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.

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.)

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

How Science Displaces Faith in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis

The Baconian project does not appear at first glance to be an especially mystical or religious adventure. We are accustomed to looking back on the work of Sir Francis Bacon as one of the seminal writs of divorce between faith and natural reason. Bacon’s own words from The Great Instauration lend credence to this view. He prays to God, “that things human may not interfere with things divine,” and that a clear delineation between the two realms will “give to faith what which is faith’s.” Simply put, some matters are the domain of natural reason and induction, while the “divine mysteries” must be relegated to the realm of divine revelation.

Federal Vision debate over at De Regno Christi. So far, it's been a really healthy discussion with a strangely appropriate diversion into where the TRs and FVs fall on the modern-postmodern continuum. Caleb Stegall's comments are great. Makes me wish I had followed The New Pantagruel before it went defunct.

Second: Slate's discussion of the new book on Patrick Henry College: God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America. Again, fascinating stuff, especially when compared to my own school.

My question consists of just three words: What is sleep? I admit I did a double-take when I first found out what my topic was. Even an infant knows, right? Nothing is more natural to the human body (even the sexual drive takes a back seat to physical exhaustion). And no one has to be reminded that they should be tired. Some people long for “meaningful” sleep so desperately that the NYT reported last year that 42 million sleep prescriptions were written by doctors. And hasn’t science removed all doubt about what it does and why we need it? Well, no. It turns out that even though every person on earth spends about one-third of his or her life in a state of sleep, science is still trying to figure it out. As one medical journal says bluntly: “No one knows what sleep really is.” It’s a bit of an embarrassment, really. I even asked the NSA’s resident expert about the nature of sleep. And, no, not even Brian Schlect had an answer. Although he offered to test any hypotheses I might have.

But I had to find an answer, of course. It’s possible to take a number of different perspectives. What happens during sleep? Why do we sleep? And, What does sleep mean to us?

Kant’s Kingdom of Ends and the Kingdom of God

The modern impulse is a matronly one. From the first spark of the Enlightenment project, the modernist had the aim of cleaning up the mess which had been created by the untidy medievals. Descartes in his Discourse on Method begins by posing the question: if all men possess reason, why do we end up in disagreement on so many issues—often to the point of bloodshed? The ethical application of the modern quest for universal agreement is centered on the principle that “reason,” rather than external authority, provides mankind with the means to achieve order. And, further, it is possible to establish a internal “law” which would have all men treat all men with equity. The medievals had imposed the threat of ecclesial judgment on men in order to force them into line with divine law. For the moderns, however, this external threat reeked of arbitrary violence; surely there must be a more rational way to establish a universal law than to fall back on ecclesial powers which allegedly derived their authority from a Being not bound by law. For the modern, any law of ethics must be based in human autonomy, centered in the self. Immanuel Kant, following in this stream of thought, proposed his own modern Golden Rule—one which is ultimately impersonal, autonomous, and lacking in the self-sacrificial virtue of the biblical alternative.

Most of the postmodern voices within the political theology movement seem to be running together at full speed away from the liberalized Gomorrah. But even while they share the same fear of getting caught in a downpour of brimstone, it also appears that some are headed in slightly different directions. I’d like to briefly contrast two sub-movements within the broader group of post-liberal refugees. For no reason other than personal caprice, I’ll call them the Reformed and the Missional movements. The former label is a bit unfairly associated with the work of Oliver O’Donovan, formerly of Oxford University, now of Edinburgh. O’Donovan is actually an Anglican, but shares enough in common with the Reformed tradition that I’m going to ignore that minor moral failing. The Missional movement I’ve associated with the work of Stanley Hauerwas (of Duke) and William Cavanaugh, who studied under Hauerwas and now teaches at St. Thomas in the barren tundra of Minnesota. Since our group has already been introduced to the work of Cavanaugh (and Hauerwas, by extension), I’m going to look at two Reformed critiques leveled by O’Donovan at the Missional view: the eschatological critique and the incarnational critique.

He has been manifested in a human body for this reason only, out of the love and goodness of His Father, for the salvation of us men.… The first fact that you must grasp is this: the renewal of creation has been wrought by the Self-same Word Who made it in the beginning. --Athanasius, De Incarnatione

Protestantism has come to inherit a certain reputation. The story which is told, and which many children of the Reformation have come to enjoy, begins with the idea that it was modern, Protestant world which disenchanted the world, in Max Weber’s memorable phrase. It could perhaps be argued that the evidence against the Reformation is largely circumstantial—a matter of being in the wrong place at precisely the wrong time—except for the fact that so many modern Protestants want to take credit for the crime (particularly in the more historically-oriented traditions, Lutheranism and Calvinism). We are very happy to play the role of homewrecker in the early modern divorce between nature and grace.

The political terms of this divorce are central to the story: the Reformation cemented a new dualism of civil and spiritual authority, in which the civil—or temporal—realm was disenchanted of the meddling influences of the spiritual (which was identified with the sacerdotalism of the papalists). The medieval idea of two swords within one Christendom was replaced by the modern idea of Luther’s “two kingdoms,” in which the temporal had jurisdiction over this world, and the spiritual over the next. D.G. Hart argues along these lines that Protestantism was the capstone of Western political secularism:

By reducing the authority of the church in the secular or nonreligious sphere, Protestantism solidified the separation of church and state that had long characterized the West and came to dominate the modern era. Gone was the notion that revelation or churchly authorities govern the civil jurisdiction. Instead, with Protestantism… came the possibility for the study of and theorizing about politics to emerge as a separate sphere.

But the question could arise as to why this particular telling of the story neglects a certain strand of early Reformation thought, one which did not seek to divorce nature from grace, and yet stands out as strikingly Protestant. For in between the world of monadic nature and the world of monadic grace there lies a hypostasis —it is here that an alternate narrative of Protestant political authority resides. The parallelism between the metaphysical realms of nature and grace, and the political realms of the civil and the ecclesiastical, suggest that our view of the nature of political authority cannot be divorced from our views of the historical significance of the act of Incarnation. For it is at this hypostatic juncture that the realms of nature and of grace most pointedly intersect, and must therefore inform our view of political authority.

The rumor of God seems an unwieldy thing. It’s like some childhood game of telephone which delivers truth over to falsehood and ends in a complete unraveling of language by the end of the line. Such is the way that men speak of God, say the postmoderns. One age delivers their myth to another age, which in turn shapes and distorts according to its whim. In the end, you have a god for urbanites and a god for trailer parks, a god for the rich and a god for the underprivileged, a god for any economic or political culture in which you find yourself. When God is only a rumor, when He has been presumed dead, you find not one, but many, to take His place. In short, postmodernism is polytheistic.

This is the problem in an age of self-proclaimed doubt, where the wisdom of modernity’s elders is distrusted. Truth, according to popular belief, has been cast out on the wind, and who can shepherd it home? This seems to be what Eliot had in mind when he wrote:

Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?

The deceit of the elders: a promise that our wrestling with words and meaning would not end in futility—that it would matter. They were wrong and they were liars, says Eliot. Their search for knowledge was “useless in the darkness into which they peered.” The moderns sought “knowledge derived from experience,” but time gave the lie to that sort of knowledge. We have learned that time imposes new patterns and experiences which dizzy us, disorient us. “Every moment is a new and shocking / Valuation.”

So it is with language. Logos birthed in chaos will engender uncertainty in culture (in a weird hybrid of Derrida and Orwell). Do we raise a cry of alarm, like Orwell? Or, with Derrida, do we slyly poke fun at the doddering old moderns as they try to summon Truth with the word “truth.”

He has been manifested in a human body for this reason only, out of the love and goodness of His Father, for the salvation of us men.… The first fact that you must grasp is this: the renewal of creation has been wrought by the Self-same Word Who made it in the beginning. --Athanasius, De Incarnatione

Protestantism has come to inherit a certain reputation. The story which is told, and which many children of the Reformation have come to enjoy, begins with the idea that it was modern, Protestant world which disenchanted the world, in Max Weber’s memorable phrase. It could perhaps be argued that the evidence against the Reformation is largely circumstantial—a matter of being in the wrong place at precisely the wrong time—except for the fact that so many modern Protestants want to take credit for the crime (particularly in the more historically-oriented traditions, Lutheranism and Calvinism). We are very happy to play the role of homewrecker in the early modern divorce between nature and grace.

The political terms of this divorce are central to the story: the Reformation cemented a new dualism of civil and spiritual authority, in which the civil—or temporal—realm was disenchanted of the meddling influences of the spiritual (which was identified with the sacerdotalism of the papalists). The medieval idea of two swords within one Christendom was replaced by the modern idea of Luther’s “two kingdoms,” in which the temporal had jurisdiction over this world, and the spiritual over the next. D.G. Hart argues along these lines that Protestantism was the capstone of Western political secularism:

By reducing the authority of the church in the secular or nonreligious sphere, Protestantism solidified the separation of church and state that had long characterized the West and came to dominate the modern era. Gone was the notion that revelation or churchly authorities govern the civil jurisdiction. Instead, with Protestantism… came the possibility for the study of and theorizing about politics to emerge as a separate sphere.

Oliver O’Donovan suggests that this sort of story-telling can be dismissed, in part, as self-congratulatory (and perhaps misguidedly so). A further question might arise as to why this particular telling of the story neglects a certain strand of early Reformation thought, one which did not seek to divorce nature from grace, and yet stands out as strikingly Protestant. For in between the theoretical worlds of monadic nature and monadic grace there lies a hypostasis —it is here that an alternate narrative of Protestant political authority resides. The parallelism between the metaphysical realms of nature and grace, and the political realms of the civil and the ecclesiastical, suggest that our view of the nature of political authority cannot be divorced from our view of the paradigmatic significance of the act of Incarnation. For it is at this hypostatic juncture that the realms of nature and of grace most pointedly intersect, and must therefore inform our view of political authority.

The Judgment of Language in Postmodernity

I.
Modernity is like a young boy with his fat fingers full of ill-gotten licorice and lollipops, standing on the kitchen counter yelling out in a shrill voice that his mother is sleeping. Before he can taste of the sweets, his mother rises grumpily from her nap and metes out parental judgment in the old fashioned way. Is this what he wanted from the start?

II.
What has happened is this: we desired to build up, and not out. The Tower was the modern goal: to shepherd our common modern language of science into a technological marvel which would bring us to the heights of heaven. Our metanarrative ambition, as David Bentley Hart calls it, drove us upward, to “transcend the conditioned finitude and contingency of stories by discovering the meaning, limits, and motives of all stories.” Rather than fill the earth with many stories, we ground them into mortar and bitumen and layered them up into one tall Enlightenment Tower and expected it to stand there forever. Modernity used the lingua scientifica to erect its own god to replace the One who had faded into rumor. And for some reason, modernity expected the unity of the Tower to stand.