Author: myer4269

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Does Theology Matter?

“…the pretense that a theologian can escape from his own time is false, and the desire to escape into a timeless systematic Nirvana is a rebellious affront to the theologian’s calling. Theology is a pastoral vocation, a ministry to the church, and not to the church of the future or to the church of all times and places, but to the church as the theologian finds her.” Peter Leithart, A Son to Me p. 18

“As I said, the theologian’s real work is not to prove that the Faith is true, only that it’s interesting.” Robert Farrar Capon, Hunting the Divine Fox p. 85

We had never been that close, friends of friends really, but I have always liked Ryan. He doesn’t pull any punches, and he is also a killer songwriter, a real deal storyteller, who has written an album called Flatlands full of dark and brooding songs that capture where I am from with an intimate knowing that is both caring and critical. A few months ago he wrote an email to me and a bunch of friends, many of whom are pastors and/or seminary students, about some real doubts he was having about faith and the isolation he felt as a musician trying to make it at something that almost nobody makes it doing.

When we wrote back some of us made versions of the case that things are not as bad as they seem, while others of us retreated into abstract theological categories. At the time I thought the matter was closed because he didn’t immediately write back, but a few months later he responded to all of us to tell us how badly we had failed him. What he had heard in our responses was the same old pap about faith and doubt, and as pastors and as students of theology, he thought we should have more to offer than, “That sucks man” or worse still, “Well, let’s look at this through the lens of sovereignty or providence or the theology of suffering.” There was real sadness and anger in his reply, and though he later wrote a follow-up apology, saying he had overstated things and that he was sorry, I felt the sting of what he had said because whatever the tone, I knew there was a red-hot core of truth in it.

In his final email he asked if he could call all of us to apologize over the phone. He called me and we talked and he apologized again. Though I accepted his apology, I told him that in many ways he was right. I told him that in my case there were times when I used theology, particularly theological categories, as a kind of armor against doubt. When I had read his second email, I felt him saying, “I see your armor, and it isn’t protecting you from anything. It might shimmer in the sun and look formidable in battle, but I know exactly where the chinks are.”

What Ryan said hit deeply because he tapped a nerve in me that was already raw. For some time I had been thinking about the value of my theological training and my calling as a pastor and had been wondering how I might better use theology to meet people in their doubt or pain or curiosity. As much as I love theology as theology and find it intrinsically fascinating whether or not I can make it practical, I know that for most people theology has to hit their lives in a way that makes sense. I don’t think that is a failing on their part. I think it’s good to ask how things apply in real and meaningful ways. I’ve just been wondering if you can make the leap from the theology of seminary to a meaningful theology of the street, and if you can, then how.

In seminary I was shown the virtue of a clear head and was taught the need to think in categories. Categories are useful because like empty hangers they give you a place to hang things instead of throwing them on the floor. I wouldn’t have survived seminary without this way of thinking, and it continues to come in handy in all sorts of ways. When many things come at you at once, categories allow a kind of intellectual triage to sort through what is urgent and what is not. Categories can also help you distinguish between what is truly interesting and what appears to be interesting because of seeming novelty. The story of our time is not that the emperor has no clothes but that the emperor has the same clothes and keeps telling us they are new. Categorical thinking helps you say, “Same clothes, same emperor.”

It shouldn’t be surprising though that there are dangers in this way of thinking. For one, if what you crave is novelty, then you really are going to be disappointed once you begin to peel back the layers and discover that there may be a few new things under the sun, but not as many as you might think or like. For some that fact alone can become a point of despair and the world can become flat as a consequence.[1]

For another, thinking in theological categories can feel like a weapon so that some who wield it fancy themselves Alexanders with worlds to conquer and subdue. I have certainly found a temptation in myself to use my theological categories as a dismissive way of dividing the world. An education in any discipline should provide ways to encounter and interact with and divide the world, so this isn’t a temptation unique to theology. However, theology’s subject is the God who made everything so there is a particular temptation for those who study him to think that they therefore know everything.

I am thinking about all of this for a few reasons. One is I just submitted a proposal to do doctoral work in theology, so in auditing my own motivations for doing such a thing, I’m asking some questions, including “Why does theology matter, again?” and “If it does, how can I make it matter to people?” In writing this essay and the ones I hope to write, I’d like to have my lover’s quarrel with theology in public and write my way to an answer. I’d like to invite the feedback of any who would read this so I can sharpen my own thinking. In all of this my hope is to write my way toward a different way of communicating theology.

Which brings me back to Ryan, to his music and to his album Flatlands. The album is sparse and honest because, like in the flatlands of the title, there is nowhere to hide. When I first listened to the album and heard his song “Amarillo,” a song about my hometown, it was the sonic equivalent of driving the nothing-but-horizon-roads of the Texas panhandle, dirt kicking up, the road a straightedge laid across the length of golden paper, with little else in the sight line to give any sense of perspective. I felt in that song the same smallness I felt so often growing up, staring out across plains and sky, a smallness that pressed upon me the weight of the seeming cosmic-scale nothingness of life, but a smallness that also was lightness and wonder at being alive, the joy of being a witness to such enormity.

And I realize now that I’ve been chasing that feeling. I chased it in music in high school. I chased it in literature and poetry in college. And I chased it all the way to seminary. I have felt it at times along the way to be sure, if only now and again, and my life and my experience and my belief has taught me to call what I’ve experienced not a feeling merely, but a person, to call it God. The weight and lightness, the dread and joy, the awe and wonder, have cohered in my experience and understanding as the Trinitarian God of Christianity. But there is the experience of that person and then there is the act of speaking of that experience and trying to describe that person. At its most basic that is what theology is–our description of the person and experience of God. In that sense theology is as natural and necessary as oxygen. But Theology-with-capital-T, theology as a discipline and academic enterprise, is something else.

What I am really writing about here is the theologian’s calling. If I want to become more and more a theologian and if I want to serve the church as a theologian, what exactly is it that I would be doing? What characteristics of the theologian and what form of theology best serve the church? For so long the question has been, what characteristics of the theologian best serve the academy, and not the academy as we might imagine it if we were starting from scratch, but the professionalized academy as we find it now. There are disconnects, fractures and fault lines between the academy of the past and academy of the present and between the the theologian who serves the church and the theologian who serves the academy. There are so few who do this well. From my limited viewpoint, whoever seeks to love and cherish both the church and the academy often takes one as a wife and the other as a mistress, and both the church and academy suffer as a consequence. But does it have to be that way at all and does it have to be that way for me?

That’s what I hope to explore in this series of essays that I hope to write over the coming months. The goal is to write one essay of between 2000 to 3000 words each month and to send it out in a newsletter which will include links to books, articles, songs, artists, and other things that have influenced or informed my thinking as I was writing that particular essay. I’m doing this for a few reasons. For one, I want create a tangible writing goal for myself that pushes me to write something of substance on a monthly basis. For another, I want to invite others into the conversation to sharpen and challenge the things I am saying so that this whole process is actually an adventure. I’m setting out with no particular destination. As I said, I want to write my way towards an answer or answers, and I’m inviting you to come along with me.

  1. The glory of things is not necessarily their newness. Mountains do not stir awe because they are new. They stir awe because they are momentous, sublime, dangerous, and beautiful. If you snub the Alps simply because you have already seen the Rockies, you are missing the point. Getting to the place where you say, “Oh great. Another mountain,” tells you something more about you than it does about mountains. The same is true in theology and reading the bible. Part of the glory is the repetition. This is what typology is all about–that there is beauty in patterns and repetition, in archetypes and symbols. Of course, the one great exception to the Preacher’s lament, “There is nothing new under the sun,” is the great exception to almost everything–the Incarnation.   ↩

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The City of God and the Citadel of Pride: Why Humility Matters

“The grace of God could not be commended in a way more likely to evoke a grateful response, than the way by which the only Son of God, while remaining unchangeably in his own proper being, clothed himself in humanity and gave to man the spirit of his love by the mediation of a man, so that by this love men might come to him who formerly was so far away from them, far from mortals in his immortality, from the changeable in his changelessnes, from the wicked in his righteousness, from the wretched in his blessedness. And because he has implanted in our nature the desire for blessedness and immortality he has now taken on himself mortality, while continuing in his blessedness, so that he might confer on us what our hearts desire; and by his sufferings he has taught us to make light of what we dread.” City of God, Book X.29

What is ultimately offensive and irreconcilable about the Incarnation may not be the metaphysics, the sheer improbability and seeming impossibility that God would become man, but the even more stunning implications about the kind of God who would become man. Who is this God who would subject himself to the vicissitudes of history? What is this uncontrollable mystery marked not primarily by power and might but by humility?

In Book X of City of God Augustine spars with the Neoplatonists, represented primarily by Porphyry. I have to admit that this section was pretty tough going for me. I’m not entirely familiar with Neoplatonism, and though Platonism will always cast a shadow on Western thought for good or for ill, I wasn’t entirely sure where Augustine was going. But a real payoff came in chapter 29 of Book X, where Augustine comes to a truth that is instructive for anyone engaged in evangelism and apologetics.

In this chapter, Augustine asserts that at bottom it is not for philosophical or intellectual reasons that the Neoplatonists reject Christ. Rather it is because Christ’s humility in the Incarnation and Crucifixion are affronts to their pride. Of course the whole of Christ’s life and ministry raises intellectual questions, but for Augustine, the hurdle is not primarily an intellectual one of unanswerable questions, but a spiritual one of utter humility.

This is not to say the Incarnation is not an unfathomable mystery. Of course it is bottomless and beautiful and worthy of our contemplation. Nor is this to say that intellectual objections are empty and therefore should not be addressed, but it is to say that there is often a deeper objection behind the presenting objection, and if that deeper objection is not addressed, intellectual answers, no matter how subtle or seemingly satisfying, cannot win the day. For pride is the final stronghold, the last fortress that must fall in the battle for our affection. To be sure, even when we have turned to Christ, skirmishes will be fought, offensives will be launched from this fortress, for pride resides in our most inward citadel, in the Helm’s Deep of very selves.

Here Augustine is addressing that special form of pride, intellectual pride. Augustine’s target may be the neoplatonist, but it could just as easily be the New Atheist or the materialist or any other such movement that will inevitably come down the pike. But to take the example of the New Atheist, for Dawkins or Hitchens or Harris to acknowledge the hint of the possibility that there is some reality outside of science as they have defined it would be an act of enormous humility. What they have to lose is credibility, platforms, and power, the very things that Christ laid aside in the Incarnation.

In The Lord of the Rings Frodo’s greatest advantage is his seeming inconsequence. As Gandalf says of the quest to destroy the Ring, “Let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning.” Humility has its own power because it never occurs to the powerful that anyone would willingly sacrificing power. This willingness, this sacrifice is its own kind of power.

Yet anyone looking at the quest of the ring bearer from the outside would have their doubts.  Surely this hobbit cannot matter? Surely the fate of Middle-Earth does not hinge on a halfling? And many looking on the life of Christ have had their doubts. Surely the Christ cannot come from Galilee? Surely the Christ is not a carpenter, born and raised in obscurity? And we pile on our own objections. He never penned a book, never traveled beyond the borders of his occupied country, never directly affronted the occupying powers, never commanded the allegiance of the powerful. But if we would experience the humility of Christ and see its power to overcome darkness, and in seeing acknowledge the latent power of humility to destroy the one thing that seems unassailable, human pride, then we might come to a place of worship and awe, a place of understanding, not where all our questions are answered to our complete satisfaction, but where as Augustine puts it, “he might confer on us what our hearts desire.” 

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Desire, Satisfaction, and the Supreme Good, Reflections on City of God, pt. 6

“All those schools must be ranked below those philosophers who have found man’s true Good not in the enjoyment of the body or the mind, but in the enjoyment of God. This is not like the mind’s enjoyment of the body, or of itself; nor is it like of friend by friend; it is like the eye’s enjoyment of light–or rather that is the closet analogy…Therefore Plato has no hesitation in asserting that to be a philosopher is to love God, whose nature is immaterial…To be sure, it does not automatically follow that a man is happy, just because he enjoys what he has set his heart on; many are miserable because they are in love with things that should not be loved, and they become even more miserable when they enjoy them. But it remains true that no one is happy without the enjoyment of what he loves. Even those who set their heart on the wrong things do not suppose their happiness to consist in the loving, but in the enjoyment. If anyone then enjoys what he loves, and loves the true Supreme Good, only the most miserable would deny his happiness. Now this Sovereign Good, according to Plato, is God. And that is why he will have it that the true philosopher is the lover of God, since the aim of philosophy is happiness, and he who has set his heart on God will be happy in the enjoyment of him.” City of God Book VIII.10

Here Augustine grapples with one of the central questions: what is the supreme good, the Summum Bonum? That is to ask, what is supremely worthy of pursuit? Or to put it another way, what is the aim of life? When the weeds are cleared, what is left? When the dross is burned away, what remains?

As important as that question is, behind that question is another more fundamental question, namely, what are human beings. In this passage, Augustine is arguing that human beings are primarily creatures of desire, driven by enjoyment and pleasure, and that therefore happiness (and by extension the supreme good) comes from enjoying what is loved. That may seem simple enough, but for some, it may seem strange to see Augustine affirming these things in his discussion of the supreme good because he has something of a not entirely undeserved reputation when it comes to things like sex. But as much as the problem may lie with Augustine’s own sexual baggage, a lot of the problem lies with our culture’s tendency to hear words like pleasure, desire, and enjoyment in purely sexual ways.

Which actually speaks to one of his central points in this passage–not all desire is good or beneficial or rightly orientated, not all love leads to happiness. Moreover, perhaps we hear these words in a sexualized way because our sexual desires are disordered. But that seems impossible to many because of the tendency to think of desire and the indulgence of that desire in a purely circular and simplistic way with no thought of what desire itself tells us about the nature of the world and what our desires might be aiming us toward. Even it the thought of disordered desire may not occur to us, it is something to grapple with, especially if  Augustine is right that “many are miserable because they are in love with things that should not be loved, and they become even more miserable when they enjoy them.”

While the thought may be simple–that human beings are creatures of desire made to enjoy that which is desired–the application is enormously complex. There are so many things to desire and so many ways that desire can become disordered. This is not to mention where the lines between true enjoyment and overindulgence are. It is hard to argue that we are creatures of desire, creatures of appetite. Love, passion, romance, labors of love are the bright face of desire while greed, gluttony, overindulgence, addiction are its dark twin. When we think of our gut level orientation to the world it’s hard to argue that so much of day to day life is grappling with desire. The push and pull of the everyday is often found in the counterbalance of seeking to satisfy certain desires, while simultaneously suppressing others. But that angst is precisely why the question of the supreme good is so important. If we are creatures of desire, then we must at least attempt to figure out what it is that it is best to desire. Or to put it another way, what is the thing that when it is desired and then enjoyed is most satisfying? For Augustine that is God. As he puts it in Confessions,”God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.”

Even if you answer the question differently than Augustine, it is worth asking why and pondering what it might mean, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, that there seem to be desires that nothing in this world fully satisfy.

 

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What have your gods required of you? Reflections on City of God, Pt. 5

Up to this point in City of God, Augustine has been showing the impotence of the Roman gods in the affairs of this world. They do not offer the protection or benefits claimed for them, and their sheer number indicates that whatever power they might have is limited to inconsequential spheres of influence that in the end have no benefit. In Book VI he turns to the question of eternal life, asking if these gods have anything to offer their worshippers on the other side of death. His answer, of course, is no, but along the way he interacts with Varro, author of Divine Antiquities, a book now lost to history which offered detailed descriptions of Roman religion.

Varro’s book sounds fascinating, like a encyclopedia of the sociology of religion of the day. And as Augustine describes it, Varro’s book is long (which is saying something considering what a brick City of God is). Within the book, Varro distinguishes between mythical, physical, and civil theology, respectively, the gods of the theater, the gods of the philosophers, and the gods of the state. One reason for these distinctions is that Varro wants to distance himself from the gods of the theatre, what he calls the mythic gods, and wants to uphold the gods of the state, what he calls the civil gods. Both Varro and Augustine find the theater disgraceful and its presentation of the gods unseemly. But Augustine finds Varro’s distinction between the mythic and the civil gods to be meaningless because the horrors and savagery depicted in plays is the same type of savagery enacted in the temple of the gods. Fascinatingly, Augustine quotes Seneca on this point, who says of Roman worship, “One man cuts off his male organs, another gashes his arms. If this is the way they earn the favor of the gods, what happens when they fear their anger?”

One of Seneca’s implied points, and certainly one of Augustine’s explicit points, is that the worship required by a given god tells you a lot about the character of that god, which then begs the deeper question, are gods who require such things worthy of worship? Augustine’s overall point in this book is that people should not contort themselves and pour themselves out for gods who have nothing to offer in this life or in the next. For Augustine, the gods of the Roman pantheon are the epitome of gods who are unworthy of worship because they cannot save in this life or the next.

Another important point from this section is that worship is always demanding because by definition you are offering yourself to another, and to truly offer yourself is never easy. But to pour yourself out to things, ideas, ambitions that in the end deplete and bleed you and offer nothing in return is a tragedy. That is not overstating it, because from a Christian point of view misdirected worship, the pouring out of the self for those things that act like gods but are not gods, is the deepest human tragedy. It is the tragedy of idolatry. Or as David Foster Wallace so beautifully and strikingly puts it,

“Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.” David Foster Wallace, This is Water

What have your gods required of you? This is a great question for any season, but especially for Lent, when we offer before the Lord our deepest motivations and desires, asking him to cleanse and forgive us.

 

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Fate vs. Providence, Reflections on City of God, Part 4

In Book IV of City of God, Augustine argues that Rome’s greatness is not due to the pantheon of gods they worshipped. At the beginning of Book V Augustine turns to fate, destiny, and astrology to show that Rome’s greatness was not written in the stars either. As you can imagine such discussions lead very quickly into the deep waters of free will and God’s foreknowledge.

As others have noted, City of God 5.9 is worth reading and rereading, but I want to discuss a different aspect of this section of the book, namely the difference between a pagan notion of fate or destiny and a Christian notion of providence. This distinction, it seems to me, lies at the very heart of Augustine’s own thinking, and at the heart of how Christians perceive reality and the vicissitudes of history. Fate and destiny are faceless, and they are nameless too, to the extent that there is no one to thank for blessing and no one to rail against for cursing. To be sure, as Augustine discusses at length, Rome deified their conception of Felicity and Fortune in order to put a face to the nameless force, but for Augustine that is exactly the problem. In naming these goddesses, Fortune and Felicity, the Romans rightly intuit the need for a face on the other side of reality, but they don’t go far enough in identifying the one true God of history and the universe.

Providence, on the other hand, is the will of the benevolent God playing out in time and space. Providence, in its fullest sense accounts for both free will and foreknowledge, and places ultimate causes in the hands of the God of Christian revelation. There are two very practical things to note about a Christian view of providence. 1) Though the ultimate purpose of seemingly random events remains inscrutable, the character of the one governing them is not. The God of Christian revelation is loving, compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast mercy. For all his power and might, the face behind reality is ultimately kind. 2) There is no area of life or reality left merely to chance. Again, we might not understand events and our experiences fully, but the promise of Christian revelation is that the expanse of Providence spans from the movement of the celestial bodies to the intricacies of a bird’s wing. As Augustine puts it,

“Thus God is the supreme reality, with his Word and the Holy Spirit–three who are one. He is the God omnipotent, creator and maker of every soul and every body; participation in him brings happiness to all who are happy in truth and not in illusion; he has made man a rational animal, consisting of soul and body; and when man sins he does not let him go unpunished, nor does he abandon him without pity…From him derives every mode of every being, every species, every order, all measure, number, and weight. He is the source of all that exists in nature, whatever its kind, whatsoever its value, and of the seeds of forms, and forms of seeds, and the motions of seeds and forms. He has given to flesh its origin, beauty, health, fertility in propagation, the arrangement of the bodily organs, and the health that comes from their harmony. He has endowed even the soul or irrational creatures with memory, sense, and appetite, but above all this, he has given to the rational soul thought, intelligence, and will. He has not abandoned even the inner parts of the smallest and lowliest creature, or the bird’s death (to say nothing of the heavens and the earth, the angels and mankind)–he has not left them without a harmony of their constituent parts, a kind of peace. It is beyond anything incredible that he should have willed the kingdoms of mean, their dominations and their servitudes, to be outside the range of the laws of his providence.” City of God, V.11

As I read this beautiful passage, I imagine what Augustine would have made of quantum mechanics in this regard and the awe and worship he would have felt to know that providence extends to the infinitesimal just as much as to the infinite. And a passage like this reminds me at base what is so immensely practical and life giving about theology. Discussions of Providence, free will, and sovereignty can certainly be anything but life giving, but to affirm and believe in, and ultimately be comforted by God’s providential care of all things is to know freedom and peace and to be filled with worship and awe.

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Worship, Empire, and the Fickle Human Heart, Reflections on City of God

“But the worshippers and lovers of those gods, whom they delighted to imitate in their criminal wickedness, are unconcerned about the utter corruption of their country. ‘So long as it lasts,’ they say, ‘so long as it enjoys material prosperity, and the glory of victorious war, or, better, the security of peace, why should we worry? What concerns us is that we should get richer all the time, to have enough for extravagant spending every day, enough to keep our inferiors in their place…Anyone who disapproves of this kind of happiness should rank as a public enemy: anyone who attempts to change it or get rid of it should be hustled out of hearing by the freedom-loving majority: he should be kicked out, and removed from the land of the living. We should reckon the true gods to be those who see that the people get this happiness and then preserve it for them.” City of God, Book II, Chapter 20

In this passage, as a master of rhetoric, Augustine uses hyperbole to great effect. By adopting the voice of a typical Roman citizen, he skewers both the Roman deities and those who worship them. He also tellingly reveals one dark aspect of imperialism–the calloused disdain of the privileged for those beneath them. More broadly, here and throughout Book II, Augustine is examining the ways in which false worship distorts the worshipper. In Augustine’s logic worshippers become corrupt because the gods they worship are corrupt. Worship is formative and shapes the worshipper into the image of the thing worshipped.

As this passage shows, for Augustine what was ultimately disordered about Roman worship was that it was a means to an end. In other words, the worship was false not just because the gods themselves were false, but more importantly because the worship was offered as a way to secure some other thing, such as wealth, happiness, security, prosperity. The last line sums up this theology: “We should reckon the true gods to be those who see that the people get this happiness and then preserve it for them.” In other words, we will offer worship only to the extent that it benefits us. It is interesting on this count to see the ways in which Roman gods are in one sense simply personified versions of the thing desired–a god of war or reason, a goddess of love or wisdom. It is also interesting to note how many of the Greek and Roman myths narrate gods acting on their behalf to secure some thing desired.

This passage also reminds me of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, a book where the gods of the old world, the gods of mythology, roam the American landscape mostly as grifters and vagrants because they are no longer worshipped and are only vaguely remembered. They have been replaced by new gods, like television, media, celebrity, technology. And one of Gaiman’s points in writing, besides providing a vastly entertaining story and interesting world, is to show in which human worship is doled out in order to receive benefits. Old gods are traded for new gods when their are new benefits to be had.

Even if you aren’t religious in any way, I think it is instructive to take Augustine’s words and Gaiman’s story and think of how mercenary and fickle the human heart really is. Our affection is so fleeting. Our devotion so often given for selfish reasons. Why is that? Why do we have such a hard time remaining steadfast? It is also instructive to consider the inscrutable God of providence and Lord of history that Augustine commends and to wonder how it would shape and form us to worship Him.

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How do we suffer well? Reflections on City of God

“When the good and the wicked suffer alike, the identity of their sufferings does not mean that there is no difference between them. Though the sufferings are the same, the sufferers remain different. Virtue and vice are not the same, even they undergo the same torment. The fire which makes gold shine makes chaff smoke; the same flail breaks up the straw, and clears the grain; and oil is not mistaken for lees because both are forced out of the same press. In the same way, the violence which assails good men to test them, to cleanse and purify them, effects in the wicked their condemnation, ruin, and annihilation. Thus the wicked, under pressure of affliction, execrate God and blaspheme; the good, in the same affliction, offer up prayers and praises. This shows that what matters is the nature of the sufferer, not the nature of the sufferings. Stir a cesspit, and a foul stench arises; stir perfume, and a delightful fragrance ascends. But the movement is identical.” City of God, I.8

Throughout City of God Augustine describes the providential ways of God as inscrutable. For him, God certainly acts in and through history, but his exact motivations and purposes are unknown. To be sure, Augustine, as a Christian, has a sense of the overall trajectory of history (everything is moving towards the City of God) but the particulars of history and vicissitudes of the everyday often remain mysterious. This is another way of saying that Augustine doesn’t have a complete answer to the question of why do we suffer, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have anything to say about suffering itself.

Again this is where Augustine becomes relevant for us. Though we are not living through the particular circumstances of the fall of Rome, we are none the less caught in the messiness of history, trying to make sense not only of our own lives but also of the circumstances all around us. Augustine’s reminder that the same experience of suffering produces different results can help us in the midst of our lives because it reminds us that we don’t have to spend all our time thinking about the spinning wheel of history, but instead can concentrate on the quality of our own character rooted by faith in the one who moves the wheel of history. While concentrating on suffering in general helps us cultivate a theology of suffering, concentrating on the particular of our suffering and how we respond to it helps us cultivate character.

This point has been driven home to me lately, as I have witnessed in the last few weeks different people suffering in similar ways (grappling with cancer), and yet their responses have been profoundly different. For me Augustine’s contrast of the stinking cesspit versus the pleasant perfume draws the contrast between what I have seen both vividly and accurately, and has driven home a simple point, but a point philosophically minded people like me need reminding of–witnessing particular suffering is so different from thinking about suffering in the abstract. I so often think about the problem of suffering from a detached, rarified viewpoint and only ask the question why. Why would God let these things happen? But if I only ask that question, I fail to confront the particularity of suffering in individuals, to meet them and empathize with them in the midst of their suffering, and in so doing ask a total different question–how is it that two people can suffer in extremely similar ways and yet react in such opposite ways? Why is it that suffering produces such different results?

Don’t get me wrong. Both the general and particular viewpoints on suffering are necessary. The question of suffering in the abstract helps us grapple with the nature of God, humanity, and the world, and Augustine himself is an able guide through these issues, showing us ways to think deeply about the nature of suffering in general. But the question of suffering in the particular helps us grapple with the quality of life and character, and helps us confront what can sometimes be a terrifying question–what kind of people are we becoming–a question that is often only answerable in the crucible of suffering.

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Would Augustine have kept a blog? Reflections on City of God, Part 1

On the First Things blog, Collin Garbarino suggested people join him in reading Saint Augustine’s City of God over the course of 2014. I decided to do just that because I’ve wanted to read it for a while now, but tackling it seemed so daunting. But his suggested pace of three pages a day or so seemed more than manageable, and the slower pace has its charms. For one, I am able to linger over the details a bit more, and for another, I am able to think about how the whole thing fits together. At this point, I’ve been able to keep up, so I’m about 125 pages in, and I thought blogging some reflections on my reading would help me process this mammoth book and keep me on my reading track. These reflections will not be systematic in any way and won’t serve anyone as a reading guide, but I do hope they might help me and maybe others process how vital Augustine’s thinking is even now and maybe even especially now.

In this first post, I simply want to reflect on how vital and relevant the book seems. It’s striking that even among a slew of historical details and all the particulars of Roman history that the underlying themes resonate so strongly. His reflections on the nature of empire, on suffering, on the nature of history itself have much to say to us now. Which I suppose is another way of saying the book is a classic for a reason. Even with its particularity it speaks almost universally. Take this statement, for example, where Augustine reflects on the desire of empires to insatiably expand:

“Why must an empire be deprived of peace, in order that it may be great? In regard to men’s bodies it is surely better to be of moderate size, and to be healthy, than to reach the immense stature of giant at the cost of unending disorders–not to rest when that stature is reached, but to be troubled with greater disorders with the increasing size of the limbs” (III.10).

One thinks here not only of empires that have expanded only to find themselves decaying from the inside, but in our own time, one thinks of corporations and financial institutions who are massive and lumbering and who may unknowingly carry cancer in their limbs as a result of their ever expanding size. I can’t but think when I read these lines that the flailing arms of an ailing giant can do great damage.

On another note, it’s interesting to reflect on how Augustine would have published his thoughts in our time. Certainly the thousand page brick sitting on my desk right now would have had a hard time getting published, even though the sprawling and discursive nature of the book is part of its charm. Because of its myriad interests and expansive scope, I wonder if he would have used a forum like this one to collect his thoughts. I know its anachronistic, and maybe even offensive to some, to think of City of God like a series of blog posts, but the book and chapter structure lends itself to small blog post like chunks. Of course, I could just be thinking this because I’m reading it in a blog-like way, three pages at a time.

Even so, there is something very un-blog like about the book because his project is to integrate the particulars into a coherent whole like a unified field theory of history and theology. It is hard to imagine any project in our time having such ambition, and if it did we would probably say it was doomed to failure from the outset. Which is one of the charms of reading old books–they don’t have to conform to our notions of what is possible and achievable.

I’m only a month into this, and it would be too hard to catch up, so if you read this, I would encourage to dive into *City of God* with me.

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Storytelling as Raising the Dead

In this fascinating clip, filmmaker Ken Burns discusses the nature of story and his attraction to historical subjects. For him, good stories are more than they seem on the surface because “the genuine stories are about one and one equaling three.” Such stories dig at the deeper things in reality because “the things that matter most to us-some people call it love, some people call it God, some people call it reason-is that other thing where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that’s the three.” And it is this greater something we are all looking for in stories, so much so that we tend to “coalesce around stories that seem transcendent.”

What I found most interesting in Burns account was his self-understanding of why he tells stories in general, and historical stories in particular. For him telling historical stories is a kind of “waking of the dead.” So in seeking the very transcendence he describes, Burns points to a kind of resurrective power in stories, particularly in stories about history. His fascination with such stories stems from losing his mother to cancer at a young age: “It may be obvious and close to home whom I’m actually trying to wake up.”

Beyond the haunting and beautiful resurrection imagery inherent in this statement, Burns, by identifying this kernel in his own experience, describes what Stanley Hauerwas calls an “intuition of meaning.” In his memoir *Hannah’s Child,* Hauerwas reflects on the impulse to tell his own story, and for him, memoir comes not from recounting events for the sake of recounting events. Rather memoir comes from events coalescing around a central intuition, an insight into how these events might be thematically related. Quoting Sven Birkerts, Hauerwas says these intuitions result from “the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of contingency and become story.” So for Burns, his mother’s early death provides an intuition of meaning, a place to begin his own story. While for Hauerwas, his mother’s Hannah-like prayer of dedication to the Lord provides his intuition of meaning.

So I’m wondering, as I think about my own future, and even as I attempt to write in a more personal vein, what is my intuition of meaning?

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Once Upon a Time vs. In the Beginning

Once upon a time…

A recent article by Maria Konnikoiva examines the enduring power of these four little words. As she notes, some variation of the phrase appears in most languages, pointing to its near universal use and appeal. But why is the phrase so powerful? What makes stories, especially fairy tales, so affective? Konnikova argues that the phrase offers us both distance and vagueness by placing us in another time in an upspecified place. Such psychological distance allows us “the possibility of comprehending far more about reality than can come from reality itself.” And such vagueness allows us to insert ourselves into the story, to try out different lives and scenarios. Such stories, then, offer a kind of virtual reality in which we can process our own stories. As Konnikovia says,

“The world of once upon a time is not reality. It is a creation of make-believe. It is an invitation for fantasy and imagination to take the stuff of real life and do with it what they will—and perhaps, to translate the newfound truths back from story to actuality. In the realm of the imaginary, anxiety doesn’t become less anxious, nor tragedy less tragic. But in that world, you can make sense of it all from a distance. It can’t touch you in quite the same way—and yet it can lead you to a much deeper understanding and feeling of realities that would be too impenetrable without those four magic words at the fore.”

Konnikovia argues that stories, especially fairy tales, have psychological value because they give us a place to ennact pieces of our own lives and a means to process our own anxities. And while I don’t want to deny this pscyhological function of stories, because I have experienced it myself, I do want to contrast it with what I take to be a Christian understanding of story.

Take the way the Bible begins. “In the beginning…” pulls us into the narrative in similar way to “Once upon a time.” But while “In the beginning” gives us a sense of distance, it is only a chronological distance, more akin to “Once upon our time.” No matter how far back those words stretch, we are placed firmly within our own time and space. Whatever one thinks about the historiticity of Genesis in general or of chapters 1-3 in particular, the Bible wants us to know that this is our story and this is where we came from.  

As another example of Biblical storytelling, consider the opening of Samuel. It begins, “There was a certain man…” Such a phrase offers us neither distance nor vagueness.  Here we have a specific man in a specific time with specific wives and and specific problems. We are not distanced from this man, Elkanah. Rather we are thrown into the middle of his family sorrow–his beloved wife Hannah is barren. Yet in the midst of all the specificity, fairy tale like things happen. Against every odd, Hannah conceives a child. Even in our age of fertility doctors and artificial insemmination, the reversal of barreness is a kind of miracle. And the song Hannah sings in exulatation to the Lord has all the sweep and force of epic poetry, cataloging a host of reversals: the rich become poor, and the poor become rich, the proud are cast down and the humble are exalted, the fertile become barren and the barren become fertile. Indeed, one of the great tropes of stories is reversal–the unexpected the rise of the unlikely figure, and it is one of God’s favorite tropes. We need only look to the incarnation and crucifixion to see that God loves reversal and that he knows how to tell a story.  

To put the contrast another way, while Konnikovia’s approach rightly affirms the benefit stories have for our understanding of reality, the Scriptures point to something even bigger–the narrative shape of reality. It is one thing for us to examine our lives by means of other stories. It is quite another to affirm that reality itself is a kind of story and to thereby conclude, whether consciously or not, that there is a storyteller. From my bias, one reason fairy tales are powerful is that for all their fancy, for all their distance and vagueness, they point to the narrative shape of reality. Indeed, even when stories aren’t “true” they inevitably speak to the narrative shape of our lives by pointing to true things. This is because we live in the world of “in the beginning” where God spoke or “narrated” everything into existence.  In the God narrated world, we cannot help but place ourselves in stories because we cannot help but see our lives as part of his story. 

I suppose a merely psychological understanding of narrative would say that natural selection is telling the story. If so, then one reason I believe in God is for completely aesthetic reasons–I think a creator God who narrates the world and who is bringing reality to its ultimate conclusion makes for a better story than Darwin and the Big Bang.