefs are indubitable only in the sense that we believe them to be so. Otherwise they are not even beliefs, but merely somebody’s states of mind. [p. 267]
[We] can voice our ultimate convictions only from within our convictions—from within the whole system of acceptances that are logically prior to any particular assertion of our own, prior to the holding of any piece of knowledge. If an ultimate logical level is to be attained and made explicit, this must be a declaration of my personal beliefs… An example of a logically consistent exposition of fundamental beliefs is St. Augustine’s Confessions. Its first ten books contain an account of the period before his conversion and of his struggle for the faith he was yet lacking. Yet the whole of this process is interpreted by him from the point of view which he reached after his conversion. He seems to acknowledge that you cannot expose an error by interpreting it from the premisses which lead to it, but only from premisses which are believed to be true. His maxim nisi credideritis non intelligitis [“unless ye believe, ye shall not understand”] expresses this logical requirement. It says, as I understand it, that the process of examining any topic is both an exploration of the topic, and an exegesis of our fundamental beliefs in the light of which we approach it; a dialectical combination of exploration and exegesis. Our fundamental beliefs are continuously reconsidered in the course of such a process, but only within the scope of their own basic premises. [p. 267]
[The] greatly increased critical powers of man… have endowed our mind with a capacity for self-transcendence of which we can never again divest ourselves. We have plucked from the Tree a second apple which has for ever imperilled [sic] our knowledge of Good and Evil, and we must learn to know these qualities henceforth in the blinding light of our new analytical powers. Humanity has been deprived a second time of its innocence, and driven out of another garden which was, at any rate, a Fool’s Paradise. Innocently, we had trusted that we could be relieved of all personal responsibility for our beliefs by objective criteria of validity—and our own critical powers have shattered this hope. Struck by our sudden nakedness, we may try to brazen it out by flaunting it in a profession of nihilism. But modern man’s immorality is unstable. Presently his moral passions reassert themselves in objectivist disguise and the scientistic Minotaur is born. The alternative to this, which I am seeking to establish here, is to restore to us once more the power for the deliberate holding of unproven beliefs. We should be able to profess now knowingly and openly those beliefs which could be tacitly taken for granted in the days before modern philosophic criticism reached its present incisiveness. Such powers may appear dangerous. But a dogmatic orthodoxy can be kept in check both internally and externally, while a creed inverted into a science is both blind and deceptive. [p. 268]
Recall: this work was written at the same time as Gadamer’s Truth and Method and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and predates by over two decades MacIntyre’s trilogy that runs from After Virtue through Whose Justice? Which Rationality? to Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Those works, of course, have immense value in their own right (though I am beginning to suspect that Kuhn ought to be read as basically a special case of Polanyi). Yet it is remarkable how many of their core insights are anticipated here and elsewhere. MacIntyre’s “there is no rationality that is not of some tradition”? Here it is. Gadamer’s “the Enlightenment instilled an unjustified prejudice against prejudices”? Bingo. Kuhn’s recognition of regnant scientific “paradigms” that depend largely on the standards of scientific satisfaction in a given period, rather than the totality of available evidence? Ding, ding, ding. It’s all in here, folks, at least in highly compressed form.
Of course, Polanyi’s prose — which I am finding far slower even than MacIntyre’s — is a real hindrance to his reception. (The above quotations, some of which are remarkably snappy, are not exactly representative!) But in my own fields of theology and biblical studies, I cannot help thinking that discussions of method and comparison of different works which do not attend to these core insights amount only to so many exercises in wheel-spinning. Such exercises, at best, may result in a good workout — but at the end you are still sitting in the same place you were, with a great deal of sweat and exhaustion but no forward progress to show for it. Is forward progress then possible? That is the burden of the final chapters of Personal Knowledge.
The key question for critics of “theological interpretation of Scripture”: Does “non-theological interpretation” of Scripture exist? It is normally claimed that the historical-critical mode of interpretation, in opposition to various religiously motivated modes, provides a set of “scientific” tools to establish the original meaning of the text in question (or the meaning now hidden underneath numerous redactional layers), so as to lay a surer foundation for future reflection upon the text. (Set aside, for a moment, the recognition that rather than producing a unified, scientific account of the Bible’s meaning and origins, the historical-critical mode has provided only a far more fragmented and scrambled picture, or rather set of pictures, than existed in the supposedly pre-critical age.) Essential to this mode is the assertion (which, at a certain level, I accept without controversy) that the history of a text’s, or idea’s, development and effects is absolutely critical to understanding its meaning. Now turn this question to the historical-critical mode itself. It has a history, and a distinctly theological history at that. Its developers and proponents had beliefs, complex beliefs indeed, about God, the Church, the Bible, and the like — living when and where they did, how could they not? Those beliefs affected their work, as their work affected their beliefs, in a constant hermeneutical spiral, affecting the directions given to their intellectual passions and the sorts of resolutions they found satisfying — how could they not? Can the historical-critical mode — or any mode of interpretation of a text which confronts one with questions about God (and is there any text which does not?) — really then be called “non-theological”?
I’m quite enjoying the early pages of (the first volume of) Tom Greggs’ Dogmatic Ecclesiology. But unfortunately he has not managed to transcend the post-Barthian theologian’s penchant for the occasional syntactical monstrosity:
But simultaneously, we must recognize that from the side of the created history and time which God has put in place, there is no God aside from the God who is known within the spatiotemporal boundedness of creation—no God aside from the God of the church. God as God self-determines Godself for creation is God in God’s eternal being, known in God’s revelation to the life of the church. This is not because of an overemphasis on the created order over against the sheer magnificent plenitude of God’s being, but because, in the sheer magnificent plenitude of God’s being, God has determined Godself for all eternity to be for creation and to be the God who makes Godself known as being pro nobis for the world by being pro nos within God’s community of the church.
Oof. I mean, it’s comprehensible, if you read it a few times. But should we need to? Perhaps it is fitting that attempts to say meaningful things about the inner life of the Holy Trinity tend to stretch human language beyond not only its metaphorical but also its syntactical capabilities.
(And while there — this is the exact sort of sentence that convinced me, when starting grad school, that capitalizing grammatically masculine pronouns for the Deity was a far preferable solution than the “Godself” locution.)
No knock on Greggs’ book. I’m sure there’s not a modern theologian who has avoided this problem. But it’s representative.
A great analysis by Polanyi of the cultural structure that maintains (or at least maintained) Marxism:
This is the characteristic structure of what I shall call a dynamo-objective coupling. Alleged scientific assertions, which are accepted as such because they satisfy moral passions, will excite these passions further, and thus lend increased convincing power to the scientific affirmations in question—and so on, indefinitely. Moreover, such a dynamo-objective coupling is also potent in its own defence. Any criticism of its scientific part is rebutted by the moral passions behind it, while any moral objections to it are coldly brushed aside by invoking the inexorable verdict of its scientific findings. Each of the two components, the dynamic and the objective, takes it in turn to draw attention away from the other when it is under attack.
We can see that this structure underlies also a logical fallacy exposed by the academic critics of Marxism, and explains why the fallacy survives its exposure. The critics say that no political programme can be derived from the Marxian prediction of the inevitable destruction of Capitalism at the hands of the proletariat. For it is senseless to enlist fighters for a battle which is said to be already decided; while if the battle is not yet decided, you cannot predict its issue. But within a dynamo-objective coupling, the logical objection against using a historical prediction as an appeal to fight for the certain outcome of history no longer arises. For the prediction is accepted only because we believe that the Socialist cause is just; and this implies that Socialist action is right. The prediction implies therefore a call to action.
— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy, 230–31
… I suggest that an ecclesiology of brokenness is the only “right” ecclesiology for our pluralistic time, when the strengths of other Christian communions and the weaknesses of our own no longer can be ignored. The way toward Christian unity, then, may be, not through defending the uniqueness of our own particular strands of the Christian tapestry, but rather through admitting their limitations and seeking theological solutions from threads other than our own.
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.
Three incredibly important paragraphs from Polanyi:
Every acceptance of authority is qualified by some measure of reaction to it or even against it. Submission to a consensus is always accompanied to some extent by the imposition of one’s views on the consensus to which we submit. Every time we use a word in speaking and writing we both comply with usage and at the same time somewhat modify the existing usage; every time I select a programme on the radio I modify a little the balance of current cultural valuations; even when I make my purchase at current prices I slightly modify the whole price system. Indeed, whenever I submit to a current consensus, I inevitably modify its teaching; for I submit to what I myself think it teaches and by joining the consensus on these terms I affect its content. On the other hand, even the sharpest dissent still operates by partial submission to an existing consensus: for the revolutionary must speak in terms that people can understand. Moreover, every dissenter is a teacher. The figures of Antigone and of the Socrates of the Apology are monuments of the dissenter as law-giver. So are also the prophets of the Old Testament—and so is a Luther, or a Calvin. All modern revolutionaries since the Jacobins demonstrate likewise that dissent does not seek to abolish public authority, but to claim it for itself.
Admittedly, submission to authority is in general less deliberately assertive than is an act of dissent. But not always. St. Augustine’s struggle for belief in revelation was much more dynamic and original than is the rejection of revelation by a religiously brought up young man today. In any case, at every step of the process by which we are brought up and continue to participate in an established consensus, we exercise some measure of choice between different degrees of conformity and dissent, and either of these choices may mean a more passive or a more assertive reaction.
We should realize at the same time how inevitable, and how unceasing and comprehensive are such accreditive decisions. I cannot speak of a scientific fact, of a word, of a poem or a boxing champion; of last week’s murder or the Queen of England; of money or music or the fashion in hats, of what is just or unjust, trivial, amusing, boring or scandalous, without implying a reference to a consensus by which these matters are acknowledged—or denied to be—what I declare them to be. I must continually endorse the existing consensus or dissent from it to some degree, and in either case I express what I believe the consensus ought to be in respect to whatever I speak of. The present text, in which I have described in my own way the interaction of every utterance with the public consensus, is no exception to what I have said in the text about utterances of this kind. Throughout this book I am affirming my own beliefs, and more particularly so when I insist, as I do here, that such personal affirmations and choices are inescapable, and, when I argue, as I shall do, that this is all that can be required of me.
— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, 208–09
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 was one of the central problems confronting all the foreign policy executives [in 1914] (and those who try to understand them today): the ‘national interest’ was not an objective imperative pressing in on government from the world outside, but the projection of particular interests within the political elite itself.”
— Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, 190
Two notes, with no pretense to originality, from my most recent reread of The Lord of the Rings (probably the 15th lifetime or something like that):
One of the many things that elevates Tolkien’s trilogy to true greatness is how deep and subtle an exploration it offers of political philosophy/theology. What is the ideal king like? What is the good, if any, of political violence? How is power to be used? What is true peace? What does a flourishing society look like? What responsibilities do we have to the past — and the future? What is true greatness, and what responsibility do the great have to the humble? Tolkien addresses all these questions, and more: sometimes by way of explicit statement (usually in the mouth of Gandalf, Aragorn, Elrond, or Faramir); sometimes less directly but still explicitly spelled out in the course of events (the tragedy of Boromir, or the Scouring of the Shire); sometimes more by the narrator’s showing than telling (the spiritual dimension of the conflict, or the changes in narrative voice and register). One wonderful narrative example: the transformation of Merry and Pippin through their great deeds and their sufferings (and the Ent-draughts), and the great authority and “lordliness” they possess on returning to the Shire — yet without losing their deep love for and connection to the Shire and its people, who do not really understand what they have survived and done.
The conflict in The Lord of the Rings is more spiritual than it is material. Of course there is much heroic violence and the clashing of great armies and many glorious deeds and so forth; but Tolkien perceives, and shows, that his heroes and armies depend more on their hope and the strength of their spirit than on their bodies and their arms, and that before and after any physical blow is struck the chief weapon of the Dark Lord and his servants is fear and despair. The powerful weapons and tokens that appear in the story — Aragorn’s sword Andúril, Galadriel’s star-glass — all work by possessing and exerting a spiritual influence to bring hope and courage in dark places. Most of all, the One Ring is no mere MacGuffin, but it is a malevolent agent in the plot: drawing the allies of Mordor to harass and hunt down the Ring-bearer, while tempting the Ring-bearer and his companions with delusions of grandeur and unearned power — yet ultimately the Ring’s malicious hold over the wills of both Frodo and Gollum is its own and its true master’s undoing. The strength of will and spirit of any character is always his or her most important and relevant feature to the plot, before the ability to perform any particular deed. So the great ones — Gandalf, Aragorn, Galadriel, and Faramir — all pass the test by refusing to take the One Ring from its humble yet rightful bearer, so enabling the only bearers who could creep undetected into Mordor to take the Ring to the Mountain of Fire. Aragorn has the strength of will to wrestle with Sauron in the palantír of Orthanc, so inducing him to strike Gondor before he is fully ready. Sam fights off the Ring’s temptation on the fences of Mordor by love for his master and the characteristically hobbitish practical humility (a small garden at home is quite enough for him to manage!). The spiritual dimension of the conflict is more important to its progression than the material. A lesson for us all.
‘Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.’
— Gandalf the White, in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King: being the Third Part of the Lord of the Rings, 1150
‘Dear me! We Tooks and Brandybucks, we can’t live long on the heights.’
‘No,’ said Merry. ‘I can’t. Not yet, at any rate. But at least, Pippin, we can now see them, and honour them. It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose: you must start somewhere and have some roots, and the soil of the Shire is deep. Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not. I am glad that I know about them, a little.’
— Peregrin Took and Meriadoc Brandybuck, in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King: being the Third Part of the Lord of the Rings, 1139
We should also remember that the rules of induction have lent their support throughout the ages to beliefs that are contrary to those of science. Astrology has been sustained for 3000 years by empirical evidence confirming the predictions of horoscopes. This represents the longest chain of historically known empirical generalizations. For many prehistoric centuries the theories embodied in magic and witchcraft appeared to be strikingly confirmed by events in the eyes of those who believed in magic and witchcraft. Lecky rightly points out that the destruction of belief in witchcraft during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was achieved in the face of an overwhelming, and still rapidly growing, body of evidence for its reality. Those who denied that witches existed did not attempt to explain this evidence at all, but successfully urged that it be disregarded. Glanvill, who was one of the founders of the Royal Society, not unreasonably denounced this method as unscientific, on the ground of the professed empiricism of contemporary science. Some of the unexplained evidence for witchcraft was indeed buried for good, and only struggled painfully to light two centuries later when it was eventually recognized as the manifestation of hypnotic powers.
— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy, 168
“The Elves may fear the Dark Lord, and they may fly before him, but never again will they listen to him or serve him. And here in Rivendell there live still some of his chief foes: the Elven-wise, lords of the Eldar from beyond the furthest seas. They do not fear the Ringwraiths, for those who have dwelt in the Blessed Realm live at once in both worlds, and against both the Seen and the Unseen they have great power.'
‘I thought that I saw a white figure that shone and did not grow dim like the others. Was that Glorfindel then?'
‘Yes, you saw him for a moment as he is upon the other side: one of the mighty of the Firstborn.’
— Gandalf and Frodo in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, 290
“[Dynamic] relationships are not only more important than the entities related, but… ontologically prior to them — so that what we call ‘things’ arise out of the web of interconnectedness, not the web out of the things.”
— Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 1224