Agnology - a study in human ignorance

Hilarious 1993 essay by N.T. Wright on a "scholarly" interpretation of the Gospel of Thomas (thanks to Matt Colvin):

As Michelle pondered this, she was reminded of Winnie-the-Pooh who, in his search for Woozles, went round and round the same clump trees following his own footprints in the snow, and using the extra sets of tracks, each time round, as evidence that the quarry was more real and numerous than before. How did it go? Early Thomas and Early Q give a ‘sapiental’ portrait of Jesus the Cynic or Jesus the early Gnostic; these are the earliest sources, therefore that’s what Jesus probably was probably like. Once round the trees. Why are Early Thomas and Early Q early? Because they contain no apocalyptic and are sapiental, or Cynic, or Gnostic. Twice round the trees. Why is the absence of apocalyptic a sign of earliness? Because Jesus and the earliest church weren’t into that stuff. Three times round the trees. How do we know Jesus and the earliest Church weren’t into that stuff? Because of Early Thomas and Early Q. As Michelle thought of the ever-increasing footprints in the hermeneutical snow, she didn’t exactly feel that the circle was vicious. That wasn’t a nice thing to think about one’s implied author. She did, however, have an uncomfortable feeling that the circle was shy: that is to say, that any virtue it might possess remained well hidden behind a thick veil of hermeneutical modesty.

After reading a couple of Oliver O'Donovan's works, my current to-read list includes:

Man and the State
by Jacques Maritain

Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ
by William T. Cavanaugh

Theopolitical Imagination
by William Cavanaugh

The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology
edited by William Cavanaugh

Theology and the Political: The New Debate
edited by Creston Davis and John Milbank

After Christendom? How the Church Is to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas
by Stanley Hauerwas

This article in NY magazine reminds me very much of what Walker Percy had to say about postmodern sexuality: contrary to all appearances, the pervasive porn and open display of unbridled lust are actually a myth which hides the fact that our culture's sexual desire is fading (Ecc. 12:5). Sex has become a product and hobby; it's not desired so much as bought. (Thanks to the the Hicks brothers.)

I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans and T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could not get over it. Ilana has waist-length, wild and curly golden-blonde hair. “Can’t I even see your hair?” I asked, trying to find my old friend in there. “No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my husband,” she said with a calm sexual confidence, “ever gets to see my hair.”

When she showed me her little house in a settlement on a hill, and I saw the bedroom, draped in Middle Eastern embroideries, that she shares only with her husband—the kids are not allowed—the sexual intensity in the air was archaic, overwhelming. It was private. It was a feeling of erotic intensity deeper than any I have ever picked up between secular couples in the liberated West. And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007). Famous director of soap ads:

Biblicism. Certainly frightens me.

See Lane Keister's post on this as well.

Fascinating site with alternate or fantastical maps: Strange Maps. Some examples:

- A map of baseball team allegiances (why do the Cubs have a dominion far exceeding the Sox?)
- A map of where the single population of one gender is greater than the other (there are a lot more single men in Seattle, and way more single girls all along the east coast).
- A map of the US where each state's name is replaced with the name of a foreign county which has roughly the same GDP (Arkansas [2.7] matches the output of Pakistan [270 million]).

Thanks to Worldmagblog.

Hebrews 10:29 has become a bit of a lightning rod in the whole FV debate (see Lane Keister’s interactions here and more importantly here). Just had a few brief and very unqualified comments to make about the passage in question.

How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has spurned the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?

The problem the passage poses to the TR crowd is that the author of Hebrews (let’s call him “Paul,” just for kicks) seems to be saying that there exists the sort of person who has been sanctified by the blood of the covenant who has fallen away to damnation. For the TR, a typical way to interpret this passage (along with Hebrews 6:6) is that “Paul” is actually speaking in hypotheticals (such as Matt 24:24—“...to lead astray, if possible, even the elect”). In other words, if someone sanctified by the blood of the covenant were to fall away (though this is tacitly impossible) he would be judged even worse than the man who rejected it from the beginning.

Lane Keister, to his credit, rejects this exegesis. The passage does not pose an impossible hypothesis. The Greek uses the aorist tense – it’s more definitive than the TR interpretation is comfortable with. Mr. Keister suggests that the man “Paul” has in view may indeed be an apostate – one who partook of baptism and communion and fell away, but never had “faith." The problem with this, on the surface, is that “Paul” says this apostate was sanctified by the Spirit. From the TR perspective, the Spirit cannot and will not actively work in someone internally if they are not elect.

Just from my cursory look at the passage (I haven’t looked at the Greek yet, aside from Mr. K’s comments), it seems clear, at first glance, that there is a definite historical/eschatological dimension that the TR interpretation doesn’t take into account. (Warning: here is where my remarks tend toward the speculative.)

Hebrews is the most covenantal epistle in the NT. Sacrificial language, temple allusions, contrasts between Moses and Christ are at the heart of its message—that is, Christ and His new covenant are superior to the old Aaronic dispensation. Christ’s sacrifice is once-and-for-all.

My observation boils down to this: Hebrews 10:29 is right in the middle of this historical/eschatological framework. So couldn’t it be that “Paul” is again contrasting the old covenant (“the blood of the covenant”) with the new? Look at the context:

26 For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, 27 but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. 28 Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. 29 How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has spurned the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?

The Israelites were covered under the blood of the covenant, and were led by the Spirit. They saw the glory of Christ, the last prophet and true Son, and scorned him, profaning His blood. “Paul” is talking about Israel. He argues along these lines: if under Moses (while Israel was ignorant of what was to come) the disobedient were punished, how much more will Israel be judged now that Christ has revealed himself. Israel was baptized (1 Corinthians 10:2) and shown favor (i.e. grace) from God. But now that the perfect has come, they have rejected it, calling upon themselves a harsher judgment than the Israelites in the wilderness.

I need to do a little more study to firm up some things. However, I can’t escape the conclusion that the historical/eschatological dimension is central to Hebrews 10 (and the rest of the epistle). The key to the “problem passages,” like 6:6 and 10:29, lies in “Paul’s” interest in the historical and future apostasy of Israel (the people of God).

The problem is at the heart of the FV debate: God works in His people to save them through real, physical, covenantal grace. Israel was offered this salvation in Christ, but rejected it. The apostasy passages in Hebrews, which troubled me so deeply as a TR, resolve beautifully when viewed eschatologically. When the people of God reject this salvation, the judgment is worse for them than on the ignorant.

1. Resurrection Fern - Iron & Wine
2. Things Are What You Make of Them - Bishop Allen
3. Click, Click, Click - Bishop Allen
4. The Ocean - The Bravery
5. He Lays In the Reins - Iron & Wine/Calexico
6. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel
7. On This Side - Tiny Vipers
8. While You Were Sleeping - Elvis Perkins
9. Young Folks - Peter Bjorn and John

…on political theology

-     Political theology is one place our eschatology shows its true colors.

-     It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that the FV contingent are postmillennial (in the Puritan or Princeton paradigm), while the vocal FV opponents are largely amillennial. Not to over-simplify the debate, but it does seem that there is some watershed at work here. But I don’t believe it’s eschatology, per se.

-     It seems that PT reveals this watershed. Like the evangelical world at large, the Reformed world tends to fall into one of two political camps (using Niebuhr’s categories):

           1) Christ transforming culture crowd: an assortment of Christian nationalists, PAC-supporters, and Reconstructionists who have passed their sell-by date.
           2) Christ against culture crowd: old-school pietists and younger missional Christians whose nightmares consist of a sword-wielding Constantine bearing down on doe-eyed pagans.

-      Most of the younger generation is moving away from their parents’ political activism. See this recent editorial from Christianity Today. Part of this might be nothing more than the perennial phenomenon of the younger generation trending liberal in opposition to the older generation’s middle class values. So-called missional Christians are more likely to be seen at a green peace rally (trendy politics) rather than handing out Christian Coalition candidate scorecards after Sunday worship (traditional politics).

-      Many Reformed Christians make many of the same arguments as the missional Christians (see TR king R. Scott Clark’s recommendation of CT’s editorial).

-      In so far as “Constantinianism” = contemporary Christian political activism, the missional and amillennial Christians have some very valid points. Christian politics has been frighteningly beholden to nationalism and American exceptionalism since at least 1620.

One pet peeve: the American flag in the sanctuary. Or the experience of entering a conservative church shortly after the Fourth of July to see that American décor had taken over the sanctuary.

-      At the same time, something which the missional and PACers share in common is a corrosive dualism. Despite their apparent differences, both recognize in their political views a dualism of heaven and earth, grace and nature. Both acknowledge two kingdoms. The missional Christians believe that the church’s message has been compromised by the invasion of worldly modernistic interests, e.g. middle class values, capitalism, etc.—all of which is true enough. The Christian Coalition crowd also recognizes two kingdoms, but believes that the spiritual kingdom should invade the secular kingdom and transform its power structures through political action.

Both views see two realms of power: one of nature, one of grace. That’s the problem.

-      True political theology posits that the dichotomy of nature and grace is a false one.

-      Calvin’s question applies here: which comes first, knowledge of God or knowledge of self? His answer: Yes.

-      True political theology lays out the blueprint of a city into which the kings of the nations bring their glory. True political theology explains what Christ meant by the keys of the kingdom. What does it mean to bind and to loose?

-      The first enemy that confronted Christ’s kingdom was nationalism.

In a 1979 interview, Graham Greene answered the question of whether he went to Communion still:

No, I’ve broken the rules. They are rules I respect, so I haven’t been to Communion now for nearly thirty years….In my private life, my situation is not regular. If I went to Communion, I would have to confess and make promises. I prefer to excommunicate myself…. There’s a difference between believe and faith….Faith is above belief. One can say that it’s a gift of God, which belief is not. Belief is founded on reason. On the whole I keep my faith while enduring long periods of disbelief. At such moments I shrug my shoulders and tell myself I’m wrong—as though a brilliant mathematician had come and told me that the solution of an equation was wrong. My faith remains in the background, but it remains.

Roger Ebert on Scorcese:

I have often thought that many of Scorsese's critics and admirers do not realize how deeply the Catholic Church of pre-Vatican II could burrow into the subconscious, or in how many ways Scorsese is a Catholic director. This movie is like an examination of conscience, when you stay up all night trying to figure out a way to tell the priest: I know I done wrong, but, oh, Father, what else was I gonna do?

Eliot, "Chorus from the Rock":

And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls."

After 11 years, Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet is finally on DVD. I wish Christmas came early this year.

The bishop of Durham on rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's (from God and Caesar, Then and Now):

Tax revolts against Rome were nothing new. A large-scale one had taken place during Jesus’ boyhood, and had been crushed with typical Roman brutality. Saying, ‘Yes, pay the tax,’ would be to say ‘I’m not serious about God’s kingdom.’ But to incite people not to pay would at once incur trouble.

Jesus gets his interlocutors to produce a coin, tacitly admitting that they kept the hated coinage, with its blasphemous inscription and its (to a Jew) illegal image, a portrait of Caesar himself. Whose is it? he asks. Caesar’s, they answer. Well then, says Jesus, you’d better pay back Caesar in his own coin – and pay God back in his own coin!

The closest echoes to this double command are found in 1 Maccabees 2.68. Mattathias is telling his sons, especially Judas, to get ready for revolution. ‘Pay back to the Gentiles what is due to them,’ he says, ‘and keep the law’s commands’. Paying back the Gentiles was not meant to refer to money. I am sure that some of Jesus’ hearers would have picked up that revolutionary hint. Because he was standing there looking at a coin, his surface meaning was, of course, that the tax had to be paid; but underneath was the strong hint that Caesar’s regime was a blasphemous nonsense and that one day God would overthrow it.

The setting and the saying show decisively, against what is so frequently asserted by both Right and Left within the Enlightenment tradition, that Jesus did not mean it as indicating a separation between the spheres of Caesar and God, with each taking responsibility for a distinct part of the world. Even at the surface level, the saying must have meant that God claimed the whole of life, including questions about taxes. Of course, Jesus acknowledges, you may have to pay taxes to the pagans, just as Jews in exile had to pray to God for the welfare of Babylon; but that doesn’t mean that God is only concerned with a different, ‘spiritual’ world. God is present in the ambiguity, summoning people to an allegiance which transcended but certainly included the position they found themselves in vis-a-vis the occupying power.

This really amuses me.

Over at Slate, Hitchens touts the Enlightenment line with great dexterity. One gets the impression that he actually believes he's saying something that hasn't been preached by moderns for the past four hundred years.

That religion is no more than a projection of man's wish to be a slave and a fool and of his related fear of too much knowledge or too much freedom. Well, we didn't even need Hobbes (who wanted to replace a divine with a man-made dictator) to tell us that. To regret that we cannot be done with superstition is no more than to regret that we have a common ancestry with apes and plants and fish. But millimetrical progress has been made even so, and it is measurable precisely to the degree that we cease to believe ourselves the objects of a divine (and here's the totalitarian element again) "plan." Shaking off the fantastic illusion that we are the objective of the Big Bang or the process of evolution is something that any educated human can now do.

I really wonder whether Hitchens truly believes it is possible to escape authority (divine or totalitarian). Perhaps he'd like to see a non-personal ultimate authority -- "Reason" (an ideal which Marsilius, Bacon, Descartes, and other dead white men thought they had invented).

D.G. Hart wonders whether dualism is always such a bad thing after all:

The Westminster Divines in chapters 20 and 31, for starters, talk about the differences between civil and ecclesiastical power, and also say that the church is not to meddle in matters civil. This is dualism in my view. It suggests that the state has authority over the physical sphere of human existence and the church over the spiritual. Yes, there are overlapping areas, such as that the state’s laws imply morality and churches own property. But the basic point is that the church uses a two-edged spiritual sword for her discipline, the state uses a real one....

But while I’m at it, I’ll take a stab at defending religious neutrality, in ways comparable to linguistic neutrality. I do think Kuyperians are good Calvinists when they describe the situation of every person — either he or she is a God-fearer, a covenant-keeper (imperfect) or not. So no one is neutral in this sense. But when I go before a judge, and I am identified as a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, I am pretty confident that a non-Christian can still hear my case impartially without condemning me for the creed I confess. (I’m actually worried more about his politics than his theology or lack thereof.)

Evelyn Waugh, like Adam Fenwyck-Symes, was very much at the heart of modern life in the 1920s. By his friends’ accounts and his own, Waugh indulged in about every fad, fashion, and lifestyle that raged through the generation lost between the two world wars. He loved modernist poetry, unlike his Edwardian father. He was attracted to socialism and cubism, to Hemmingway and (by many accounts) homosexuality—each an unavoidable presence in Oxford at that time. His early essays and editorials display the usual undergraduate disdain for gray heads and old ideas. He wrote in 1921 of his own generation, “they will be above all things, clear-sighted, they will have no use for phrases or shadows. In the nineteenth century the old men saw visions and the young men dreamed dreams. The youngest generation are going to be very hard and analytical … and they will not call their aim ‘Truth.’”

The effect that the First World War had on Waugh’s generation cannot be overstated. Much like the Vietnam war’s impact on the hippie generation, the Great War opened an immense cultural gulf between the Edwardians and the Bright Young Things. The latter believed that the war was an unnecessary tragedy caused by their parents’ pride and false nobility. Humphrey Carpenter illustrates this in his indispensable work, The Brideshead Generation: “Evelyn’s generation’s attitude to the Great War is evoked in Nancy Mitford’s first novel, where a young aesthete states to a returned soldier: ‘We haven’t exactly forgotten it, but it was never anything to do with us. It was your war and I hope you enjoyed it, that’s all.’”

In Vile Bodies, Waugh tells a story of similar feeling. Written in 1930, the novel was the last written before Waugh converted to Catholicism. He had begun his literary career as a satirist of the sacred idols of modern England. Critics praised his first two novels for their heartlessness. The Fortnightly Review compared Vile Bodies to Eliot’s "The Waste Land" and added it to the canon of “contemporary literature of disillusionment.”

The state of Waugh’s personal life at the time was probably unknown to the reviewers at the time. Waugh had married Evelyn Gardiner in 1928 (friends called the couple He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn). The marriage was never strong, and She-Evelyn reportedly began cheating on her new husband only a matter of months after the union was made. The tragedy of the marriage would later become literary fodder for Waugh’s satire, A Handful of Dust. But at the time, the divorce proceedings sent Waugh into depression—Vile Bodies was written out of these circumstances. Waugh’s brother, Alec, recalled how at the time his brother told him, “The trouble about the world today is that there’s not enough religion in it. There’s nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment.” A few months after the divorce was finalized, Evelyn formally joined the Church of Rome.

Waugh had always been a moralist of some stripe—it is, after all, part of the job description of a satirist. However, while before his conversion his moral vision could only mock, his post-conversion satire gradually develops an alternative vision to the hopeless wanderings of his generation. In his early fiction, Waugh consistently highlights how his age has lost the ability to feel or to find a consummation of any kind—religious, sexual, or artistic. He makes it clear that this state of frustrated tension is not the result of complacency. The Bright Young Things want nothing more than to find fulfillment of some kind. Why else the frenzy of artistic and bacchanalian activity? The crazed parties in Vile Bodies are manifestations of the younger generation’s desperate need for meaning, according to Waugh; if nothing else, they provide distractions from the interwar hopelessness about everything.

Waugh’s most magisterial novel, Brideshead Revisited, provides a fascinating post-conversion look back on this period of time. Written in 1945, Brideshead Revisited is the story of Charles Ryder in two parts: the first being his interwar life as a Oxford student taken under wing by the Bright Young Thing, Sebastian Flyte; the second part takes place some years later as Ryder and the other Bright Young Things begin to see their world fall apart as rumors of war with Germany begin circulating.

In the first part of the story, titled “Et Ego In Arcadia,” Sebastian Flyte introduces Ryder to the colorful, charming world of the British aristocracy at college and at home. In many ways, it is a more cultured version of the scene in Vile Bodies. Charles and Sebastian spend their school days idly, and always with a bottle of wine in hand. Sebastian’s social circle is not so concerned with academics, rather preferring to spend their time drunkenly reciting Eliot’s latest poetry. Charles idealizes his friend’s wit and self-possession—a feeling that only intensifies when the two friends spend a holiday at Sebastian’s home, Brideshead Castle. The aristocratic Flytes becomes Charles’ surrogate family—the pious Lady Marchmain, Sebastian’s Catholic mother; Sebastian’s sister, the aloof and sexual Julia; the youngest sister, the precocious young Cordelia; and later in the story, the exiled agnostic, Lord Marchmain. Much like their school days, Charles and Sebastian are rarely sober, and spend most of their time lounging around the immense grounds of the manor. Sebastian, though, is vaguely uncomfortable while at home—a point which Charles fails to understand at first. The source of his discomfort lies in the reminder while at home of the residual Catholicism of his heritage which resides primarily in his moralistic mother. Sebastian’s relationship with the family religion is something which Charles had not encountered before....

Throughout his novels, Evelyn Waugh is consistently pessimistic about the future of modernity. Those characters who are most modern are also the most heartless, for they have the least to lose. Like Tony and Brenda Last in A Handful of Dust or Mr. Joyboy in The Loved One, the modern man for Waugh had no reason to honor family, religious, or moral customs. Further, since ultimate meaning had been stripped from life, any normal sentiments and pleasure were no longer there to be had. In the modern world, sex is painful (and unproductive), war is pointless, the art of today will be forgotten by tomorrow. Even the death of a child doesn’t warrant a few tears from his parents.

Confronted with this bleak waste land, the modern man becomes like Adam Fenwick-Symes or like Hooper. Either he gives himself over to meaningless entertainment and frivolity, or he becomes a passionless victim of ennui (which is, ultimately, what Adam Fenwick-Symes succumbs to)....

De Regno Christi is planning an online debate concerning Federal Vision theology--starting Sept. 17.

Two movies in production which I'll have to see:

Kenneth Branaugh's remake of Sleuth. Love the idea of Caine playing Olivier's role.

A new Brideshead Revisited. The project has a new director now. The previous one, David Yates, wanted to make God the villain in the story ... so I suppose it can only get better with someone else calling the shots. I hope.

Alan Jacobs finally posts his review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: The Youngest Brother's Tale. It's well worth the wait.