New Blogs

Ladies and gentlemen:

I will no longer be posting on Ladder on Wheels for the time being, saving my posts for the collated blog over at the Christian Humanist Podcast website. So if you like the sort of thing you read here, you'll get three times as much if you add www.christianhumanist.org/chb to your RSS feed reader. I won't be deleting this blog, and if something happens and the podcast folds in wrath and acrimony, I'm sure I'll come back. But for the time being at least, my thoughts will be here, not here.

The other announcement: If you liked my music or just wanted to laugh at it, I will be posting more of it at asymposiumofpopularsong.blogspot.com. There's nothing up there just yet, but add it to your reader and you'll be alerted when something is. I'll start with old songs and then eventually record some new ones. (I have a back catalogue since 2007 that hasn't been recorded.)

Thanks for reading Ladder on Wheels, and we'll see you at The Christian Humanist Blog.

The Christian Humanist #10: Literary Hell

It should be up on Feedburner and iTunes sometime this afternoon; in the meantime, here's the show notes. Also, please visit the new Christian Humanist Podcast website!

General Introduction
- Response to listener email and the CWC
- Football talk

The Greco-Roman Underworld
- Odysseus in Hades
- Aeneas in the underworld
- Awkward!

Anglo-Saxon Hell
- Beowulf fights Grendel’s mother
- Do we need to make Beowulf into a theological allegory?
- Hell without flames
- Hel as a person

Tactile vs. Abstract
- Why are modern minds so nervous about physical location?
- Anxiety over falsification?
- TBN reads The Weekly World News

The Master of the Afterlife
- Our favorite translations
- The Allen Mandelbaum story
- The division of the circles
- Our favorite punishments

Milton’s Hell
- The pathos and anxiety of counteroffensive
- Genesis B
- The role of self-deception in literary hells

20^th-Century Hells (And More!)
- “Don Juan in Hell”
- Trying to make sense of William Blake
- Lewis’ bus ride over the moon
- The Orthodox version of hell
- Purgatory
- One-dimensional sin and Piers Plowman
- Hell is other people

Lightning Round
- What are the dangers?
- Is literary hell a good thing or a bad thing?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica. New York: Pearson, 2008.

Barth, Karl. Dogmatics in Outline. New York: Harper, 1959.

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Trans. Leo Sherley-Price. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. Ed. John E. Grant and Mary Lynn Johnson. New York: Norton, 2007.

The Blickling Homilies. Trans. Richard J. Kelly. New York: Continuum 2003.

Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Everyman’s, 1995.

---. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin, 2002. 3 volumes.

---. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Penguin, 1950. 3 volumes.

Eliot, T.S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950. New York: Harcourt, 1952.

Gower, John. Confessio Amantis. Trans. Andrew Galloway. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute, 2006.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Langland, William. Piers Plowman. New York: Norton, 2006.

Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce. New York: HarperOne, 2009.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. New York: Norton, 2004.

The Poems of MS Junius 11: Basic Readings. Ed. R.M. Liuzza. Florence, Kent.: Routledge, 2002.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit and Three Other Plays. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. New York: Penguin, 1979.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2008.

The Christian Humanist #9: Pat Robertson, Haiti, and Suffering

The latest episode of The Christian Humanist will be on iTunes and Feedburner soon. A word about the music: You'll notice I let the song play much longer than normal at the end of the episode--that's because it's one of the saddest, most beautiful songs I've ever heard, and the artist could use your support. The song is "Resplendent," the artist is Vigilantes of Love, and the album is Audible Sigh. You can get it at www.volsounds.com. Highly recommended. (And yes, that's Emmylou Harris singing along.)

General Introduction
- The creek done rose

Pat Robertson and the Haitian Earthquake
- Robertson as a boon to mediocre seminary students with blogs
- Michial gets amused; David gets irate
- Why the world needs more David Grubbses

The Veracity of Robertson’s Claim
- Is he just making stuff up?
- Haitian voodoo
- Robertson’s flattening of Bois Caïman
- The equally flattening response of Robertson’s critics
- Voodoo as political ritual; Bois Caïman as ongoing event
- Does voodoo deal with the demonic world?
- The all makes Nathan nervous

Pacts with the Devil
- Robert Johnson at the crossroads
- Medieval witch trials
- Evolution from Christ’s temptation
- Do Haitians believe in the pact?
- The U.S.’s earthquake weapon and global warming

The Cause and Purpose of Suffering
- Biblical views of suffering
- The Christian Humanist podcast teaches the Book of Job
- Extrabiblical ancient theodicies
- Punishment as an act of kindness
- Calvin on providence
- WHEEL! OF! FORTUNE!
- “The Wanderer” and the convergence of providence and fortune
- C.S. Lewis on suffering
- Why abstract theodicy doesn’t work
- Does God will suffering?

Back to Pat Robertson
- Reliance on 1 Chronicles’ view of suffering
- Polygonal theodicy
- Can we stone Pat Robertson to death yet?
- Pretending to be a prophet but actually being Job’s friend
- Jesus dodges the question

The Appropriate Response to Tragedies
- David Brooks responds appropriately
- Help and humility
- Suffering as a call to repentance
- What does it mean for creation to groan?

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. Victor Watts. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust: A Tragedy. Trans. Walter W. Arndt. New York: Norton, 2000.

Lewis, C.S. A Grief Observed. New York: HarperOne, 2001.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. Trans. George Bull. New York: Penguin, 2003.

The Malleus Maleficarum. Trans. Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.

Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. New York: Norton, 2004.

Thompson, Francis. Hound of Heaven and Other Poems. Wellesley, Mass.: Branden, 1978.

“The Wanderer.” Trans. S.A.J. Bradley. Anglo-Saxon Poetry: An Anthology of Old English Poems. London: Dent, 1982.

Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Search for the No Man's Land

Uncle Tom’s Cabin—which I managed to go 27 years without reading—is really a remarkable book, particularly its first half, before Harriet Beecher Stowe completely devolves into sentimental pulp. (I spent at least one hundred pages wishing Little Eva would just go ahead and die already.) The most effective and interesting parts of the book are the ones in which Stowe leaves behind her plot and the conventions of sentimental fiction in order to rage against the reader and present her (really quite radical for the time) views on the race question. For example:

I know the feeling among some of you northerners well enough. Not that there is a particle of virtue in our not having [slavery]; but custom with us does what Christianity ought to do,—obliterates the feeling of personal prejudice. I have often noticed, in my travels north how much stronger this was with you than with us. You loathe [African Americans] as you would a snake or a toad, yet you are indignant at their wrongs. You would not have them abused; but you don’t want to have anything to do with them yourselves. You would send them to Africa, out of your sight and smell, and then send a missionary or two to do up all the self-denial of elevating them compendiously. Isn’t that it?

Well, Randy Newman agrees, anyway. Uncle Tom is at its best in passages like these, in which Stowe loads up an ideological shotgun and hits absolutely everyone she can with its debris—no one in her world is safe from her indictment, which is what makes her most famous novel something beyond self-righteous; it’s what makes it a good novel rather than a merely important one. (I can’t bring myself to say great—not when the last third of the book is so weak and bound to convention.)

But I’m not writing to talk about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Instead, I want to say a few words about her much less known 1859 novel The Minister’s Wooing, another sentimental novel of protest—only in this case she’s protesting the hard Calvinism of her lineage rather than slavery (at which she nevertheless gets a few shots off).

Let’s define our terms first. The sentimental novel—however much American critics want to pretend it’s not so—has been the dominant form of the novel for most of the genre’s existence, beginning with Samuel Richardson and moving on through Sister Carrie and up to—I don’t know, Twilight. There is a formula: boy tries to seduce girl; girl resists; girl undergoes incredible feeling; then, depending on whether the novel is a comedy or a tragedy, she either marries the right boy or is left ruined by the wrong one.

The best writing I’ve read on sentimental fiction is Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel. Fiedler tells us that the sentimental novel, arising as it does at the end of the Puritan era, replaces Protestantism with something called the “Sentimental Love Religion,” a nebulous faith with limited dogma that posits “love between the sexes as the fountainhead of virtue and joy.” On a more primeval level, it posits emotion as a higher path to truth than reason and thus stands as a precursor to Byronian Romanticism.

This is why it’s safe to call both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Minister’s Wooing “sentimental novels of protest”; Stowe may use logic in her attacks on slavery and Calvinism, but her indictment of her readers is an indictment of a failure to feel, not to think, properly. And that’s her indictment of Calvinism, as well: at its worst, it is a cold, unfeeling dogmatic system rather than a religion meant for real human beings. It has its high points, of course,

But it is to be conceded, that these systems, so admirable in relation to the energy, earnestness, and acuteness of their authors, when received as absolute truth, and as a basis of actual life, had, on minds of a certain class, the effect of a slow poison, producing life-habits of morbid action very different from any which ever followed the simple reading of the Bible.

Thus Stowe proffers a new religion to replace it—only the new religion she proffers is the same old sentimental love religion with a thin veneer of Christianity over it. At times, her faith sounds downright blasphemous, as when she notes that

Of old, it was thought that one who administered poison in the sacramental bread and wine had touched the very height of impious sacrilege; but this crime is white, by the side of his who poisons God’s eternal sacrament of love and destroys a woman’s soul through her noblest and purest affections.

It’s rare to find such a concise and blatant statement of the changes sentimentalism makes to Christianity, but there it is. The one sacrament for the sentimentalist is love, and not the agape of the New Testament. Romance is king, eros by another name. The rampant piety of The Minister’s Wooing and other novels like it only masks the fact that sexuality is at its center, only imperfectly disguises the sexual longing at its core.

The plot is thus. (Spoilers follow.) Mary Scudder is a pious young woman of feeling in late eighteenth-century Newport. She’s halfway in love with her cousin James, an unbelieving sailor, whom she wants to marry but cannot because of her faith. Meanwhile, she is passively courted by her middle-aged minister, Dr. Hopkins, a staunch Calvinist and abolitionist. James goes off to sea for two years, and after a short time word comes back that his ship has sunk and he’s dead. Mary and other members of the community have a crisis of faith. Dr. Hopkins proposes, and Mary says yes, even though she doesn’t love him the way she loves James. Just before the wedding, James shows up and announces that he’s become a Christian, at which point Hopkins lets Mary off the hook. Everyone lives happily ever after.

(There’s also a standard “seduction” subplot, starring Aaron Burr, of “Got Milk?” fame, in the role of the seducer, but this part of the novel seems uncomfortably attached to the main plot.)

The Minister’s Wooing is most interesting in its philosophical conversation (as is Uncle Tom’s Cabin, leading me to conclude that Stowe must have been privy to some wonderful conversations among the famous members of her family). Its plot is mostly sentimental convention, but for a time I thought it was going to go in a more satisfying direction. There is a brief moment (“brief” being a relative term in a novel of nearly 600 pages) in which it appears that, even though James has returned from death and the sea a Christian, Mary will fulfill her vow to Dr. Hopkins anyway. As she tells a friend who has told her she will be miserable in a marriage without eros,

I believe, that, if you go on patiently in the way of duty, and pray daily to God, He will at last take out of your heart this painful love, and give you a true and healthy one. As you say, such feelings are very sweet and noble; but they are not the only ones we have to live by—we can find happiness in duty, in self-sacrifice, in calm, sincere, honest friendship.

What a revolution it would have been in the history of the sentimental novel if our heroine had become Mary Hopkins and lived a happy life devoid of eros! The novel would have grown and adapted; it would have been a critique not just of cold Calvinism but of the warm (and for some reason, I want to say moist) sentimental love religion. Instead, Hopkins appears, a deux ex machina, and allows Mary to renege on her promises and marry her true love.

No one would blame her in real life, of course, but the plot of a sentimental novel bears so little resemblance to life as it was ever lived that I can’t help wishing that Stowe had been braver in her attacks—as brave, in fact, as she is in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where no ideology escapes her penetrating stare. As it is, she takes a look at the battle between Calvinism and the sentimental love religion, nods at the no-man’s land in the center, and sanguinely takes her place in the sewing circle.

The Christian Humanist #8: Apologetics

The triumphant return of The Christian Humanist!

General Introduction
- Emmanuel College’s takeover of The Christian Humanist Podcast.

Our Experiences with Apologetics
- Ethical apologetics
- Archaeological apologetics
- David Grubbs, head librarian
- Michial’s apologetics class
- The BLT department

Justin Martyr and Tertullian
- Philosopher made theologian
- Justin and the Logos
- The advantage of prophets
- Are they even considered apologists?
- Tertullian’s exorcism throwdown

Aquinas and Anselm
- Aquinas’ “proofs of God”
- Integrating Aristotle and revelation
- Faith seeking understanding
- Aquinas’ rejection of Anselm
- What role does reason play in faith?
- Dawkins’ philosophical tone-deafness

C.S. Lewis
- Looking at his life before his argument
- Lewis’ fear of God’s wrath
- Eternal homesickness
- Materialism to idealism to Christianity
- The moral argument
- Michial admits his ignorance of N.T. Wright

Christian Existentialism
- Is “faith seeking understanding” the majority opinion?
- Enlightenment disputation in the neutral public square
- Pascal’s Wager
- Kierkegaard’s radical subjectivity
- Do Enlightenment apologists throw out revelation?
- David defends Ken Ham (kind of)
- Rescuing Jesus
- God’s billboards and man’s submission

A Disclaimer
- Are we saying that science is wrong?
- Are we saying that science and faith have no compatibility?
- Are we saying that there’s no way to use apologetics in science?
- I’ll see your Locke and raise you a Nietzsche

The Rise of the Nü Atheists
- How has the discipline of apologetics changed?
- The overall tone-deafness of the nü atheists
- Where’s the real battle?
- The MC Hammer defense
- Apologetics as an inside tool

What’s the Role of Apologetics Now?
- Know what the questions are
- Being an apologist for learning to the Christian
- Proceed in humility

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anselm. Monologion and Proslogion with the Replies of Gaunilo and Anselm. Trans. Thomas Williams. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996.

Aquinas, Thomas. Of God and His Creatures: An Annotated Translation of the Summa Contra Gentiles. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2006.

---. The Summa Theologica. New York: Pearson, 2008.

Augustine. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

---. Essential Sermons. Trans. Edmund Hill. Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City, 2007.

Barth, Karl. The Word of God and the Word of Man. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958.

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York: Mariner, 2008.

Eagleton, Terry. Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader. Ed. Wilson H. Kimnach, et al. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999.

Ham, Ken. The Revised and Expanded Answers Book: The 20 Most-Asked Questions About Creation, Evolution and the Book of Genesis Answered! Green Forest, Ariz.: Master, 1990.

Justin Martyr. The Writings of Justin Martyr. Ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Berkeley, Ca.: Apocryphile, 2007.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1992. Two volumes.

Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. San Francisco: Harper, 2001.

---. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.

McDowell, Josh. The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Fully Updated to Answer the Questions Challenging Christians Today. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1999.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.

Pascal, Blaise. Pensees. Trans. A.J. Krailsheimer. New York: Penguin, 1995.

Strobel, Lee. The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1998.

Tertullian. Tertulliani Liber Apologeticus: The Apology of Tertullian. Trans. Henry Annesley Woodham. Charleston, S.C.: BiblioBazaar, 2009.

Voragine, Jacobo di. The Golden Legend: Selections. Trans. Christopher Stace. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Wright, N.T. Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense. New York: HarperOne, 2010.

Quare Me Repulisti, et Quare Tristis Incedo

If you’re looking for the first American masterpiece of the Modernist era, look no further than Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 short-story collection (really a loose novel more than anything), Winesburg, Ohio. A mentor to both Hemingway and Faulkner, Anderson manages to maintain a connection to the realist traditions of the preceding decades and bring them into the Modernist world, breaking his characters down into the “grotesques” he uses to make a philosophical point but never allowing them to lose their efficacy as human beings. Winesburg manages to do something that most of the fiction of the era can’t—which is to say that it’s both interesting and moving.

And the most moving story in the collection is the first (or second, depending on whether you count the anecdote about the writer and the carpenter before the title page. The story is titled “Hands” and deals with a strawberry picker with the improbable name of Wing Biddlebaum. Wing serves as Anderson’s depiction of the otherwise unremarkable man with an incredible and uncontrollable power, one that separates him from those around him and leads him to a life of utter loneliness.

Wing Biddlebaum, at the beginning of his story, is one of the clearest images of alienation in American literature. We see this from the opening paragraph, in which he stands “Upon the half decayed veranda” and looks “Across a long field that had been seeded for clover but that had produced only a dense crop of yellow mustard weeds” at a group of children whom he longs to embrace but cannot. This field is an image of broken dreams, the broken dreams that separate him from the rest of the town.

Indeed, Anderson tells us outright that “forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts, [he] did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the town where he had lived for twenty years.” The townsfolk don’t hate or mock him—rather, they are amazed at his ability to harvest strawberries and are “proud of the hands of Wing Biddlebaum in the same spirit in which [they are] proud of Banker White’s new stone house and Wesley Moyer’s bay stallion, Tony Tip, that had won the two-fifteen trot at the fall races in Cleveland.” He is an object among objects—or at the very best an animal, but never a human being.

He is an outsider, nearly purely alienated—except for his relationship with a teenager named George Willard, which allows him to “lo[se] something of his timidity, and his shadowy personality, submerged in a sea of doubts, came forth to look at the world.” In other words, he becomes human through this act of communion. When he touches George Willard and sends him away in horror, the town has lost its last opportunity to learn Wing’s story.

We get it, though. Wing was once named Adolph Myers, a Pennsylvania schoolteacher who had a peculiar sort of religious power which manifested itself chiefly through his hands: “By the caress that was in his fingers he expressed himself. He was one of those men in whom the force that creates life is diffused, not centralized. Under the caress of his hands doubt and disbelief went out of the minds of the boys and they began also to dream.” He is a priest, mostly unconsciously, who can heal people by merely touching them.

The predictable happens, however, and Wing is accused of child molestation, at which point “Hidden, shadowy doubts that had been in men’s minds concerning Adolph Myers were galvanized into beliefs.” He has been made into a grotesque by the truths of others—not even by adopting his own truth. (I should note here that Sherwood’s big philosophical theme in the novel is that the process of accepting a truth as one’s own converts one into something less than human and makes that truth into a “falsehood.”) Once he flees Pennsylvania for Winesburg, he can no longer trust his religious power: “Although he did not understand what had happened he felt that the hands must be to blame.”

And yet, and yet. Wing cannot control the power that lives in his hands. It is for this reason that he isolates himself from the other Winesburgians, for this reason that he warns George Willard that “You are destroying yourself . . . You have the inclination to be alone and to dream and you are afraid of dreams. You want to be like others in this town here. You hear them talk and you try to imitate them.” Unlike George, Wing cannot imitate them—his hands are uncontrollable, and the end of the story finds him enacting religious rituals alone and unconsciously:

A few stray white bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the table; putting the lamp upon a low stool he began to pick up the crumbs, carrying them to his mouth one by one with unbelievable rapidity. In the dense blotch of light beneath the table, the kneeling figure looked like a priest engaged in some service of his church. The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of the devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary.

The message is clear: The sort of religious power Wing Biddlebaum/Adolph Myers possesses can only be misunderstood by the society in which priests must live, but they cannot get rid of it, it being a curse as much as a blessing. The only solution is to retreat behind a dusty field of broken dreams and sever the human connections one so sorely needs. The dispensation of grace comes only rarely and at great personal cost. Such is the role of the undogmatic priest in a world hungry for doctrine—he can communicate only subconsciously, an action which will always be viewed suspiciously by outsiders.

Someone must have written about Anderson’s influence on John Updike—the description I’ve given of Wing Biddlebaum in this post echoes Updike’s portrayal of Harry Angstrom, particularly in Rabbit, Run. (Updike’s essay for the New Yorker, “Twisted Apples” serves as the introduction to the Modern Library edition of Winesburg, Ohio.) The difference, of course, is that Rabbit is instinctively loved by most of the people in his society, even as his religious impulses destroy lives. This must say something about the difference between 1919 and 1959—but I’m not ready to tease that out yet.

Post of the Year

According to my blog tracker, my most popular post is the two part "Deep in the Big Black Heart of the Sunshine State," about the deep existential darkness in Disney/Pixar's best movies. It wasn't even close, and it's all thanks to John Frost over at The Disney Blog, who promoted the posts. Frost's generous promotion was followed by cross-posts on The Journal of Cartoon Overanalyzations and, improbably, on the message boards at ultimate-guitar.com, both of which boosted those posts skyward.

The message, of course, is that the Internet cares far more about what I have to say about cartoons than what I have to say about literature--which isn't really surprising. Too bad I'm pretty much out of thoughts on cartoons.

If anyone is interested, our most-downloaded podcast is Episode #4: God and Country. It's not one of my favorites, but that's the one people apparently were intrigued by.

Happy New Year, everyone (and new decade, whatever the naysayers say). Here's hoping 2010 is better than 2009--and that the teens are better than the aughts.

The Semi-Puritan Mind of Thomas Paine

There were two Americas in the beginning, as there were in the nineteenth century and as, if the 24-hour news networks are to be believed, there are now. The geography and principles have changed, but the split always exists. On the one hand, you had New England, founded by the Puritans not, as the history books told me in elementary school, for freedom of religion but for the freedom to practice their religion and to punish or banish all others. On the other, you had the mid-Atlantic states, beginning with Jamestown, Virginia, settled for financial reasons—if God was involved in the settlement at Jamestown, He had to share the space with gold and glory, as the old saying went.

(And yes, there were others—New York, settled by the Dutch as a fur-trading outpost and a center of American business ever since; Savannah, Georgia, originally founded as a refuge from English debtors prisons and the best laid-out city I’ve ever visited; St. Augustine, the oldest city in North America, or so the board of tourism says, founded by the Spanish while John Winthrop was just a gleam in his daddy’s eye. But it’s Massachusetts and Virginia, with Philadelphia in between but belonging mostly to the latter, that made the difference during this country’s infancy. Of the seven men labeled as the major Founding Fathers by Richard B. Morris, only two—John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, of New York City—and it wasn’t until Andrew Jackson in 1829 that we’d have a president from anywhere other than Massachusetts or Virginia.)

And yet these two Americans were not as separate as it might appear, in that the Puritan worldview—stripped, to some extent, of its religious baggage—filtered its way down to Philadelphia and Virginia. In his book The American Jeremiad, Sacvan Bercovitch notes that the two baseline principles of “Yankee” America, “multidenominational religion and the sacral view of free-enterprise economics” were natural heirs of Puritanism:

Both these developments were rooted in the heterodox tenets established a century before: the moral distinction between the Old World and the New (as between Egypt and Canaan), the chosen people whose special calling entailed special trials, and above all a mythic view of history that extended New England’s past into an apocalypse which stood “near, even at the door,” requiring one last great act, one more climactic pouring out of the spirit, in order to realize itself.

Bercovitch’s analysis explains something puzzling at the heart of the political tracts put out by Deists at the time of the American Revolution. How could a group of people who didn’t believe in God’s providence still see America as, in Winthrop’s famous words, “a city on a hill”? For there can be little doubt that this is how our Founding Fathers saw their country.

Let’s take the instructive example of Thomas Paine, the Deist or atheist (the debate rages on) who coined the phrase “The United States of America” and who wrote the wildly popular anonymous tract Common Sense a mere six months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Very early on, he makes the bold statement that “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.” Leaving aside the truth or falsity of this statement for now, we can safely say that it is an early, though probably not the earliest, instance of secular American exceptionalism. Paine may use the language of the Puritans, but he’s not claiming that it will be the avenue to lead all of the elect to Christ and thus bring on the tribulation and the millennium. Rather, it is America’s secular government that will serve as the Great Example for the rest of the world.

But Paine’s very secular purpose relies on the Bible for much of its argument. A Deist, he did not believe in the accuracy of the Bible, but he nevertheless appeals to its authority, spending several pages conducting what amounts to a Puritan-style exegetical and political sermon. Problem is, his exegesis is lousy: “In the early ages of the world, according to the scripture chronology, there were no kings; the consequence of which was there were no wars; it is the pride of kings which throw mankind into confusion.” Such a statement is true only if one considers Moses, Joshua, and the Judges to be kings—war very clearly predates kingship in the Hebrew Bible.

But Paine has to use the scriptures to make his point precisely because of the remnants of the Puritan legacy in America—our New England forefathers always viewed themselves as a sort of new Israel, whose success was guaranteed because of biblical prophecies that predicted the maintenance and triumph of the faithful remnant. (This was not a metaphor for the American Puritans; they saw themselves speaking literal truth when they equated ancient Israel with seventeenth-century America.) So Paine’s use of the scriptures has a specific historical purpose, and, as Bercovitch notes, it marks a turning point when Puritan rhetoric became distinctly secular.

I am more interested in the present-day effects of Paine’s rhetoric, however. I argued in episode three of The Christian Humanist that America is not and never has been a “Christian nation” in the sense that the Christian right asserts that it was. My co-host David Grubbs quite rightly brought up the religious language of our (mostly secular) Founding Fathers, and if he agreed with me that the Christian right misreads the facts, he insisted that they have a leg to stand on.

Fair enough, and now we understand why. You’d have to flash forward 225 years from Tom Paine to Karl Rove to find a nonbeliever so cynically willing to use religious language to persuade religious believers to adopt a political viewpoint, and, as with Rove, it worked for Paine. The Revolution was conducted, if not on religious grounds, at least using religious language, even though Paine, Jefferson, Madison, et al, had no real intention of making the United States a “Christian nation.”

And yet it backfired. Every time a Christian conservative appeals to the mythic past of those religious founding fathers (you simply must watch this video, for example, which must have required more time and effort to upload to YouTube than to research and write), they are seizing on an intentional ambiguity in the writings of men like Thomas Paine. Use religious language when you don’t wish to adopt that religion, and you end up with generations of people who can’t tell your real views.

The Christian Humanist Episode #7: Wars on Christmas

The last--and in my opinion best--episode of our first semester should be up on Feedburner and iTunes shortly.

General Introduction
- More on science fiction and fantasy
- Book recommendations for Sam Mulberry

Christmas in the Medieval Era
- David reiterates the complexity of Medieval Europe
- Christmas and kings
- An Arthurian Christmas
- Where have all the jousters gone?

Washington Irving’s Rediscovery of Christmas
- The Puritan and American Wars on Christmas
- Geoffrey Crayon goes to England
- Mix of secular and religious traditions
- The weird bachelor uncle
- Irving misses tradition
- Santa Claus

A Christmas Carol
- Why are we so afraid of Scrooge?
- David questions his cynicism
- Warning: Don’t let your children listen to this section!!!!
- Scrooge’s rational skepticism and misanthropy

How the Grinch Stole Christmas
- Michial prepares for the flame emails
- Scrooge removed from motivation
- Physical disability

Merry X-Mas, Everyone
- “JESUS IS NOT AN X!!!!!!”
- Michial defends X-Mas objectors
- In which Nathan Gilmour looks like a total bumpkin
- Dreaming of a White Christmas with the KKK

The 21^st-Century “War on Christmas”
- Not an attempt to destroy Christmas
- Born of inclusivity
- Protests against public display of religious paraphernalia
- Economic impetus for Christmas
- Ties to the 24-hour news cycle
- Ham-fisted inclusivism
- Why is this only in America?

Is There a Conspiracy?
- Are there supernatural forces at play here?
- A question of data interpretation
- Are we dealing with a broader intellectual or cultural trend?

How Shall We Then Live?
- Secular and religious Christmas festivals
- Advent carols
- David Grubbs tells us the real story of St. Nicholas
- You can’t go home again

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abbott, Edwin Abbott. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007.

Irving, Washington. Knickerbocker’s History of New York, Complete. Teddington: Echo Library, 2007.

---. The Sketch-Book. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Malory, Sir Thomas. Morte Darthur. Ed. Stephen H.A. Shepherd. New York: Norton, 2003.

Moore, Clement. The Night Before Christmas: Heirloom Edition. Philadelphia: Running Press Kids, 2001.

Powers, Tim. Declare. New York: HarperTorch, 2002.

---. On Stranger Tides. Northridge, Cal.: Babbage, 2006.

Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Seuss, Dr. How the Grinch Stole Christmas! New York: Random House, 1957.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Trans. Marie Borroff. New York: Norton, 2009.

Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Fawcett, 1996.

Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves

My knowledge of early American women writers is embarrassingly small. I’ve read the usual poems by Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley, and once in a survey course I struggled through Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, which I ended up abandoning in disgust. My situation is, I suspect, not that different than other literary scholars who focus on other eras, and to my credit or debit, I’d never read other writers of the era (Charles Brockden Brown, for example) until very recently.

My committee added a few women writers of the early days of the republic to my comprehensives list, however, and it was with a certain amount of dread that I looked forward to Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie. How wrong I was. These two books are by far the most enjoyable and interesting pieces I’ve read thus far from the days before the American Renaissance—and the fact that I’d not heard of them until this year suggests a tragic and gaping hole in my education.

Charles Brockden Brown is justly called the father of American literature, but just as often he’s rather unjustly called the first American novelist of note. I am, let me be clear, a fan of the Canon and think that every student of literature, no matter what his or her specific area of study, should have to read the “classics” (preferably in a multiple-semester and interdisciplinary core curriculum required of all university students, but that’s a topic for another post).

I am therefore generally unsympathetic toward arguments that call the Canon racist or sexist or otherwise exclusionary—I am certain that women writers from the Elizabethan era would be added to the Canon were there enough of them of the same quality as Shakespeare, Marlowe, etc., and it is not Shakespeare’s fault that there is no female Hamlet, Aphra Behn notwithstanding. (Another topic for another time: I do accept Paul Lauter’s suggestion that the Academy should have multiple canons, but even so, I wish to maintain the large one in the center, even though it’s composed of Dead White Men. Oronooko is simply not as important as Dr. Faustus, not as influential or as important to Western culture. I have not read it, but I suspect it is also not as good. Please no comments calling the Canon into question.)

So it means something when I say that Brown is unjustly called the first American novelist of note. One of the first things one learns about Charlotte Temple is that it was the first American bestseller, and among the next things one learns is that more than two hundred editions of the novel were printed between its first appearance in 1791 and its virtual disappearance from study in the early twentieth century. It sold far more copies than Wieland or Edgar Huntly, inspired far greater devotion, and was much more of a cultural touchstone. It seems obvious that Rowson is both the mother of American literature and our true first novelist of note.

But its cultural impact wouldn’t matter if it were a mere eighteenth-century version of Twilight, a weepy melodrama for young women that had nothing to say to the larger world. (God help my academic descendents who will have to fight against Stephanie Meyer’s inclusion in the Canon.) No, Charlotte is incredibly rich for its genre (sentimental romance) and length (just over one hundred pages in my edition); its message is complex and not easily stated, and its actors move beyond the stock characters who generally populate such novels.

Rowson sets Charlotte Temple up as a moralistic tale of a fallen woman, taking breaks throughout the narrative to reassure readers (constantly assumed to be either impressionable young women or their censoring matrons) that the moral is forthcoming. But it never really does—Charlotte falls, but she does so even after doing her very best to live uprightly, and unlike many other novels of this type, her seducer genuinely loves her and provides for her even after external circumstances move him to leave her.

You can find the criticism in your local university’s database that will tease out the implications of the plot-moral dualism in Charlotte Temple to much more effect than I am willing or able to in this space. I bring it up only to note that it’s far more complicated and intellectually engaging than the canonical novels of Charles Brockden Brown—who set out to raise moral questions, best I can tell.

As good as Charlotte Temple is, however, it pales in comparison to Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, first published several decades later as Early Times in Massachusetts. When Sedgwick is discussed at all—apparently a relatively and tragically rare occasion—it is as either a domestic novelist amongst domestic novelists, i.e., an American Jane Austen; or else it is as a female counterpart to James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier romances.

I must take this opportunity to express my absolute loathing of James Fenimore Cooper. I don’t hate him as much as Mark Twain famously did, but I’ve read both The Last of the Mohicans and The Pioneers, and if the former is bearable for the interest of its implications about race, the latter is among the most boring books I’ve ever read. Cooper has a lot of characters in these novels—characters who never, with a very few exceptions, rise above their status as characters to become human beings (especially not Natty Bumppo). The plots are interesting enough in places, but Cooper can’t write a battle scene to save his life. These are, simply put, bad books.

Not so with Hope Leslie, which covers the Pequod uprisings of the seventeenth century with far more grace than that with which Cooper handles the French and Indian War in The Last of the Mohicans. The characters ring true—the titular protagonist has more depth in the course of her three hundred pages than Cooper grants to Bumppo in more than a thousand, and her ideas (which, big surprise, is what I really read for) are far richer and more complex than anything Cooper can come up with.

Critics read the novel particularly for Sedgwick’s remarkably progressive views on race and gender. Her most likeable character is Magawisca, an Indian woman who does her very best to function as an emissary between Pequod and white society and ends up torn to pieces for her efforts. (She doesn’t die, but in one particularly gory scene, she has her arm chopped off by a tomahawk while trying to re-enact Pocahontas’ defense of John Smith.) She is tragic but never melodramatic, never approaching the “tragic mulatto” portrayal of race that would prove so popular later in the century. Magawisca is the route by which Sedgwick can express her views on racial reconciliation and female empowerment, but the incredible thing, to say it again, is that her use as a symbol does not detract from the verisimilitude of her portrayal. She is one of the most memorable characters in American literature.

I am ready, in fact, to name Hope Leslie the single greatest American novel before The Scarlet Letter, and to pronounce ex cathedra that no American literature class should ever teach The Last of the Mohicans without teaching it alongside Sedgwick’s far superior novel—unless, of course, the class is called “Novels Called Classics That Aren’t That Good.” It is leaps and bounds above Brown, Cooper, Poe, and all but the best sketches of Washington Irving; it stands with the best of our literature from any era.

I have joked before that I don’t read women authors. Susanna Rowson and Catharine Maria Sedgwick are going a long way in convincing me to change that habit.

More on Science Fiction

As Nathan Gilmour says, I “really have a way of drawing the ire of scientists.” After this week’s podcast on Fantasy literature and Science Fiction, we received a very long and well-reasoned dissenting opinion from Beth Crompton, who’s probably our most faithful listener who is not married to one of the hosts. She has two problems with the episode, and since both of them seem to have been sparked by things I said, I’ll be responding to them here in this post.

Her first problem is that our discussion of science fiction is “too general,” a fact that I admitted to during the podcast itself and will reiterate here: I’ve not read a lot of science fiction, especially the hard genre stuff, and so what I know about the genre is going to be based heavily on the literature that has been picked up by the Academy as transcending its genre.

My entire knowledge of literary science fiction thus boils down to four novels by Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land, I Will Fear No Evil, Time Enough for Love, and The Number of the Beast), Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (I’ve not seen Blade Runner, however), and a larger number of novels in the related “dystopian” genre, particularly Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins, both of which I have taught in classroom settings. So any statement I make about science fiction is going to be rather limited, a fact which I will freely admit and perhaps should have stressed further on the podcast. I am not qualified to make broad statements about science fiction as a genre.

Beth’s bigger caveat with our discussion revolves around my final mini-lecture on the podcast, in which I talked about some points Percy makes in his excellent self-help parody Lost in the Cosmos. (It’s absolutely the best starting point for Percy, in my opinion—don’t just pick up The Moviegoer; it’ll bore you to tears.) We were running short on time, and since the podcast wasn’t on Percy, I didn’t go into a whole lot of detail about what else he says in that book. Since I have as much space as I want here and since his argument is important to Beth’s objections, I’ll do so now.

One thing Percy does in this book—the main thing for what we’re talking about—is to expand Kierkegaard’s ethical sphere, really to move it into the modern world. Kierkegaard, as you may know, says there are three “stages on life’s way”: the aesthetic, in which a person lives for himself and the moment; the ethical, in which he lives for an idea; and the religious, in which he lives for God. (It’s much more complicated than that, and Kierkegaard wrote at least three books elucidating the spheres.)

So Percy goes about trying to find out who in the modern world best represents the ethical sphere, and his conclusion is that it’s represented by two groups: artists and scientists. The former, however, collapses back into aestheticism too easily, whereas the latter remain firmly convicted of their ethical beliefs “Because science works better, this is the age of science, scientists are the princes of the age.” So scientists are the modern embodiment of the ethical sphere and thus feel most at home in the world.

So when Percy brings up Carl Sagan and asks why he’s so lonely, he’s looking for chinks in that armor. Beth claims that she is “sort of depressed by the assertion that scientists are any more particularly lonely and depressed than anyone else.” The addition of the word depressed changes the meaning of the assertion. If I used it in the podcast, I certainly did not mean to. Percy never claims Sagan is depressed—only that he is lonely, a different kettle of fish. He has a worldview that seems to explain everything, an ethos by which he can live his life—and yet he’s looking for more, against what he knows is all reason. David was right to mark this as a “religious itch”—from my own Christian existentialist perspective, the desire for aliens to come down and increase our knowledge, or fulfill us, or whatever else, is a misdirected version of the first section of Augustine’s Confessions, i.e., “our hearts are restless until they find rest in You.”

(Our introductory music this week was very nearly Radiohead’s “Subterranean Homesick Alien” incidentally, which is a great musical version of this same notion. The poor narrator of the song is lost in a world where everything is tied up and longs for something outside the circuit to come in and break it.)

Beth points out quite rightly that “just because something is well-understood and categorized doesn't mean it's not still freaking cool” and that scientists often have a sense of wonder about the universe. This is very true. But I didn’t accuse scientific materialism of not having a sense of wonder about the universe (at least I don’t think I did—I have not gone back and listened to the podcast). I accused them of having a worldview that does not allow for mystery as the word is typically understood. It’s true that mystery and wonder are related things, and I could have this wrong, but I see no place for mystery in Enlightenment scientism and the materialism that has followed in its wake and floats around scientific discourse to this day.

She also says that “there's a lot more to science than classifying things, and also, it would be a strange categorization indeed that left out humans,” responding to my reference to Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel, that he designed a system that explained everything, then stepped back and saw that he didn’t fit into it. Obviously science does more than classification, but it begins at classification, or at least classification takes place near the beginning of things—and when scientists can’t classify something (the unclassifiable is coterminous with the mysterious, of course), they are forced to leave it out, to leave it untouched.

(An example: in this Salon.com interview, a journalist asked Richard Dawkins what science can do about the why questions that science cannot answer. Dawkins, somewhat incredibly, actually claimed that such questions are just not worth asking. In other words, there’s no point in asking if there’s a meaning to life. Obviously not every scientist—not even every materialist scientist—is Richard Dawkins, but his attitude is instructive here.)

And while scientific systems may have a place for “humans,” I would argue that materialist science (a distinction which I am sure to make) has no place for the Self as understood by everything from Christian theology to Sartrean existentialism to 18th-century political thought. In my encounters with scientists (popular scientists, of course) who wish to deal with the concept of the Self, they either ignore it altogether (leave it out of their systems as something not worth talking about) or attempt to force it into a narrowly materialist worldview, as I heard Michael Shermer do just last week when he was talking about neuro-biology. The Self is a set of chemical reactions. Under such a schema, the scientist as a Self is left out of his own system in any meaningful way.

Beth helpfully gives me a list of science fiction that is life-affirming, which I appreciate and which I will try to read if I ever finish my comprehensive exams and dissertation (a dodge, yes, but at least I’m admitting it’s a dodge), but I do want to stress that I did not claim science fiction was depressing or nihilistic. In fact, when I brought up Carl Sagan’s loneliness, I said specifically that I was talking about sci-fi in its more optimistic strains. So the relative sadness of T.S. Eliot and Nathaniel Hawthorne vs. Neil Gaiman or Ursula LeGuin is not really relevant here. If anything, I’d argue that the realism I read is far more depressing than the sci-fi I’ve read—and of course there are materialists and non-materialists writing in both genres.

I do have to say one thing about depressing literature, however. Beth specifically calls out Hawthorne for his depressing approach to sin in The Scarlet Letter. (I respectfully disagree.) But she praises an R.A. Lafferty novel that I am not familiar with. Here is her description:

Sin in Lafferty's novels exists to be ridiculous. In The Annals of Klepsis, there is a woman who was exiled for committing the Unspeakable Sin, and she is badgered throughout the novel to reveal the nature of her sin, not so that she can be judged, but just because everyone is really curious about what it was. The most frustrating thing about the novel for the reader is not that this woman sinned and what this says about the treatment of women and society's lack of compassion, but that we never figure out what the Unspeakable Sin was either and we would really like to know, because it sounds fascinating.

I have two points here: (a) From my Christian point of view, making sin “ridiculous” rather than something very serious indeed is a grave misstep, and I’d much prefer a depressing novel that treated it seriously than an upbeat one that treated it as a joke; (b) the plot Beth describes parallels Hawthorne’s short story “Ethan Brand” to such a degree that I can only assume it’s an homage to him. So it’s a good thing, I suppose, that not everyone hates Hawthorne. [Insert smiley-faced emoticon.]

At any rate, I hope that clears up any misconceptions I may have given Beth or other listeners about my feelings on science and science fiction. I must again reiterate that I’ve got nothing against science. I just don’t trust materialism; I think it’s bankrupt as a worldview and is a complete failure at explaining the peculiar mystery of what it means to be a human being. Echoing Percy’s question about Carl Sagan’s loneliness was my way of suggesting that something deep inside the materialist is afraid of the same thing.

Thanks to Beth for writing such a long and thoughtful email. She clearly knows much more about science fiction than I do and has thought a lot about it. If you want to respond to anything you hear on The Christian Humanist Podcast, send us an email at thechristianhumanist@gmail.com.

Episode #6: Fantasy and Sci-Fi

This is our seventh episode, and we're finally talking about literature. It oughta be up on Feedburner and iTunes sometime this afternoon.

General Introduction
- Things were busy while David was gone.
- Brief feedback notices.

A Moment of Confession; or, It’s All Geek to Me
- Nathan Gilmour, dungeon-master extraordinaire
- Michial’s Back to the Future obsession
- Has David ever read anything without dwarves in it?
- “Oh, not another [expletive] elf!”

How does speculative fiction relate to mundane reality?
- Questions at the borders of our knowledge
- Humanity as an aesthetic category
- Science fiction and the novel of ideas
- Sex and science
- Realities of human experience
- How black-and-white is the world of fantasy literature?

Speculative fiction and literary realism
- Metaphor and literality
- Madeleine L’Engle’s probable vs. possible
- Separate spheres or cross-pollination?
- Fantasy novel as novel

Ideas in Fantasy Literature
- Interiority interacting with fantastic elements
- Proliferation of Tolkeinian beings
- The nonhuman face of humanity
- To be human means to have potential

Ideas in Science Fiction
- Walker Percy’s ontological lapsometer and the Cartesian split
- Disembodied heads galore!
- How death leads to life
- Man and technology

Christians and Speculative Fiction
- Should Christians read about witchcraft?
- Why witchcraft doesn’t mean today what it used to mean
- The shift from romance to realism
- The materialism of science fiction
- Why is Carl Sagan so lonely?
- The evolution of the vampire

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Card, Orson Scott. How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. New York: Writer’s Digest, 2001.

Chesterton, G.K. Tremendous Trifles: Humorous Sketches. New York: WLC, 2009.

Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.

Gilgamesh: A New English Version. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Free Press, 2006.

Gibson, William. Count Zero. New York: Ace, 2006.

L’Engle, Madeleine. Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. New York: North Point Press, 2000.

Percy, Walker. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. New York: Picador, 2000.

---. Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World. New York: Picador, 1999.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. New York: Penguin, 1979.

Tolkein, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings: One Volume Edition. New York: Mariner, 2005.

Episode #5.1: More on New Calvinism and Emergent

It's just me and Nathan Gilmour in this week's short episode, responding to criticism about last week. Please pardon our technical difficulties.

General Introduction
- How this show will work.
- Nathan’s blog addressing Sam Mulberry’s email.

Emergent and Poststructuralist Philosophy
- Is poststructuralism “out” in the Academy?
- Michial gets cynical; Nathan gets sanguine.
- Existentialism and poststructuralism.
- Effusive praise for James K.A. Smith.
- Radical Orthodoxy.
- Calvinism Outside of New Calvinism.
- Ecumenism.
- Michial refuses to call heresy.
- The difference between Christian existentialism and the Emergent Church.

Self-Definition
- Can a postmodernist nail things down?
- Definition under attack.
- Enlightenment thought and systematizing.
- Does the Emergent Church subvert itself?

More on Celebrity Culture
- We badmouth the absent David Grubbs.
- A consequence of Calvinist intellectualism?
- “The dark, tangled, visceral aspect of Christianity.”
- Home video feeds.

Feedback
- Tripp Fuller and Tony Jones.
- Why don’t the Neo-Calvinists respond?
- Were we kinder to Neo-Calvinists?

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics: An Introduction. Ed. Helmut Gollwitzer. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1994.

Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.

Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007.

McLaren, Brian. A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001.

Milbank, John, et al. Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Pinnock, Clark. Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2001.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1988.

Schaeffer, Francis A. A Christian Manifesto. Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2005.

Smith, James K.A. Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2006.

Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Fawcett, 1996.


LINKS
Nathan Gilmour's Written Response

Nathan Gilmour Responds to Podcast Questions

Right here, folks.

I can second most of what he says, except when he talks about knowing mostly Emergent people in their 40s and 50s; this has definitely not been my experience. I will particularly get behind the following sentence: "I wanted to do a show on Emergent and the New Calvinism because I thought that each corrected a deficiency in the other." I believe this, as well, and have been kicking around a related episode of the podcast on why denominations are a good thing. If we do that one, however, it'll be in the spring semester, as I've only got one more episode to moderate this season, and it's going to be on Apologetics. (UPDATE: No, it won't be. We've switched the schedules around, and I have no more moderations this semester. Apologetics was supposed to be our first episode; now it appears it'll be the first episode of the second season.)

Thanks for listening and reading, and if you've got any questions, comments, or complaints, send 'em along to thechristianhumanist@gmail.com.

Karl Barth, Christian Humanist

I’m afraid I’ve been spreading a vicious lie about my favorite theologian, Karl Barth, for several years now, and I feel I need to clear the air a bit. I brought it up on the very first episode of The Christian Humanist Podcast (TCH if you’re me; the CHP if you’re Nathan Gilmour or teach at Bethel University), and I go into more detail in this post from two summers ago.

The lie: Karl Barth did not believe in what Calvinists call “general revelation,” and more specifically, that he distrusted Christian humanism and thought it a quest at best quixotic and quite possibly heretical. Turns out, this may not be true.

I should admit straight out that I have not read as much Barth as I should. I’ve been through Helmut Gottwizer’s 260-page selection of the three-kabillion-page Church Dogmatics several times, and I’ve read The Humanity of God and Evangelical Theology: An Introduction. Hardly enough, it’s true, to make me an expert. (It may not even be enough for me to call him my favorite theologian, but I’m going to anyway.)

I think I make a pretty good case for my position in the post linked to above, both defending my position that he mistrusts natural theology and, in the sequel, giving a few historical reasons why that might be the case. I may only have half of the story, however, as I’m realizing as I make my way through Ralph C. Wood’s The Comedy of Redemption. Wood seems to have read every word Barth ever wrote five or six times and devotes two full chapters in his book on American novelists to the other great Swiss theologian, and he says I’m wrong:

It is a commonplace to say that Karl Barth’s work is Christocentric. It is even more conventional to dismiss his theology as antihumanistic. The aim of this chapter is to show that, while the former is incontestably true, the latter is demonstrably false. Barth’s theology of culture, far from being misanthropic, has a profound regard for humanity and all its works. Yet it is not built upon our native longing for God. Barth makes a radically evangelical estimate of human creation, rooting it in the Gospel’s own unapologetic claim that God in Christ has shown himself to be ineluctably for us rather than against us.

As usual, I have overstated the case, though it’s good to know that I’m at least following the crowd in my misreading of Barth. The major counterexample is Barth’s deep love for Mozart. He apparently began and ended every day by listening to a Mozart record, and “Barth’s study contained a picture of Mozart that was hung—as Barth always pointed out—at a slightly higher level than Calvin’s.” The theologian saw Mozart’s music as a major signifier of God’s grace and wrote what is apparently a very famous essay about him. According to Barth, the composer

heard, and causes those who have ears to hear, even today, what we shall not see until the end of time—the whole context of providence. As though in the light of this end, he heard the harmony of creation to which the shadow also belongs but in which the shadow is not darkness, deficiency is not defeat, sadness cannot become despair, trouble cannot degenerate into tragedy and infinite melancholy is not ultimately forced to claim undisputed sway. Thus the cheerfulness in this harmony is not without its limits. But the light shines all the more brightly because it breaks forth from the shadow.

(To which I say, whatever. I’ve never liked Mozart very much, even though he appears to be the official composer of Christian existentialism, between Barth’s adoration of him and Kierkegaard’s long essay in Don Giovanni in Either/Or. I still like Beethoven, Chopin, and Erik Satie better.)

It is important that Barth is talking about Mozart and not, say, Bach. (According to Wood, in fact, Barth believes that “Mozart . . . is content to play while Bach is determined to preach. The angels may perform Bach when they are before the throne of God . . . but when gathered unto themselves it’s always Mozart.”) Finding theology in Bach would be easy; his music is full of theological themes. But not Mozart, who “did not intend his music, at least not his secular work, to resound with the praise of God’s prevenient grace.”

So Barth is finding echoes of faith in a work meant for a secular audience and written by a person who (by all accounts) was thoroughgoingly secular. This is, in fact, the task of the Christian humanist as I define it—to “demonstrate[] what surprising echoes of the Gospel can be heard within human creation whenever it is not made the basis for faith in God.” Barth’s trouble comes when we start with the secular work and try to move toward the Bible; this cannot be because “Only by first hearing God’s unique and saving Word spoken in Christ can we later catch its worldly resonances.”

This explains Barth’s antipathy for what he calls, in the Church Dogmatics, “Christian humanism.” The Christian humanist moves from the world to the Gospel instead of vice versa and is thus in danger of building Towers of Babel. Wood calls Barth “a humanist Christ rather than a Christian humanist. In the latter formulation, the noun always overwhelms the adjective.” (I disagree, incidentally, which is why the podcast is still called TCH instead of THC.)

But Wood’s final thoughts in the chapter are worthwhile to anyone who considers him- or herself a Christian humanist or a humanist Christian or whatever else:

Hence Barth’s refusal to set a so-called Christian humanism in opposition to scientific, existentialist, Marxist, or other humanisms. Because they are all abstract programs, says Barth, Christian faith must not seek to compete or to compare itself with them. The Gospel, Barth insists, differs from all humanisms not in degree but in kind. It “is neither a principle, not a point of view, nor a moral philosophy. It is spirit and life, a good message of God’s presence and work in Jesus Christ. It does not form some Front or Party either, not even for the sake of a certain conception of man. It forms congregations, and these exist for service among all men.”

Wise words from Barth, as usual—words that all Christian scholars in the humanities should take to heart to avoid moving in the wrong direction. Sorry for the confusion.

The Christian Humanist Episode #5: Neo-Calvinists vs. the Emergent Church

It should be on Feedburner and iTunes very soon, but in the meantime, here's the show notes for the latest episode--in which we criticize the arch-enemies of Neo-Calvinism and the Emergent Church.

General Introduction
- Listener email.
- Response to the CWC’s crossover idea.

Our Experiences
- Nathan stumbles, Forrest Gump-like, upon the movements.
- Piperians and Edwardsians.
- Joshua Harris and the outlaw hideout.
- Emergent at Toccoa Falls College.
- The popular face of postmodern theory.

Celebrity Culture
- Origins of Neo-Calvinism and Emergent in the critique of Evangelical criticism.
- A sign of the times?
- The Emergent Church’s position in the multimedia age.
- Neo-Calvinist video feeds and Reformed history.
- The cult of Joshua Harris.
- Has Christianity always been a celebrity culture?

The Emergent Church and Ecumenism
- Emergent claims that the history of Christianity is the history of competing claims.
- You can’t compress diverse traditions into a singular culture.
- The “yes, but on the other hand” tradition.

The Movements and History
- Michial answers another question instead.
- Neo-Calvinists or Neo-Puritans?
- The free-for-all ecumenism of the Emergent Church.

The Curse of Exclusivity
- Neo-Calvinism’s concern with the minute details of confession.
- Emergent’s hipsterism.
- Calvinism clubs.
- The reason for David’s mistrust of Emergent.
- Christ the Center and the PCUSA.
- Our second ex cathedra pronouncement.
- Why we want our pastor in a comb-over, not a faux-hawk.
- What a good church should look like.

The Future of the Movements
- Are they sustainable or the new Rosicrucians?
- Neo-Orthodoxy vs. Neo-Liberalism.
- Neo-Calvinism as not all that “neo.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Trans. Leo Sherley-Price. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Bell, Rob. Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2006.

Carson, D.A. Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2005.

DeYoung, Kevin and Ted Kluck. Why We’re Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be. Chicago: Moody, 2008.

Driscoll, Mark. The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out without Selling Out. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2004.

Hansen, Collin. Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists. Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2008.

Harris, Josh. I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 2003.

Kimball, Dan, et al. The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2003.

McLaren, Brian. A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001.

Miller, Donald. Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2003.

Piper, John. Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 2003.