Though it now seems like a fairly obvious point, probably already made somewhere by St. Augustine or the like, it has never before today struck me what is the nature of the basic contrast between the false seed of Adam, represented by Cain and his son Enoch, and the true seed, represented by Seth and his son Enosh.

Cain, cast away from the gate of Paradise and alienated from the ground, goes off and establishes a city — which he names for his son, linking the future of his line metaphorically and literally to human civilization (which begets agriculture, technology, and culture). Enoch, it is worth noting, means something like “dedicated” or “disciplined.” As a result of Cainite man’s alienation from the world through sin, he dedicates himself — not unfruitfully, in a way — to the civilizing practices of building, making, growing, and so forth, that will “discipline” the world towards his ends. Nevertheless, since these attempts at civilization began in Cain seeking to escape the consequences of his brother’s murder, they will inevitably tend towards and end in Lamech’s celebration of a young man’s murder.

But Seth stays, it seems, with his father and mother at the gates of Paradise, and continues to worship the true Creator rather than dedicating himself to overcoming creatureliness. And this is just what Enosh means: man, as frail and weak, mortal, yet relationally bound. Sethite man “remembers that he is dust” and “calls on the name of the Lord” — the only name that can deliver from death.

Evangelical theology is trapped in a perpetual struggle between its two uneasily coexisting traditions: biblical theology and systematic theology. The dispute is always the same. It never ceases, never disappears, never makes real progress on genuinely reconciling the traditions, but continues forever. The players come and go, the ostensible matter of controversy shifts, but the arguments never change. This is happening, in one form, right now with John Mark Comer and the New Calvinists; it happened in the last decade with the debate over the Gospel between “Team King Jesus” and “Team Gospel Coalition”; it happened in the decade before that with N. T. Wright and John Piper on justification (funny how the New Calvinists keep popping up here!); and so forth ad infinitum. Squint a bit, and even the early stages of the Reformation outline the same form of controversy: Luther the doctor of Old Testament, Zwingli the advocate of expository preaching, and so forth for the “Bible” side, and Eck, Cajetan, various Popes, et al for the “theology” side. (My personal favorite example of this is the pair of books published by IVP Academic a few years ago, authored respectively by Hans Boersma and Scot McKnight: Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew and Five Things Biblical Scholars Wish Theologians Knew.)

Here is the general form of the controversy. Note that whenever it wells up and spills over, it can do so under the impulse of either tradition, but really identifying such responsibility is difficult; it is just one perpetual-motion controversy, and so the whole thing (at least when viewed as neutrally as possible) is a chicken and egg problem. However, let us suppose it is (re)triggered by the Bible side:

1. A theologian specializing in Biblical interpretation (which is all that a “biblical scholar” really is) publishes some argument, taking as his (and it is, as we know, usually a he) point of polemical departure some commonly taken-for-granted bit of doctrina, especially as it is popularly preached rather than scholastically described: for example (to pick, almost at random, from N. T. Wright), the gospel is about you “getting saved” so that you will “go to heaven when you die.” This bit of (again, popularly expressed) teaching is then found to be a remarkably inadequate representation of the biblical texts usually adduced to support it: so John 3, Romans 3–8, Revelation 21–22, and so forth actually testify that “salvation” and “eternal life” have a present dimension and reference, and the future hope is primarily for heaven “coming down to earth,” not us escaping earth and going “up to heaven”: not “life after death” so much as, in Wright’s (brilliant) phrase, “life after life after death.” Often the popular misrepresentation is straightforwardly taken to be the responsibility of some major, and beloved, historical-theological figure in the tradition: Augustine, Luther, and Calvin are popular choices here. (Sometimes it is not the (re)originator of the controversy who does this, but some less-cautious disciple.)
2. These warning shots arouse the systematic theologians from their dogmatic slumbers (noodling away over the finer points of Jonathan Edwards’ doctrine of the beatific vision, or Kuyper’s theology of church offices, or whatever), and they determine to return fire. The more historically minded pursue lines of historical critique: the representation of Augustine (or whomever) is in fact a misrepresentation, and Augustine was far more careful than he is generally criticized as being. What we most need today, in fact, is not less Augustinianism, but more Augustinian Augustinianism! Or: the biblical theologian is simply and naïvely repristinating a historical error (e.g., the Hellenization thesis) which has been weighed, measured, and found wanting. The more philosophically minded, similarly, take the concepts deployed (again, simply and naïvely) by the biblical theologian and subject them to philosophical-theological critique: this is (or depends upon) univocity repristinated, or Social Trinitarianism uncritically retrieved, or Socinianism resurgent. Sometimes this sort of thing has the genuinely salutary effect of bringing the various parties’ philosophical and theological presuppositions directly into view. Often it reads more like an attempt to overwhelm the opponent with force of Weighty Words.
3. Now the biblical theologians sharpen their exegetical tools to reply. There are a number of forking paths here, but they mostly consist of the same basic move: Sure, they say, you may be right about what Augustine said: but was Augustine right about what the Bible said? The systematicians are far too concerned with the neatness of their systems, far too quick to find dogmatic concepts — which took centuries to develop — in the text of the Bible itself. Or they are far too quick to occlude (here enters a historical-theological presupposition) what was imaginable, and therefore mean-able, to the author of a particular book in favor of the Church’s later consensus about what that book must really have meant: the conceptual equivalent of “illegitimate totality transfer” in semantics. This is typically where, in New Testament, references to “Second Temple Jewish” and, in Old Testament, references to “Bronze Age Israelite” thought occur: no Second Temple Jewish reader had such and such a conceptual category as to have been able to comprehend what Augustine later argued, and likewise Augustine had lost some key conceptual categories possessed by a Second Temple Jew. You know, the Hellenization thesis may be discredited in certain areas, but come on, you’re really telling me that by transposing the Biblical subject matter into the language of neo-Platonism there was not an iota, not a jot that passed from the Law’s original meaning? Are we even evangelicals anymore (rather than — horror of horrors! — Roman Catholics) if we are willing to prioritize a later theological development over what the Bible says?
4. The systematicians, of course, cannot abide this sort of suggestion. Naïve (you keep using that word) historicism! is the charge flung at the biblical theologians. You are operating from theological presuppositions just as much as we are, but the difference is a) you don’t know what yours are, whereas we do, and b) yours are wrong. Sometimes there is a historical doubling down, a sort of fighting the historicizing fire with fire: Don’t you know that your same argument about this same text was made in, say, the third century by [checks notes] Paul of Samosata? To reject Paulianist heresy, we must also reject your argument. Or: You have, damningly, overlooked a most critical distinction made in the 17th century by Francis Turretin — which convincingly vindicates our interpretation, and demolishes yours. The more thoughtful and careful systematicians, at this point, are actually usually willing to own that yes, they are willing to prioritize a later theological development (though of course for evangelicals it is that of, say, Martin Luther and not the Council of Trent, for… reasons!) because they believe it more effectively preserves some essential truth taught in the Bible — or which itself must be preserved to in turn preserve some essential truth taught in the Bible.
5. And so on, and so forth, unto the ages of ages. Eventually an individual controversy will run out of steam and settle back down under the surface. But never for long. All this has happened before, and it will all happen again.

This process — which I describe above with great love for both sides, and with tongue firmly in cheek — is a kind of dialectical expression of the basic aporia of the evangelical tradition. Belonging myself, however uneasily, to a stream of that tradition, I believe and affirm unhesitatingly every word of what follows in this paragraph, and thus belong to the realm and feel the force of the aporia. The Bible possesses a unique and singular authority, an authority distinct from and superior to any human tradition. What it speaks to us shares fully in the eternal authority of the Triune God, of Whom it testifies singularly and authoritatively and Who is singularly and authoritatively God (the Shema means more, but not less, than this). It is therefore of supreme importance to understand and obey what it is speaking. However, there is no non-traditioned, perfectly rational position from which any human can interpret the totality of what it is speaking. Add to this that the content and message of the tradition, as we now express it, is derivative from but not identical to the content and message of the Bible: it is, unavoidably, at a minimum that content and message — which was originally imparted in one moment of history — interpreted and therefore translated into a new moment of history. This renders its traditioned re-presentation remarkably contingent when viewed historically, even as such tradition is simultaneously inescapable and necessary. It is only the (theological) confession of Divine Providence which guards for us this sheer contingency from tipping into simple invalidity.

Thus, the Bible’s authority seems to be not just an article of faith but the greatest article of faith, the article of faith on which all other articles of faith depend — but simultaneously the more it becomes an article of faith, the less contact it seems to have with not only reality as historically experienced but also its own text and matter. Thence the divide between biblical and systematic theologians. The biblical theologians protest when the systematicians take the text of the Bible beyond what it presents itself to us as being; the systematic theologians protest when the biblicists set the Bible over against the articles of faith which depend upon it, which it has generated, and are in turn what we live. This dynamic is constantly re-presenting itself at the level of the matter under controversy. Take the doctrine of God. The more that, for instance, under the influence of philosophical criticism, God becomes absolutely transcendent, unqualifiedly impassible, and so forth, the less contact this God-concept seems to have with the God represented in the narratives of Scripture, which naturally invites rebuke — but equally a God-concept simply transposed out of the narratives of Scripture invites this philosophical criticism: if God were not absolutely transcendent and unqualifiedly impassible, could the sorts of exalted things Scripture says (and we are invited to say) about His faithfulness and justice and so on really be maintained?

“As ministers,” Barth remarks in one of his great early essays, “we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God.” Put differently: we must re-present the Bible, but can we — and may we? Everyone wants to live “the religion of the Bible,” but nobody can live “the religion of the Bible” in the strictest sense of the word, because the Bible does not so much present as generate a “religion” which is both greater and lesser than itself. Nobody wants to “go beyond what is written” — but nobody can truly “not go beyond what is written,” because as soon as one asks the question “what is written?” it inevitably comes coupled with the question “how do you read it?” Both parties in the debates are permanently trapped in this dialectic. Everyone involved knows all this, at a more or less tacit level. The debates are almost entered into with a sigh of dismayed recognition, as a performance that must be undertaken yet whose non-outcome is fully known and expected. At times they seem to be an exercise in deflecting our attention from this basic aporia: like the head of Medusa, it cannot be looked at directly, hence it turn us to stone (or, yet worse, to Rome). No new Aquinas or Calvin or Barth has come along, someone who can embody both traditions so persuasively and definitively as to reconcile them and generate a new synthetic tradition of evangelical theology. Is such a reconciliation possible? Where could such a figure come from? Who is sufficient for these things?

And how, then, shall we live? For we must, we cannot but, go on with living even as we theologize, and if our theology — in all its detail and in its grand sweep — has nothing really to do with our living (if, that is, such a thing is even possible) then it is a grand experiment in foolishness, in “wise words taught by mere human wisdom.” The controversy wells up again, and again, and again because all parties recognize that in it the form of our life before God is somehow at stake. There is a way (that is, The Way) and it must be walked in. I am tempted to conclude here on a note of despair for the insolubility of this problem, and yet I cannot despair entirely. For, low and gentle, yet firm, I hear again the voice of The Way, cutting through the noise of the controversies and of my own mind, speaking the simplest words of all, inviting, beckoning, pleading: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

For this reason I do not and cannot ultimately choose a “side” in these theological controversies. Rather, wherever I encounter them — on either side — I will tend to throw in my lot with those who seek to speak and live the words of The Way after Him. I will trust in His words — His Word — to me, because there is no deeper metaphysical or ontological substrate than this trust. That is why any of us have ended up in these controversies to begin with, after all: Before we ever wrestled with the concept of history, or the hermeneutics of Biblical narrative, or the concept of God, we heard the Voice of the Way and found ourselves irresistibly drawn towards Him, found ourselves convinced that He is the Truth and the Life, came to know Him as the pearl of great value to have which it is worth selling all. And that is where we will still be after the controversies cease, when we will see no longer as in a mirror dimly but face to face.

Here I would like to advance the admittedly speculative hypothesis that the peculiar quality of music lies in its ability to produce a highly specific form of relating to the world, one in which our relationship to the world as a whole becomes tangible and thus can be both modulated and modified. Music in a way negotiates the quality of relation itself, whereas languages and sign systems can only ever thematize one particular relationship to or segment of the world at a time… [Listening] to music has a different orientation than seeing, grasping, or feeling. The experience of music suspends the division between self and world, transforming it in a way into a pure relationship. Music is the rhythms, sounds, melodies, and tones between self and world, even if these of course have their source in the social world and the world of things. The universe of sound consists in its ability to express or generate all manner of different and differently nuanced relationships: strife, loneliness, desolation, resentment, alienation, and tension, as well as yearning, refuge, security, love, responsivity. This pure relational quality adheres to music in all of its manifestations, high culture as well as pop culture, and allows us to comprehend how it is that music and dance have always been so closely linked. …

[95] Only from this perspective can we understand how, on the one hand, music possesses the power to change the way we are situated in the world (our “attunement”), while, on the other hand, we crave different kinds of music depending on our relationship to the world at a certain moment. Even (and especially) music that expresses sadness, melancholy, hopelessness, or strife is capable of moving us, because we are able to experience it as resonating with our own sadness, melancholy, or strife, i.e. with our own relationships to the world. We experience being moved by such sounds as something positive (even and especially when we are brought to tears) and not at all as something that itself makes us depressed. To the contrary, it is when we are no longer touched, moved, or gripped by music that we experience alienation or, in extreme cases, depression, as it is then that we experience the world as mute, even as it is still so loud. …

If my contention is correct that music negotiates the quality of relation (to the world) itself, then we can begin to understand the eminently important function that it is capable of fulfilling in modern society. Music affirms and potentially corrects, moderates, and modifies our relation to the world, repeatedly re-establishing it as the “ur-relationship” from which subject and world origi-nate… Seen from this perspective, the “musicalization” of the world since the twentieth century seems to be an almost inevitable correlate (because complementary in its effects) to the growing reification of our two-sided bodily relationship to the world[.]

— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (London: Polity, 2019), 94–95

[Our] work is not done simply by distinguishing between good resonance and bad alienation. Rather, it is here that our conceptual problems begin. First, it is possible to identify experiences that exhibit characteristics of “negative” resonance, either because they are directly harmful to subjects or because they have normatively undesirable or even disastrous “side-effects.” Second, the longing for total and lasting resonance with the world itself turns out to be a subjectively pathological and in political terms potentially totalitarian tendency. Third (and relat-edly), we shall see that forms and phases of alienation are not only unavoidable, but also required for the subsequent development of resonant relationships. It will, moreover, prove necessary to conceptually differentiate between brief, often intense moments of resonant experience and lasting resonant relationships, which are necessary to provide a stable and reliable basis for such repeatable experiences.

— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, 39

Eighteenth-century man was the man who could no longer remain ignorant of the significance of the fact that Copernicus and Galileo were right, that this vast and rich earth of his, the theatre of his deeds was not the centre of the universe, but a grain of dust amid countless others in this universe, and who clearly saw the consequences of all this. What did this really apocalyptic revolution in his picture of the universe mean for man? An unprecedented and boundless humiliation of man? No, said the man of the eighteenth century, who was not the first to gain this knowledge, but certainly the first to realize it fully and completely; no, man is all the greater for this, man is in the centre of all things, in a quite different sense, too, for he was able to discover this revolutionary truth by his own resources and to think it abstractly, again to consider and penetrate a world which had expanded overnight into infinity—and without anything else having changed, without his having to pay for it in any [24] way: clearly now the world was even more and properly so his world! It is paradoxical and yet it is a fact that the answer to his humiliation was those philosophical systems of rationalism, empiricism and scepticism which made men even more self-confident. The geocentric picture of the universe was replaced as a matter of course by the anthropocentric.

— Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History, 23–24

Might take this down later…

———

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Donald Trump, especially at this point in his political career, is a turnout candidate par excellence.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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 catena of quotations from Schweitzer’s elegant concluding chapter — whatever one makes of his own historical portrait of Jesus, which is the complementary strand in his thought to the below (indeed the number of ellipses etc. indicates that the two are twisted together in this chapter like a double helix), it is very hard to deny the force and incision of this polemic against the projection-as-historicization of Jesus:

Whatever the ultimate solution may be, the historical Jesus of whom the criticism of the future, taking as its starting-point the problems which have been recognized and admitted, will draw the portrait, can never render modern theology the services which it claimed from its own half-historical, half-modern, Jesus. He will be a Jesus, who was Messiah, and lived as such, either on the ground of a literary fiction of the earliest Evangelist, or on the ground of a purely eschatological Messianic conception. In either case, He will not be a Jesus Christ to whom the [397] religion of the present can ascribe, according to its long-cherished custom, its own thoughts and ideas, as it did with the Jesus of its own making. …

The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own. What surprised and dismayed the theology of the last forty years was that, despite all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep Him in our time, but had to let Him go. He returned to His own time, not owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position. …

[398] We modern theologians are too proud of our historical method, too proud of our historical Jesus, too confident in our belief in the spiritual gains which our historical theology can bring to the world. The thought that we could build up by the increase of historical knowledge a new and vigorous Christianity and set free new spiritual forces, rules us like a fixed idea, and prevents us from seeing that the task which we have grappled with and in some measure discharged is only one of the intellectual preliminaries of the great religious task. We thought that it was for us to lead our time by a roundabout way through the historical Jesus, as we understood Him, in order to bring it to the Jesus who is a spiritual power in the present. This roundabout way has now been closed by genuine history.

There was a danger of our thrusting ourselves between men and the Gospels, and refusing to leave the individual man alone with the sayings of Jesus. There was a danger that we should offer them a Jesus who was too small, because we had forced Him into conformity with our human standards and human psychology. To see that, one need only read the Lives of Jesus written since the ‘sixties [1860s], and notice what they have made of the great imperious sayings of the Lord, how they have weakened down His imperative world-contemning [sic] demands upon individuals, that He might not come into conflict with our ethical ideals, and might tune His denial of the world to our acceptance of it. Many of the greatest sayings are found lying in a corner like explosive shells from which the charges have been removed. No small portion of elemental religious power needed to be drawn off from His sayings to prevent them from conflicting with our system of religious world-acceptance. We have made Jesus hold another language with our time from that which He really held.

In the process we ourselves have been enfeebled, and have robbed our own thoughts of their vigour in order to project them back into history and make them speak to us out of the past. It is nothing less than a misfortune for modern theology that it mixes history with everything and ends by being proud of the skill with which it finds its own thoughts—even to its beggarly pseudo-[399]metaphysic with which it has banished genuine speculative metaphysic from the sphere of religion—in Jesus, and represents Him as expressing them. …

[400] Because it is thus preoccupied with the general, the universal, modern theology is determined to find its world-accepting ethic in the teaching of Jesus. Therein lies its weakness. The world affirms itself automatically; the modern spirit cannot but affirm it. But why on that account abolish the conflict between modern life, with the world-affirming spirit which inspires it as a whole, and the world-negating spirit of Jesus? Why spare the spirit of the individual man its appointed task of fighting its way through the world-negation of Jesus, of contending with Him at every step over the value of material and intellectual goods—a conflict in which it may never rest? For the general, for the institutions of society, the rule is: affirmation of the world, in conscious opposition to the view of Jesus, on the ground that the world has affirmed itself! This general affirmation of the world, however, if it is to be Christian, must in the individual spirit be Christianised and transfigured by the personal rejection of the world which is preached in the sayings of Jesus. It is only by means of the tension thus set up that religious energy can be communicated to our time. There [401] was a danger that modern theology, for the sake of peace, would deny the world-negation in the sayings of Jesus, with which Protestantism was out of sympathy, and thus unstring the bow and make Protestantism a mere sociological instead of a religious force. There was perhaps also a danger of inward insincerity, in the fact that it refused to admit to itself and others that it maintained its affirmation of the world in opposition to the sayings of Jesus, simply because it could not do otherwise. For that reason it is a good thing that the true historical Jesus should overthrow the modern Jesus, should rise up against the modern spirit and send upon earth, not peace, but a sword.

— 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), 396–401.

The dispute arises in part because there are really two types of continents: Those recognized by cultures around the world, and those recognized by geologists. Cultures can define a continent any way they want, while geologists have to use a definition. And geological research in recent years has made defining continental boundaries less simple than it might have once seemed as researchers find evidence of unexpected continental material.

From an amusing NYT Science article entitled “How Many Continents Are There? You May Not Like the Answers.” Of course, the obvious Polanyian question is — are geologists not a culture?

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

[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