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.

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.

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.

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.

The Christian Humanist Episode #4: God and Country

We've uploaded the latest episode of The Christian Humanist to the FTP site, and it should be available via iTunes this afternoon and our Feedburner site even earlier.

General Introduction
- Response to CWC: The Radio Show regarding visual art
- Response to listener Beth regarding science

Our Three Assumptions
- The United States is not and never has been a “Christian nation.”
- It is not a particularly admirable goal to make the United States into a theocracy.
- No one political party fulfills the mission of Christ.

Our Experiences with Christianity and Politics
- Evangelicalism and Limbaughism
- Pro-life churches
- Home schooling and conservativism

Constantine’s Conversion
- David clears up a common misconception
- A defense of Constantine
- Early reaction to Constantine’s conversion
- Oh, those complicated Middle Ages!

Anabaptist Politics
- Nathan’s not a Mennonite
- Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder
- Divine vocations that are not for Christians

The American Revolution
- David clears up another common misconception
- What was the American Revolution actually about?
- Were the Christian colonists right to revolt?
- Paul’s appeal to his rights as a Roman citizen
- The difference between kings and emperors
- The pragmatism of the Church Fathers

Modern-Day Protest
- Should Christians make the world safer?
- The role of prophetic speech
- Who should pull the sword out of the sheath?

Should Christians Run for Office?
- Does Washington corrupt otherwise pure people?
- Should we be serving in academia?
- Blame it on the system
- The importance of postmodern theory
- Nathan’s letter-writing campaign

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Estep, William. The Anabaptist Story: An Introduction to Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdman’s, 1996.

Grafton, John, ed. The Declaration of Independence and Other Great Documents of American History 1775-1865. New York: Dover, 2000.

Hauerwas, Stanley. After Christendom?: How the Church Is to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas. Nashville: Abingdon, 1991.

Wulfstan, St. Homilies of Wulfstan. Ed. D. Bethurum. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1957.

Yoder, John Howard. The Politics of Jesus. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdman’s, 1994.

Addendum: Poe and the Patristics

I misspoke a bit on the podcast yesterday—if you haven’t listened to it yet, what are you waiting for?—when I said that the Church Fathers play virtually no role in American literature. (If you didn’t notice, I had actually forgotten about Updike’s Roger’s Version until the second before I brought it up.) In fact, there’s at least one other major American author who leans on them from time to time: Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe was not a religious man. The quote you see on atheist websites from time to time (“No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter than you and I; and all religion is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry”) seems to be more or less an accurate statement of his views. But the man was something close to obsessed with subjective experience, which leaves a space open not only for semi-traditional mysticism but for Kierkegaard-style religious existentialism. (My first paper in my PhD program was on this topic.)

So when Poe brings up the Church Fathers, which happens only very rarely, it’s generally to serve a higher purpose—to demonstrate a character’s intense subjectivity. The most famous instance is in the short story “Berenice,” one of his very best. Our narrator is one of Poe’s typical hyper-sensitive artist types, this time named Ægeus. He’s a half-cousin to Roderick Usher, sickly and gloomy. Indeed, his entire existence seems bound up in his family’s enormous library, in which his mother died giving birth to him.

His cousin Berenice, on the other hand, is “agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy . . . roaming carelessly through life with no thought of the shadows in her path.” It takes a paranoid and neurotic subjectivist like Ægeus to see the shadows, of course, and he watches as his cousin develops an illness that strips her of her personality and identity. His own illness, at this point, “grew rapidly upon me, and assumed finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form . . . This monomania, if I must so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive.” He has become a hysteric—or a mystic.

His monomania is fed by his choice of reading material, which consists primarily of “St. Austin’s great work, the ‘City of God;’ and Tertullian ‘de Carne Christi.’ ” The operative sentence in the latter, of course, is the famous “Mortuus est Dei filius; credibile est quia ineptum est; et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est”: “The Son of God died; it is wholly credible because it is unsound. And, buried, he rose again; it is certain because it is impossible.” Ægeus’ hypersensitive mind takes this paradoxical statement to heart, and when Berenice dies and is buried, he unconsciously slinks out to the grave, exhumes the corpse, and uses dental equipment to pull out his cousin’s teeth.

That’s when we learn that Berenice hadn’t died after all; she was merely in a swoon, and this act of amateur dentistry has brought her out of it. (Biblical scholars: When did the “swoon theory” against the resurrection first enter theological conversation?) Her cousin’s monomania, fueled by the absurdist writings of the most unpleasant of the Church Fathers, has saved her, albeit in a horrifying way.

(I have the vague sense that the Patristics pop up in another of Poe’s tales, but I can’t place which one. I had assumed it was “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” a heavily philosophical conversation between two corpses buried in the same grave, but I was wrong. So this may be Poe’s lone reference to the Church Fathers.)

What this demonstrates is that the attitude we described in the podcast as typical of Evangelicals is by no means exclusive to Evangelicals. If the Church Fathers are our crazy uncles to whom we are related but to whom no one wishes to speak at the family reunion, we’re in good artistic company in thinking so. Poe asserts here that they have something valuable, perhaps even life-saving, to say—but in saying it they threaten our souls and our sanity.

The Christian Humanist Episode #3: The Crazy Uncles No One Talks To: The Church Fathers

The third episode of The Christian Humanist Podcast should be up on iTunes shortly. In the meantime, you can download it here (not at the time I'm writing, but soon). In this episode, we discuss the Church Fathers and our relationship with them today. Listen as I display my utter ignorance of Church history! Listen as David and Nathan put me to shame! Just listen.

Show Notes

General Introduction
- Who are the Church Fathers?
- Are all Fathers saints?

Our Own Experiences with the Patristics
- And how do we feel today?
- Reformers and Patristics
- The hazy lines between Apostles and Fathers

The Fathers' Relationship with the Classics
- Their concern with philosophers
- Augustine's City of God
- Tertullian's denunciation of Christian humanism

The Church Fathers in Our Own Disciplines
- John Updike's Roger's Version
- The Wife of Bath objects!
- The Patristics up for grabs in the Renaissance

The Elephant in the Room
- Are we incorrect in our interpretations of the Bible when they differ from the Patristics'?
- The tyranny of the democracy of the dead
- C.S. Lewis suggests a via media
- The big Orthodox question
- What does "unanimous consent" even mean?
- Apostolic succession or unanimity of teaching?

Are the Patristics Fathers to Protestants, Too?
- Too influential to ignore
- Don't skip fifteen centuries of theology
- The Christian Classics Ethereal Library


BIBLIOGRAPHY
Augustine. City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin, 2003.

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

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Ed. V.A. Kolve and Glending Olson. New York: Norton, 2005.

Chesterton, G.K. The Everlasting Man. Ft. Collins, Co.: Ignatius, 1993.

Fathers of the Church. The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent. Charlotte, N.C.: TAN, 2009.

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

Lewis, C.S. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994.

Luther, Martin. The Bondage of the Will. New York: General Books LLC, 2009.

McGrath, Alistair. Christianity's Dangerous Idea. New York: HarperOne, 2008.

Milton, John. "The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce." The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 182-226.

Niebuhr, H. Richard. Christ and Culture. New York: Harper and Row, 1956.

Norris, Frederick W. Christianity: A Short Global History. Oxford: Oneworld, 2002.

Tertullian. On Idolatry. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2004.

Updike, John. Roger's Version. New York: Knopf, 1996.

LINKS
Christian Classics Ethereal Library
The Catholic Encyclopedia: Fathers of the Church

The Christian Humanist Episode #2: Christian Humanism Meets John Calvin

This week, The Christian Humanist podcast discusses John Calvin's influence, for good or for ill, on Christian humanism.

A brief technical note: If you subscribed last week to our feed on iTunes, you need to delete that feed, re-search for the podcast, and resubscribe. We had to delete and resubmit the podcast because things didn't show up the way we wanted them to.

General Introduction
- Response to questions from CWC: The Radio Show.
- How can Christian Humanism include both Erasmus and Aquinas?
- We refuse to comment on the relationship between faith and reason?
- Nathan begs Christian colleges to hire David and Michial.

Our First Encounters with Calvinism
- No polemics here.
- Southern Baptists and Calvinism.
- Calvinism as a solution to total depravity.
- A moratorium on Calvinist dating strategies.
- Personal questions and intellectual debates.
- How much Calvin have we read, anyway?
- What does Reformed mean in terms of Calvinism?
- Is Open Theism an option?

Calvin's Minimalism
- The Institutes as apology.
- Calvin as cherry-picker of the classics.
- Calvin's intellectual theology.
- Is there a place for visual art in Calvinism?

Calvin in Our Own Research

- Calvin as a giant of the 17th century.

- Reading Anglo-Saxon literature through Calvin.

- Calvinism and Christian existentialism.

Predestination

- Is it fair to bind Calvinism to predestination?

- Is predestination a comforting or horrible doctrine?

Calvin's Legacy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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

Augustine. City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics: A Selection. Ed. Helmut Gollwitzer. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1994.

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

Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling. Trans. Alastair Hannay. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Lewis, C.S. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. New York: Harper Collins, 1994.

Perkins, William. “Perkins’ Diagram of the Path to Salvation.” Religion and Society in Early Modern England. Ed. David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell. New York: Routledge, 2005. 139-140.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “The Humanism of Existentialism.” Essays in Existentialism. Ed. Wade Baskin. New York: Citadel, 1993. 31-62.

The Christian Humanist Episode #1: What Is Christian Humanism

After a few misfires and foul-ups, I'm proud to announce that the first episode of my podcast with Nathan Gilmour and David Grubbs, "The Christian Humanist." We'll be recording these every Tuesday (at least this semester...things can always change) on a variety of topics. (We've got the first six or seven lined up, and they look like winners to me.) We've submitted the episode to iTunes, so it'll be up there before too long, and you can subscribe to it there if you are so inclined. I'll also post a link to the MP3 and the show notes here each week. Happy listening, and let us know what you think!

Episode #1: What Is Christian Humanism?

General Introduction

Definitions of Humanism

- “Secular humanism”

- Study of the humanities—discipline and education

- “Philosophy is the handmaiden of theology”

Humanism in the Early Church and the Medieval Era

- Justin Martyr’s adaptation of the Logos

- Tertullian’s rejection of Athens

- Alfred the Great as humanist

Humanism in the Renaissance

- Desiderius Erasmus vs. Martin Luther

- Francisco Suarez as heir of Aquinas

- John Milton’s classicism

- Francis Bacon’s New Science

General and Special Revelation

- John Calvin, the Seneca scholar

- Is Christian humanism intellectual arrogance?

20^th- and 21^st-century Humanism

- New Critics

- “Heroic Critics”

- The dismantling of the Canon

- Christian colleges and humanism

Theological Objections to Christian Humanism

- Pauline objection

- Augustinian objection

- Barthian objection

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. New York: Oxford UP, 2006.

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

Bacon, Francis. The New Organon. Ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics: A Selection. Ed. Helmut Gollwitzer. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1994.

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Riverhead, 1995.

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

Carson, D.A. Christ and Culture Revisited. New York: Eerdmans, 2008.

Denby, David. Great Books. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

Erasmus, Desiderius. The Praise of Folly and Other Writings. Ed. Robert M. Adams. New York: Norton, 1989.

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

Kurtz, Paul. Humanist Manifestos I and II. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1984.

L’Engle, Madeleine. Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. New York: Shaw, 2001.

Milton, John. The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.

Niebuhr, H. Richard. Christ and Culture. New York: Harper and Row, 1956.

Sayers, Dorothy L. The Mind of the Maker. New York: HarperOne, 1987.

Suarez, Francisco. On Creation, Conservation, and Concurrence: Metaphysical Disputations 20-22. Trans. Alfred J. Freddoso. Chicago: St. Augustine’s, 2002.

Tertullian. De Praescriptione Haereticorum ad Martyas. New York: General, 2009.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Tolkien Reader. New York: Del Rey, 1986.

Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. New York: New York Review of Books, 2008.

Links:

thechristianhumanist@gmail.com

Nathan Gilmour's blog

Columbia University’s Literature Humanities

Torrey Honors Institute

Bethel University’s Christianity and Western Culture

Bethel University’s Western Humanities

Why I Like Christian Colleges