Category: Culture

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Culture

James Davidson Hunter's Provocative New Book

James Davidson Hunter is well known to most of us interested in the intersection of Christianity and culture. His new book, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World is sure to rock some boats. Here’s a snippet from Chapter Two of the book, in which Hunter lays out what he perceives to be the dominant modes of cultural discourse by contemporary Christianity:

the reality is that politics is the tactic of choice for many Christians as they think about changing the world. This has been most conspicuously true for Evangelicals, though it has also been as true for Christians in the Mainline Protestant traditions. It is not an exaggeration to say that the dominant public witness of the Christian churches in America since the early 1980s has been a political witness. This remains true today, again, particularly among Evangelicals who, through innumerable parachurch ministries, assert themselves into one political issue after another and into electoral politics as well.

Hunter goes on to discuss the “worldview” approach to cultural engagement, which encourages individual Christians, even if not directly engaged in politics, to transform culture through the power of ideas. He notes:

At the end of the day, the message is clear: even if not in the lofty realms of political life that he was called to, you too can be a Wilberforce. In your own sphere of influence, you too can be an Edwards, a Dwight, a Booth, a Lincoln, a Churchill, a Dorothy Day, a Martin Luther King, a Mandela, a Mother Teresa, a Vaclav Havel, a John Paul II, and so on. If you have the courage and hold to the right values and ifyou think Christianly with an adequate Christian worldview, you too can change the world.

He concludes, however, that “This account is almost wholly mistaken.”

The problem, Hunter suggests, is that “worldview transformation” approaches are rooted in idealism, particularly German idealism — the notion that “culture” is what exists in the “hearts and minds” of ordinary people. He argues that idealism misconstrues the capacity of individuals to change contingent historical circumstances, and ironically reinforces a sort of Cartesian dualism about “culture” “by ignoring the institutional nature of culture and disregarding the way culture is embedded in structures of power.”

A great deal of what Hunter says here resonates with me. I think he’s on to something important about how Christian and other religious lawyers and legal scholars should construe their roles as “culture makers.” More on some of Hunter’s specific conclusions in another post.

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Culture Law and Policy Theology

Justice, Judgment and Love

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the connection between justice, judgment and love in Christian theology. 

When I was in litigation practice, I always felt a bit of awe when I received an order from a Judge, even regarding something mundane like the exchange of documents in a civil case.  That piece of paper represented the power and authority of the United States government compelling some person or corporation to behave a certain way, on pain of sanctions for contempt of court.  When is the exercise of such authority legitimate and just?  This is perhaps the most important question any legal system must address.

In my little corner of Christianity, American evangelicalism, we tend to focus quite a bit on God’s final judgment — the ultimate eschatological question of “who’s in and who’s out” of heaven.  I’m worried that this typical faith narrative of ours lacks much meaningful representation of how justice, judgment, and love relate to each other or to God’s character.  As I see it, the problem with this narrative isn’t that God judges; it’s that the god who is depicted as judge seems to lack any sense of justice or any attribute of love. Here is a god not unlike the gods of ancient mythology — arbitrary, distant, angry, petty, bent on destruction.

It seems to me that our Evangelical god sometimes isn’t really the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ.  As my theologian friend Scot McKnight notes in his book A Community Called Atonement, “[j]ustice . . . cannot be reduced to revenge or retribution.  Instead, it is the redemptive grace of God at work in God’s community of faith that preemptively strikes with grace, love, peace, and forgiveness to restore others to selves, and to restore selves to others.”  God’s justice portrayed in the Christian scriptures is a justice of restoration. It is not arbitrary, but rather flows from the relational character of the Triune God, which is a relationship of perfect fellowship and love.

A United States federal district court judge’s orders are legitimate because and to the extent that they are constructed within the communal framework of our constitutional social contract. God’s judgments are legitimate because they are the extension of the communal life of God into the world He created to share in that life.  But if God is love, why would his justice ever exclude anyone from enjoying the benefits of the restored community?

I think Hans Boersma, in his rich book Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross, offers a helpful (and very Augustinian) response:

Just as divine hospitality requires at least some violence to make it flourish, so also God’s love requires that he become angry when his love is violated. For God not to get angry when he is rejected by people made in his image (and redeemed in Christ) would demonstrate indifference, not love. . . . Love, it seems, requires passionate anger toward anything that would endanger the relationship of love.

Justice motivated by love requires a sort of “violence.”   If God is to restore the community of peace, He must melt away that which opposes peace, just as the refiner melts away that which corrupts the strength and beauty of the metal.  “For he [God] is like a refiner’s fire” (Mal. 3:2).

But how does this particularly Christian and Trinitarian understanding of justice, judgment and love translate into theories of culture and of positive law?  We Christians obviously have a dark history of presuming license to employ physical violence against others — particularly our Jewish neighbors, but also fellow Christians with whom we disagree on matters of faith and practice — in order to establish what we think God’s community of peace should look like on this earth.  Indeed, St. Augustine’s tract against the Donatists itself represents the temptation to appropriate the mechanisms of state violence in the service of a specific Christian view of the peaceable kingdom.

On this point I envy my Catholic friends who can point to Balthasar and the nouvelle theologie behind the Second Vatican Council for a rich contemporary understanding of justice, judgment, and pluralism.  I don’t think the usual evangelical default to Kuyper and “common grace” helps very much.  In fact, for Christian scholars of the law and culture in the evangelical tradition, I think developing a meaningful theology of justice and judgment in a pluralistic world is one of our most pressing tasks.

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Books and Film Culture Humor Spirituality

State of the Bride

The pastor of the Hope Center, an urban ministry with which I’ve done some volunteer work, posted this interesting video on my Facebook wall. I absolutely love the creativity of the visual arts work here, and the “performance art” aspect of the piece. The artist’s commentary is interesting: “the fatherless generation has brought about the shepherdless generation.”  I’m not sure I totally understand or agree with the intent of that statement.  Urban churches such as the Hope Center, in my experience, tend towards a Pentecostal style of theology that emphasizes the moral and spiritual apostasy of the institutional Church.  Some of this critique is drawn from dispensationalist teachings about the “true” church in the end times.  Unfortunately, this can lead to an anti-intellectual and insular form of Christianity, which overlooks the many good things God is doing in denominational and other churches.  And having grown up in relatively wealthy suburban evangelical churches, I’ve been blessed with many excellent shepherds, so it’s a bit hard for me to relate to the urban context.  Nevertheless, I think there’s truth here that we all need to hear.

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Culture Law and Policy

Red State, Blue State, Law, and Mission

My next post on “Law” is up at the Jesus Creed:  Red State, Blue State, Law and Mission.

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Biblical Studies Culture Hermeneutics Science and Religion Theological Hermeneutics

NT Wright on the Biblical Creation Texts, Genre, and Politics

This is an excellent video from N.T. Wright.  I think he’s right that faithful readings of the text must try to disentangle the text from our prior cultural and political assumptions and battles.

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Culture Law and Policy

Law on the Jesus Creed: Hate Crimes and Thought Crimes

My post on hate crimes and “thought crimes” is now up on Jesus Creed.

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Culture Looking Glass

Through the Looking Glass: Scapbooking and History

This is a wonderful article in the Cresset on scrapbooking and the nature of history.

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Culture

Christy Tennant on Porn Propaganda

This piece by Christy Tennant is excellent.

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Books and Film Culture Redemptive Violence and Film

Conversations With Thomas on Redemptive Violence in Film

I’m starting a series with Thomas at Everyday Liturgy on “Redemptive Violence in Film.”  Here is the first post, from Thomas:

In the critically acclaimed genre stalwart High Noon, Gary Cooper plays Will Kane, a town sheriff who learns of the release of a murderous, bloodthirsty villain named Frank Miller the same day he marries a Quaker woman and promises to retire his badge and lead a simple, peaceful life as a shopkeeper.

Conflicted about the release of Frank Miller, Kane decides to stop the horses, get back to town, and defeat Frank Miller once and for all.

But, in the years since Frank Miller went away to jail, the town so united by their victory over the ruthless criminal has now become a town more excited by money and good times than by justice, equity, and community.  This is the world Kane has policed for so many years, and even though he is often told he doesn’t need to protect them, there is a new sheriff coming tomorrow, and it’d be best he just went away to avoid trouble Kane nonetheless stays to protect the town.

The town, so numb to guns and violence, wants no part in just another shooting.  No one will join a posse to round up Miller again, so Kane decides to go it his own. This whole time, Grace Kelly’s wonderfully played Mrs. Kane, only a half hour after her wedding to this man, finds herself sitting in a hotel waiting for a train to take her to St. Louis and divorce (has to be a record).  Mrs. Kane, as a Quaker, is a pacifist and cannot accept her new husband carrying around a gun, let alone being motivated to use it once more. She sits, perplexed and conflicted, in the hotel counting down the hours until the noon train.

[Spoiler Alert] Here in lies the myth of redemptive violence, when Kane must face down four armed men in the town center to defend his pride (now thoroughly hubris and self-deception).  It is insane to protect a town that does not want you around, even more insane to make a rash decision that leads to your wife wanting a divorce after a half hour of marriage, and most insane to go against men four to one. And the myth is this: Kane wins.  He shoots three of the men after the noon train comes in an elongated shootout that starts as his wife is leaving for St. Louis.  She runs off the train thinking she will find her husband’s dead body, yet instead finds one of the villains.   Her husband has killed. Instead of becoming infuriated and running back for the train, Mrs. Kane grabs a gun and shoots a villain in the back, giving her husband the chance he needs to finally defeat Frank Miller with a spree of bullets, sending him to his death.

Violence has brought peace, and the couple that was on the brink of divorce is united in the defeat of the forces that would have separated them, and they ride off into the sunset leaving the cowardly townspeople in their dust.

There is another way to read the end of this story, one that deconstructs the myth of redemptive violence.  This myth says violence is the only way to assure peace.  Unfortunately the peace the Kane’s find is one that is hollow and individualistic instead of uniting.  Peace should be a uniting force, yet in the Western peace is not the salvation of a community as much as the use of violence as a will too power.  The individual leaves only when they have exerted their will upon a place and exercised hubris as the only moral authority (watch Appaloosa, a movie that features the town’s laws being actually signed over to the hired guns).

Riding off into the sunset is a symbol of individualism at all costs, and the cost is community.  There are a few movies, like The Magnificent Seven, where morality is not tied to economy but tied to justice, and the hired guns slowly become part of the peaceful community and the violence at the end of the film is defense, not mercenaries.  One of the guns even stays behind and becomes incorporated into the community.  The traditional western ethos is one of violence assures peace, and the approval of a Quaker going against her religion and a prideful man gunning down villians when he had no real legal authority or need to do so is a celebrated act.  This act can be turned on its head though as the couple leaves the town immediately and sets off for the sunset.  Violence is always an act of separation, and though violence has brought the Kanes together once more it separates them from the community.   Peace, as any Quaker can tell you, is an act of unity and community.  Peace brings unity, even if it enters the gray area of defense as in The Magnificent Seven.   Redemptive violence is tragic because it only gives peace to one of the parties, and the other party is left dead or in ruins, as in war, revenge, and retaliation.  The Kanes may look safe and sound and ready to enjoy their honeymoon, but they leave a town with four dead bodies and a broken moral compass, a town that on the outside looks a lot like what’s on their inside:  persons who have compromised their integrity, religion, and morality for the sake of “peace.”

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Academic Culture Interviews James K.A. Smith Photography and Music Spirituality

Conversation With Jamie Smith: Part 2

This is Part 2 of my conversation with James K.A. Smith (Part 1 is here).  The occasion for this conversation is the introductory essay to Jamie’s book The Devil Reads Derrida, “The Church, Christian Scholars, and Little Miss Sunshine.”  Thanks very much to Jamie for doing this!

Dave: It’s interesting that you mention finding your way into the Reformed tradition starting with “Old Princeton.” So where did you go from there? The Evangelical mainstream — if there is such a thing — as well as the intellectual leaders of the Evangelical mainstream, remain rooted in Old Princeton, at least concerning epistemology and scripture. This can be a significant tension, which I think is commonly experienced. A big part of the community holds pretty strongly to the belief that common sense realism, combined with B.B. Warfield’s concept of Biblical inerrancy, are vital and sufficient for Christian intellectual engagement. Often this is coupled with a very strong sense of cultural antithesis, so that opposition to these ideas is viewed as opposition to the Kingdom of God. But for many people, myself included, the more you poke at it, the more Old Princeton starts to look moldy and crumbly. It may have been an important for its time in the Nineteenth Century, but the paradigms it offers don’t hold up very well against many advances in learning from other fields of inquiry. What alternative paradigms exist for Christian scholars who hope to remain within the historic stream of Christian thought and belief?

Jamie: When I started my graduate studies, I landed at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. I knew this was a philosophical graduate school “in the Reformed tradition,” which is why I was attracted to it. But given my formation to that point, “Reformed” for me just meant Edwards, Warfield, Hodge and gang. Little did I realize that ICS was rooted in the Dutch philosophical tradition of Kuyper and Dooyeweerd–and that they’re philosophical framework constituted a trenchant critique of the “common sense realism” of Old Princeton! In fact, when I was at ICS we started with a week-long “boot camp” that was basically a baptism into Dooyeweerd. And already in that week I saw the prim, tidy edifice I had erected crumbling around me.

Perhaps one could just say that the Old Princeton paradigm does not stand up to the critique of rationalism that was articulated in the 20th century, whereas Kuyper and Dooyeweerd were articulating a critique of the idols of reason well-before Heidegger, Derrida, et. al.

So “where did I go,” you ask, after Old Princeton? Amsterdam! Now, I didn’t exactly settle down there, but the Dutch side of the Reformed tradition offered a model of the Christian scholarly project that seemed much more nimble and attuned to contemporary challenges. It’s this tradition that would later produce folks like Nicholas Wolterstorff, Alvin Plantinga and George Marsden. And if I recall correctly, Kuyper makes a significant cameo in Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Indeed, Andy Crouch’s new book, Culture Making is kind of “Kuyper for Evangelicals” (and much preferred to Colson’s rendition of the same in How Now Shall We Live?).

If anyone wanted to follow up on this, I would still recommend Kuyper’s Stone Lectures at Princeton, published simply as Calvinism. But I might also recommend a little-known book that looks at classic figures in Christian thought (from Clement up to Gutierrez) from within this paradigm: Bringing into Captivity Every Thought: Capita Selecta in the History of Christian Evaluations of Non-Christian Philosophy (University Press of America).

Dave: I really appreciated “The Secret Lives of Saints: Reflections on Doubt,” which is included in The Devil Reads Derrida. But I’ve had trouble distinguishing “doubt” from “unbelief” from “scholarly skepticism,” and I wonder if you could comment about that. Academe is all about asking questions. Some think this results from relativism in the universities, a belief that there is no ultimate truth, but that hasn’t been my experience at all. Most of my academic colleagues, at heart, are passionate truth-seekers, though they might believe that ultimate knowledge of the truth is humanly unobtainable — or that Christianity simply isn’t true. Offer them a pile of steaming apologetic skubala and they’ll throw it right back at you. I’ve been covered in it more times than I want to admit. So this mindset forces us to ask questions: “who says,” “why,” “why not,” “where’s the evidence,” “what about this,” and so on. I might even say that this is our job as scholars. Yet an important part of our faith as Christians is confession — “I believe….” How can a Christian scholar start to integrate these apparently competing postures of “question” and “confession”?

Jamie: Well, this probably won’t make you happy, but I’m going to deflect this question a bit. While I don’t at all want to denigrate truth-seeking (!), I sometimes think the questions of skeptics are a cover for deeper, more affective issues they not articulating. I think there’s a place for evidence and demonstration and argument, but I also think there can be times (quite often) where this amounts to casting pearls before swine–not that our interlocutors are swine, but that they’re not really in a place to receive the arguments because, ultimately, it’s not the evidence that’s at issue. It’s love. I still think Christian scholars are doing their apologetic best when they model love–not by defending their beliefs but by living a peculiar life of love that is winsome, attractive, alluring. The fact of the matter is, despite all my philosophical proclivities, I was loved into the kingdom of God. And while skeptical interlocutors amongst are academic colleagues might be (sincerely) articulating questions and concerns in our debates with them, it might just be the case that what’s at issue is not really “intellectual.”

In this respect, I’m reminded of Augustine’s conversion in Book VIII of the Confessions. By that point, it’s not at all a matter of knowledge or conviction. Augustine knows what’s right; you might even say he believed it. What was holding him back was the will–he wasn’t willing to pursue a way of life. Christianity is not an intellectual system; it’s a way of life.

Dave: If you had to identify three books that Christian thinkers should read this year (besides the Bible or your own books), what would they be?

Wow. Tough question. By “this year,” do you mean new books that have just come out? That’d be tough to say. Let me stall by suggesting three classics that I think every Christian, not to mention Christian “thinkers,” should read at some point: Augustine’s Confessions, Augustine’s De doctrina christiana (“On Christian Teaching”), and Augustine’s City of God. Yeah, I think Augustine’s pretty important. Whether you could read those “this year”–well, that’s another question.

If you meant new books out this year, I’d recommend Graham Ward’s forthcoming book, The Politics of Discipleship (Baker Academic), D. Stephen Long’s new book, Speaking of God: Theology, Language, and Truth (Eerdmans), and Eric Gregory’s Politics and the Order of Love (U of Chicago).

Dave: Can I just ask one follow up on the question you deflected?! So I understand and agree for the most part with what you’re saying about responding to external non-Christian critics — though I might cite something like Merold Westphal’s “Suspicion and Faith” for the notion that we need to learn from our critics. What I meant to get at a little more is the “internal” check. As you describe your experience at ICS, you met with skepticism about the Old Princeton paradigm, for example. As Christian Scholars, these teachers of yours were asking skeptical questions of competing Christian paradigms in order to encourage you to develop what you’ve come to believe are richer Christian paradigms. This is part of the discipleship of the mind, as I see it — asking hard questions, and taking hard questions seriously, in ways that help refine our thinking in the process of (or as part of the process of) every thought being taken captive by Christ. But this can result in the tension between question and confession. Your confession of some Reformed distinctives won’t mean exactly the same as the confession of someone within the Old Princeton paradigm, for example, because of the questions you’ve asked. Some people who disagree with how you think of some issue of theology or Bible interpretation will suggest you fail to believe the Bible or God against those questions. Maybe my (long winded) question is this: how do you, as someone who is a bridge between the questioning world of Christian scholarship and the confessing world of the Christian Church, distinguish between “faithful” questions and questions that represent affective problems of the will?

Jamie: Oh, OK: I better appreciate what you’re asking now. I guess I would be hesitant to set up these two different worlds–the “questioning” world of Christian scholarship and the “confessing” world of the church. I think there’s inseparable intermingling here. Or let me put it this way: every question is its own kind of confession. Even our questions are articulated from somewhere, on the basis of something–however tenuous. And some of our best confessions are questions: Why, O Lord? How long, O Lord? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? As I think about it, the confessions are not boundaries that mark the limits of questioning; rather, the creeds and confessions are the guardrails that enable us to lean out and over the precipice, asking the hard questions.

I sometimes suggest that the Reformed tradition is like a Weeble. Do you remember those toys? “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down!” These were egg-shaped toys with a heavily weighted bottom. You could press the toys in any direction and they could lean out, but then return to center. I think of the church’s creeds and confessions as the weighted bottom of my theoretical questioning: they provide a center of gravity that enables me to lean out into the hard questions. Granted, our churches often are not comfortable with fostering an ethos of curiosity and questioning, even though God is not at all frightened by such things. Again, I think it’s important for Christian scholars to model what faithful questioning looks like.