The narrow mind of the literary world

Posted on by | 2 Comments

As my lovely wife posted recently, the British novelist Julian Gough wrote an excellent blog post a while back on the self-deluded ghetto that is modern literary fiction.  His post was occasioned by a review in the Guardian—a review of a lit-fic book by a British author, by a British lit-fic author—that was very impressed with the book in question for the originality of its central theme.  The only problem?  Well, here’s what Gough has to say:

This is the first line of the review: “The Opposite House is not the first novel to suggest that migration is a condition, not an event; but it may be the first to contend that the condition afflicts no one so profoundly as the gods.”Now, I couldn’t quite believe that was her opening claim. But it was.  She really thought that her stablemate at Bloomsbury was probably “the first to contend” that migration “afflicts no one so profoundly as the gods”. And editors and sub-editors had let this stand.Which means that nobody involved in the whole process was aware that Neil Gaiman had spent nearly six hundred pages, in his novel American Gods (which is not “literary”, nor published by Bloomsbury), writing about nothing but how migration profoundly afflicts the gods.

I’m not surprised by this—nor, I suspect, is Gough, since in the first paragraph of the piece, he’s already diagnosed the main problem with the modern literary ghetto:  it’s

a ghetto that doesn’t know it’s a ghetto: a ghetto that thinks it is the world.

I have no problem with people enjoying literary fiction; I think a lot of it’s badly overpraised, but some of it’s worthwhile.  What I do have a problem with, as I’ve noted before, is precisely this attitude Gough puts his finger on, that lit-fic isn’t a genre, but rather is simply what’s worth the attention of the serious reader.  This is, not to put too fine a point on it, pure tripe from beginning to end, as B. R. Myers demonstrated at some length a while ago in The Atlantic (much to the anger and discomfiture, it should be noted, of the the mandarins of the lit-fic world; but though they did a fine job of dismissing his points and pulling rank on him, I don’t recall anyone actually disproving his arguments).  Between them, Myers and Gough do a fine job of blowing away the pretentions of modern literary fiction and its acolytes, and showing that their affectation of superiority to the rest of the publishing world has no grounding in reality; in so doing, they demonstrate that the self-proclaimed openness and wideness of vision of the lit-fic world is in fact astonishingly myopic and narrow-minded.

Would the real issue please stand up?

Posted on by | No Comments

Lots more to blog about from the Worship Symposium, and I’ll get back to that in a more serious way tomorrow; but I wanted to note separately a comment Craig Barnes made by the by in his workshop on Saturday to this effect:  “The reason Presbyterians are so hung up on talking about sex is that it enables them to avoid talking about the fact that the [PCUSA] is dying. . . .  Presbyterians would rather talk about sex than death.”It’s an interesting point, and I have a sinking feeling he’s more or less right.  I’m not one who thinks we can just pretend our intradenominational disputes over sexual ethics aren’t there, or aren’t significant, because they are—but I have tended to think that if we could somehow just agree to put everything on hold for a while and put our energies instead into revitalizing older churches and planting new ones, as my other denomination (the Reformed Church in America) is doing, that the Presbyterian Church (USA) would be a lot better off, and in a much healthier position to have (and survive) the debate.  If the Rev. Dr. Barnes is right, though, I’m not so sure; if he’s right, we’d just find something else to sabotage ourselves.  Which suggests that some other approach is in order.  I just wish I had an idea what.

Blindness and Sight

Posted on by | No Comments

(Isaiah 42:10-25; John 9:39-41)

As many of you know, Isaiah is one of those books of the Bible that liberal biblical scholarship believes should be cut into pieces. The mainstream view among liberal academics divides it into three parts. The first is chapters 1-39, which is generally attributed to the historical eighth-century BC prophet Isaiah and his disciples; the section we’re looking at, chapters 40-55, is credited to a person or persons unknown in exile in Babylon during the sixth century BC, shortly before the Persian conquest under Cyrus; chapters 56-66 are usually supposed to have been written by yet another person or group of people some time after the people of Israel returned to their homeland.

Now, for various reasons, some of which I talked about in the opening sermon of this series, I think this view is a bunch of malarkey which has been cooked up by people who don’t believe in prophecy, and thus have to come up with some alternative explanation for, in particular, the prediction of the coming of Cyrus. If you start with the assumption that Isaiah could not have had knowledge of the future, then obviously he couldn’t have known about Cyrus, and therefore someone else has to be responsible for that part. This is, I think, a bad idea for a lot of reasons, but perhaps the most important one—and certainly the most serious for our efforts to understand what the prophet is on about—is that this view of the book introduces assumptions which badly skew our reading of the text.

The most significant of those bad assumptions, I believe, comes into play for the first time here. You see, in order to read Isaiah 40-55 as disconnected from the rest of the book, you have to see it as separate from the book’s storyline, if you will. Instead, these chapters become just one long word of encouragement to the exiles—granted there are some complaints from God mixed in, but those are just side notes; the overall theme is that God is going to deliver his people and everything is going back to the way it should be. But if you clear those assumptions out of the way and read the text carefully, you see something rather different; what you see, as I argued a few weeks ago, is God’s plan for the world shifting into a new phase. You see the servant Isaiah’s been talking about for the first 39 chapters—the people of Israel—fading from view, and a new Servant—Jesus Christ—rising to prominence to carry on the mission they have rejected.

That shift begins with the introduction of the Servant, whom God will raise up to carry out the mission that should have been performed by his people; here in this passage, we start to see that play out. The prophet calls the nations to sing a new song to the Lord for the new thing he has declared, and then we get this image of the Lord as the divine warrior going forth to battle—though who the enemies are in this context, we aren’t told; the focus is on the Lord, who has been silent, but now is going to raise his voice and shout like a warrior in battle, or a woman in labor. No longer will he hold himself back; instead, he’s going to do extraordinary things, both in judgment and in blessing.

In particular, look at verse 16: “I will lead the blind by a way they do not know, and I will guide them along unfamiliar paths; I will turn their darkness into light, and the rough places into level ground. These are the things I will do, and I will not leave them undone.” Now, what does this mean? Look back a minute to verses 6-7, which we read last week: “I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles, to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.” That’s the promise and the instruction which God gives to his Servant. So we have the ministry of the Servant to bring Israel and the nations back to the proper worship of God, represented as giving sight to the blind and freeing those who are prisoners; and that language of blindness is picked up here, as God states that he himself will lead the blind and make a way for them. 

And then look at verse 17: “But those who trust in idols, who say to images, ‘You are our gods,’ will be turned back in utter shame.” That might seem like a complete left turn to you—maybe you’re starting to think that Isaiah has idolatry on the brain—but actually, it’s the connection that tells us what Isaiah’s on about. You see, there’s a biblical trope here, a standard biblical way of speaking that’s in play in this text—it’s the association of blindness (and also deafness) with idolatry. It isn’t literal physical blindness that’s primarily in view—that’s just a metaphor and a symptom; rather, what Isaiah has in mind is the spiritual blindness that comes along with worshiping idols. You see, God can see and hear—indeed, he sees and hears everything, because he’s the creator of all that is—but idols can’t; they’re just lumps of wood and stone, and so they’re as deaf and blind as the materials from which they’re made and the tools with which they’re shaped. Thus, those who worship the living God can see and hear, because they worship the one who gave them eyes and ears, but those who worship idols soon become as deaf and blind as the false gods before whom they bow.

This is the tragedy of verses 18-25. God had formed himself a nation, his people Israel, to be his servant to lead the nations out of their blindness—but instead, they wandered away from him to worship idols themselves; instead of delivering the peoples of the world from their bondage to idolatry, they ended up in need of deliverance right along with them. That’s why God has to raise up another Servant, because his people have done their best to render themselves no different than the world around them. Indeed, they may well be worse off—thus God asks, “Who is blind but my servant, and deaf like the messenger I send?”—because unlike the nations, they ought to know better. They ought to know better, and have deliberately chosen not to. They have seen many things, but have paid no attention, and though their ears are open, they hear nothing.

This is why Jesus says in John 9, “I have come into this world for judgment, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” Why judgment? Look at Isaiah 42:17: “Those who trust in idols will be turned back in utter shame.” Those are people who have been offered the gift of verse 16 and refused it—they hold fast to their idols, preferring gods of their own invention, that they can control. And who are those people? They’re the ones who think they already see just fine, thank you—as the Pharisees did—and thus refuse to believe that they need Jesus; in so doing, their darkness, their true blindness, is revealed and confirmed. It’s not that Jesus wants this to happen, that he desires to judge them; but he knew that in his coming, they would judge themselves, and that that judgment on them was thus an inevitable part of his coming. Just as he came, as Isaiah had promised, to bring sight to the blind, so would he also come to reveal the blindness of those who loudly proclaimed their ability to see.

Now, the interesting thing about this is that the Pharisees weren’t blind in the same way as the people Isaiah was talking about—or at least, they would have said they weren’t. They knew this passage from Isaiah as well as Jesus did, and they understood the prophet’s complaint about the people of his time; they knew the dangers of idolatry, of worshiping the gods of the nations, and they were devoutly opposed to that. Their whole effort, their whole reason for existence, was focused on worshiping God faithfully and keeping his law as well as they possibly could; they no doubt saw themselves as the exact opposite of blind and deaf Israel, because they saw their mission as one of preparing the way for the coming of the Servant of God. So why does Jesus make the same charge against them that Isaiah made against the people of his own day?

There are two reasons. First off, they had made an idol of their own religion. Their focus had slipped—as it’s all too prone to do—from worshiping God and giving him glory to worshiping their own purity and glorifying themselves. That’s why, as Jesus charges elsewhere, they’ve begun to use the law of God for their own purposes, figuring out ways to use legal technicalities to avoid meeting some of the law’s more inconvenient expectations, like giving to those in need. This is also why, second, they had committed their own version of blind Israel’s other biggest sin: just as Israel had looked down on the nations as enemies, rather than seeing them as their mission field, so the Pharisees looked down on non-Pharisees as inferiors, people to avoid rather than people to bless. One of the things they objected to about Jesus, remember, was that he hung out with lowlifes and sinners, whom they themselves despised and hated. In this, too, their essential blindness was revealed, because it showed that their true focus wasn’t on God; they couldn’t see that the “people of the land” whom they loathed, the nations whom they regarded as enemies, were the people God loved and wanted to redeem, just as much as he loved and wanted to redeem them. They were, ultimately, all about themselves, and that’s not what God is on about, or wants us to be on about.

The reason, I think, is that the Pharisees had lost sight of the fact that their relationship with God was all about grace, not about their own effort—and make no mistake, they should have known that; we often miss it, too, but the Old Testament really is just as much about the grace of God as the New Testament. That’s why Jesus is the fulfillment of the law, not its replacement. They had lost sight of the fact that even for all the work they put in, they didn’t deserve God’s favor any more than the tax collectors, prostitutes, and foreigners they held in such contempt, and so they failed to understand that their proper response to God and his grace was not to keep it to themselves but to share it. They failed to understand that God calls his people to mission—to the mission of the Servant, to be agents of grace for the world. May we not make the same mistake.

The work of the people is the work of the Holy Spirit

Posted on by | No Comments
Simon Chan, “A Theological Understanding of the Liturgy as the Work of the Spirit”


• download

The most interesting part of my second day at the Worship Symposium at Calvin was Simon Chan’s workshop on the liturgy as the work of the Holy Spirit.  Dr. Chan is a Pentecostal who teaches at Trinity Theological College, an ecumenical Christian seminary in Singapore; from the title and the interview he gave Christianity Today last year, I knew him to be rather more liturgically-minded than most Pentecostals, but I didn’t expect him to ground his argument in the work of Eastern Orthodox theologians like John Zizioulas and Nikos Nissiotis—which is exactly what he did.  It was a fascinating argument and discussion about the way in which the Holy Spirit works on and in the church, and effectively takes on the shape of the church—the church, we might say, becomes the body of Christ by embodying the Holy Spirit.I’ll be a while processing what Dr. Chan had to say, I suspect; but I greatly appreciate his emphasis on the fact that the Spirit of God is always present with and at work in the church, and that it’s the Spirit’s ongoing work that constitutes the church.  That really drives home the point that we are entirely dependent on grace.

The importance of friendship in ministry

Posted on by | No Comments

The Worship Symposium began today at Calvin; this year, I started off by taking a seminar on “Developing Pastoral Excellence,” which turned out to be interesting in an unexpected way.  The presenter, the Rev. David Wood, is the director of Transition into Ministry, a program funded by the Lilly Foundation which seeks to aid and support pastors in the transition from the education process into the early years of their first call.  As such, he’s been thinking a lot about what it means to be a good pastor and what is necessary for pastors to minister well; in so doing, in looking at all the list that various authors have generated of what makes an excellent pastor, he noticed “the sound of something missing”:  he argued that an essential and unconsidered component of pastoral excellence is friendship.In brief, his argument runs like this.  To be a good pastor, one must be a person of character and integrity and moral habit; as Aristotle (whom he quoted repeatedly) says, “We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”  To live in this way requires sustained moral effort; and to sustain moral effort, the Rev. Wood contends (following Aristotle), we need friends of character—deep, strong friendships with godly people whom we can trust implicitly.This is true for a number of reasons.  For one, central to our work as pastors is our ability to maintain a proper balance of intimacy and distance with the people in our congregations, something we can’t do if we’re starved for intimacy ourselves.  For another, this requires a degre of self-knowledge which we can’t manage on our own—we need people who know us well to reflect us back to ourselves, so that we can see them through their eyes.  For a third, we need support, reinforcement, encouragement, and sometimes a good swift kick or two from others if we’re to live lives of excellence of character—none of us have the resources in ourselves to do that alone.And fourth, we need friends to protect us from boredom.  The Rev. Wood argues that when you see a pastor in moral collapse, you’re probably seeing someone who was bored with their life.  It’s easy to grow bored with the things that matter most to us if we have no one with whom to share them; it’s easy to forget why they matter.  We need others to help us remember, and to help us stay excited about and invested in them.  As long as we stay interested in what we’re called to be doing, we stay energized about doing it, and invested in it.  When we get bored, we go looking for trouble—and usually find it.

Lessons from the mistakes of the Bush administration

Posted on by | No Comments

courtesy of the Baseball Crank, who has put together an excellent and thoughtful list.NB:  this is a list of mistakes—to wit, things that hampered President Bush and his administration in achieving their goals and purposes—not a list of policy disagreements.  To take the biggest one, the invasion of Iraq was not a “mistake.”  You may think we never should have invaded Iraq, and history may prove you right or it may prove you wrong, but either way, that’s not a “mistake”—it’s a policy judgment with which you disagree.  That’s a whole other list and a whole different set of questions and issues.As such, almost all of the points on this list are apolitical; certainly the first eight are, and even the last two probably apply to Democrats as well as Republicans, though differently.  Most of these points have to do with matters of practical judgment such as personnel appointments and communication.

Laughing at Uncle Joe; or, is Joe Biden the new Dan Quayle?

Posted on by | No Comments

I like what Ed Walsh has to say about this:

In an earlier post, I mentioned the trouble comedians were having coming up with a funny trope to use to poke fun at President Obama. The experts’ conclusion seems to be that Vice President Biden is the fattest target for humor in the Administration.Now we see the story developing further. It’s not just Biden, see, but Obama’s reaction to Biden that is becoming a reliable comic routine. In this scenario, Barack Obama is Joe Biden’s straight man.It’s promising. As this Politico clip of segments from “The Daily Show” and “The Tonight Show” makes clear, watching the habitually on-message president react to Biden’s howitzer-in-a-hurricane rhetorical style is pretty funny. And it offers the hint of a crack in Obama’s cool public face.

John Updike, RIP

Posted on by | No Comments

If you’d asked me yesterday who was America’s greatest living writer, I probably would ultimately have come down for John Updike; as the Wikipedia article on him puts it, “Updike was widely recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his highly stylistic writing, and his prolific output, having published more than twenty-five novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children’s books.”  He seemed to do everything, as a writer, and if not always brilliantly, he consistently managed to do it with insight and wit.  I particularly appreciate his willingness to be unfashionable in his opinions (as seen for instance in his piece “On Not Being a Dove”).  Like the rest of his contemporaries, he was no longer at his best as a writer, but his death today of lung cancer is a great loss to the republic of American letters—with his independence of mind, I think, being the greatest loss of all.

An unexamined faith is . . . what?

Posted on by | No Comments

In my previous post, commenting on James Hitchcock’s Touchstone editorial “Subject to Change,” I discussed the main body of his argument, but I didn’t address his closing comment, which might be the most interesting thing he has to say:

One of the oldest and deepest assumptions of Western civilization is that the unexamined life is not worth living, and it is a perplexing theological conundrum to what extent real faith exists if the possibility of rejecting it does not exist also.

This is in one way a logical conclusion to his piece, since it does connect directly to the burden of his argument; this is really the core question underlying the issue he raises.  Put like this, however, this closing paragraph is also an opening paragraph to an article (or a book) not yet written, as it opens out onto a whole new field of discussion.  For my part, I tend to think this is a question without a definitive answer—that it really depends on the person; it does seem clear, though, that an unexamined or unchallenged faith, if not necessarily less real, is at least far less robust than a faith that has had to confront and address the possibility of unbelief.  As well, those whose faith is never questioned are not likely to learn to question and evaluate themselves, and thus their faith will probably tend to be shallower, and to engage life in a more superficial fashion.  I don’t think we can look down on those whose faith is sheltered, but we can say that it’s an open question whether they’ve put their roots deep enough to survive the storms if and when they come.My brothers and sisters, consider it entirely as joy when you face trials of many kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfast endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.—James 1:2-4

Modernity as universal cultural acid

Posted on by | 2 Comments

James Hitchcock has a truly remarkable editorial in the latest Touchstone which asks a penetrating question:  can traditional societies survive the power of modernity?  He writes,

A closed traditional society finds it almost impossible to effect an orderly and controlled transition to modernity. Religion dominates all aspects of life to the extent that no distinction is made between matters of faith and mere custom. . . .Thus, it proves psychologically impossible to discard those things in traditional society that have outlived their legitimacy without thereby setting off global change. The changing culture fosters a half-conscious conviction that truth lies roughly in asserting the opposite of what one previously believed. Changes cannot be evaluated rationally, because people are carried along by a euphoric sense of having liberated themselves from long-standing, narrow oppressiveness.Modern society offers an opportunity to exercise freedom in the fullest sense, an exercise that exposes the facts that what passes for deep conviction may be for many people merely a brittle social conformity, and what passes for morality may be the mere absence of opportunities for sin.Muslims who see the United States as the Great Satan reject the good of political liberty along with the poisonous moral licentiousness that such liberty permits. They perceive the ambiguity of modernity itself, most of which either originated in the United States or has been propagated through American influence.But for that very reason the antibodies to modern cultural viruses also exist most robustly in the United States, which is practically the only society in the Western world where moral traditionalists have an effective voice in public affairs.Religious belief is stronger in America than anywhere else in the West partly because believers have had to find ways of living their faith without the kind of social supports that, historically, were provided in countries with established churches.

This is an interesting explanation for America’s unusual religious culture, and one that makes a great deal of sense; but if he’s right to suggest that “the forces of modernity—political, economic, and cultural—really are irresistible and that sooner or later almost every society in the world will have to face them,” then the implications of his argument must be faced as well, because they are of great significance.  As he says,

If that assumption is correct, it is better to experience modernity sooner rather than later, in order to make use of what is good in it and to learn to cope with what is bad. Simple quarantine is no longer possible. . . .Both for societies and for individuals, our cultural situation is tragic in the classical sense, because it requires decisions none of which are free of possible bad consequences. Maintaining a rigorously closed society may protect generations of people from the worst evils of modernity, even as it virtually guarantees that later generations will be infected all the more virulently. But alternatively, allowing people a good measure of freedom inevitably leads to abuse.

While, from a Christian perspective, one may well call the consequences of this situation for the church tragic, there is a silver lining as well:  if Hitchcock’s overall thesis is correct, then that applies not only to Christian societies but also to Muslim societies as well.  This suggests that while traditionalist Islamic societies will no doubt succeed in resisting modernity for some time—which is, I believe, the driving concern behind the rise of Islamism in its various forms, including its most virulent strain, jihadism—they cannot resist forever; eventually, the Islamic world will see its own version of Quebec’s “Silent Revolution,” and the collapse of radical Islam, leaving much of the Islamic world looking much like the once-Christian nations of western Europe.  This offers hope that, in our conflict with militant Islam as with the Cold War against global communism, if we will stand strong and not surrender, we will see a Berlin Wall moment.