The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Carl R. Trueman

I grew up in 70's and 80's evangelicalism, with "Christian education" through my second year in College. But unlike many of my Christian friends, I wanted to understand my world in deeper terms than what I could get in Sunday school and Bible classes.  I was interested in philosophy, art, history and how it can relate to us.  I was drawn to the world of big ideas.  It was exciting to contemplate how ideas can shape us, and make us what we are.  I tried to go to the best writers in Christianity I could find.   As a lover of literature and philosophy I found the Christian imaginative intellectualism of C.S. Lewis enchanting, and I enjoyed his works immensely.   But it was Francis Schaeffer who really opened the world of ideas for me.   Through his writings, I was introduced to the ideas that moved Western history, philosophy, art, all curated through the lens of Schaeffer--and my Christian School teachers who carefully orchestrated how I should regard the likes of Freud, Nietzsche, Darwin etc.

Later in my late teens as my Christian faith waned and a skepticism grew, I left Schaeffer behind, and began to read Freud, Nietzsche etc. on my own.   As I got to know the writers I discovered how Schaeffer had been subtly unfair in the ways he had portrayed many of them.  Schaeffer's preuppositional-ism was a kind of self fulfilling prophecy, that didn't really describe what these writers were saying at all.  Furthermore the framing was such that a Christian School student could doubt what the writer was saying because the writer--lets say for instance Darwin, had the wrong World View.   Left to a Godless universe of chance--or so the student of Schaeffer would presuppose--Darwin could only arrive at a Godless view of nature full of chance--a question begging fallacy.   The actual reader of Darwin won't get this impression at all!  Darwin's universe is full of surprise, wonder, detail and evidence with stunning insight into how nature works--like natural selection which belie a universe of random chance.  

Schaeffer's portrayal of secular writers was constantly question begging the non-truth of other worldviews, while simultaneously question begging the truth of Christianity; pigeon-holing the non Christian writers into men of straw--non existent caricatures of the great writers who have contributed to modern society.  I had many Christian friends who would read Schaeffer.  But none of them had ever undertaken Nietzsche or Freud.   A few read snippets of Darwin.  It dawned on me that Schaeffer's writings--while vivid, often perceptive, and inventive--also had the effect of being a kind of intellectual gate keeper for the rest of the Evangelicals that would read him.   You don't need to read Darwin.  Schaeffer will read him for you, and here is what you should think about it, and this is why things are what they are!

Writers like Schaeffer could open the door for some students to venture further reading and education--and in his best moments he seems to encourage that--while dogmatic, insistent, and preachy in his worst moments. While for other students Schaeffer is a door closer--reading the work, curating it down to cliffnotes--or a two sentence synopsis of how the student should think about it, so he can close the book and rest knowing he plays for the correct team.   From what I witnessed, the intellectualism of writers like Schaeffer seemingly had the effect of encouraging un-intellectualism in the lay reader. Schaeffer's synthesis of "worldview," "presuppositionalism," "relativism" even his definitions of "darwinism" become definitive for a narrow reading that excludes possibility.  The result was nothing but an empty false dichotomy that doesn't really describe anything, but offers the Christian a pseudo language to contemplate, and comprehend an increasingly secular world without actually needing to engage it.  There were dozens of books I read which followed this pattern.  Challenge of Postmodernism: An Evangelical Engagement (David Dockery) Ancient Future Faith (Robert Weber) to name just a couple. 

This tradition of  Evangelical gatekeeping using secular terminology continues on to this day with Carl Trueman's The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.  Trueman is at pains not to follow the exacting preachy path of writers like Schaeffer or Weber, he avoids their terms and dogma and replaces it with  a new more nuanced terminology--that he will even veer from himself at times as "not quite right," or "overly general," but this reader can't help but think it's the same kind of bait and switch.  He is at pains to state that his book is "neither a lament nor a polemic."  But over and over and over he can't seem to help himself from coming across lamentful and polemical.   Even if Trueman is being honest here, this reader can't help but extrapolate lamentation and polemics from his argument.   The villains haven't changed from Schaeffer, it's still Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and Darwin; with some new ones like the Romantic poets and Rousseau who have wrought our "Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution."   The good guys are the Christians--Trueman's readers--the humble suffering anti-gays, and anti-transgenders who feel bowled over by the changes of widespread acceptance of LGBT, embattled by cake sellers, Gays getting married, and unisex bathrooms.

  This book is written for the self possessed Christian who is searching for language and historical context to deal with the terrifying (for them) prospect of LGBT acceptance--but what Trueman polemically calls "LGBT dominance in our society."  The "Cultural pathology" he insists of our current tolerances are the result of a "plastic people" bogged down in a "social imaginary;" a borrowed formulation Trueman describes as an act of self actualization of identity, subject to the unconscious intellectual forces of "poiesis" the  process where an individual creates meaning of self out of raw material.  These are useful words and they may even describe authentic cultural forces to a certain extent, and Trueman outlines them well through the help of a few modern observers (Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, Alasidir MacIntyre).   The upshot of these concepts is--via Trueman--the rise of individualism and the so called 'sexual revolution.'  But the danger is that this terminology can easily become polemical, especially when tied to LGBT issues.   Where earlier Evangelicals had used words like "relativist" and "post-modern" to rhetorically beat their secular opponents, Trueman offers the Christian gatekeepers a new sexualized vocabulary, that is vaguely Freudian.  "Social Imaginary" for instance is a concept easily reversed on Christians, as Freud had used "illusion" as a kind of useful fiction for religion.  One could just as easily ignore the rhetorical finger Trueman is pointing at secular society, and take note of the 3 fingers pointing back at him and his readers.  Aren't Christians too now subject to the same forces of individualism, the Poiesis, and social imaginary, and "cultural pathology"  Trueman is lamenting?  He doesn't have much to say about that.  Who's to say that the cultural forces of Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, and the Romantic poets haven't also created the prerequisites for Evangelicalism as we now see it in it's nearly universal acceptance of Trump, non vaccines, and false claims of election fraud.  As I write, a year ago a crowd of mostly Christians invaded our capital.  January 6th 2022.  Trueman is silent on such things.

Trueman's premise is partly based upon the false idea that LGBT is a homogenized group.  It simply isn't.  To his credit he acknowledges showing how the T differs from the G in significant ways.  But where he is nuanced he still wanders into dogma far too often.  He offers no concept of transgender experience, Which he likes to refer to as "self determined."   It's not.   His premise is that the sentence "I'm a man trapped in a woman's body" has wide acceptance, and the book is an attempt to explain why.  But it's false because it's far from a universal phrase among trans.  In fact it's fallen into disrepute among some of them, and it's a false qualifier, imperfect to describe the experience of gender dysphoria (more on that in a minute):  https://mermaidsuk.org.uk/news/do-you-still-use-the-phrase-born-in-the-wrong-body/

 Trueman begins the book discussing how his grandfather who died in 1994 had he heard the phrase would have "burst out laughing and think of it as incoherent gibberish."  One wonders would his grandfather have been cognizant of his laughter's affect on the countless trans people in 94 undergoing gender dysphoria,  struggling to be understood, with suicidal thoughts, wanting acceptance but not knowing how to communicate it?  Trueman is barely sensitive to their plea, but like his grandfather,  Trueman isn't interested in LGBT experience, only the ideology that could lead to it's acceptance and application.  But that's missing the point. LGBT aren't LGBT because of some linguistic fusion of Freud and Marx and and the rest of cultural ideology Trueman asserts.  Gender as a concept is a human created notion, but from time to time animals display homosexual behavior, and even take on the characteristics of the other sex.   It's as ridiculous as arguing that the cultural fusion of Marx and Freud allows some Marsh Harrier (A bird)  males to tolerate their birdlike cohorts to take on female characteristics as they often do.  https://daily.jstor.org/transgender-proclivities-in-animals/.   Witnessing the natural processes of humans and animals are what convinced many of us toward LGBT acceptance, not some unconscious philosophical conditioning of leftward writers shaping narrow ideology of an individual self!  https://www.vice.com/en/article/8x8bez/yes-there-are-trans-animals

But Trueman's focus on Marx and Freud is interesting.   Trueman follows Wilhelm Reich in showing how if Freud's point is "sex is showing who we are" (A dubious notion that Trueman polemically asserts all his opponents assert!)  and Marx's construction of economic and social reality are fused, you get political freedom associated with sexual freedom.   Trueman may not be wrong about this.  But why just Marx?   It could also just as easily be Adam Smith?  Or both?   Capitalistic and Democratic elements also contribute to our notions of sexual equality.   Trueman's focus is on the noisy Marxist activists of the 70's but he is missing many smart cultural critics who noticed that critical theory didn't have much to do with gay acceptance.  https://www.cato.org/commentary/capitalism-not-socialism-led-gay-rights.  It's not just Herbert Marcus.  It's Ayn Rand too!   The majority of gays I know are libertarian!  Trueman may or may not quibble with this (I don't know) but by focusing on the typical boogie men of the Right, he again comes across polemical.  

It would be hard to argue with Trueman that  LGBT tolerance is mostly a western phenomenon.  But there are exceptions, Taiwan for instance and South Korea.  Furthermore, there is no way to discount the effect of eastern writers on the west in the past 100 years, nor the effect of women.   Trueman--like Schaeffer and the other Christian gatekeepers hands our society woes to a few influential white men, and leaves out the rest.  

  The so called 'sexual revolution' Trueman views as our society's obsession isn't exactly right either.  He is over-stating it.  Has he checked the numbers lately?  Sex is down!  People are having less of it.   https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-have-been-having-less-sex-whether-theyre-teenagers-or-40-somethings/.   Trueman writes as if LGBT activism is seeking to invade Christian convictions, but in general it's not.  Much of LGBT that I'm aware of feel as if they have won the battle they wanted to win, they have a general acceptance of society and it's time to move on.  https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/battle-gay-rights-over/592645/. 

It's Right leaning Christians who are still embattled, seeking to reverse progress for LGBT rights, which of course feeds LGBT activism and the vicious circle goes on and on.

  While I enjoyed reading and disagreeing (I blinked in nearly every page) with Trueman I certainly admire his scholarship and applaud what he is attempting.  The last chapter of the book is conciliatory, and there may well be another volume he will write which may better flesh out his point.  He may be right generally (but not specifically) on how we got to where we are, but he leaves out far too much of the story, and his language incites quick judgements.  There is much more to Marx and Freud--and the rest than the argument he is making.  My hope would be that the Christians who read Trueman will follow the kind of path I did, with Schaeffer, and not stop reading.  

 

 

 I found this account after years of neglect!   I'll be writing more soon!

Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person who Ever Lived

Reading Evangelical literature is rarely stimulating for me, however I was recently loaned this book by a friend of mine.   I decided to review it on this blog.  I haven't been diving into philosophy and literature as much lately, and perhaps it is time to get back.

I've grown up around Evangelicals, and I always asked hard questions and I was generally ignored (Not by all of them).    To this day, the majority of Evangelicals I've known rarely ask hard questions.   A question's value to them--from what I can gather seems to matter only upon who is asking?   In this case it is Rob Bell who is asking hard questions, and since he is a pastor of a pretty big church (or he was) he has seemingly caused quite a stir.    He writes:

If there are only a select few who go to heaven, which is more terrifying to fathom:  the billions who burn forever or the few who escape this fate?   How does a person end up being one of the few?  Chance?  Luck?  Random Selection?.....  Having a youth pastor who "relates better to the kids?........What kind of faith is that... What kind of God is that?....  

He asks "What if the missionary {Who we need to give us the message of Jesus' redemptive truth} gets a flat tire?"

 Bell answers these  questions through poignant story telling, a generous theology, and a highly selective reading of the Bible to arrive at a Human being and a God who are constantly in a process together, striving toward a redemptive victory for God's all inclusive love.   

Bell is maybe the latest in a long line of Christian thinkers who are quite comfortable in uncertainty and ambiguity in their faith.   Like the great liberal Southern Baptist E.Y. Mullins, The poet John Milton, Henry Beecher who wrote "Charity before Clarity", C.S. Lewis's Great Divorce and even the great American religious critic and skeptic William James, along with modern day "Emergents" like Brian McLaren, Bell finds a place in the universe for everybody.   

  It would be a mistake to call Bell a true universalist since he clearly believes in Hell.    He writes of Hell:

...When we read "eternal punishment," it's important that we don't read categories and concepts into a phrase that aren't there.   Jesus isn't talking about forever as we think of forever, Jesus may be talking about something else...we need a loaded, volatile, adequately violent, dramatic, serious word to describe the real consequences we experience when we reject the good and true and beautiful life that God has for us.    We need a big, wide terrible evil that comes from the secrets hidden deep within our hearts all the way to the massive, society-wide collapse and chaos that comes when we fail to live in God's world God's way.  And for that, the word "hell" works quite well.   Let's keep it."

Though I find this extremely moving, I am in awe of Bell's audacity as he finds a way to be a modern palatable Christian without being a traditional Christian through a sincere, but clumsy re-interpretation of the Bible.   There is an odd exegetical gymnastic at play here between the greek word "Aion" which in Greek can be read as ever-lasting but also can mean a period of time, and Matthew 25--which is completely re-interpreted by Bell.   After blinking at Bell's mis-reading I got to thinking.   One could gently comment that if hell isn't forever, then why should Heaven be?   If we are to trust Bell's translation, lets apply it to John 3:16

For God so loved the world,  that he gave his only son,  So that who-so-ever believes in him shall not perish but have life for a period of time.    (John 3:16 uses the same word "aionos")

Still, Bell does find plenty of Universal passages and stories in the Bible.   The skeptic is free to observe that both views are very present in the Bible and it is a matter of emphasis.   I applaud Bell for his generosity.    As I read him, Bell leaves the door open for both Heaven and Hell to be as much about what humans do to each other, as what God does to us.   Bell affirms hell only after he has re-defined it, and in so doing has set off a fire-storm with his Evangelical and Reformed kinsmen.  

Bell is not exactly a mystic, but he he drapes the Cross, Jesus' death and life, and his dying to live, in a modern, poetic kind of mystical imagery.    

There is an energy in the world, a spark, an electricity that everything is plugged into.   The Greeks called it zoe, the mystics call it "spirit," and Obi-Wan called it "the force."

This is funny, but it's also quite serious.   Bell has Americanized the early Christian experience:

They believed that at a specific moment in the history of the world, that life-giving "word of God" took on flesh and blood.  In Jesus, they affirmed, was that word, that divine life giving energy that brought the universe into existence....  Are we the ultimate orbiter of what can, and cannot, exist?   Or is the universe more open, wondrous, unexpected, and far beyond anything we can comprehend?   Are you open or closed?  

Presumably, Evangelical traditionalists and reformers who believe in Hell would be closed here.  I am reminded of the great religious critic William James in his monumental book Varieties of Religious Experience (A good role-model for me) wrote:

In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness.  This is the ever-lasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed.   In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which should make the critic stop and think.... Perpetually telling of the unity of man with God, their speech antedates languages, and they do not grow old.

Bell has no clime or creed, he is tolerant of mystics but he is too American and "real" to embrace anything but a sublime mysticism of salvation, that looks to me like every other Evangelical view except that in the end it happens to be more theologically generous and thoughtful of others.  A Universalism that is shrouded in American Christian Imagery may never grow old.    Bell's mystical power is in the Bible he interprets and re-interprets at will to find a Jesus and God who is everything, and all that matters to us in every conceivable and non-conceivable way.   He finds the Jesus he is looking for.     I recommend this book to anyone looking for a softened yet highly charged Christian Protestantism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essay Self Reliance and American Triumphalism

All of American idealism is related on some level to the essay Self Reliance.   And I'd like to discuss some of it here.

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

It is a fundamental American ideal to believe in the inward self, and much of our language concerning the self comes to us through Emerson.   To be sure he did not invent the American conception of the self, but he is our most vital prophet, and the prime influence upon American Poetry and Literature.   For example, Walt Whitman was "simmering, simmering simmering,"and then read "Emerson and was consumed."   Robert Frost is certainly the greatest disciple of Emerson, while Emily Dickenson almost certainly sought to evade Emerson where-ever possible.  Allen Tate called Emerson "the devil."  T.S. Elliott sought to erase Emersonian self Idolatry.  Every American poet or mystic goes back to Emerson in some way even if they have never read him.   Surely every American of every intellectual stripe can find resonance here:

A man should learn to detect and watch the gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of firmament of bards and sages.  Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.   In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts:  they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty...I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.   I would write on the lintels of the door-post, WHIM.  

The lustres we behold in literature, art and philosophy are our own, though we have alienated them from ourselves.   This gives us the freedom to appropriate that which we love and did not ourselves create.    All American artforms from Poetry to Jazz are built upon this principle of the inward self and it's angst free ability to appropriate.   For example:   Charlie Parker's appropriation of Gershwin's "I've Got Rhythm" with his marvelous re-write "Anthropology" is a prime example.  With-in Gershwin is Parker's own rejected thought re-worked.    Emerson gives us the blueprint to owning intellectual property that is nor ours to possess.  But what limit is there in Emerson upon the human capacity for appropriation?  I have to confess I can find no limit whatsoever, and this is beautiful but should put us on moral guard.

Creeds are the disease of the intellect, our prayers the disease of the will.

This is a blueprint for the American Religion, which finds God with-in, and not anywhere else.   Emerson is more explicit in his "Divinity School Address."  (All of Emerson's Essays read to me like a Graduation ceremony address)

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets...the understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age.  "This was Jehovah come down out of heaven.  I will kill you, if you say he was a man."  The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes...Let me abmonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models.

This is misleadingly called Christianity by American churchgoers, ministers, and scholars who should probably know better.     Yet the corruption of Christianity here is so pervasively American that it can hardly be separated from continental "creedal" forms of Protestantism and Catholicism.   Creedless creeds that go inward to find truth make up the American Religion, and they form all of our mystical and liberal religious leanings.    

At the same time there is a great triumphalism in Emerson.   One must ask:  How can a large group of people know truth if it can only be inwardly understood?

To be great is to be misunderstood.

American's are closest to the truth when they are alone and lonely.   This is marvelous and  deadly!    Like John Milton, Emerson is a "sect of one."   And he preaches being a sect of one to the masses.    This shapes the American self like no other, since each of us believe ourselves to be correct and knowledgeable, and  our neighbors to be media induced automatons, unable to think for themselves.    Emerson speaks  both to anti-establishment hippies, and the establishment itself, since nearly every American establishment wants to think of itself as an outsider.   Emerson's essay's and particularly Self Reliance flatter us, and more importantly give us the traits upon which to flatter.  

The essence of Emerson's writing is power and the self's relation to it.   Nietzsche and Kierkegaard both wrote movingly of the emergence of the individual self, but it is Emerson who can express it in terms of American frontier-ism and our desire for space (Both inward and outward).    "Space" is the prime word for the American psyche, and as we have run out of it in our cities, there has been more of a turn inwardly for it, and Emerson speaks to us regardless of our religion and politics.

   

Genesis 6

And the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.  And it repented the LORD that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart.  And the LORD said: 'I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and creeping thing, and fowl of the air; for it repenteth Me that I have made them.  Jewish Publication Society Genesis 5-7

What is the character of God?    Surely Platonic theology must always seek to downplay the plain display here of Yahweh's character that seems at odds with itself.     To get a handle on the potency of this passage it is good to read some Christian and Jewish commentary of it.  Here is the Geneva Study Bible's commentary on verse 6.

"God never repents, but he speaks in human terms, because he destroyed him, and in a way that denied him as a creature."

If you are a Calvinist (Plato influenced) Christian, the writer of Genesis must have slipped into a "human" mode of explanation since God's thoughts cannot be understood and later Scripture and theology flatly denies that God is capable of repenting his own actions.  

Wesley is just as uncomfortable with Genesis 6:6.   Here is his commentary.

"And it repented the Lord that he had made man upon the earth" — That he had made a creature of such noble powers, and had put him on this earth, which he built and furnished on purpose to be a comfortable habitation for him; and it grieved him at his heart - These are expressions after the manner of men, and must be understood so as not to reflect upon God's immutability or felicity. It doth not speak any passion or uneasiness in God, nothing can create disturbance to the eternal mind; but it speaks his just and holy displeasure against sin and sinners: neither doth it speak any change of God's mind; for with him there is no variableness; but it speaks a change of his way. When God had made man upright, he rested and was refreshed, Exodus 31:17. and his way towards him was such as shewed him well pleased with the work of his own hands; but now man was apostatized, he could not do otherwise, but shew himself displeased; so that the change was in man, not in God.

I must hasten to point out that both commentaries  are uneasy with Yahweh's unease.   "It doth not speak any passion or uneasiness in God, nothing can create disturbance to the eternal mind."   Both Wesley and the Geneva Bible manage to miss the point.   Yahweh's passion cannot be denied as he repents of his own act of creation, and his subsequent, perhaps even hasty decision to blot out man from the earth in an unparalleled act of human genocide.   Any sense of God's Immutability (A Platonic ideal) is deeply called into question by this passage, and I would submit that all of us, of every theological and secular stripe are left disturbed here.  

Historically Genesis 6 was probably written by the writer scholars call "J."   The early Old Testament was more than likely a combination of complex, subtle and not so subtle edits of various writers designated as J, E, P, and D.  J, the Yahwist, because his writings all contain Yahweh or "The Lord" may have been the earliest writer in the Bible.   This explains the cognitive dissonance evoked by certain verses, and also why some of Genesis makes more sense when the J passages are separated from the rest.   

I was fifteen when I first read Genesis 6, and nothing brought into question the theology of my Christian upbringing more than my own contemplation of Yahweh's character, particularly as it is presented here.  Nothing is more anti-theological than Yahweh who will be where he will be, and won't be where he won't (Exodus 3).   "Immutable" is a theological concept, and Yahweh does indeed seem to become immutable over time (E, P and D each present a more unchanging Yahweh with less character).   Yet even Christian theologians are disturbed by this passage.    The "J" verses are often quoted by "Open theists" as proof that God can change his mind, and that he in fact learns as he goes, giving us the choice.   God and Man Choose together.   This is close to a Jewish treatment of Genesis 6.   I recommend Arbraham Herschel's "God in Search of Man."  Most Jews by definition would be "open theists" except with-out Christ.    It's only the Platonic influenced parts of Judaism that are disrupted by this passage.  Kabbalah influenced commentaries seem to ignore it altogether, instead focusing on the numerology of the verses in a complex way.    It is easier to ignore Genesis 6 then to face it, particularly if you are theologically driven.    If you are a Christian and not an Open theist you may be disturbed by the ramifications of Yahweh's character displayed here.    One apologetics website fights Open Theism with this retort:

(Genesis 6:6).. is not a problem for Classical Christian Theism nor is it a proof text for Open Theism.  The verse simply tells us that the Lord was grieved and had sorrow in His heart for making man.  Why?  Because mankind had fallen into great sin and this grieved the Lord.  Does it mean that God didn't know that mankind would fall and become sinful?  Of course not.  Cannot God know that they would become sinners and also be grieved when it happens?  Of course.  Let me illustrate.

I have children.  I love them and provide for them.  But, they have grieved me in their various sins -- as any child will do to his parents.  I knew they would grieve me when they were born because I know they are sinners by nature.  This doesn't mean I was surprised and didn't know they would rebel when it happened.  Quite the contrary; knowing they would sin doesn't mean I won't be grieved when their rebellion and sin is finally manifested.

The open theist would have us believe that God was grieved because He was surprised or didn't know the depths of sin to which the world would fall.  But surely, even in Open Theism, God knew that people would sin.  So, this verse can't be claimed to demonstrate that God didn't know the future choices of people.

This is funny because it misses the point.   The apologetics writer here may know that his children are going to rebel against him.   But he doesn't decide to drown them out of his foreknowledge!   Yahweh is more shocked then we want to admit, and this may be disturbing to some, but I find it quite liberating.   "All too human" is a good description of Yahweh as he is presented in "J."    We can write whatever we want about Genesis 6, but we cannot change the wording of it.   All of our theological disruptions go back to it, and careful readers of the Bible can drown in it, without the ark of theology and later explanation.   

Blue Like Jazz: Donald Miller

As a Jazz Musician, I found it disappointing to find Miller's book had little or nothing to do with Jazz. I've read too much Christian literature lately, and Miller's book is another in a long line of tired attempts to modernize American Christianity beyond its "conservative traditional" mystique. I have commented elsewhere in this blog on Emergent Christianity, and how impressive it is that given its assumptions each of us could in fact become our own Church, with our own sense of Church authority, whatever that might mean for any particular individual, I'm not sure.

I have often observed that both Right and Left winged American Evangelical Christianity are children of Emerson with different emphasis. The choruses they sing are Walt Whitman's Song of Myself where "Jesus" is a metaphor of "myself." The preaching is Emerson's monumental Self Reliance: the principle essay that still moves American politics both Right and Left, despite the fact that fewer and fewer of us have read it.

Miller is just another in a long line of American self invented Christians. One must admire his poetry, and good humor and his writing style. He has his own "particularism" reminiscent of Anne Lamott, or even Victor Hugo, but with a Christian twist. Miller is thoughtful, modern, and "real." I mean "real" in the sense of how any self invented twenty or thirty something wants to think of themselves as "real" these days. Which probably means half-digested truths applied to a bumper sticker that seeks to be more profound than that. I suppose one could call it "post-modern" as numerous reviews I read of it did. But post-modern is a much brandied about term in Christian circles, and I seriously doubt any of them have ever read Lyotard.

What would Emerson have made of Miller and his fellow emergents? I think perhaps he would approve of the contradictions inherent in Miller's framework as much as he would like the over-all freedom of it. If Christianity is "blue like Jazz," than it also necessarily is as individual, personal, and free to be whatever it happens to be. "Everybody sings their song the way they feel it. Everybody lifts up their hands."

In the end its not a question of intellect but one's own personal experience. It is always about the self, yet Miller in Anne Lamott fashion, with good humor, dismisses his self's ability to make a clear judgement. Only an American Christian can be so self driven while insisting the self is no longer relevant. Miller writes "The most difficult lie I ever contended with is this: life is a story about me." Yet Walt Whitman has his revenge after-all as Miller's profound journey is in the nether regions of his self awareness. The problems of the world are not out there, but inside Miller himself "The needy thing in his chest." What can set it free other than a new self alignment? That in the end is his prescription and I can only shake my head in awe of the audacity of it all.

American Christians like Miller are selfish selves, who humble themselves, give of themselves to God, who also lives in them and contends with themselves. God gets all the glory but he lives with-in them. Does the self reap the glory in the end? I suspect that it does.

Miller recounts humorous experiences of Individuals undergoing a "God thing." Can they ever separate the self from the God? Such a question is necessarily alien to them, as the nuances of their language allow a strange "knowing" distinction. Such a knowing is the "spark" or the "gnostic" urge so celebrated by Walt Whitman and Emerson, which can also be found in Kabbalah.

The God with-in apprehends the God with-out, or so Emerson thought. I love the poetry, though I fear the social/political consequences are something else. The nuances of doctrine are no longer necessary in Miller, only the particulars of situation. One of my favorite Emerson quotes is: "Our prayers are the disease of the will, and our creeds the disease of the intellect." Would Miller go that far? I suspect he would. Only an Emersonian Christian could somehow appropriate at least the last half of this formulation, the way Miller does. My hat is off to him and his audacious quest. Is it freedom he gains? I often wonder, is it freedom for the self? Or from other selves? I suspect the later, despite emergent Christian protestations to the contrary.

This book will last a short period in American consciousness as the Christian Church undergoes another metamorphosis, with an increasing hunger for the "fresh" perspectives. The sentiments of Miller, which belong to Emerson and Walt Whitman are timeless and have so infected Leftward Evangelical Christianity that I can scarcely distinguish them.

The Quest of The Historical Jesus: Albert Schweitzer

I have been away from this blog for a while, due mostly to difficult life circumstances, but now I return to it. I have received some emails regarding previous posts; I try to respond as quickly as I can.

Of all the questers I've read, Schweitzer stands as the most poignant. This book in particular is probably essential reading for theologians, pastors, serious Christians, and skeptics. Since it was published in 1911, it has stood as a landmark book. In the study of Jesus, no scholar can completely ignore Schweitzer. He writes:

“The critical study of the life of Jesus has been for theology a school of honesty. The world had never seen before, and will never see again, a struggle for truth so full of pain and renunciation as that of which the lives of Jesus of the last hundred years contain the cryptic record…

Schweitzer begins his critique with an astounding survey of all of the German scholarship on Jesus, taking us through the Eschatology focus of Reimarus, the early rationalists, the fictitious lives, Paulus, Strauss, Bauer, Renan, and finally Wrede.

N.T. Wright, and other so-called “third questers” are often credited for comprehending Jesus in his Jewish context. Yet many of them owe their views to Schweitzer who was among the first to try to place Jesus in his Jewish surroundings.

Schweitzer, more than anyone else at the time, summed up the basic point of German scholarship, and concluded that the Jesus of history was quite alien to the Jesus of faith. Like almost all scholars, he wrestles with the enigma of Jesus as presented in the book of Mark, and concludes that Jesus—and thus Christianity was shaped more by the failure of the Parousia (the second coming) to take place. Jesus in his own lifetime expected a dramatic eschatological occurrence of redemption and salvation for Israel, which failed to come. His disciples chose to see the redemption in his death, and later his resurrection.

The whole history of “Christianity” down to the present day, that is to say, the real inner history of it, is based on the delay of the Parousia, the non-occurrence of the Parousia, the abandonment of eschatology, the progress and completion of the ‘de-eschatological’ of religion, which has been connected therewith. (p.358)

Schweitzer was among the first to recognize and historically trace a dramatic disappointment in Christianity, underneath its message of universal triumph.

There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus….the historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma. The study of the Life of Jesus…set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him, it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own. What surprised and dismayed the theology of the last forty years was that despite, all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep Him in our time, but had to let him go.

Schweitzer the historian realizes that it is not the study of History that can discover Jesus, he writes:

“History can destroy the present; it can reconcile the present with the past; can even to a certain extent transport the present into the past; but to contribute to the making of the present is not given unto it.”

Schweitzer at spiritual odds with his historical conclusions recognizes a kind of sincerity, which feels to him like truth.

Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force streams forth from Him and flows through our time also. This fact can neither be shaken nor confirmed by any historical discovery. It is the solid foundation of Christianity.

With a kind of anguish, Schweitzer recognizes the temptation for the reader to read himself into Jesus’ life.

It is nothing less than a misfortune for modern theology that it mixes history with everything and ends by being proud of the skill with which it finds its own thoughts.

Many of Schweitzer’s views have been disproved, by modern scholarship. He did not have access to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and one wonders what he would make of their cryptic resemblances to the New Testament. Yet, he stands as the most important Jesus scholar of the 20th century. Schweitzer was a great man, a wonderful musician, a missionary, and a winner of the Nobel Prize. It was as if he thought of St. Paul in First Corinthians 13, and the moving poem he quotes of love, hope, and faith, but the greatest of these is love. After an incredibly vigorous and poignant historical survey, Schweitzer had no faith, no hope. But he retained love.