Western civ.
There's days' worth of fascinating discussion on the First Things main page, now, of the fallout from Benedict XVI's University of Regensburg address. A lot can be picked up there about Western Christian thought & its modern development, it seems to me – not that I think of myself necessarily as a good judge of what comes into the scope of the category 'Christian thought'. I recommend in particular a couple of entries that on a quick reading I thought especially useful, as thoroughgoing &/or incisive on the address & its context & implications: one by Ryan Anderson of First Things and the other by Russell Reno, theology prof. at Creighton University. They overlap thematically, but Anderson's is perhaps the more informative, Reno's the more concise & pointed, of the two.Here's the substance of Reno's, from 3rd paragraph to the end:
Two issues come especially to the fore. The first returns the pope’s listeners back to the question of Islam and the West. Without mentioning the emerging clash of civilizations explicitly, Benedict observes that we urgently need a 'genuine dialogue of cultures and religions.' It is hard to see how Western intellectuals, who have dismissed faith as a subrational, childish piety, can possibly provide leadership in this dialogue. One need not be an Islamic fundamentalist to see their antipathy and feel their condescension.The worry Reno underlines is well founded, without a doubt. Can it be merely pessimism to look at these powerful currents of 'God-forgetfulness' and conclude the prospects for Western civilization's cultural integrity are seriously uncertain? But at the same time, this portent of dis-integrity is hardly sudden, and hardly a specifically contemporary (or even modern, really) development. More importantly, our particular moment of uncertainty is in no way the first fact about the state of history that whatever may be called a 'Christian world-view' must orient us toward for response. The first and essential fact to which Christianity provides for a capacity to respond is the fact that Jesus – divine, incarnate, dead buried & resurrected, ascended – now sits at the Father's right hand, bearing all authority. What emergency can intervene to command our attention? Nothing – so the Church confesses – advances against Christ on his throne, the only true Defender of the Faith, or his kingdom, the eternal domain of all whom he's bound, and goes on binding, to himself.
The second issue was a preoccupation of Benedict XVI’s predecessor. As the post-Christian West renounces its theological heritage and puts aside centuries-long inquiries into the complex relationship between faith and reason, our capacity to provide an ultimate context for reason atrophies, and our ability to defend truth-seeking is diminished.
If I might press the pope’s point still further: Scientific culture is not a perpetual-motion machine, and the larger questions of the possibility, meaning, and purpose of the life of the mind, themselves insoluble by means of experimental method, must be asked and answered. If we fail to do so, then we risk regressing into a clever, technologically sophisticated, and well-armed culture unable to distinguish between power and reason. Indeed, our postmodern prophets tell us they are one and the same.
It is at this point that, perhaps, Pope Benedict wants us to think yet again about what he surely knew was a controversial quotation about violence and Islam. In the twilight of the Byzantine Empire, with the military power of Islam bearing down upon Constantinople, the urbane Christian emperor cast his lot with the power of Christian speech and reason against the might of the Muslim sword. What of our own age and our own supposed guardians of culture? Threatened from without just as it decays from within, I worry that our spiritually undisciplined and intellectually undercapitalized velvet barbarism of God-forgetfulness may turn hard, cruel, and vicious.
The essential fact, then, being recognized: what should we make of what we have, as things stand in history where we are, to worry about? Surely these things, these worries confronting the West, the Pope's concerns & mine & ours, aren't less real as facts than that essential fact. If anything, we establish, actually, not diminish, our worries' reality & meaningfulness upon the premise of that essential fact of Jesus's person & work. (It's plainly not for Christians to suppose that civilization & its conflicts might be, as suggested in for instance The Matrix, a grand illusion, to be transcended by way of some mind trick even grander.) But in each eventuality thus established as real & terrible – threats without, decay within, the state of cultural self-obsession & doubt itself with all stirring of civilized nobility & folly that attends it, and so on – we see, no less than in whatever in our situation we count as blessings, nothing less than a facet, an aspect, of the Father's far-reaching providence over and the Son's kingly love toward the Church, who is the bride being readied by the Spirit for a celebration already announced – a celebration already, as it were, the dénouement of a story that Civilization belongs to, & that it exists only to see unfolded.
posted by paul bowman @ 9:30 PM
7 Comments:
Interesting (and possibly unavoidable) that you raise The Matrix. My perspective ever since my youth has been that Christ's Kingdom does in fact require wholly new eyes for us to recognize it - what was it, the red pill? This POV is largely the result of my Anabaptist upbringing, which traditionally has a near-paranoid suspicion of any body that wields authority. The degree that civlizations reflect the Kingdom of God is, I've thought, nearly accidental.
Of late, though, I've been reconsidering Paul's final statement to Agrippa: "that you might become as I am - except for these chains." What did he envision?
Wrote a few paragraphs in reply here a couple of days ago, then scrapped it. A lot of different potential lines of inquiry here, of course — and every one my mind starts down lands me in trouble before too long, as you may imagine. (I mean, civilization, you know. It's a big subject.) But I'm interested in hearing further about how your perspective's developed, so I don't want to back off from the questions. Just have to take it in small bites, for as far as that might get things.
Actually, I have a partly Anabaptist heritage myself. Originating Bowman immigrant to Pennsylvania, in the line of Bowmans I belong to, was a Bauman(n) evidently from Switzerland, whose last son moved in the later 18th cent. to mountainous Franklin Cnty, Virginia — where descendants, including my grandfather's 2 younger brothers, still live a fairly rural life & carry on something of a German Brethren church tradition. (My grandfather's grandfather was apparently elected a Brethren minister, even, but I don't know anything further about him.) My grandfather, though, left home & married a Lutheran girl in Roanoke; they became comfortable big-church Baptists in small-town central Virginia after WWII, neither of them being particularly interested in questions of denominational distinction, and brought up my dad & his brother for all real purposes religiously illiterate. Yet my parents, determining themselves at the outset of their marriage as (contra drugs long-hairs & communism) conservatives and influenced in part by friends in a college Sunday-school group, ended up in an 'Independent Fundamental' Baptist church on moving to Maryland in the early 70s (with a toddling me), and so came back in a way to semi-Anabaptism, or rather to a version of the pietist-biblicist anti-Left baptistic optional-denominationalism that seems to be thought of now, not uncommonly, as nearly a pure expression of conservative American evangelicalism. (Call it the socially-unconscious modern development of Anabaptism — ha ha.) But this is not quite a tradition — in fact in its ordinary practice it's to large degree historically & theologically rootless (espec. as a post-War phenomenon, I gather), in some ways plainly incoherent in credal terms (amid a bewildering swirl of proof-texts), and quite malleable across generational timespans, as I suppose has been well documented now. So I'm very cautious, myself, from present perspective, about how I look to this background as a heritage & a foundation for faith. (Which certainly isn't to say that I think of it as no foundation.)
What this comes to, in part, is that what I have to acknowledge come down to me as cultural heritage involves among other things a way of thinking (or not, depending on point of view) that combines a considerable measure of perfectly paranoid institution-wariness with vigorous defense of the Establishment, almost as if there were no conceivable contradiction between them. (DeVito & Schwarzenegger in Twins — this post's movie tie-in.) And it's not that hard to recognize, really, if one gets jogged out of familar circles a bit, anyway, and has to start accounting some for one's own prejudices' incompatibility with others'. One of the things I've been thinking a bit about, though, is whether this extreme view, in late-20th-early-21st-cent. Evangelical Christendom set adrift upon American prosperity, of wedded antinomies doesn't just make more apparent than usual what's merely obscured in cases where religious traditions develop more sustained life and are more well-disciplined and apparently coherent? In other words, I wonder if there's an essential political-religious paradox lurking here?
Well, something to chew on.
Here, pieces of my earlier effort at reply — which I put aside, I should have said, rather than scrapped. If I had time I'd recompose — but what the hey.
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The Matrix is just a convenient popular reference in a way. I recognize that there's potentially a lot to interpret if the movie/s is/are really to be fairly discussed. And I confess a certain impropriety in alluding to it, since I haven't taken much of an interest in discussion that's run (& for all I know continues to run) about them out there. It's not obvious to me from casual viewing, actually, that the story comes to any clear & unified idea of reality (or, much less, of the Gospel, to the extent it informs the story), so I'm wary of trying to make very much of it, in spite of the richness of the material. (For what it's worth, I'm ready enough to acknowledge enjoying the movies as a group, especially of course for thrilling cinematographic effects — ahem — understood to include, if you follow me, Monica Bellucci.)
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On Paul before Agrippa: I'm pretty sure I understand what you're getting at, and I'm intrigued to hear further. But seems like I should ask if it's relevant to the way you approach the question here that Paul doesn't only address Agrippa there? — 'I would to God that not only you but also all who hear me today might both almost and altogether become as I am, except ....'
Paul's proposition is unsettling, if not problematic - and clearly he wasn't just pointing a finger at Agrippa and gently making a personal claim: the more I re-read Paul (and commentaries on his epistles by the likes of NT Wright) the more I see this as the plainest example of his "speaking the Truth to Power". He has, I would think, a Divinely inspired confidence that this Truth will be heard by others, and will have reverberations with eternal echoes.
But I wonder about "these chains". Paul, being a revolutionary, is not concerned with the practicalities of establishing Christ's "Upside Down Kingdom" in Caesar's realm - but this is our concern, and rightly - even pragmatically - so. I would like to move cautiously toward possible answers, but I have quite some distance to cover, ideologically, before I can.
An example of the sort of theology that was the norm for my upbringing is Donald Kraybill's "Upside Down Kingdom".
I'd say more, but I'm rather fried from the weekend's events, and would rather my befuddled musings not get mistaken for well-considered heresy!
I'd like to hear more of your thoughts on this. I might well have jumped too quickly to conclusion that I saw where you were going re: Paul before Agrippa and 'these chains'.
Is Paul entirely a revolutionary? I've read very little of Wright (though have picked up something of the tenor of his ideas as elements of them circulate in various discussions), I confess, and nothing of Kraybill, whom I'm sorry to say I didn't know at all. I have an idea what's meant by 'upside-down kingdom', and would be inclined to think of what I understand it to signify as an aspect of emphasis within, but not a complete picture of, the Gospel's breaking-in of Heaven in the earthly history. But clarification would be helpful. (Anyone?) It seems to me that Paul must be something more than a revolutionary — in fact, that he's more concerned with something already established than with establishing something — that he looks forward, so to speak, fundamentally by looking backward. He looks forward more aware, with respect to history, of something completed than of what's immediately incipient; and his chains, along with whatever else he & the Church he labors with undergo, he sees as subordinate & passing in significance, although not insubstantial for the part individuals' & churches' lives have to play. In fact the empire itself, for him, seems somehow simultaneously to threaten & thwart the progress he's committed to, and to expose and bear out its form and reality. I don't mean to suggest that I think I can reconcile this, of course. And I'm not entirely sure I'm addressing the same question you're addressing! — but expect things will get somewhat clearer with further discussion.
What if I said that Paul seems to be speaking Power to power and Truth to truth, in Acts & elsewhere, as opposed to 'Truth to Power'? Does that sound like a meaningful distinction, from where you stand, or no?
re: meaningful distinction - yes, I think it is. And "revolutionary" was a word chosen in haste (and befuddlement). Still, Paul remains (for me) the most problematic of the NT writers. I believe his writings are the strange result of inspiration and alloyed genius. In that time, place, and revolutionary (sorry - can't escape it) interaction of cultures he was given a unique glimpse into the "mind of G_d", and did what he could to articulate what he saw, and how it related to his previous experience and scholarship. He mediates for the reader, but it is still a human mediation, and as you read the prison epistles it is hard to escape the sense that he is fighting with his own sense of disappointment. God's timeline - the eschaton (hey! first time I've used that word! Next coffee's on me!!) - for instance, slowly SLOWLY reveals itself to be very different than the one he anticipated. His struggles with troublemakers wear him down. He is a very human being. He apparently had an unshakeable sense of Who he served, and a dynamic sense of His Kingdom. But that dynamic sense, I think, altered with experience.
I have to admit, though, that I speak more out of an intuition formed through prolonged exposure than I do out of legitimate study. Mssrs Koyzis and Strauss (and Wright, for that matter) would probably draw very different conclusions re: Pauline Perspective.
I wouldn't categorically resist anything you suggest there, I think. I'm inclined to affirm the idea, or echo you, so far as to say there's probably no grasping, as a believing life unfolds, what's revealed in Christ except by way of something reflecting (however dimly, absent genius) that dynamic (in part because rational) sense, altering with experience, of what the Kingdom of God must mean that you're identifying in Paul. I mean, disappointment must be built-in, there. Something here we should have a term for, maybe — 'apostolic pathos' (or phrasing in this vein more suggestive &/or more precisely & obscurely Greek!) — that should indicate a definite place for, and a definitely Christian heritage in, disappointment at the unveiling of God's purposes in time, bound up with faith. (Not that Old Testament patriarchs' & prophets' faithful lives wouldn't be said first to have epitomized this role of disappointment in feeling out responsiveness to God & being overwhelmed by Him, historically; but that the Gospel and the apostolic mission should perhaps be said to make for a much harder, maybe more tragic, realization of it.) It's possible that I'm generalizing too much against your point, though. I may well be missing nuances, angles, simple facts that you're reading in Paul, or in the Acts accounts. Anyway, I don't expect I can claim any more 'legitimate study' than you can — and do know I could use a lot more exposure to New Testament scholarship recent & old, both.
All this being said, though, aren't Paul's expressions of confidence & expectation all the more insistent & provocative in light of it, most especially at the condition of chains? — 'I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to keep what I have committed to him until that day.' — 'the crown of righteousness ... not to me only but also to all who have loved his appearing.' — 'And the Lord will deliver me from every evil work and preserve me for his heavenly kingdom. To him be glory forever & ever.' — and so on.
Don't know whether Messrs Koyzis & Strauss lurk here much, if at all, but I'd certainly be interested in their insights/objections/re-directions in this sort of discussion too — as also in such studious others' as Abel's, Baus's, Baus's, Irani's, Anderson's, &c. Might just be you & me batting stuff back & forth in the dark here, though — which is fine, promising & fruitful without any addendum or amendment, as far as I'm concerned.
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