The Making of Many Books

The Making of Many Books: Christianity and Literary Studies

(delivered 4/24/09, at CGSA)

To start off, I’d like to thank you guys for the chance to speak on this topic—as many of you can attest (okay, okay, you and some of my students), once I get started talking about literature and/or theology, it’s rather difficult to get me to shut up. So if I seem to be leaving out large chunks of argument, it’s probably because I, too, want to eat dinner at some point tonight. But with that caveat, let’s get started. It’s been about eighteen months since I last prattled to you about literature and theology, and they’ve been eighteen rather important months in terms of my own experience with and thinking about literary studies. Since my last talk, long long ago (well, summer 07) in a church basement far far away, I’ve had a chance to learn a lot more about my field and think a lot more about my place as a Christian scholar within it. As I finished up my MA in 2008 and survived the slightly nerve-wracking PhD application process, and more recently as I’ve drafted preliminary goals and descriptions for my dissertation research on Christianity and 19^th-century American literature, I’ve been able to crystallize some of my ideas about this whole Christian intellectual enterprise. Perhaps more importantly, during the same period I’ve been able to teach four classes related to tonight’s topic, including a Bible as Literature course this quarter, and to discuss some of that work with some great Christian colleagues at the Following Christ conference this past December. I mention all this not because I consider myself an expert on Christianity and literature, by any means, but to remind you (and myself) that more and more this is the shape that my academic calling is taking, at least for now.

But since only part of my life takes place in the academy, I actually want to start off with a slightly more banal example: a conversation I had last Friday afternoon, with one of the local National City bank officers. I was there to re-open my savings account, and she was there to process the requisite paperwork and make the requisite small talk. Somehow, in between her dire warnings against credit card abuse and her equally dire warnings against not getting and using a credit card, say, yesterday, the topic of my profession came up. As soon as I revealed that, yes, I was an English major, she told me that “we could have used you here a few minutes ago.” Without missing a beat, and almost without thinking about it, I shot back, “Grammar dispute?” I was right, though I almost wish I wasn’t. Perhaps, just perhaps, there might have been an intra-office debate over the relative literary merits of Charles Brockden Brown vs. James Fenimore Cooper, or a fast-paced repartee regarding the philosophical sources of Moby-Dick, or even just a burning question about which century Gerard Manley Hopkins belonged to. But grammar? For a fleeting moment I felt rather like Marvin the Paranoid Android from the Hitchhiker trilogy: “Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they want me to delete an extraneous comma. Call that job satisfaction, 'cause I don't.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. Particularly in my part-time job as a freelance editor, extraneous commas are my bread and butter, or more to the point, my burger and fries. Though I’d really rather answer the question “What do you do with an English major” with “marry her” than with “hunt for wayward punctuation” (though now that I think about it, there are worse first dates than hunting for wayward punctuation together.) the practical end of literary studies we shall always have with us. And when I try to think about what constitutes a Christian literary studies in that context, it seems a bit silly to talk about fixing capitalization for the furtherance of the Kingdom. Even the prospect of teaching the ever-present sections of freshman composition doesn’t exactly inspire rhapsodies, yet in the minds of many, an English PhD seems to have little other use, Christian or not. The cosmologists among us may grapple with the awesome and occasionally terrifying origins of the universe, the biologists may coax cures for cancer out of recalcitrant zebrafish, and even the theoretical physicists might just lay the groundwork for warp drive someday. But the literature folks? We grade papers. We teach students. And maybe once in a while we can point out a nifty allusion during Bible study. Most of us, quite honestly, are content to sit in an office or a classroom and talk about otherwise obscure authors and otherwise moldy books.

Okay, so I’m exaggerating slightly: at least within the academy, most people know that English does involve some level of serious research and real scholarly contributions. That end of things isn’t without its problems either, however. Particularly in the last forty years, English departments have become increasingly interdisciplinary, drawing together threads from materials that might otherwise be delegated to history, philosophy, political science, or even religious studies. My own embryonic dissertation does just that, and frankly that’s part of what attracted me to the field in the first place: the chance to study a lot of different areas of the humanities while still remaining grounded in creative literature. But this level of interdisciplinarity also means that new ideas travel even more quickly to and through English departments, even (and sometimes especially) those ideas that challenge traditional views of art, philosophy, morality, and theology. Deconstruction, radical feminism, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and yes, even that amorphous mass of ideas known as postmodernism, all occupy their own niches of my profession, and all have their own proverbial bones to pick with Biblical Christianity.

This division of labor in turn tends to create a problematic environment for Christian scholars, particularly those who hold to conservative politics or theology, and not just because the average academician relies on CNN or The Daily Show for information about what Christians are “really like.” Many of my colleagues—and here I’m speaking of the profession more broadly, not just within OSU English—associate Christianity with what they see as outmoded and exclusionary ways of “doing literary studies,” and with reductive and simplistic scholarship. After all, the argument goes, if you’re really committed to all that God stuff and can’t manage to keep it out of your professional work, obviously you would ignore or distort any evidence that posed a threat to your deep-seated ideology. (In the interests of finishing this talk before midnight, I’ll spare you the tangent I could embark on now—but rest assured, it’s there.) Meanwhile, outsiders often criticize English departments, and do so with some justification, as being repositories of particularly egregious postmodern excess and thus of tuition dollars (or worse, tax dollars) wasted on frivolous (or even dangerous) academic projects. During the conservative critique of higher education in the 80s and 90s, for instance, English departments often bore the brunt of criticism, as we seemed to do little but prove the point of Ecclesiastes 12:12: “of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”

Amidst such battles, what’s a Christian literary scholar to do, and how can we, as a body of believers and a body of rather bright people, come to grips with this rather vexed battlefield of ideas? Well, I’m not going to sit here and lecture you on how you should read more good books, rediscover the classics, or even encourage your undergrad friends to enroll in my next Bible as Literature course. Besides the fact that I’ve already given that talk a couple summers back, I think the case for the “library as armory,” to use James Emery White’s phrase, has been made pretty solidly already. On the Christian side, Jim Sire, Leland Ryken, Gene Veith, and Cleanth Brooks have all made strong arguments for the value of literature to a Christian. And they’re not alone: besides the early 20^th-century secular defenses of reading, scholars such as Wayne Booth, Jim Phelan, Denis Donoghue, and even Harold Bloom have renewed our attention to the ethical aspects of reading and writing. So rather than rehearsing their arguments, I want to ask a slightly different set of questions: what opportunities exist for “studying Christianly” in an English department, and how might the process fit with what has been called “Kingdom purposes”?

To start addressing these questions, and indeed to make any meaningful links between academia and Christianity, we should first of all note that we’re operating, by necessity as much as by choice, within an institutional context. To study and teach English Christianly, at least at this stage of my career, means that I organize my teaching and research—my academic witness, as it were—based on boundaries that weren’t my idea and sometimes don’t exactly fit with my version of academic utopia. But they’re there, and in my experience it’s a lot more efficient to work within the system than to try to remake it in our own images. In English, the central concept is that of the organizing discourse, a sort of intellectual worldview that influences and sometimes fully determines a given scholar’s choice of subject matter, analytical approach, interests, and conclusions.

For example, studies within the discourse of postcolonialism—one of my undergrad focus areas and briefly a potential focus for my professional work—emphasize differences in race, power, and language, and posit an inherent antagonism between Western and non-Western authors, texts, philosophies, etc. A postcolonial scholar of Moby-Dick, then, might look at the representation of Queequeg and the other non-white characters, and consider what is at stake in Ahab’s using them to pursue his fiery hunt. Or, and this is probably more likely given contemporary disciplinary politics, perhaps the same scholar would consider the novel as itself a part of the Western academy, or of Melville studies, or of the Vast Right-Wing Dead White Male Conspiracy, or whatever. The point is that discourses such as postcolonialism—and I need hardly add that these are not necessarily steady or consistent categories—represent both a set of philosophical assumptions about literature and a method of analyzing it.

Given these structures, how would the “outrageous idea of a Christian literary studies,” to use Hal Bush’s phrase (itself, of course, adapted from George Marsden’s broader work) work as a critical organizing discourse? Though many individual Christians have strongly influenced literary theory—St. Augustine, Martin Luther, C.S. Lewis, Cleanth Brooks, Northrop Frye, and James Sire, just to name a few—with the possible exception of Lewis’ book An Experiment in Criticism no one has really tried to set up an explicitly Christian theory of literary study. Part of the problem is isolating a primary explanatory focus, the base (to borrow the language of my Marxist colleagues) which drives the superstructure of a given discourse. In feminism, for instance, everything comes back to gender; in Marxism, to class-driven ideology; and in ecocriticism, to the interplay between humans and their environment. But what does Christianity “come back to”? Yes, we can talk and write about religious expression or church history or even individual doctrines, given sufficient textual evidence. As I understand the Bible, though, the whole point of Christ’s sovereignty is that it’s not reducible to any of those things—as Kuyper puts it, and as we’ve all probably heard…several times in our respective Intervarsity tenures, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: 'Mine!'” So what we have, it seems, is not so much an organizing principle for Christian scholarship, one that we can identify, understand, or dissect, but an organizing Person, one who is rather fond of identifying, understanding, dissecting, convicting, and finally redeeming us.

In the face of this rather inconvenient truth, I would argue that though it is possible to identify Christian ways of reading and writing—and many scholars have done some great work along those lines already-- Christianity cannot function as the same type of totalizing discourse, as just one more “ism” in the already crowded and diverse leviathan of English studies. But my own responsibility as a Christian scholar of literature doesn’t evaporate there. Fortunately, neither do the opportunities for Christian work in literary studies. Hal Bush, for instance, has identified three potentially fruitful avenues for Christian scholarship in literature: historical criticism, cultural studies, and “a more urgent and potentially even more fruitful project, which is the production of a theory of culture itself.” Likewise, as Bush suggests earlier in the same essay, our work as Christian teachers of writing and literature, a role that will no doubt dominate my own career, should also be considered as part of the process.

This leads me to my second point: that literary studies, understood in the light of God’s sovereignty and call on our lives, must consider the English department (and the university in which it operates) as a mission field. By this, I do not only mean the direct evangelism, in the sense of personal testimony and “altar calls,” that is familiar to those of us in the Evangelical tradition. Certainly, in some settings this level of boldness may be ethically and professionally appropriate, but in my experience that’s not often the case in grad school. Rather, I have in mind a broader understanding of witness, one that establishes Christianity’s intellectual and personal legitimacy, along the lines of Jim Sire’s definition of apologetics: to “la[y] before the watching world such a winsome embodiment of the Christian faith that for any and all who are willing to observe there will be an intellectually and emotionally credible witness to its fundamental truth” (26).

Let me give an example to try to explain this concept of witness. This quarter, I have the privilege of teaching English 280, OSU’s Bible as Literature course: two mornings a week (though I’m not sure 7:30 classes really count as morning) I’m in charge of lecturing to about 35 students on the Bible, most recently on the book of Joshua. Now, though I haven’t explicitly said so in class, pretty much all of my students know I’m a Christian, and the perceptive ones—of which there are many this quarter, thank God—have probably also figured out some of my more specific theological and doctrinal stances. But I’m still an untenured instructor at a public university, and frankly it would be unethical for me to act as if I were a Sunday school teacher in the classroom. (Though, I will admit that it’s fun to joke with my Christian friends that OSU is paying me to lead a Bible study!) Accordingly, I’m limited in what I can say in ways that I wouldn’t be in a typical evangelistic setting. All the same, I can and should explain to my students how a given passage might work theologically or note how certain themes and techniques play out in Christian beliefs. And what’s more, my students, many of whom are Christians themselves, are perfectly free to make their own more direct witnessing claims, and I am free to refrain from shushing them at the first glimpse of absolute truth.

So when I say that my department is my mission field, I do so aware of the fact that an apologia, the term translated as “defense” or “answer” in I Peter 3:15, can take many different forms. In some subfields of English studies, Christianity-centered research is a rather natural development, even among scholars who aren’t believers themselves. For instance, studies about the Medieval and Renaissance periods—roughly from the 5^th to the early 17^th centuries—often include theological and religious contexts by necessity, as do studies of early American literature. Even in my own field of 19^th-century American literature, Christian scholars are making progress: Roger Lundin and Hal Bush have recent books on Christianity in Emerson and Twain, respectively, and there’s been a fairly consistent interest in the religious contexts of Hawthorne’s and Melville’s fiction as well, which will be part of my dissertation’s focus. Other subfields, though, have far less Christian representation—they are, so to speak, the “unreached” in the discipline. So far, for instance, relatively little theoretical work on gender or race has been from an explicitly Christian perspective, and many Christian scholars, myself among them, aren’t quite sure how to handle recent theoretical emphases on postmodernism and poststructuralism. So yes, there’s still lots of work to do, and still lots of scholars to pray for, but the field as a whole isn’t quite as gloomy or hostile as it might seem from the outside.

Thus far, I’ve mainly focused on why Christianity can and ought to matter to literary scholars, as part of their specific disciplinary practices. However, I want to conclude tonight’s talk by asking a more generally applicable question: why should literature per se matter to the Christian? As I pointed out earlier, there are many Christian defenses of reading literature. At least potentially, it may edify us, instruct us, educate us, and let us get pleasurably lost in the “pied beauty” of human language: paw through any good anthology, and you’ll find quite a bit of what Hopkins labeled “All things counter, original, spare, [and] strange.” Part of the reason that many literary theorists and not a few literary artists have treated literature as a proxy or even replacement for religion, I think, is that both capture us (on the page as well as through the page) in all our messily familiar—and familiarly messy—humanity. Cleanth Brooks put it well:

Like religion, literature is suffused with terms that appeal to the human heart. The interpretation may be merely implicit in the work, as when a lyric poet meditates on a flower, or it may be quite explicit and circumstantial, as when a novelist traces the history of a family or a society. But whether implicit or explicit, slightly or massively detailed, the literary artist brings together events and observations and moods into a pattern which has its coherence of attitude. The poem or novel or play gives us—if we want to use polysyllabic terms—a value-structured experience (51).

More specifically, we have in the Bible an inescapable and authoritative anthology of ancient literature, one that surprises and challenges me every time I read it, whether I’m specifically reading for theological meaning or not. Upon encountering the Bible, one may object to it, snarl at it, argue with it, read into it, or live by it—but one may not simply pretend it never existed. For the Christian, of course, this effect is even greater, for we are not simply called to appreciate Scripture’s literary artistry and historical importance, but rather to submit our whole lives to it. Yet over and above the Bible’s astounding ethics, history, artistry, and so on, consider this: it does not simply use literature as a convenient vehicle for its truth claims, but further redeems literature, and with it human language. In it, the very Word of God, transmitted over thousands of years by dozens of people, is incarnated, and by that act of incarnation God makes language matter (and, I suppose, makes matter of language). And though no human book or human author can duplicate this incarnational miracle of inspiration, I am fully convinced that good literature, properly understood, can help point the way. Writing in 1885, Gerard Manley Hopkins asked in one poem “To what serves Mortal Beauty?” This was his answer: “See: it does this: keeps warm/ Men’s wit to the things that are”—and ultimately, he concludes, to “God’s better beauty, grace.”

Human language and human literature, like all creation, is fallen, and is “groaning together in the pains of childbirth,” waiting for the here-but-not-yet redemption of the Kingdom of God. And that redemptive process, ultimately, is what makes my job and my calling meaningful—7:30 classes and endless grading notwithstanding—and what I hope will animate my life and my witness as a Christian literary scholar. Thanks for your attention.

Following Christ 2008, Day 1

As of this post, we're just about at the twelve hour mark since the Following Christ 2008 conference started-- technically this is still the "Day Ahead" part, though, since the official plenary sessions don't start until Sunday evening. Be that as it may, it's still been a long day for all involved, particularly those who had to get up way too early to get on the road. My own transportation method of choice was Greyhound (way cheaper than gas, let alone parking fees, and just as fast as driving), which pulled into the downtown Chicago station at around 9:30. Initially, I'd planned for about a mile walk between the station and the hotel, but apparently calculated from the wrong spot. So, the walk stretched to two miles, in the suddenly warmish and rather muggy weather. Wearing my winter coat onto the bus thus proved a mistake, as I had to clean up and change clothes before I even thought about any large-scale socialization. Fortunately, that's been the only logistical hiccup so far: the hotel supplied the two full-size beds I'd requested, plus the roll-away bed, so all three of us in the room have plenty of space. To my knowledge, they're still upstairs (on the 25th floor-- my ears pop every time I ride the elevator up or down) snoozing, but I wasn't nearly tired enough to sleep when they were. Thus, this post, tapped out in the still-noisy hotel lobby, the only place in the building with free wireless.

For the Day-Ahead event, I chose the Emerging Scholars Network meeting, as there wasn't anything more overtly nerdy available. Keeping with the conference theme of "human flourishing," the theme of our meetings and various mini-seminars is "Flourishing in the Academy," as most of the participants and leaders are either in or en route to tenure-track academic positions. Today's buzzword was "calling" (one wonders if Falco's vocation was a Vienna Calling), so the panelists mainly addressed questions of definition, practice, and potential obstacles to calling. As this is a fairly popular discussion topic among Grad IV types, some of the basic concepts were already familiar, but overall I think the speakers struck a good balance of simple and complex material. Unfortunately all my notes are upstairs at the moment so an extended account/critique will have to wait, but suffice it to say that there was considerable methodological and theological diversity among the speakers so far. That happens, I suppose, when you put a Catholic mystic (or wannabe mystic, I suppose, given that we're no longer in the medieval period) and a staunch Evangelical Protestant in the same room, let alone on the same panel. However, given that Intervarsity is a parachurch organization and thus rather tautologically tolerant of differences which would make other groups' collective blood curl, this is not terribly unusual. My own taste is definitely for the more intellectual (or failing that, at least exegetical) presentations rather than their rambling Charismatic counterparts, but I got at least something out of all the talks.

The yawns are finally starting to hit my brain, so I'll save further comment for later posts. Let me close, however, is a quote I found particularly interesting, and one I'll probably inflict on my students next quarter as an introduction to the study of Christianity and American literature. It's from Jurgen Habermas, an atheist German philosopher who nonetheless sided with the Roman Catholic Church when the Pope protested the systematic exclusion of Christianity from the then-pending European Union constitution:

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

Perhaps I'll be really mean and make my students analyze that quote for their diagnostic essay. Bwahaha.

Theology and Economics

I delivered a version of this paper at CGSA tonight, which is to say I ad-libbed about 70% and read about 30% from the manuscript. It could still use a couple revisions and the bibliography is absent for the moment, but it's a start. Fortunately, I received Thomas Sowell's book Basic Economics from Amazon today (thanks Mom) so may have an actual idea of what I'm talking about later this summer.

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Invisible Hands and Visible Churches:
Economics and Theology

Thus far in the quarter, most of our meetings have focused on one or two passages of Scripture, generally those sections of the Gospels which, either implicitly or explicitly, talk about money, the poor, economic class, and so on. This pattern, I suspect, is similar if not identical to the way in which most Evangelical churches approach the topic: a series of sermons and/or Bible studies-- perhaps with the benefit of background or commentary, perhaps without-- that works through the passage, extracts a moral about handling money or handling people, and, more often than not, asks its audience members to apply these principles to their own lives. Now, before some of you literally decide to throw the book at me (or 66 of them, as the case may be), let me reassure you that I don’t bring this practice up solely to criticize it. Besides the theological fact that the Bible is the only reliable source of revelation and should be the final authority for church practice and doctrine—or as the Intervarsity Doctrinal Basis has it, “[t]he unique divine inspiration, entire trustworthiness and authority of the Bible”—such close readings bear a striking resemblance to the kind of stuff I get paid to do in the English department.

I do want to point out, however, that in much the same way our academic projects must include both data analysis and some level of corralling that data into theories of our own or others’ making, both our conceptions and presentations of Christianity includes both specific doctrines and larger theological structures. These structures, be they systematic or scattered, chanted or available in a series of handy pamphlets at the Welcome Center in the lobby, give us a key hermeneutic context for understanding how a given passage fits into Biblical teachings on a given subject—and how some passages don’t fit so neatly at all. But while different faith traditions place different premiums on systematic theology, I would argue that this type of macro-level thinking is crucial to individual and corporate spiritual development. Let me give a brief example. In the past few centuries, many non-Christian authors and thinkers have expressed admiration for Jesus’ ethical teachings: Gandhi is said to have based much of his personal ethics on the Sermon on the Mount, and Ben Franklin exhorted the readers of his Autobiography to “imitate Jesus and Socrates” (68). Likewise, many contemporary social policy debates cite a “Judeo-Christian ethic,” though rather few connect that ethic to concepts of the Trinity or the Incarnation.

Theology, by organizing what we know about God from Scripture, allows us to draw together what would otherwise only be a highly eclectic set of precepts and doctrines, and at the same time gives us the backing to tell our friends and colleagues that there is, actually, something to this whole Christianity thing besides waking up before noon on Sunday, and maybe even doing so without a hangover. So, while tonight’s discussion will be less about specific passages and more about the big questions we’ve been dancing around for most of the quarter, I think it will be a helpful way of thinking through some key issues. In the same way, since my interest here is in the relationship between systems of theology and systems of economics, though I expect some specific policies to come up in discussion, I don’t want to make this only about one or two specific economic behaviors but instead about the two major economic systems—free-market capitalism and centrally-controlled socialism—that shape both theoretical and practical conceptions of economics. To that end, I want to start by defining some terms, which you may or may not wish to amend depending on your predilection for labels, and setting up some of the overarching questions in any discussion of theology and economics. From there, we’ll look at some of the more influential opinions of this intersection, both those from professional economists and from self-identified Christians of various stripes. Finally, I want to make a case for the social and spiritual benefits of capitalism, and suggest why a turn towards socialism, as advocated by many in the Democratic Party, would be likewise harmful.

First things first: what is this amorphous thing we call economics, aside from the title of a high school course with more math than I’d care to remember? Well, prior to the twentieth century, the term was quite broad: it developed out of moral philosophy, and encompassed all aspects of production and exchange, as well as their relationship to the rule of law, local and federal government, and human customs. Thus, for instance, the field of “home economics,” a term which survived well into the 20th century but has now been replaced with “family and consumer science,” considered not just the purchase of eggs, flour, and sugar and the output of cake, but rather the whole range of skills required to manage a home. Likewise, it is no coincidence that Adam Smith’s 1776 classic economics text is called The Wealth of Nations, as at Smith’s time the term “political economy” meant something closer to what “government” means today. So, telling the average citizen in Smith’s day that “It’s the economy, stupid” would probably earn you a rather strange look, though not half so strange as “We are the change we’ve been waiting for” would garner.

More recent definitions of economics, as Mark Longbrake pointed out last quarter, focus specifically on scarcity and abundance: how much of a given product, service, or resource is available in a given market, and what that does to prices, supply & demand, and so on. In 1932, Lionel Robbins defined economics similarly as “the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses .” Simply put, economics studies the interplay among sets of finite resources—money, lab time, and of course remaining cans of Mountain Dew—which exhibit relative and dynamic values at least partly determined by one’s historical and cultural context. So, while I would argue that both capitalism and socialism imply (if not always cause) various social conditions and various worldview commitments, in a technical sense each mainly proposes a model for dealing with scarcity. We’ll get into the details of those models later; first, I want to talk a bit about how economists and theologians have understood the relationship between their respective fields.

Particularly in front of this audience, I know better than to try and define “theology” outright, at least to any degree more helpful than “the study of God.” Likewise, even secular economists have recognized that even beyond the sociological difficulties that result when one assigns unilateral motives or beliefs to an entire religious group, a given religious person may not consciously move from systematic theology to systematic economics, and may not be particularly systematic about either one. Seymour Siegel, for instance, argues that while “Faith is understood…as the central idea of a life system,” such that “either a collective or an individual cannot function without a faith,” religion is “a symbolic expression in an institutional form of this ultimate concern or faith…partially influenced by the faith itself” (22-23) Theology, then, is “a rational or at least putatively rational explanation, both of the faith principle and of religion,” which “is partially internal insofar as it expressed the original faith, and external insofar as the faith has to be expressed in terms which are known to the cultural situation of the time” (23). For those of you keeping track of all that, I suggest ibuprofen. Siegel’s point, I think, is not only that economic variation within co-religionists is to be expected, but that it can be difficult to attribute a given economic choice specifically to faith (or what we might call worldview), religious expression, or theological codification.

To that end, I want to throw out a few big questions to consider as we move through this material. First, does a “Christian theory of economics” flow primarily from worldview or “first principles,” primarily from specific religious practice, such as almsgiving or tithing, primarily from theological explanations, or from some combination of the three? Second, does a given combination of internal (worldview/religious/theological) and external (social/political/cultural) factors necessarily make an economic stance more or less Christian? Third, as Christians should our focus be on individual economic situations or rather on social or communal situations? Fourth, what is the appropriate role for an individual Christian, for a local church or group of churches, and for a secular government? And finally, what role, if any, does “social justice” play in evangelism, and does extensive investment in it exhibit good stewardship?

With those in mind—and I will, of course, expect a five-page paper from each of you at the end of the evening—let me set up the range of opinions on these issues by explaining what I mean by “capitalism” and “socialism.” As you can imagine, the fact that these two basic systems of thought have proven flexible enough to be adopted, with varying success, by dozens of different governments and nation-states only complicates the problem of giving a single, coherent definition for each term. To make matters worse, though it is fair to say that the respective adherents to capitalism and socialism consider the two philosophies antagonistic to one another, Marxist socialism, surely the most popular and adapted form of socialism since the 19th century, adds two significant difficulties. First, Marx claims that since history is both linear and rational, then not only is capitalism necessary but it is in fact a necessary precursor to socialism. Accordingly, whereas most extreme pro-capitalists—who tend to be libertarians or anarchists—would see any hint of socialism as anathema, Marxist socialists would view these “mixed economies” much more positively. In a related complication, for Marxists socialism is not the end but rather the middle stage, to be replaced ultimately by communism, presumably once all traces of capitalism have been eradicated (and once its middle-class practitioners have been ruined, converted, or killed). So right off the bat we have an asymmetrical conception of “pure capitalism” vs. “pure socialism,” which as with other binaries, quite effectively confuses both things and the poor saps who study them.

In spite of these difficulties, though, I do want to contrast capitalism and socialism, briefly, in terms of ownership. While ownership is not the only way to contrast the two systems, it is probably the point of greatest debate, since each side claims a monopoly (there’s an ironic term for you) on fair ownership. Under capitalism, each individual theoretically owns his or her own “means of production,” whether that translates to an actual physical object, such as the laptop on which I edit papers and write lesson plans, or to the labor and time involved in a business transaction. The modern corporation is a good example of this: though Microsoft, Exxon-Mobil, and Kroger are all quite adept at spending and earning money, in a capitalist economy none of these companies technically owns anything: they exchange goods for their customers’ financial resources, they exchange wages for their employees’ labor, and they exchange profits and interest for their shareholders’ investments. Though all these exchanges are voluntary—and this freedom of choice is key for capitalism to function—they are not exclusively done for individual greed or benefit. This is the cornerstone of Adam Smith’s argument in Wealth of Nations: that someone who "intends only his own gain" is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good” (qtd. in Friedman 1-2). Although the dominant thread of capitalistic thought does allow for limited government intervention and control of some parts of the economy, such as national defense, by and large capitalists prefer to allow private competition to regulate the market. As Milton Friedman puts it, the conflict is between the “view that government's role is to serve as an umpire to prevent individuals from coercing one another” and the view that government's role is to serve as a parent charged with the duty of coercing some to aid others” (5).

The opposite notion of ownership is true under socialism: since it does away with all notions of private property and thus of voluntary, individual exchange, at least on paper, then everyone in a given society owns everything—though in practice the State ends up with considerably more economic control than any of its constituents. Still, socialism has proven attractive to many ironically because it promises actual democracy, at least for members of the proletariat, and a way out of a capitalist system in which bourgeoisie employers not only make a profit on their workers’ labor, but in doing so create what Marx called “alienated labor” by removing the worker’s alleged birthright to earn full price for his or her work. For Marx, this process reduces both worker and product to commodity, “an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference” (437). Further, Marx argued, capitalism unduly elevates an object’s “exchange value” over its “use-value” (438), eventually emptying that object (or worker) of any intrinsic sense of worth because it (or he) is both owned and traded by an outside force. So, socialists argue, eliminating private ownership not only leads to economic equality—generally through the forced redistribution of wealth, as in our modern welfare system—but in fact reclaims human dignity at the same time.

Even from this brief and necessarily reductive summary, I hope you can see the outlines of the major debates here. Let’s look now at how others have understood that debate in theological terms, and more broadly how each defines a Christian’s economic obligations. The first source I’d like us to consider appeared in 1981, released by the Institute for Religion and Democracy and written primarily by First Things editor Richard Neuhaus. It’s entitled “Christianity and Democracy,” and appeared not only in the midst of the Cold War, but also at a time when many leaders associated with the National Council of Churches “advocated a "moral symmetry" between the Soviet Union and the United States, agitated for unilateral disarmament, and condemned anticommunism as a moral failing and even a theological heresy.” The whole thing is worth reading, but I want to focus on just a few paragraphs here.

Democratic governance is based upon a morality of respect and fairness for all. It is responsive to the diverse moral judgments and meanings affirmed by individuals and institutions within society. It not only tolerates but rigorously protects those spheres within which people find meaning for their lives and share that meaning with others. Most importantly, democratic government does not seek to control or restrict the sphere of religion in which people affirm, exercise, and share their ultimate beliefs about the world and their place in it.

As democratic government does not seek to absorb the sphere of religion, so it does seek to respect the autonomy of cultural and economic life. With respect to the last, there is much debate about the relationship between democracy and capitalism. Whatever the economic achievements of capitalism, and they are considerable, our primary concern is to preserve and strengthen democracy. We believe that the personal and institutional ownership and control of property-always as stewards of God to whom the whole creation belongs-contributes greatly to freedom. We note as a matter of historical fact that democratic governance exists only where the free market plays a large part in a society's economy.

Like political democracy, a market economy is a process open to the future. The focus is on the production of wealth rather than on the consolidation and redistribution of existing goods. Experience in America and the world suggests that when a market economy is open to the participation of all, it works to the benefit of all, and especially of the poor. Conversely, we note that the economic systems advanced by totalitarian regimes have been consistently disastrous for all but the new class of the political elite. A market economy may be a necessary condition for democracy. It is obviously not a sufficient condition for democracy. There are more or less capitalist societies with repressive regimes quite unlike the democratic governance we affirm. In modern industrialized societies the state is necessarily involved in aspects of economic life. Apart from pragmatic considerations, however, our bias in favor of a market economy is informed by our commitment to democracy. To the extent that capitalism is a necessary restraint upon the monistic drives of society, it warrants our critical approval.

Let’s cross the aisle now, so to speak, and examine a claim to “Christian socialism,” or at least the possibility thereof. Many of you are familiar with the work of Jim Wallis, a prominent liberal theologian in the postmodern “Emergent Church” movement, and an outspoken apologist for the so-called “Christian Left.” Wallis’ best-known book is called God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, which by the title alone should give you some idea why his ideas have been consistently controversial. I’d like to read you a section from an interview he gave shortly after the 2004 elections, with C.P. Farley of Powell’s Books. Farley asked:

In the US, more people per capita consider themselves religious, and base their political views on religious faith, than in Europe, where much of the population doesn't believe in God and doesn't go to church. Yet it seems to me that the values you consider biblical—attention to the poor, placing value on the common good, aversion to violence and a means to solve problems, etc.—you actually find these values lived out in European societies more than you do in the United States.

Here is Wallis’ response:

Well, you would have liked this last session this morning, where my English, Anglican priest wife was making that point. She said, "Now I'm in the most religious country in the world. I'm coming from so-called secular Europe, which is often disdained here. But here I find 55 million Americans haven't got healthcare. In our system, which might not be perfect, healthcare is a human right, not a commodity to be bought and sold. I come here and I have kids out in the streets shooting each another outside my front window. Most British people have never seen a gun in real life."
I said today in response to that that there's a tradition of Christian socialism in Britain, so called—it's not really socialism in the American image of that word, it's not about totalitarian, or Marxist elites taking over the world. It's about social concern of a religious sort. Most socialists in Britain were Methodists, not Marxists. And what they created, in fact, was the social welfare state. A reflection of Christian values, they would say. Now, that's become very secular, but Joy would say her country, in terms of care of the poor and healthcare, exemplifies Christian values more than we do, where Christianity has become very individualistic and often critical of the question What ever became of the common good? So, How does faith affect our cultures and our policies and structures? is a fair question. And the individualistic ethics of twentieth century Evangelicalism, I think, betrayed the ethics of nineteenth century Evangelicalism. And eighteenth-century British Evangelicalism, which was responsible for John Wesley, who was a revivalist. Or John Newton, the author of "Amazing Grace." He was a slave trader. So when he said "Save a wretch like me" he wasn't just suffering from existential angst. He was a slave trader, and he turned his life around. And through him William Wilberforce got converted, who was the parliamentarian who fought for thirty years to end slavery, and did. All that was Christian revivalism put into a social reform context. Individual ethics doesn't really solve those issues. So, there's a paradox there. Joy just said in the last session, "Well, you all may have the numbers of religious people, but we have a more compassionate society." And it's true.

Though I find Wallis’ equation of 19th-century abolitionism with “the social welfare state” dubious at best—and that’s to say nothing of his less palatable social and political positions, such as his support of both abortion and homosexuality—I do think he raises a good question: how ought the Biblical injunctions to be salt and light work out in terms of social and economic policy? In the time we have left, I want to share why I think capitalism is the choice most consistent with Scripture, as well as with a Biblical view of human freedom and dignity. And to put some of your minds at ease: yes, these are actually my own conclusions, not just talking points that Karl Rove transmitted directly into my positronic matrix. In many cases, those who criticize capitalism, particularly critics who claim to do so from a Christian perspective, level the charge that capitalist society rewards greed, lacks compassion, and makes “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” thereby perpetuating injustice. Furthermore, they argue, by redistributing resources—that’s code for taking my stuff and giving it to you—socialism teaches Christians how to be merciful and charitable, and shifts the focus from individual avarice to social justice. While it is true that human sin—which, by the way, is not unique to capitalism—has led some people and companies to exploit others, I would argue that not only are there more important spiritual benefits to the freedom capitalism offers, but also that socialistic notions of justice and charity are ultimately short-sighted and ineffective.

First, Scriptural presentations of work and property both mesh with capitalist ideals, though as in many things Scripture proposes stricter limits than some in the business world. One of the first instructions given to man, for instance, is to “work” and “keep” the Garden of Eden—to manage the property as God’s steward, and to be subject to God’s laws. Now, Genesis makes it pretty clear, I think, that neither Adam nor Eve were working the land so they could afford the latest SUV, or even the latest James Sire book. More to the point, there was only a garden—or an Adam, for that matter—because of God’s work, work which He declared “very good.” Since there was no scarcity and no competition here, properly speaking Adam’s initial work was not for economic purposes, then, but rather to reflect God’s creative and, yes, productive image. As Jim Lewis notes, the postlapsarian view of work (given in Genesis 4) does not represent a punishment but rather a transformation “from blessing to burden .” Work, Biblically understood, is not a method to ensure dying with the most toys or to nudge the world towards class warfare, as Marx envisioned. It is in fact a process merging man’s brokenness with God’s grace: work is hard because we do it sinfully, yet work can be rewarding and even joyful because we do it as image-bearers.

In a similar way, despite the vastly different cultural and historical contexts recorded in the Bible, privately held property is represented as both normal and good, and even for communal projects (such as the building of the Temple) is seen as the best starting point. In the Old Testament, much of the Jewish civil law concerns specific uses of property and, ultimately, presents a model of stewardship based on private ownership. For example, in the first few verses of Exodus 25, which kicks off a long section detailing the design of the Tabernacle, God instructs Moses to collect what we might call a free-will offering of materials and luxuries. Particularly when juxtaposed with the account in Exodus 32 of the rebellious Israelites melting down their gold to create an idol, this preface suggests that personal property is a gift, to be used to glorify God as best we can. A similar dynamic shows up in the New Testament, particularly in the accounts of the early church: we may choose to be faithful with our possessions and use them for “Kingdom purposes,” or we may choose to use them poorly to bring honor only to ourselves, but nowhere is there Scriptural precedent for abdicating the responsibility of property to the State or even to the church.
This leads me to my next point: that the economic freedom inherent to capitalist exchange reinforces Scriptural notions of human dignity and freedom. As Kerby Anderson puts it:

The Bible says that human beings are created in the image of God. This implies that we have rationality and responsibility. Because we have rationality and volition, we can choose between various competing products and services. Furthermore, we can function within a market system in which people can exercise their power of choice. We are not like the animals that are governed by instinct. We are governed by rationality and can make meaningful choices within a market system.

Whatever your particular theological views on the interplay between human will and God’s sovereignty, we are certainly given the ability to use our God-given rationality, as Anderson notes, to steward those resources which we are given. And while Christians recognize this choice as a result of God’s design, even those outside Christianity deserve the chance to enjoy the blessings of work and perhaps of wealth, because they too are created in God’s image. I like George Gilder’s argument on this, here as summarized by John Armstrong:

Socialism always destroys personal freedoms by trying to plan for other lives through a central government system that watches out for you. (This is why President Reagan once quipped that the worst words you could ever hear were these: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you!") Capitalism allows you to plan for yourself. It allows for creativity and enterprise. Furthermore, it encourages people to provide for others in order to express their creativity through goods and services. Greed is, in reality, inimical to capitalism. Greed drives the welfare state more than it does capitalism since greedy people want unearned rewards to be given to them by a benevolent government that levels the playing field.

My final point may strike some of you as pragmatic and not particularly spiritual, but I’m going to make it anyway: competition is actually good for the visible church and for its members, not simply because of the potential for material advantages, but further because it encourages hard work and excellence. Think back to the last time you applied for a new job or a spot in a new academic program. How much harder did you work because you knew others were competing for the same thing? Now, I’m not saying that religion ought to be a buyer’s market, since unlike most products and services, most religions make some claim to absolute truth. But the fact is that we, as a body of believers, are not the only game in town anymore, a reality particularly evident in the university setting. Why then should we not wrestle harder with tough questions, invest more into evangelism, and, when appropriate, improve the communities around us? The truth is that we’ll never impact the university for Christ, let alone the entire world, if we wait around for privilege to kick in: we have to want it, and we have to fight for it. To abandon the chance to do that, even for the laudable if vague goals of “helping others” or “making the world a better place” is simply a bad idea, and in my view a dangerously irresponsible use of our time, talent, and treasure.

Advice for Grad Students

I originally wrote this bibliography for the ChristLit listserv, but since it's not letting me post right now I thought I'd put it here as well. All annotations are mine; most of the cited material belongs to others.
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I am myself but a lowly Master's student, so cannot yet speak from exact experience as to what works and what doesn't in pursuing a PhD in English. However, I have collected several websites, articles, books, etc during the course of my application process. Here is a brief bibliography.

On Christianity and grad school:
1. Intervarsity's Grad and Faculty Ministries (http://www.intervarsity.org/gfm/). If your target school has a chapter, it's worth checking out-- in my experience, they have great advice, people, and resources about life as a Christian grad student. More to the point, they offer a type of community that you're not likely to find in your local church. If you're curious about what an active chapter looks like, my group's site is at http://www.osu-cgsa.org. I also wrote a blog post for them with resources on Christian intellectualism more generally: http://tinyurl.com/2h2laq.

2. Alan Jacobs, "Thoughts on Graduate School" (http://ayjay.backpackit.com/pub/1037353). This is geared more towards undergrads interested in Christianity and literature, but has some good general advice nonetheless. Among others, Jacobs makes the very good point that "even in graduate school, you have a life beyond studying, you should spend a good deal of time thinking about what sort of environment you believe you would thrive in."

3. Intervarsity, Emerging Scholars Network (http://www.intervarsity.org/gfm/esn/). ESN offers a multitude of great information and resources for Christian intellectuals, no matter what your discipline or degree. Here you'll find articles on intellectual life, opportunities for mentoring, some great discounts on relevant periodicals, and much more. Membership is free.

4. Harold Bush, "The Outrageous Idea of a Christian Literary Studies: Prospects for the Future & A Meditation on Hope," Christianity & Literature 51.1 (Autumn 2001): 79-103. Good, concrete advice for pursuing literary projects involving Christianity, from a regular ChristLit contributor. (And if I may say so, Christianity and Literature is a good journal to read from at random.)

5. George Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) and The Soul of the American University. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.) Both longer treatments of Christianity's historical and present role in education-- worth a look.

On grad school more generally:

1. Phil Agre, "Advice for Undergraduates Considering Grad School." http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/grad-school.html. This is from a sociology/computer science perspective, but is quite extensive.

2. PhD-Survey.org, "English." http://www.phd-survey.org/advice/english.htm. Advice from current PhD students in English, generally more anecdotal than research-based. Buying a current grad student coffee can be another good source of such advice.

3. Marie desJardins, "How to Be a Good Graduate Student." http://www.cs.indiana.edu/how.2b/how.2b.html. Though the introduction to this site says the advice is primarily aimed at women in grad school, in fact much of it applies to students of both genders.

4. Ronald Azuma, "So Long, and Thanks for the PhD!" http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/hitch4.html. Another CS perspective, but very thorough and quite entertaining. I rather like this quote from it: "Being a graduate student is like becoming all of the Seven Dwarves. In the beginning you're Dopey and Bashful. In the middle, you are usually sick (Sneezy), tired (Sleepy), and irritable (Grumpy). But at the end, they call you Doc, and then you're Happy."

5. About.com, "Graduate School." http://gradschool.about.com/. Lots of general-interest articles about the application process, survival, etc. Not necessarily from a Christian perspective.

6. Robert Peters, Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student's Guide to Earning a M.A. or PhD (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997); Gregory Semenza, Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Emily Toth, Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia (U Penn, 1997). There are lots of advice books out there for grad students, but these three are the only ones I'm familiar with. They all have their problems, but can be as useful for deciding what you don't want in a grad program as for deciding what you do. My personal nod would go to Semenza, and my personal blech-get-this-rubbish-off-my-bookshelf to Toth.

The Library as Armory

I gave the following talk at CGSA, on July 27, 2007.
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A Mind for God: The Library as Armory

It is no exaggeration, I think, to say that “Piled Higher and Deeper” is the single greatest comic strip ever, in all the venerable history of comic strips—or at least, the best one about grad school, even if it does portray mostly engineering students. One strip from 2003 recounts a few of what it calls “questions not even 5+ years of grad school will help you answer.” For the PhD in physics: “But, uncle, what exactly causes gravity?” For the PhD in political science: “Why war?” And of course, for the PhD in mechanical engineering: “So, son, think we can fix this old car?” To each of these questions, the poor confused grad students can only respond “um,” no doubt with visions of equations and conference papers dancing before their eyes. Perhaps if the father had asked about fixing jet engines, he’d have gotten a better response.

Now, tragically, this list leaves out my personal favorite question, and one I’ve gotten far too often since I first declared an English major in ‘96 or so: “What’s your favorite book?” As glad as I am to see the general public recognize that the primary business of literary studies is literature—otherwise they might be asking “What’s your favorite discursive literary artifact that tries to mask its own bourgeois capitalist ideological agenda?”—this question still tends to unnerve me. This is mainly because I have no idea how to answer it. At least until the dissertation, my official academic reading during any given quarter spans plenty of authors, genres, and periods—and multiple countries are by no means out of the question. During one, well, hectic semester in college, I took six classes on literature from six different continents, so you can imagine how muddled my poor type-A brain got by finals week. And even now, when most of my readings are from dead white Anglophones, the impulse for comparison often prevents me from picking the best book to defend a given philosophical point, let alone picking one to elevate above everything else. Asking me to choose a favorite book is like asking a food critic to pick his favorite entrée or a musician to pick her favorite melody. For a hundred different reasons, I relish a hundred different authors: Nabokov’s wordplay, Jane Austen’s wit, Melville’s brooding, Dostoevsky’s rants, Tolstoy’s sweep, Douglas Adams’ absurdity—and that’s just some of the fiction. Don’t get me started on theory and philosophy-- we might be here all night!

But while variety makes a convenient excuse for my not choosing one book to rule them all, actually I don’t think it’s the greatest obstacle. That honor, it seems to me, belongs to an ambivalence in many Christian circles over just what makes a good book—one that ought to be the Christian’s favorite tome. Recently I visited a new church, and after the worship service I made a beeline for the church library: since the church was a large one, I figured the library would be accordingly respectable. And, placed alongside similar libraries I’ve seen, it was indeed. Between the commentaries, subject studies, church histories, and biographies, there was more than enough for a lifetime’s serious study—not to mention the potential for amazing improvement in one’s walk with God. But I must admit, I’m a bit of a literary snob, and I paid particular attention to the shelves labeled “fiction.” Here, too, there was quite a lot of reading material: Jan Karon’s Mitford series, several volumes of the ever-expanding Left Behind franchise, and scores of brightly-colored but rather forgettable paperback novels. Now, having occasionally tried my own hand at creative writing with generally ugly and clichéd results, I must doff my cap to anyone who’s managed to finish a whole novel and get it published to boot. And I don’t doubt that God has used even the least palatable and most formulaic Christian fiction to teach and encourage its readers. But what dismayed me about the library’s selection was what was missing from its offerings. Yes, there was…plenty of Tim Lahaye, but Narnia was nowhere to be seen—and ditto for G.K. Chesterton, Tolkien, Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, or even Milton and Dante. And even that list doesn’t account for the thousands of writers who espoused a Christian worldview but didn’t explicitly write “religious” stories—or, horror of horrors, used their fiction to critique the Church of their day. As Gene Veith puts it, “[f]rom the beginnings of the church to the present day, Christian writers have explored their faith in books, and in doing so have nourished their fellow believers. Some of the best writers who have ever lived have been Christians, working explicitly out of the Christian worldview” (xiv)[1].

Some of you, no doubt, noticed that the list of favorites I rattled off earlier was decidedly non-Biblical. After all, the Bible includes loads of wordplay, wit, brooding, and all the other characteristics that keep even the oldest literary work fresh and alive. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t know the Bible nearly as well as I wish or ought to do so, though more than one of my so-called secular favorites picks up themes I first heard in Sunday School. You see, the more I study literature the better I understand the Bible, and the more I study the Bible the better I understand literature—especially literature written outside the Christian tradition. For while I firmly believe that God has directly inspired one and only one Book, and included in it all we need to know about God and about ourselves, the fact remains that all literature in a sense treats the same subject matter. Cleanth Brooks, an important literary critic during the first half of the 20th century, puts it this way:

Like religion, literature is suffused with terms that appeal to the human heart. The interpretation may be merely implicit in the work, as when a lyric poet meditates on a flower, or it may be quite explicit and circumstantial, as when a novelist traces the history of a family or a society. But whether implicit or explicit, slightly or massively detailed, the literary artist brings together events and observations and moods into a pattern which has its coherence of attitude. The poem or novel or play gives us—if we want to use polysyllabic terms—a value-structured experience (51)[2].

Though Brooks’ phrase “value-structured experience” has some important differences from James Sire’s “reading for worldview” model, as set out in his book How to Read Slowly, it’s worth unpacking a bit. Indeed, I would argue, such a self-conscious preoccupation with values forms the bedrock of many major theories of literary aesthetics, particularly those concerned with the interplay between Christianity and literature. Tolstoy, for instance, argues that “[a]rt is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them” (123)[3].

While not all theorists share Tolstoy’s insistence on the primarily emotional impact of art, even those who decry Christian literature as so much ideological pandering admit that all literature transmits and promotes a set of values. More to the point, of all the humanities literature offers the strongest evidence that art and its values are mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing. The phrase “What Would Jesus Do?”, which all of us probably encountered in junior high, originally appeared (to my knowledge) in In His Steps, a novel by Charles Sheldon. And for Sheldon to present that question as he does requires a belief that Jesus, as both a literary character in the Gospels and as a real historical figure, can and ought to be imitated. I include both these categories because I think the combination is crucial to Sheldon’s understanding of Jesus’ character, and thus to the ways in which his characters decide just what Jesus would do. As a character in the Gospels, texts which though often biographical and expository are nonetheless literary, Jesus’ specific actions are limited by the stories’ various settings and the author’s various choices. For instance, the line “Peace, be still,” which Jesus says in Mark’s account of the calming of the storm, wouldn’t make sense, say, during the wedding at Cana. Now, given this particular scene we might extrapolate how Jesus might have behaved during Hurricane Katrina (and thus, in Sheldon’s logic, how we as Christians ought to behave) but those speculations would be, strictly speaking, extra-literary. And though we as readers generally assume that literary characters do exist “outside” the narration—that there is, in fact, more than one day to the life of Ivan Denisovich—we hardly expect to meet Huck Finn on the road to Emmaus. However, the fact that Sheldon’s characters apply Jesus’ example to situations not found in the Gospels (such as one character’s decision whether to advertise a brutal boxing match in his newspaper) suggests that they—and Sheldon-- could keep asking “What Would Jesus Do” because they believed the representation corresponded to a real person.

So, in this case, we can certainly analyze Sheldon’s novel in terms of Christian discourse. But we should not stop there! For even as In His Steps uses Christian language to describe social action, it in turn affected and still affects conversations about Christianity and social action today. “WWJD” become a byword, an advertising slogan, and the basis for many a youth group homily about the latest Hollywood-hatched heresy to come down the pipeline. But this process is not unique to the twentieth century: we also see it in Scripture itself. When God identifies himself to Moses as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:15), He appeals to an intertextuality of sorts—the knowledge that Moses (and the story’s later audience) would recognize the reference to Israelite history now recorded in Genesis. Likewise, the New Testament, at several crucial junctures, takes on imagery and language from OT texts: see, for instance, the book of Hebrews. There, the author opens with an even more explicitly intertextual assertion: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things” (Heb. 1:1-2a).

So far, I’ve suggested some ways in which we can understand the relationship between religion and literature, and how each one’s role complements the other. Now I want to turn specifically to the question of reading literature, which is the subject of James Emery White’s third chapter in A Mind for God. White titles his chapter “The Library as Armory,” a phrase originally from the writings of a 12th-century monk but also reminiscent of Paul’s account in Ephesians 6 about the “whole armor of God” (6:11). (And just as a side note, I’d like to point out that the whole “library as armory” idea originally depended on a pun: the Latin words for “library” and “armory” are similar. None of you should be surprised, then, that I was drawn to this chapter.) Now the point of this metaphor is not to recruit one’s books as physical weapons—though I’ve got some nice hardback anthologies at home that would work—but as in Paul’s metaphor of armor to use reading to prepare for both intellectual and spiritual battle. Here, as in Ephesians, we would do well to note that both sets of arms serve primarily defensive functions. A good library, like a sharp mind, may not protect us from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but it will serve us well against what Paul labels “the fiery darts of the evil one” (Eph. 6:16).

Now wait a second here. Didn’t we already hear this lecture a few weeks ago, from some nerdy character with an orange hat? You know—all that stuff about the mind being important, how we should think smarter not harder, why Billy Sunday played ping pong with jackrabbits, yada yada yada. Well, yes: a lot of the best arguments for serious and conscientious reading are the same ones for a serious and conscientious mental life in general. After all, if our human minds are to reflect some small part of God’s mind, and if we are to use our minds to interact with the outside world, obviously we’re going to have to do our homework. I somehow doubt that Paul’s sermon in Acts 17 came out of Mars Hill Cliff Notes. Furthermore, as graduate students we are perhaps the last group that needs a homily about the importance of reading more—our advisors demonstrate that truth every time we meet with them! What is probably clear by this point in the quarter is that the specific disciplines and topics we discuss in these Friday sessions are not meant to be mutually exclusive: indeed, any one of them can hardly function without the others. In recent weeks, we have heard from Salena about the importance of engagement with cultural models of diversity, and from Millie about the importance of, as one of our summer posters has it, thinking Christianly. Reading literature does not replace these disciplines—it was never meant to do so—but in fact augments them. For as James Sire’s more recent work suggests, the expression of one’s worldview is as likely to appear in a creative and/or narrative format as in a systematic list. Perhaps more to the point, your classmate or coworker will likely shy away from formal theological debates about Gnosticism or redemption, but may be quite willing to chat about The Da Vinci Code or Lord of the Rings. In White’s opening chapter of A Mind for God, he argues that a solidly Christian mind allows us to “stride forward and engage the world at the point of its great need” (12). Though literature does not contain or express all of that need—this is why not all Christians should be English majors—it forms, as White points out, a vital armory with which to battle this world’s powers and principalities.

But as with study in general, a deeper study of literary forms and traditions does far more than improve our defenses, for it opens the doors to depths of profundity and beauty that we might otherwise miss. For Christians, the most obvious first step for this study is of course the ultimate bestseller: the Bible. Besides the fringe benefit of knowing the single most important and influential text in the whole of literature, an appreciation of the Bible’s literary depths helps bring its ways and truths into focus, and ultimately to bring the Way and the Truth in focus as well. White reminds us of the words of Hebrews 4:12: “the word of God is living, and active, and sharper than any two–edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart.” Naturally, this quality of Scripture ultimately comes from God, but nonetheless it comes about partly through literary devices. And it is precisely the Bible’s remarkable literary sweep and brilliance that keeps believers enthralled and even outsiders interested. In my experience, Biblical literacy is not simply a method for producing quaint footnotes to the rest of the canon, but rather a prerequisite for approaching the canon in the first place. Harold Bloom has described the “anxiety of influence” (in his book of the same name) among authors in the Western tradition; for Bloom, Shakespeare is the central figure of all literature, dominating and ultimately subduing all those who wrote after him. The Bible seems to me to have had a similar effect, though over a longer time span and with much more significant consequences. Upon encountering the Bible, one may object to it, snarl at it, argue with it, read into it, or live by it—but one may not simply pretend it never existed. For the Christian, of course, this effect is even greater, for we are not simply called to appreciate Scripture’s literary artistry and historical importance, but rather to submit our whole lives to it. White describes the difference thus:

As one would expect, the Bible is not to be read like any other book. More than concentrated study of the Scriptures is called for; this is a book to be obeyed. Other books are to be engaged, understood and evaluated as to the truth and wisdom, place and purpose of their contents. The Bible must also be engaged and understood, but not for the purpose of determining whether we should take it into consideration. The Bible alone calls for complete and utter submission of life and thought. As New Testament scholar N.T. Wright observes, “The Christian is prepared to say, ‘I don’t like the sound of this, but golly, if this is what it really means, I’m going to have to pray for grace and strength to get that into my heart and by shaped by it” (46).

How, then, should we go about getting this singular book into our hearts, and what does literature have to do with it? Well, as with literary texts, there is certainly no shortage of instruction booklets! At least according to Amazon.com, one can read the Bible as a business textbook, a devotional guide, a political manifesto, a little instruction book, and even a weight loss manual. Fortunately, the choice of your particular method does not fall to me to dictate, or even to suggest. But I will insist on one thing-- however you read the Bible, read it for what it is: a literary masterpiece. I quite like Leland Ryken’s opening remark in his book on the Bible as literature: “The one thing the Bible is not is what it is so often thought to be—a theological outline with proof texts attached” (9)[4]. Certainly, the careful study of Scripture has generated enough writings on theology to fill our libraries to overflowing. But even that theology flowed from an understanding of literary conventions. The smallest detail of genre, tone, or imagery might make the difference in an entire passage. Likewise, how we understand a given passage—say, the line “This is my body”—often hinges on how we interpret a given literary device in it. Even if you never plan to write a book on hermeneutics or even to set foot in another literature classroom as long as you live, you owe it to yourself to approach the Bible on its own terms—and thus approach God on His. Gordon Fee’s How to Read the Bible for All It’s Worth is a good starting point, as is Ryken’s How to Read the Bible as Literature, among other books. And frankly, your average Freshman English textbook will do quite nicely in a pinch—the older the book, the better the advice.

Speaking of old books, what about the rest of literature—the stuff White says we’re to engage with, understand, and evaluate? After having heard what I said earlier about my trouble picking a favorite book, I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I don’t spend the next hour rattling off titles for you to read and English classes for you take. You see, though I do have a handout for you with some suggested readings, I don’t think there is a single perfectly foolproof method for choosing what to read or in choosing how to interpret it. Planning a reading list, I think, is a lot like planning a meal. Yours will likely be guided by what materials you have access to; your ethnic, cultural, and linguistic background; and frankly, what kind of stuff you like. The list I prepared for tonight, for example, is rather heavy on American literature and critical theory, two of my academic interests and specialties. Likewise, nearly all the books on my list were ones I’ve read for one literature class or another, and most were originally written in English. Does this mean, as some critics of the Western canon have alleged, that only dead white Christian males have anything worthwhile to say? Hardly. But it does mean that my tastes and recommendations in reading are shaped by my background and my personality, just as many books I’ve read have influenced how I think and act. So when you read my suggestions in a few minutes, you’re perfectly welcome to mutter about how dare I leave off such-and-such a book or author. And if you should choose to email your mutterings to me, I promise not to make fun of you for reading Harry Potter. Much.

In the time we have left, then, I want to talk a bit about reading for worldview, which assuredly does not mean only reading books which agree with your own worldview. So how do we go about this? Well, the most thorough instructions from an explicitly Christian perspective are in James Sire’s book How to Read Slowly, though he covers some of the same ground in Discipleship of the Mind and Habits of the Mind as well. But Sire points out, and I quite agree, that attention to worldview is by no means limited to Christians, but rather is a rather widespread academic exercise in critical thinking. For example, David Richter, in the preface to his wonderful anthology The Critical Tradition, proposes a similar model for unpacking the insanely dense theoretical essays that are a staple of every humanities student’s academic diet. The first step is fairly straightforward: “clarify the vocabulary” [5] of whatever you’re reading. Admittedly this can be difficult in literary contexts, especially with older texts or those using specialized vocabulary, but it’s both necessary and a great way to get deeper into an argument. Once that’s done, we can start asking questions about genre, thesis, evidence, and possible objections (hmm, sounds like my freshman comp class!). For instance, how does Paul’s letter to the Romans differ in generic form from David’s psalms? Or how does Richard Dawkins approach quantitative scientific evidence as compared to Francis Collins? The final step—and admittedly, it’s common for all these steps to happen more or less simultaneously—is to analyze the text in terms of worldview, whether that worldview belongs to a character or an author. Sire has written widely on his model of determining worldviews, primarily in The Universe Next Door, so I won’t go over it now. But the point is recognizing that every text, whatever the genre, content, or historical circumstances, acts on a set of philosophical principles and assumptions that can and should inform how we read and interpret it.

That, then, is the basic plan, and one I’ve found applicable to a whole range of texts. But since my topic tonight is reading literature, I want to conclude with some practical advice about applying Sire’s model to literary texts. First and foremost, remember that both literary language and literary form do not work the same way as other types of language. (Just how they differ is a fascinating debate in itself, but that’s for another time.) Clues to a text’s worldview can appear anywhere: in its vocabulary, in its style of argument, in its form, and of course in its actual content. For instance, Wordsworth’s poem “The World is Too Much With Us” and Hopkins’ poem “God’s Grandeur” treat the same problem—the drudgery of human activity—but from very different stylistic, formal, and philosophical premises. And I need hardly add that novelistic or theological treatments of that problem will look much different from either poem. Secondly, even when you’re reading for worldview or a philosophical point, don’t neglect the aesthetic aspects of a work, and don’t simply put it aside when you’ve “figured out” the author’s worldview. During my freshman year of college, I assembled a far too ambitious term paper on worldviews in three American literature texts we’d read that semester. And while I made enough valid philosophical points to convince my TA to give me an A on the paper, looking back I wish I’d paid more attention to how the various worldviews made an artistic difference in each work—for it was that artistry that drew me to them in the first place. Thirdly, and this applies primarily to those pursuing English as an academic discipline, anticipate and be prepared for resistance from within the academy. In preparing for this talk, I sent out a notice to my department faculty and grad students, and received two responses. One, from a former grad student who recently graduated in Medieval Literature, wished me well and pointed out that “we need more open discussion of Christianity as a presence in literature.” The other response, from a retired faculty member who never has and probably never will meet me, mocked my talk and said that “the relationship between Christianity and literature is that the latter has the possibility of saving us from the former.” I hope I’ve shown tonight that such an adversarial relationship is both unrealistic and unnecessary, but like all scholars I and my Christian colleagues have a long road ahead of us.

The best advice I can give you, however, is to keep reading: passionately, omnivorously, and, yes, Christianly. Though no other book can compare to the Bible in authority and trustworthiness, as I said earlier they all have something in common: they’re about us. They trace the words we live by, the words we run from, and ultimately our relationship with the Living Word. It can be a bit disconcerting to find yourself in a book, particularly when you find Someone demanding your worship and allegiance at the same time. But keep reading, and keep thinking: your armory can always use another shelf.

References
1. Veith, Gene Edward. “Preface.” Reading Between the Lines: A Christian Guide to Literature. Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1990.
2. Brooks, Cleanth. “Religion and Literature.” 1974. Community, Religion, and Literature. Columbia, MO: U of Missouri Press, 1995. 50-62.
3. Tolstoy, Leo. What is Art? 1898. Trans. Aylmer Maude. London: Oxford UP, 1962.
4. Ryken, Leland. “Preface.” How to Read the Bible as Literature. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984.
5. Sire, James. How to Read Slowly: Reading for Comprehension. New York: Random House, 1989. 31.

A Mind for God: Introduction

Note: This is the text of a talk I'm giving (edit: gave!) Friday at CGSA.
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A Mind for God: Introduction

In every major discussion within the university—from curriculum to career plans and from programming to politics—the academy demands one thing from us across the board: intellectual toughness. Granted, no two fields, and often no two people, define this toughness quite the same way, no matter what the GRE claims. Your average mechanical engineering prof probably will get a tad concerned if your grant proposal is in rhymed couplets, and your average English prof may break out in hives if your paper mentions, well, just about any math at all. But even beyond our individual academic skills and our various professional standards, by and large academia insists that a given idea’s philosophical underpinnings—its worldview—matters as much as its actual content. During one recent class meeting, a professor of mine complained loudly about an assigned book’s conservative viewpoint, and told us flat-out that after we were done reading as much of the book as we could stomach, we should burn it.

Whether inside the classroom or around the grad student lounge, this same impulse for interrogation targets our own beliefs, most vehemently those beliefs that assert Christ’s lordship in our lives. According to one recent survey, 53% of university professors distrust evangelical Christians—not because of inconvenient politics, but because we, as a group, don’t always play by the academy’s rules. As Christian scholars, we may experience pressure from both the church and the academy to think differently, or at least to keep quiet about what we are thinking. Mark Noll captures this exasperating balance well:

Those of us who call ourselves “evangelical scholars” are accustomed to suspicion from the church and incredulity from the academy. Modern scholarship, many in the churches believe, has proven itself implacably hostile to faith. Evangelical Christianity, many in the academy believe, holds to propositions that have no legitimate place in learned discourse. Perhaps more commonly, we evangelical scholars find ourselves in the even more depressing situation where no one pays us any notice at all. (1)

Here we encounter one of those wonderful paradoxes that animate so much of our beloved ivory tower. Though most will grudgingly allow religion a supporting role in academic identity, evangelical Christianity is viewed not as a starting point for or even complement to intellectual inquiry, but rather an excuse to avoid it. Christianity, some claim, gives its adherents carte blanche to contradict proven scientific facts, demand a theocratic education system at all levels, and flatly refuse to apply reason to “matters of faith.” What’s more, the critics argue, the very idea of an unassailable authority, be it Scripture, church tradition, or simply God, stifles any worthwhile intellectual activity. For instance, in a 2000 article called “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind ,” Alan Wolfe insists that though faculty at some Christian colleges (i.e. Calvin, Wheaton, and Baylor) have produced quality scholarship, the schools’ various statements of faith—which faculty must sign—nefariously morph the academy from a marketplace of idea to a deadened echo chamber (2). Closer to home, one of my colleagues in English rejected a student project that argued for a husband’s authority based on Biblical models because, in her words, “God doesn’t belong in papers.” Christianity, Nietzsche and his comrades-in-arms have argued for decades, deadens the mind in the name of a delusion.

Unfortunately, such critics make a valid point: to use Mark Noll’s phrase, “the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there isn’t much of an evangelical mind.” Though historically Christian faith has been the impetus behind many far-reaching and astounding feats of intellect—as Charles Zaffini reminded us last quarter—at times we as Christians have needlessly limited our worship and discipleship of the mind. An IVCF article, for instance, notes that Billy Sunday once boasted, “I don't know any more about theology than a jack-rabbit knows about ping pong.” He also said that “when the word of God says one thing and scholarship another, scholarship can go to hell.” Many of us could probably offer further anecdotal evidence of this tendency: the superficial college Bible studies, the feel-good sermons, and perhaps a well-meaning elder or two who honestly can’t understand why you want to go back to school instead of getting “a real job.” But we can also understand this movement towards anti-intellectualism as a historical process. Here, for instance, is Richard Hofstadtler’s now classic account of the relationship between evangelicalism and anti-intellectualism, from his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life:

One begins with the hardly contestable proposition that religious faith is not, in the main, propagated by logic or learning. One moves on from this to the idea that it is best propagated (in the judgment of Christ and on historical evidence) by men who have been unlearned and ignorant. It seems to follow from this that the kind of wisdom and truth possessed by such men is superior to what learned and cultivated minds have. In fact, learning and cultivation appear to be handicaps in the propagation of faith. And since the propagation of faith is the most important task before man, those who are as “ignorant as babes” have, in the most fundamental virtue, greater strength than those men who have addicted themselves to logic and learning. Accordingly, though one shrinks from a bald statement of the conclusion, humble ignorance is far better as a human quality than a cultivated mind. At bottom, this proposition, despite all the difficulties that attend it, has been eminently congenial both to American evangelicalism and to American democracy

(qtd. in Noll 11). (3)

Over the next several weeks, many of our discussions here at CGSA will focus on this issue, roughly organized according to James Emory White’s book A Mind for God. Since we will have ample opportunity in future sessions to tackle specific aspects of the issue, tonight I want to focus on what seems to me the big question about Christian intellectualism: since our salvation comes from the Lord, and not from what or how well we think, why bother with the life of the mind at all? Not all of us are called to traditional “intellectual” vocations, and I’ll be the first to admit that most treatments of the issue draw primarily (if not exclusively) on the humanities, especially history, philosophy, and literature. I want to suggest two reasons why this study, which I consider a spiritual discipline, is important.

First and foremost, we ought to value the life of the mind because that life reflects, however imperfectly, God’s perfect and perfectly true mind. White puts it this way:

Deep within the worldview of the biblical authors and equally within the minds of the earliest church fathers was the understanding that to be fully human is to think. To this day we call ourselves a race of Homo sapiens, which means “thinking beings.” This is not simply a scientific classification; it is a spiritual one. We were made in God’s image, and one of the most precious and noble dynamics within that image is the ability to think. It is simply one of the most sacred reflections of the divine image we were created in (15).

Many of you are likely familiar with the “top 40,” so to speak, of Scripture verses concerning intellectual activity: “Come now, let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18), much of Proverbs, Paul’s writings in I Corinthians 1 about wisdom and foolishness, Christ’s instruction to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength,” and so on down through the concordance. But rather than just relying on proof-texts, I’d like us to consider Scripture from another angle: that of intellectual example. When Paul tells us to be “transformed by the renewing of [our] mind[s]” (Romans 12:2), he both makes a doctrinal point and demonstrates a spiritual discipline. Paul is perhaps an extreme example of intellectual engagement in Scripture, since we are told he is already highly educated at the time of his conversion, but he is by far not the only example. Consider Josiah, for instance, one of the few faithful kings of Judah. We read in 2 Kings 22 that the spiritual renewal Josiah directed was prompted by his rediscovery of the Law—in short, by a Bible study. And it’s no coincidence that the first step in this renewal was to share that study with others:

“The king stood by the pillar and renewed the covenant in the presence of the LORD -to follow the LORD and keep his commands, regulations and decrees with all his heart and all his soul, thus confirming the words of the covenant written in this book” (I Kings 23:3).

Secondly, intellectual sharpness is crucial to our interactions with the world: Christians both stand to gain the most from it, and are in danger of losing the most without it. As I remarked earlier, those battle-hardened academics with whom we as grad students most often interact place a rather high premium on intellectual integrity. A whole gaggle of isms may descend on the same Dickens novel, battering it almost beyond recognition, but each will demand of it—and often, of the institutions represented in it—a reasonable and more or less consistent philosophy. The same standards apply to Christianity, even if we rarely crack a Bible in the classroom: Bertrand Russell’s argument that “religion has [nothing] to do with argumentation. They [Christians] accept religion on emotional grounds” (4) still animates much discussion (or more accurately, Christian-bashing) today. By retreating from conscious and concerted intellectual exercise, as many Christians have done in the name of “practical theology,” we may lose these vital debates—whether our opponents are secularists or terrorist apologists—before they start. In a world ostensibly driven by rationalism and proof, ignoring reason is the fastest way to make ourselves irrelevant. Listen to the words of Rick Nañez, an Assemblies of God missionary:

Anti-intellectualism keeps us from affecting our institutions and their various departments with solid Christian thinking. It hinders our ability to think in terms of worldview, that is, to understand the hundreds of otherwise fragmented areas of life in a coherent way. If we are suspicious of the intellect, we are hamstrung when it comes to providing well-thought-out answers to difficult questions from critics and skeptics. Anti-intellectualism can also lead to dangerous forms of mysticism and a type of superstitious faith. (5)

But we need not and should not think of intellectualism only as a cordial to stave off cultural irrelevance, for I am convinced that the life of the mind offers tangible benefits to the believer as well. Again, quoting White:

It is a moment of both peril and promise; the peril is that when the public square is uniquely open to spirituality and hungry for visionary ideas, the mind of the Christian is often found empty, passive, and more reflective of the world at hand than the world to come. But the promise is that Christians can stride forward and engage the world at the point of its great need (11-12).

Some of the specific methods for taking hold of this promise will be the subject of future sessions this summer. But on the most basic level, training ourselves to think better means not only that we gain a greater understanding of the world around us—its physical workings; its ideas; and the wacky, fallen people that populate it—but also of theology and ultimately of God. Like nothing else, Christianity offers us a backdrop against which we can organize and understand our little corners of the academic world—but only if we are willing to put the work into understanding it. Some good resources already exist to help us along the way: recommended book lists, groups like the Emerging Scholars Network and the Dead Theologians Society, and of course staff workers with many years’ experience in training grad students how to think Christianly. I don’t pretend it’s an easy process, or one that we can pursue without running smack into our own fallen and thus limited minds, but it may well be the single most rewarding discipline a Christian graduate student—and indeed, any Christian thinker—can undertake.

There’s an old joke about a man who, coming upon a tombstone, noticed the following epitaph: “Here lies a Christian intellectual.” Reflecting for a moment, he then muttered to himself: “Folks must be awfully poor around here, having to bury two people in one grave.” The challenge before us is to prove that man wrong, and to unite the two categories for all to see. Let me finish with a quote from Alec Hill, CEO of Intervarsity:

I sincerely believe that Jesus was the greatest thinker who ever lived. As such, we are to prize the mind, not shrivel into a false piety and, as a result, suffer from fear and insecurity. Rather than embracing an ethos of withdrawal and defeatism, we are to grapple honestly and openly with difficult issues. To do otherwise would be to dishonor the name we bear. Our calling is to bring every inch of creation—including the mind—to the feet of Jesus. Let us do so with resolve and humility.

(6)

Amen. Thanks for your attention.

Notes
1. Noll, Mark. “Minding the Evangelical Mind.” First Things 109 (2001): 14–17. Available online at http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=2121.
2. Wolfe, Alan. “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind,” Atlantic Monthly 286.4 (October 2000): 55-76.
3. Quoted in Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995).
4. Russell, Bertrand. “Why I Am Not a Christian.” 1927. http://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html.
5. Originally from an interview in Christianity Today (http://www.ctlibrary.com/ct/2006/marchweb-only/113-42.0.html). Quoted in: Rau, Andy. “Anti-intellectualism: a problem for the church?” Weblog post. ThinkChristian. http://www.thinkchristian.net/?p=674.
6. Hill, Alec. “Our Core Commitments: Discipling Your Mind.” http://www.intervarsity.org/slj/article/2439.

Part 3: Signals of Transcendence

Believe it or not, I initially planned just one article covering the whole of James Sire’s visit and presentations, starting with my general impressions and culminating with analysis of the two bits of rhetoric I’ll (finally) cover in this article. Of course, I also planned to write this particular article right on the temporal heels of the other two, but papers intervened. In any case, my coursework and grading are both done for the quarter, so I can now pick up where I left off.

As you’ll recall, Sire’s recent reformulation of “worldview” heavily emphasizes emotional commitments, at the cost (in my opinion) of a rational and workable concept. Be that as it may, his primary application of these ideas does maintain the intellectual integrity and logical structure typical of much of his writing. A worldview, Sire argues, is “a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, [one] that can be expressed as a story and/or in a set of presuppositions” (Naming the Elephant 122). For the second part of his Saturday seminar (as well as a brief part of his Friday CGSA talk) Sire linked this frame with the notion of “signals of transcendence,” and gave both a history of major views on these signals and his own thoughts on the matter.

For those familiar with Sire’s previous work, it may be helpful to think of this change as more methodological than strictly philosophical. For instance, in How to Read Slowly Sire presents a method for “reading for comprehension”—or more precisely, reading for worldview. In the chapter there on reading nonfiction, Sire’s analysis follows in the footsteps of the New Critics—hurrah for close reading! After reproducing a short essay originally printed in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Major street cred there, Jimmy. Major.), Sire first seeks to “clarify the vocabulary” (31) and track down the primary text’s allusions. Only then, he contends, can we ask questions about genre, thesis, evidence, and possible objections (hmm, sounds like my freshman comp class!), and eventually about the author’s particular worldview. While close reading as an analytical practice may not necessarily require a rational approach (cf. Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy, if you must), I would argue that it is wholly consistent with Sire’s then-current view of worldview as “a set of presuppositions which we hold about the basic makeup of our world” (Universe 1997, p. 16). Although Sire models his reading method narratively rather than simply listing his conclusions, he follows the same logic in How to Read Slowly as in his early editions of Universe.

Within this context, Sire’s new emphasis on “signals of transcendence” (yes, yes, we’ll get to the actual definition eventually) can be seen as a similar demonstration of irrational (or more kindly, suprarational) worldview formation. Simply put, a signal of transcendence (not to be confused with singles of transcendence, which one may find on New Age dating sites) is a human impulse or reaction that can only be satisfactorily accounted for under a transcendent system. Generally, these signals appear in discourses not explicitly marked as “Christian” or even “religious,” though they interact with such discourses in significant ways. More importantly, they are equally outside rationalism or logic per se: they constitute evidence without being proof. Confused yet? Just wait—it gets, well, longer.

The actual term “signals of transcendence” originates not with Sire, actually, but with Peter Berger, a non-Christian sociologist. Interestingly, Berger denies the possibility of special revelation (personal, direct communication from a transcendent God), but views these signals as a type of natural revelation. In a book whose title I, alas, did not write in my notes, Berger thus proposes four arguments for transcendence. The “argument from ordering,” at least in Sire’s explanation, significantly highlights the irrationality of comfort: a mother, for instance, will tell her frightened or hurt child that “everything will be all right.” In the short term, perhaps, this simply means that, say, Gargamel (of The Smurfs) won’t actually jump out of the TV and chase you around, despite last night’s rather vivid nightmare. But no human mother, however well-meaning, can override or prevent real calamities: life, actually, is not all right. To claim the opposite, in both Berger’s and Sire’s view, indicates another world of permanent comfort.

Berger’s second example, the “argument from play,” likewise draws on childhood experience, but from the child’s perspective. Play, whether in the guise of make-believe, dress up, or online RPGs, creates a secondary world with its own rules and temporality. When my brother and I were kids, for instance, most of our backyard fantasies fell under the rubric of “The Adventures of Traagar and M’giah.” To this day I have no earthly idea where we got those names, but they seemed quite natural then. Of course, the bulk of our play concepts consisted of thinly veiled adaptations (or blatant plagiarisms; our liturgy for entering the play world was “It’s Morphin’ Time!”) of various TV shows and computer games, but the creative impulse fits in Berger’s model just the same. If our universe were a closed system, he argues, then serious play (no, it’s not a contradiction in terms) could not so readily—and so creatively—break the rules. For a more academic approach to this concept, Sire recommends Tolkien’s essay, “On Fairy Tales.” To this I would add Freud’s “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1907), which though from a different viewpoint covers much of the same ground.

The third of Berger’s examples, the “argument from hope,” offers (alas) no such opportunity for random childhood anecdotes. As in the argument from ordering, Berger locates in hope an impulse contradictory to a mechanistic (i.e. naturalistic) universe. Here, though, the force seems to be more in ambiguity and even agnosticism, rather than in reassurance against all odds. For example, I may make any of these three statements: (1) I hope I get an A on my paper, (2) I hope the weather is nice for my drive home, and (3) I hope I get to talk more to that pretty flute major I met at CGSA. Granted, the syntax won’t always be strictly in the same form—or necessarily use the word “hope”—but the sentiment is. However, in each of these scenarios “hope” (I should say “Hope,” waxing Platonic, but that seems a bit too formal.) takes on a slightly different meaning. For the first, I may in flights of fancy and/or bribery think I can influence my profs’ respective grading processes, but realistically I’ve done all I can. Similarly, the weather ought to be (save any still-standing suns) determined already, whether by the proverbial chaotic butterfly wing (I blame Nabokov) or an old-fashioned cold front. But the third sentence, I think, brings out Berger’s notion more clearly: while certain empirical situations, such as riding the same bus home, certainly contribute to the stated goal, this type of hope actually transcends logical calculation. This same usage, for instance, appears in Thomas Paine’s Deistic Age of Reason: “I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.”

Finally, after three appeals to fond memories and vain future hopes, we reach Berger’s starkly realistic fourth signal: the argument from damnation. This one is particularly appropriate within the context of Christian apologetics, as many non-Christian detractors cite damnation as evidence against God’s goodness. Here as before, however, Berger is more concerned with human behavior: some particularly heinous agents of evil (Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Jack the Ripper, Barak Obama, et al) garner wishes of damnation even outside specifically theological contexts. Or, as Paul Laurence Dunbar puts it a bit more waggishly in “Theology” (1896):

There is a heaven, for ever, day by day,
The upward longing of my soul doth tell me so.
There is a hell, I’m quite as sure; for pray,
If there were not, where would my neighbors go?

Because this argument builds on a negative principle, which is to say it specifically prescribes punishment, Sire argues that it implies a converse positive principle: if we can recognize and condemn evil, then we should also be able to recognize and praise good. On a side note, C.S. Lewis uses a similar rhetorical structure in the early chapters of Mere Christianity, though he assumes an already-established moral law to do so.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, Sire applies Berger’s general observations to argue specifically for Christian theism, rather than a vague—and impersonal—“transcendence.” To do this, he draws in part on Calvin’s (the French theologian, not the Greatest Cartoon Character Ever™) sensus divinitatus thesis: that there is “an awareness or sense of God implanted in all people by nature.” However, while Calvin argues that this belief is universal, at the same time it is “rather minimal: there is a God, He is the Creator, and He ought to be worshipped.” Now, the term universal, particularly when spoken by a WASP or other dastardly Westerner, carries some rather unpleasant connotations these days in the proverbial ivory tower. What Calvin (or at least the commentary on him that Sire quotes) seems to mean, though, is not that every culture conceptualizes a personal God, but rather that they retain the concept of an all-powerful being—even by denying its actual existence. I’m not particularly fond of that last bit of logic, myself, but will let it stand for the moment.

The rest of Sire’s observations on this topic primarily deal with specific signals of transcendence in human knowledge and experience. Significantly, while in a previous talk Sire noted that reasons for belief are often formulated after the fact, signals of transcendence often appear before belief. For example, Sire cites a passage from Stephen Weinberg (a thoroughgoing atheist), which states among other things that “[i]t is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents…but that we were somehow built in from the beginning.” Weinberg, like his fellow naturalists Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan (and Harold Bloom, after a fashion), of course believes that such a belief is ultimately self-deceiving. But Sire’s point, which I think is a good one, is that even the impulse to regret that alleged delusion speaks to a reality not dreamed of in Weinberg’s philosophy.

Based on this structure, Sire spent the rest of his talk identifying strands of thought—and occasionally specific texts—that signal transcendence in a whole range of fields: biology, astronomy, math, physics, philosophy, ethics, social sciences, and of course aesthetics. I won’t get into the details of his argument for the sciences, but I do want to spend a little time on his examples from art before moving to my own two case studies. On this point the problem of universalism re-enters the picture: though Calvin dodges the diversity-enforcing bullet by weakening his claim to account for extreme cultural ranges, Sire does not. While Sire did not fully endorse Peter Kreeft’s syllogism (“There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Therefore there must be a God. You either see this or you don’t.”), he located transcendence in equally narrow circles: Bach, some paintings, Shakespeare, and poets such as G.M. Hopkins. Now, we obviously cannot expect Sire to identify transcendence in styles or genres with which he is not familiar—or perhaps more simply, those he doesn’t like—but here again I find his formulation problematic. Much as I rage, rage, against the dying of aesthetic and stylistic standards for literature, the question here is not what is aesthetically pleasing but what is emotionally effective. Sire, perhaps, would run screaming from the room (mentally, if not physically) if I cranked Stryper or Alice Cooper up to eleven. Likewise, I daresay certain fans of those two bands would groan at the prospect of sitting through all four Brandenburg Concertos. But who’s to say, aside perhaps from a few writers about two houseplants, which signal is genuine? This seems to me the biggest weakness in Sire’s argument, and an ironic one: if a signal of transcendence, well, transcends cultural specificity (as Sire and I both believe God does), how then can we limit it to one set of cultural tastes? More to the point, how might we read (as Sire suggests!!) explicitly anti-Christian texts, like Weinberg’s above, for signposts to an “unknown God”? The world, Hopkins writes, is “charged with the grandeur of God”—not just a few galleries, novels, or radio stations.

But all is not lost, even in my severely under-caffeinated curmudgeon of a universe. Just as Sire’s definition of a worldview works better as a comparatively minimal frame (as in Lewis’ hallway image in Mere Christianity) for purposes of classification and discussion, his signals of transcendence thesis functions best at the more basic level Berger describes. Specifically, I would argue, we can more usefully trace such signals as signposts at the basic levels of language and cognition, rather than as specific cultural expressions. Mikhail Bakhtin, a 20th-century Russian philosopher and literary critic, argues correctly that all human language is a dialogue: none of us speaks completely autonomously, but rather we all reflect and refract previous discourse (conversation) to carve out our own speaking identities. For instance, my phrase “a few writers about two houseplants” in the previous paragraph alludes to “The Houseplant Song” by Audio Adrenaline, which in turn pokes fun at the idea that certain genres of music by definition cannot be Christian: “It doesn’t really matter if it’s ‘Christian’ or not/ If it’s syncopated rhythm then your soul is gonna rot.” While both references in this case are intentional and conscious, however, Bakhtin locates the dialogic impulse on a precognitive (not to be confused with Agatha the Pre-Cog) level—or more precisely, in the unconscious. In other words, while I may dialogue (yes, Virginia, verbing does weird language) with Audio Adrenaline to be clever or aesthetically interesting, I enter into dialogue in the first place precisely because I have no other choice.

Now, to my knowledge, Bakhtin and his intellectual descendents explicitly limit this dialogue to the human domain: the Underground Man may chat with his actuarial (if not actual) “gentlemen,” but not with God. However, to apply dialogism to signals of transcendence we must necessarily break down that barrier. To that end, I suggest that the processes Berger, Sire, and Calvin describe all assume and indeed rely on a God-breathed—and perhaps physically implanted—awareness of a transcendent prime reality. Now, I do not wish to minimize the specifically human intertextuality dominant in religious discourse. James Baldwin, for instance, weaves much “Christianese” into his novel Go Tell it on the Mountain, even though he denies the final transcendent step from “Our Father, who art in heaven” to God. But as a counterbalance, consider these words from Flannery O’Connor’s 1962 preface to Wise Blood:

That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. For them Hazel Motes’ [the novel’s main character] integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author Hazel’s integrity lies in his not being able to (5).

I move now to analysis of two recent quotes whose respective speakers have much in common with the readers O’Connor describes. Neither, perhaps, points tidily to a linguistic “God gene,” but both, I will argue, share a cognitive affinity with what Sire calls “God-haunted poetry.” The first quote comes from Dr. H., my theory professor this past quarter. In the midst of a lecture—appropriately—on cognitive aspects of narrative expectations, he remarked that a certain narrative style was jarring because “that’s not how we’re designed…evolutionarily.” As this was a spoken lecture the ellipses here represent an actual pause, not elided words. In fact, the presence and timing of this pause is as much a signal of transcendence as the rather striking connotative disjunction between “designed” and “evolutionarily.”

Let us first consider this sentence from the audience’s standpoint, specifically in terms of chronology. Since the pause comes after “designed,” and since the words to that point represent a logically complete English construction, we can distinguish two interpretive units—and thus two possible interpretations—in the whole utterance. The first, “that’s not how we’re designed,” does not necessarily conjure up a personal (let alone loving) Designer, but it does identify a method in our otherwise maddening (and maddened, if you ask Freud) minds. More to the point, it identifies two distinct models for this design: the incorrect model associated with the narrative style Dr. H. was describing, and the correct model separate from it. Granted, this conversational snippet does not speculate on the character of this correct model, but implies its existence (ala Berger) nonetheless.

To add “evolutionarily,” however, creates a new interpretive unit that affects both how we read/hear our initial interpretation and the sentence as a whole. In fact, I would argue, the logical completeness of “that’s not how we’re designed,” and perhaps also some uneasiness with the epistemological foundations of such a statement, motivated the supplementary adverb. “Evolutionarily,” then, does double duty—it sanitizes the potential political unpleasantness stemming from “designed,” and simultaneously transforms the statement from metaphysical speculation to confirmation of accepted “scientific fact.” If we view this interpretive duality as a conflict between theism and naturalism, as Sire perhaps would, then Dr. H’s attempt to make one statement of two handily weakens his naturalistic bias. We’ve seen this before, actually, in Stephen Weinberg’s epistemologically similar statements recorded above. Weinberg’s prefatory disclaimer that “[i]t is almost irresistible for humans to believe [theism],” though syntactically smoother (it comes from a written text) than Dr. H’s “evolutionarily,” aims at the same goal: to subsume what one cannot believe under the banner of what one may safely say.

On this point Dr. H’s pause proves particularly interesting. I, of course, cannot say with certainty just went through his mind during that pause, but as we’ve learned from Berger one may broadcast signals of transcendence without even knowing the radio’s on. Just such a process is at work in Dr. H’s pause. If evolution were really akin to natural law, as his adverbial band-aid tries hard to convince us, then the phrase “that’s not how we’re designed” would be both nonsensical and ultimately superfluous. In other words, if design did not exist—only random complexity that we haven’t figured out yet, as Richard Dawkins argues—then Dr. H’s line would likely have been something like “we haven’t evolved that way.” That he, like Hazel Motes, tries to shrug “designed” off as a linguistic remnant of an unenlightened past ironically requires the very designer he doesn’t want to meet. Men of Athens, it seems, still build altars.

My second quote, while not so linguistically complex as Dr. H’s declaration, still demonstrates an important and widespread linguistic signal: euphemistic substitution. This one appears in a freshman composition paper; the author, A., was one of my students last quarter. In this paper, A. looks at the role of humor in several spoof advertisements and speculates a bit on the rhetoric of humor in the ads. To conclude, he remarks that “[the ads] play upon one of our most natural responses in life, humor, which in turn responds to itself as laughter. Laughter makes us live longer which is why nature gave us humor to keep us sane.” The syntax of the first sentence is admittedly rather awkward—a peril, alas, of being 18 and trying to write—but I’ve included it here to heighten the irony of the culminating claim. Indeed, this tension runs throughout A’s paper: on one hand, he argues that spoofs appeal to “a basic intuitive hilarity” in their audience; on the other, he swerves away from identifying this intuition with anything but happenstance.

Just as Dr. H’s “evolutionarily” blinds the Deistic clockmaker, A’s repeated use of “natural” here and throughout his paper locates humor in a closed, naturalistic universe. Within the context of the paper, of course, this move allows A. (or so he thinks) to sidestep questions of rhetorical audience: if humor is natural, then it need not be explained. But even this impulse puts an interesting spin on his final sentence. Frankly, the naturalistic sociology that A. attempts in this paper has no coherent definition for the “human nature” to which he appeals. At best, it claims that certain elements of human behavior “keep us sane,” but does not—indeed, cannot—explain any extra-societal source of those elements. And yet, it retains the unifying idea of “nature,” even if not as baldly as A. does here. In my previous article (yea verily, heap big moons ago) about Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, I explored a similar move: an abstracted “nature,” like the Divine Butler and/or Cosmic Therapist, offers agency and—dare I say it?—design without human responsibility. Incidentally, this same student later wrote a term paper arguing for illegal drug use on the basis of personal choice, so I somehow doubt he invests this nature with any significant degree of transcendent morality.

The height of the ironic substitution—and also, it seems to me, the height of the signal strength—lies in the conclusion: “Laughter makes us live longer which is why nature gave us humor to keep us sane.” Sire’s method of analysis once again proves helpful here. While the terms of A’s syllogism do not precisely match up (long life does not follow from sanity), they do reveal an embedded worldview. While earlier in the paper A. primarily argued (however dubiously) for humor’s rhetorical effectiveness as a means to an economic end. Here, though, he steps outside the economic context: humor in itself is valuable because it prolongs human life. Moreover, this consequence forms the sole motivation for the creative agent-that-is-not-one he calls “nature” here. Anthropomorphism as a stylistic practice may not be terribly popular with certain elements of the high school English teacher population, but here it makes an important—and I would argue strategic—statement about naturalism and transcendence. One aspect of prime reality, according to Sire’s model in Universe, is being the “prime existent,” (23) beyond which we need not trace morality, truth, beauty, etc. At first glance, it may seem that A. has simply substituted “nature” for “God.” However, I don’t think his statement is quite that simple. Just as Dr. H’s remark substitutes the naturalistic reading (i.e. adding “evolutionarily”) for the potentially theistic one, A’s first privileges laughter as an inborn and practically created characteristic, then tries to backpedal by crediting nature (ala Emerson) for that creativity. But neither cover-up fully does the job: each reveals what it so desperately wants to forget. To return to O’Connor’s metaphor, the “ragged figure” may well stay in the rhetorical shadows, but he never fully disappears. And that, it seems to me, is the real point of any signal of transcendence: to show substance by shadow, even when we’re unwilling to look straight on.

Well, folks, that’s all I have for you—thanks for reading! I hope you have enjoyed my comments and profited from them. Now don’t just sit there: go to your local library, bookshelf, Amazon.com, or IV staff worker and buy/read James Sire’s books. Then come back here and argue with me, or even fill another blog with equally expansive comments. And if you happen to be the aforementioned pretty flute major, I’ll be on the 8AM shuttle. Hope to see you there.