I have been enjoying the series over on Andrew Katay’s blog about (among other things) his stance towards the New Perspectives on Paul. As someone who has been greatly encouraged by the writings of the most popular author associated with this movement, N. T. Wright, and as a person with strong Evangelical convictions, I thought I would engage in a little sociological speculation as to why N. T. Wright is able to whip us Evangelicals up into such a defensive and somewhat confused frenzy.
The reason is, I suggest, that Evangelicalism harbors an uneasy alliance between a deep conservatism and the radical Protestant principle of sola scriptura. Let me explain.
Evangelicalism is a conservative cultural movement. By this, I don’t mean that it holds old-fashioned views, or is committed to certain political values of one stripe or another. I mean that it is a movement that will always try to conserve existing structures, practices, systems and values, before it will try to change existing structures, practices, systems and values. The opposite of this institutional attitude would be something like a progressivism that is disposed to challenge existing arrangements, and frequently try out new structures, practices, systems and values. In the abstract, I don’t think either is better, and in their most popular incarnations, viz. as political models, they both have their excesses and blind spots. Combine this conservative disposition with a hierarchical and deferential institutional arrangement, and you have a recipe for a cultural movement that is geared towards maintaining the status quo of its own organization and collective self-conception. So that’s the first peg: Evangelicalism tends to be, and certainly is in Sydney, conservative in the sense just described.
The second peg is this. My little corner of Evangelicalism is also proudly and strongly committed to its Reformed heritage, and this is often given expression by affirming the five sola‘s, one of which is sola scriptura. However you want to fill this out, sola scriptura will end up meaning something like: the bible is to be the sole authority in matters of life and doctrine. Or as one of our own poets has said, the chief hallmark of Evangelicalism is the disposition to believe whatever the bible can be accurately shown to teach, and to allow this to deeply shape peoples’ lives. This is a radical doctrine because it lays out a strong, one-way principle of authority. Evangelicalism always claims to put itself under the authority of whatever scripture can be accurately shown to teach. Therefore, Evangelicalism is never in a position to maintain any of its settled habits, convictions, values or institutions if they turn out to be opposed by the bible.
So. What happens when a conservative sociological movement is told that by its own lights, it has been getting some things wrong? What happens when a conservative movement is told that it has good reasons, in virtue of a consideration that it values terribly highly, that some part of the status quo - be it doctrinal, institutional, or cultural – has got to go? Well. It freaks out! It is predisposed to take exactly these kinds of reasons more seriously than any other reasons, but it is also predisposed, well, not to change. One part of its self-conception directly clashes with another. Call this, the existential crisis of Evangelicalism.
In my opinion, this is what seems to be happening with Evangelicalism’s reaction to N. T. Wright. The reason N. T. Wright generates so much heat is because he confronts Evangelicalism with an instance of this crisis moment. He fundamentally agrees with Evangelicalism that understanding and listening to the bible is supremely important. But he believes that popular Evangelicalism, in some measure, can improve in doing just that. His message is, in some part, that Evangelicalism ought to let its conservative tendencies give way to its sola scriptura commitments, at least on some important front.
I’m sure that N.T. Wright isn’t the first critic from within to be received in such a way by Evangelicalism. It would be interesting for a historian to fill out this picture by recounting how Evangelicalism has dealt with what I’ve called its existential crisis at other points in its history.
Book Recommendation
May 7, 2010
I am about halfway through the new book by the good bishop, aka. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Ostensibly it is about the remainder of life after conversion, and particularly the importance of character. I’m finding it really stimulating and helpful. The book is trying to fry several fish at once, which at times makes it seem a little unfocused, but its main thoughts emerge clearly enough. The main point could be put like this (apologies to the author for my sloppy summary):
Humans have been created with a job to do. The Ancient Greeks like Plato and Aristotle knew this, and this is why they talked about virtue so much. Virtue is just a rough-and-ready translation of the Greek word arête which also means something like ‘excellence’, or ‘success’. The Greeks answered these questions falsely, but they were onto something with making virtue an important ethical category. To answer the question, ‘What is it to live a virtuous life?’ or ‘What is an excellent human life?’ or ‘What is a life of success?’ we need to have an answer to question of the ends of humanity. What is the purpose of humanity? What is its role in creation? What did God create and redeem humans to do? Answering these questions Christianly, must involve telling the story of the creator God, his relationship with Israel, and the job the disciples took upon themselves after the resurrection.
The book’s answers to these questions have been a little inspiring. At once they have tried to be more descriptive than ’give glory to God’, and more motivating then ‘don’t sin’. Here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite.
Worship and stewardship, generating justice and beauty: these are the primary vocations of God’s redeemed people. And the habits of the heart, mind, and life to which we are called are designed to form us, gradually and bit by bit, into people who can, with the hard-won “second nature” that we call virtue, freely and gladly take forward these tasks.
- N. T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters (2010), p. 83
Like his previous Surprised by Hope (2007), this is a really accessible book that is aimed at the popular level. It does a great job of retelling the whole biblical narrative, and presenting an account of how disparate parts of the bible fit together into the one story. Along the way it reclaims some important spiritual terrain of everyday life that evangelicals of the past few decades have been in danger of abandoning – including the importance and role of aesthetics, justice and work.
Heartily recommended!
p.s. I have a North American copy of the book, published by Harper Collins. In the past, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named has published his popular level books with different publishers in North America and the rest of the world, and sometimes with entirely different titles. So if you’re hunting for this book in Australia, it may have a different name and cover. All part of his cunning ‘shock and awe’ infiltration tactics designed to distract us I suppose!
Top 9 of 2009
December 14, 2009
People are beginning to put together those inevitable “Best of 2009…” lists, so I thought I would jump on board the reflective December mood. Here are my Top 9 reads of 2009: the books and articles that had the greatest impact on my thinking this year.
1. Myles Burnyeat, ‘Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic‘, Harvard Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 1997
Bernard Williams once said that you are missing out on something if you only ever read Plato in the latest edition of Mind. These lectures are stimulating and expansive that achieve a pretty rare thing – presenting a faithful and historically informed close reading of an important text from the history of philosophy and making its main point seem more important than ever. Unreservedly recommended to everyone – especially those who may have only read about Plato in the latest edition of Mind.
2. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1979)
I owe quite a lot to this book, not least the beginnings of an appreciation of the history of Analytic Philosophy, the development of a Wittgensteinian-type approach to philosophical questions, and the resources to find my way around contemporary epistemology. Recommended to those who think that Analytic Philosophy has to be maths/physics in disguise, ahistorical, and complete with ‘serious’ metaphysical and epistemological aspirations.
3. N. T. Wright, Surprised By Hope (SPCK, 2007)
Not only did the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth actually happen, but it matters quite a lot. Loved Wright’s reflections of the purpose of the church, politics, aesthetics and work, and particularly his ability to constructively dismantle stereotypes to allow the story of Jesus to surprise and energize you. Recommended to christians who think that you go to heaven when you die, so you may as well buy that SUV now.
4. N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Fortress Press, 1992)
Wright presents the completely uncontroversial thesis that Jesus was a Jewish Man and that First-Century AD Judaism was a complex and rich culture in a way that opens up the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and words in a new way. Recommended to any Christian that hasn’t read the Gospels in a long time, or any non believer who thinks that they know basically what the story of Jesus is about.
5. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 1993)
Abstract, Confusing, Infuriating, Suprising…and just a little inspirational.
6. Onora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1989)
O’Neill did a lot to fill in my knowledge of Kant. Whilst every philosopher is caricatured, Kant is caricatured a lot! This book presents a plausible and suprising treatment of Kant’s ethics and politics, and offers a terrific construal of his themes of objectivity, universalizability, and reason.
7. John McDowell, Mind and World (Harvard University Press, 1994)
A brilliant example of the kind of Analytic Philosophy I am more and more sympathetic towards. Wittgensteinian in approach, more humanistic than mathematical, and attempting to bring the history of philosophy in touch with current work.
8. Gary Gutting, Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005)
I really don’t know enough about Foucault to judge Gutting’s portrait of him in this book. Perhaps the best thing I can say about this book is that it made me want to read a lot more Foucault. Contains several fascinating presentations of his themes, and seems to shy away from simplification and caricature at every step.
9. Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2001)
The difference between Continental and Analytic Philosophy is the difference in how you read Kant. A bold thesis that I was quite convinced by.
How a Novel Can Save the World
August 13, 2009
[Political progress] is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers…This process of coming to see other human beings as ‘one of us’ rather than as ‘them’ is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of the re-description of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as…the novel. Fiction like that of Dickens…gives us the details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended. Fiction like…Henry James, or Nabokov gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us re-describe ourselves. That is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principle vehicles of moral change and progress.
– Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), p. xvi.
In this fascinating excerpt Richard Rorty makes a few large claims. First, he claims that societies make progress in the most important sense not from the results of inquiry, but through imagination. Because of this, art, literature and film take on an enormously important political role, which leaves philosophy and other areas of inquiry relatively sidelined. Rorty believes that art is able to change and affect the way we see the world in a way which inquiry is never able to. It is important in both educating a society about the ‘other’ and in affecting their sentiments towards this ‘other’ such that reconciliation is not only a possibility but is put forward as the most attractive and human option. Through the telling of a story, a novel is able to affect the way in which you see the world. It catches you and your limited point of view up in its narrative and tells you about people and place in new ways which leave you changed. This is similar to what Foucault thought the purpose of descriptive history was – to show you hidden complexities and anomalies about the world you thought you knew, and in the process, to show you hidden complexities and anomalies about yourself.
Given this, I’m surprised at Rorty’s quick dismissal of the sermon as a vehicle of cultural change. Actually, I’m not surprised since Rorty is no fan of formal religion, least of all Christianity, but I think this statement is in tension with the really interesting point he is making. Christianity has a rich tradition of story telling. It tells a story about hope, love and overcoming otherness. A story which millions of people have listened to and have heard echos of their own story in, and which has gradually re-described the world and the self to them. A story which through re-describing the world and what it is to be a human has compelled many to the positive social and political activity of caring for the forgotten and despised, and of reaching out to the other. Two quotes put this in a nice light.
English Bishop Tom Wright has said,
[Scripture] is not, for a start, a list of rules, though it contains many commandments of various sorts and in various contexts. Nor is it a compendium of true doctrines, though of course many parts of the Bible declare great truths about God, Jesus, the world and ourselves in no uncertain terms. Most of its constituent parts, and all of it when put together whether in the Jewsih canonical form or the Christian one, can best be described as story.
– N. T. Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God (2005), p. 19
American theologian Stanley Hauerwas has said,
Too often we have conceived of salvation – what God does to us in Jesus – as a purely personal decision, or a matter of finally getting our heads straight on basic beliefs, or of having some inner feelings of righteousness about ourselves and God, or of having our social attitudes readjusted. I suggest that salvation is not so much a new beginning but rather a beginning in the middle, so to speak. Faith begins, not in discovery, but in remembrance. The story began without us, as a story of the peculiar way God is redeeming the world, a story that invites us to come forth and be saved by sharing in the work of a new people whom God has created in Israel and Jesus. Such movement saves us by (1) placing us within an adventure that is nothing less than God’s purposes for the whole world, and (2) communally training us to fashion our lives in accordance with what is true rather than what is false…
The little story I call my life is given cosmic, eternal significance as it is caught up within God’s larger account of history. ‘We were Pharaoh’s slaves…, the Lord brought us out…that he might preserve us’. The significance of our lives is frighteningly contingent on the story of another. Christians are those who hear this story and are able to tell it as our salvation.
– Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (1989), p. 52, 55.
Ethics and Reality – Part 2: Thoreau and Paul’s Reply
July 28, 2009
There is an alternative to Hume’s critique, which is the insistence that we cannot help but be morally affected by the world in which we live, and the more we give ourselves over to feel and see the moral dimensions in life, the more we will see that ethics and reality are inextricably linked. I’ll unpack this response through some obtuse statements from Henry David Thoreau which seems to echo Paul’s ethics of the New Testament. Thoreau wrote:
The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and the night…It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labours of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep…To be awake is to be alive. We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake. — Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)
Thoreau suggest
s that there is a particularly spiritual time of day when reality seems closer, or perhaps when we are closer to reality. He calls this morning because it suggests coming out of a darkness; coming out of a state of resignation, non-engagement and withdrawal, to experience reality in a fresh way. New Testament scholar Tom Wright explains the ethical thought of Paul in a similar vein. In explaining Ephesians 5.14 which screams, ‘Awake of sleeper, rise from the dead, and the Messiah will give you life’, Wright says:
In other words: it’s time to wake up! Living at the level of the non-heavenly world around you is like being asleep; worse, it’s like that for which sleep is a metaphor – it’s like being dead. Lying, stealing, sexual immorality, bad temper and so on (Paul lists them all in a devastating short passage) are forms of death, both for the person who commits them and for all whose lives are touched by their actions. They are ways of sleeping a deadly sleep. It’s time to wake up, he says. Come alive to the real world, the world where Jesus is Lord, the world into which your baptism brings you, the world you claim to belong to when you say in the creed that Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead. What we all need from time to time is for someone to say, ‘It’s time to wake up! You’ve been asleep long enough! The sun is shining and there’s a wonderful day out there! Wake up and get a life!’ — Tom Wright, Surprised By Hope (2007), p. 265
The common link between Wright’s remarks on the ethical thought of Paul and Thoreau’s cryptic words is the theme of being awake. They liken acting morally in the world to being awake and experiencing reality, and allowing th
at reality to affect and change you. It’s interesting to note that this kind of language was employed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement – calling Americans to wake up to the immorality around them, to throw off the sleep of the past.
This is not so much a reply to Hume, as offering a different picture of how ethics and reality may be related. But do you find either more compelling? Do you think that a deep knowledge of reality, possibly including a deep knowledge of humanity, society, science and God, would have necessary ethical implications? Or do you think that ethics is something totally separate?
