November 27, 2024

Matt Reynolds

Senior Editor, Books

Becoming Athletes of Attention in an Age of Distraction

In the final chapter of The Rule of Saint Benedict, the monastic author expresses a debt of influence not only to “every page and every word of divine authority in…

The Black Women Missing from Our Pews

When I was four years old, I went missing for three hours. While it was a common occurrence for my parents to not be able to find me because I…

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The post CT Books – 11-27-24 appeared first on Christianity Today.

These instincts were arguably more learned than anything else—my Malaysian father and South Korean mother moved to the country from the United States in the 1990s. So much of how I grew up was shaped by the intensity of Singapore’s academic culture, shuttling between exam-heavy course loads, afterschool tutoring, and reams of practice papers to complete.

Different phases of my life would come to mirror this rhythm: spending hectic days in high school between writing long essays and serving in church, balancing responsibilities during military service while leading a small group and trying to keep up with reading, managing the busyness of my undergraduate life and subsequent tenure as a graduate student, and, even now, trying to uphold different commitments to ministry, creative writing, editing, friends, and family amid a full-time job.

The last time I felt thoroughly burnt out was about five years ago, as an undergraduate in England. Between reading and writing essays for class, keeping active in Christian fellowships, participating in theater productions, and rowing by dawn, I found myself gradually compromising my sleep schedule. Seven hours a night got slashed to six or even four and a half. I’m not entirely sure what drove me back then. Perhaps it was a feeling of duty and responsibility I felt I owed the people I had made promises to or a desire to not let any part of my university life slip by. Lurking beneath all this, perhaps, was an impulse toward optimization.

A Waste of Time, a Work of Love

Karen Stiller

Optimization can be described in two ways, opines writer Jia Tolentino. First, it is a means of achieving profitability by “satisfy[ing] our wants” with “the least effort”—a formulation posited by the economist William Stanley Jevons. Second, it is the process of making something, as Merriam-Webster indicates, “as fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible.”

An excessive devotion to self-optimization perverts our relationships to our time and effort, trading care and an awareness of our physical and mental limitations for an unrelenting drive toward completing tasks. In other words, optimization can make us hold on too tightly to what we should entrust to God.

A national preoccupation

In tracing this instinct toward optimization to its roots, the temptation is to sketch a history of Singaporean survivalism, geopolitical anxiety, and economic competitiveness. The machinations of Singapore Inc. took root after its unceremonious separation from Malaysia in the 1960s. Because it is a small city-state with minimal natural resources, the skills of its people became its biggest competitive advantage, as we have often been told. The transformation of Singapore’s “labor force” and improvement of its “human capital” occurred through the multinational corporations that trained generations of workers and the focused educational policies that advanced our competitive edge. Meritocracy was championed as a sacred ideal; so too were diligence, productivity, and industriousness.

This heady rush toward modernization, technologization, and optimization structured national aspirations in Singapore for a long time. People saw their lives materially transformed as a result of the government’s careful management of the country’s economic development. The flip side, however, has been a perpetually stressed-out population. Upskilling has become the new mantra of the state, with government credits provided for citizens to train and learn new skills. In other words, optimizing the self continues and appears central to Singapore’s psyche.

I Met God on the Mountaintop of Ritual

Esau McCaulley

The aspirations of many in the church in Singapore began to cohere along similar lines, with the notion of blessing becoming correlated with wealth. Church life started to resemble the country’s changes, with discipleship and fellowship traded for easily optimizable and measurable programs and events: talks, dinners, and rallies, where the number of people reached or converted could be tracked in digits.

The compression of time through a nationwide emphasis on self-optimization, as well as the climbing demands of work tasks or school assignments imposed on each person in Singapore, have served only to foster anxieties surrounding comparison and hasten the movement of the months and days.

As Singaporean writer and critic Gwee Li Sui argues, “the social and technical implements of modernity have been improving our daily lives only to raise their pace, giving us more time that is wasted away as quickly. Political and economic interdependence forges trust and understanding among peoples, but it also grows frustration and a sense of insecurity through endless comparison.”

Centering prayer

As an undergraduate, I attended a talk by graphic designer Andrew Khatouli. As he spoke of the challenges he faced working in the creative industry and the pressures of pursuing creative excellence, a statement he made hit me hard: “Your work ethic is only as good as your rest ethic.” The impetus to slow down and give myself time to rest became something that was hard fought. The first step required a renewed commitment to observing the Sabbath. I began to resolve to take the entirety of my Sundays off, replacing frenzied hours doing last-minute reading with walks, podcasts, and time with friends.

The unfettered space of a day suddenly felt ripe with possibility, a passage providing a temporary severance between different streams of work. I took two biblical concepts seriously: shabbat (Hebrew for “sabbath”), of a cessation of work, and nuakh (Hebrew for “rest”), of settling into a space of prayer and praise at church and elsewhere. While we are created uniquely in God’s image, as the narrative of Genesis presents, we remain creatures made from dust. As preacher Christopher Ash argues in Zeal without Burnout, to forgo sleep, the Sabbath, friends, and the inner renewal of the Holy Spirit is to attempt to create for ourselves a kind of parity with God.

A Christian life of sustainable sacrifice, however, is underpinned by a recognition of human limitation. The cultivation of a divine intimacy and a serious inner life requires a space discrete from our perennially active personas. “There is a place in the soul that neither time, nor space, nor no created thing can touch,” wrote 14th-century mystic Meister Eckhart. The intent of prayer is to visit that kind of sanctuary Eckhart describes, says poet and philosopher John O’Donohue.

Aligning to kairos

A preoccupation with efficiency and optimizing the self can serve to lessen an awareness of our humanity. We lose our sense of our being loved into existence by the Creator, of being created in his image, and of needing to be nourished spiritually and emotionally by divine communion.

Sometimes, a kairological irruption can serve to shock us from the tepidity of our busyness and proclivities toward optimization. The New Testament conception of the Greek word kairos describes an appointed time in the purpose of God. Kairos construes a kind of immediacy and is the temporal language Jesus uses when he proclaims in the Gospel of Mark, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (1:15, ESV).

To Dust We Will Return

Jen Pollock Michel

Kairos moments such as the collapse of the body, the death of a loved one, or a car crash from exhaustion have the potential to shock us out of a hectic stupor. They are the moments that provide blunt reminders of the presence of God—ones that make us acutely aware not only of our mortal limitations but also of the ephemerality of time. They provide a reminder that our calendars do not operate in concert with the mystery of time as God orders it. We are accorded mere glimmers of how God moves in time beyond what we can see and perceive. “I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end,” writes the author of Ecclesiastes (3:10–11).

The love of God has “a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed,” says theologian Kosuke Koyama. “It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks.” When we lose sight of the restorative ethos of the Sabbath, we forget that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). We lose the ability to cultivate an interior life, to access the untouchable “place in the soul” that Eckhart describes.

Coming to Lent

In this Lenten season, it may be worthwhile to consider how best to counter the primacy of optimization. Theologian Rowan Williams suggests in his book Being Human that humans are ascribed dignity regardless of “how many boxes are ticked” because we stand “in the middle of a network of relations” to God and to one another. “A theologically informed language of personhood corrects the mechanical language that reduces us to a checklist of attributes,” writes Christopher Benson in his review of Williams’s book.

As a corrective to the pressures of optimization, I have made several commitments to try and cultivate space for interiority and silence this Lent. Silence supports our “growing humanity” and humbles our desire for power and control, argues Williams: “God is God by being God for us, and we are human by being human for God; and all joy and fulfillment opens up once we recognize this.” My first commitment has been to continue in my reading of Scripture each day. The second has been to keep to a schedule of daily devotions published by the Bible Society of Singapore. The third has been to read a poem each day from an anthology on joy.

Learning to space out my schedule, say no to certain commitments or invitations, and carve out pockets for prayer and reading each day will hopefully help to shift the coordinates of my present relationship to time. These habits will hopefully help to dislodge the ways in which self-optimization has lurked in my life as an ideal.

I do not pretend to believe that I have dispensed with the continued stresses of each day or the impulse to address tasks quickly and effectively. However, these practices have helped to provide necessary moments of pause and reflection, not least when recent events have conspired to provide the kairological shocks I needed to turn again to God.

To fall into the slowness of the liturgical calendar, to keep the Sabbath, and to remember the interventions of kairos moments is to facilitate a turn away from optimization and the structures of time that enable it. A life of faith sustains and strengthens but takes an eternity to learn to inhabit.

Jonathan Chan is the author of the poetry collection going home (Landmark, 2022). His poetry and essays have appeared in Ekstasis, The Yale Logos, and the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.

There Is No One Fully Optimized, Not Even One

Danielle Treweek

The post Resisting the Impulse of Self-Optimization appeared first on Christianity Today.

One of those works, known as The Conferences, has received a new translation from Jamie Kreiner, a professor of medieval history at UCLA and author of The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction. As part of an excellent series by Princeton University Press, Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers, Kreiner offers an abridged edition of this translation, titled How to Focus: A Monastic Guide for an Age of Distraction.

“The question of focus,” argues Benedictine historian Columba Stewart, “is the single most important practical problem Cassian addresses in his monastic theology.” Accordingly, Kreiner’s translation emphasizes excerpts relevant to this question. How to Focus features seven of Cassian’s “conferences,” in which he and his friend Germanus, a novice monk, seek counsel from “the monastic pioneers in Egypt and the Levant” about how to improve their concentration.

Monks, “hurrying toward the heavenly country,” as Benedict put it, can show laypersons “the direct route to our creator” through their discipline (ascesis) of contemplative prayer, which aspires to develop clarity of mind by managing inattention.

From ancient Egyptian ascetics in the desert to modern American disciples in the city, all humans face the temptation of distraction. Kreiner’s translation tries to finesse “a cognitive culture that is both relatable and foreign to us today.” In my estimation, it veers toward modern more than premodern locutions. For example, I cringed when she had one of Cassian’s interlocutors, Abba Moses, describe the Christian monks of the late Roman Empire as “rednecks and hicks living in this desolate desert,” who strive to keep their hearts unharmed from “toxic pathologies.”

Notwithstanding a few such missteps, which lose the needful strangeness of monastic wisdom, Kreiner should be commended for her fresh and fluent rendering of an old book. I respect a secular scholar who generously befriends Cassian, a Christian “expert who has both succeeded and failed to focus,” offering advice that is “at once more sympathetic and more sophisticated” than our contemporary fare.

We all suffer from attention deficit, whether it rises to a disorder or not. In her 2023 book Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness, and Productivity, psychologist Gloria Mark shares her empirical research. As summed up in a Wall Street Journal article, “Back in 2004, we found that people averaged 150 seconds on any screen before switching to another screen. By 2012, it had declined to 75 seconds, and between 2016 and 2021, it diminished to 47 seconds.”

Studies show that fast attention shifts result in higher anxiety and stress and lower productivity, along with increased errors and delays in completing tasks. “When we spend time switching attention and reorienting back to a task,” Mark writes, “we are draining our precious and limited cognitive resources. It’s like having a gas tank that leaks, leaving less fuel for the mission at hand.”

Eat Phlegm. Chew Grass. Sit on a Pillar.

Han-luen Kantzer Komline

As a humanities teacher, I assign my students reading from great books in the Western canon, such as Homer’s Iliad or Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.They fight against distraction, struggling to maintain their attention from paragraph to paragraph when nearby screens offer small dopamine hits every time they text a friend, check Instagram posts, watch a TikTok video, or browse the internet.

Unlike my students, who are digital natives, I am a digital immigrant with memories of a simpler media ecology—a time when focus seemed easier to achieve. With the advent and integration of digital technology, I have assumed different roles in Aesop’s fable about a foot race between two animals: I once was “slow and steady” like the tortoise, who “plodded on straight toward the goal.” But now, more frequently, I reach “the midway mark” and begin to “nibble some juicy grass and amuse [myself] in different ways” like the hare, whose speed proves disadvantageous.

To become an athlete of attention, one must undergo rigorous training, because there is no quick fix to “the confused, dazed, scatter-brained state,” as 19th-century philosopher William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology. James defined attention as “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.”

Cassian’s Conferences is important reading if we care about attentional athleticism, especially in our obedience to the double command of loving God and neighbor. If love attends to the other, then frenetic distractibility will vitiate its quality.

More than a century ago, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed “the wild hurrying or noisy anesthetization of vain diversion” that characterizes so much of modern life. Our contemporary reflex, even when we acknowledge the truth of such a diagnosis, is to blame technology, as if tools are the problem rather than their users. By contrast, Cassian’s ancient Egyptian mentors practiced self-suspicion. To treat the symptom of absent-mindedness, they wisely reflect upon the condition of the postlapsarian mind, which is not immune from the hereditary disease of original sin.

In Paradise Lost, the poet John Milton captures the dysfunction of our cognitive equipment after “man’s first disobedience” in the garden of Eden. Of Adam and Eve, he writes, “Their inward state of mind, calm region once / And full of peace, now tossed and turbulent: / For understanding ruled not, and the will / Heard not her lore, both in subjection now / To sensual appetite, who from beneath / Usurping over sov’reign reason claimed / Superior sway.” When “sov’reign reason” bows to “sensual appetite,” we become more like animals than humans. So it is not for nothing that we compare the diminished attention span of humans to those of squirrels or goldfish.

Contemporary Christians, no less than their secular counterparts, are often beguiled by the conceits of science. However, we have much to learn from ancient monastic psychology, since “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecc. 1:9). Modern psychology depends mainly on observations and interpretations of human thought patterns and behaviors, whereas premodern monks owe their “unusual knowledge of the human soul to solitary introspection and to innumerable confessions of the heart,” according to theologian Gabriel Bunge.

How to Focus shows how spelunking the soul can yield greater perspicacity than the scientific approach. The reader joins Cassian and Germanus, as if eavesdropping on a counseling session where the therapist illumines the workings of the mind.

I am arrested by the analogical imagination of the monks. To describe cognitive dysfunction, they employ varied analogies, including lukewarmness, sleepiness, intoxication (“the mind is always moving and meandering, and it’s torn apart in different directions like it’s drunk”), and thievery (“useless thoughts break in sneakily and secretly, without us even knowing, making it beyond difficult to notice and catch them, let alone kick them out”). Without the restraint of spiritual discipline, Germanus observes, the mind will move like a river, where “conscious perceptions … keep getting sucked in or spit out of this whirlpool.” Anxious thoughts are compared to “unbridled horses”: They wander from the stable of the mind unless an equine trainer disciplines them.

Alongside these negative analogies of the impaired mind, the monks offer positive analogies of the transformed mind. In their appraisal, it can become like the Ark of the Covenant, which holds the manna of “spiritual perceptions,” the stone tablets of divine law, and the rod of Aaron, “signifying the salvific banner of our true and highest priest, Jesus Christ.”

One monk, Abba Abraham of Diolkos, draws a comparison from fishing:

[Monks] should work like an expert fisherman with apostolic know-how, focusing on the shoals of thoughts swimming in the quiet deep of their heart, casting their gaze on their next meal, lying in wait without moving a muscle, peering into the depths like they’re perched on an overhanging ledge. And using their shrewd discernment they should differentiate which thoughts to hook and pull in, and which to disregard and release like bad and poisonous fish.

Elsewhere, he pictures monks as artisans who build “a domed vault” out of their minds; its “perfectly round structure” cannot be produced without taking the center into account, “making calculated adjustments to the inner and outer circumferences of the dome as they go.”

In every moment of our construction and demolition projects, [the mind] should revolve exclusively around the love of God as its fixed unchanging center. Using this reliable compass of love (as I might describe it), it should accommodate or curtail its thoughts, depending on the property of each one. Otherwise the mind will lack the real skills to construct that spiritual building of which Paul is the architect, and it won’t attain the beauty of the house that the blessed David wanted to offer in his heart to the Lord.

The above analogies are not only impressively creative accounts of our cognitive equipment in its fallen and redemptive states, but also practical ways to achieve focus with the mind’s eye—or imagination. I find it fascinating that these monks summon a faculty of the mind (imagination) to cure an ailment of the mind (distraction). Each analogy functions as a clearing in the forest, giving the Christian a better vision for her mental regress or progress.

These early Christian monks seem to meld the head and the heart. At the very least, it is nearly impossible to identify where the head ends and the heart begins, since their contents flow freely—back and forth. Against Greek dualism, which regards the human as a combination of related but disparate parts (heart, mind, body, soul, and spirit), they advance Hebrew holism, which regards the human as an indivisible whole.

Hebrew holism, however, does not preclude the New Testament dualism of flesh and spirit. Long before contemporary theologian John W. Cooper argued for “dualistic holism,” which holds to the compatibility of both views in the Bible, the monks intuited this biblical anthropology because they were nourished by “every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4).

A couple of examples can demonstrate the tacit concept of dualistic holism—or biblical common sense. Abba Moses of Scetis analogizes from the heart to the mind, positing that they both resemble “the workings of a millstone”:

[It] is set spinning when the rush of water propels the mechanism to rotate. There’s no way for the millstone to stop running as long as the water pressure is wheeling it around. But what the overseer can control is the choice of what to grind: wheat or barley or the dreaded darnel. This much is patently obvious: it has to mill whatever its operator pours into it.”

Responding to the frustrations of Germanus, who bemoans the “countless kidnappings” of his attention, Abba Serenus of Scetis reassures him that with “an extended period of training and habitual long-standing practice,” the goal of mental stability is achievable, albeit not permanently: “We have firm control here: we determine in our hearts both the ascents—thoughts that reach out to God—and the descents—thoughts that sink into earthly and physical matters.”

Notice how the elders assume that thoughts are not an exclusive property of the mind, as we currently maintain. “The heart,” to quote Blaise Pascal’s famous maxim in Pensées, “has its reasons which reason itself does not know.”

To troubleshoot distraction, we need a holistic, not reductionist, account of the human being as a complex unity. If we ignore the heart for the mind alone, or vice versa, the remedy for our distraction will be inadequate. Attention deficit is a disorder of the head and the heart; therefore, its treatment should consist not only of medicine and cognitive behavioral therapy, per the modern practice, but also of “fasts, vigils, meditating on the scriptures, nakedness, and total dispossession,” per the ancient practice of monks. “To pay attention,” poet Mary Oliver wrote, “this is our endless and proper work”—and it calls upon the entire human being, not merely one part cordoned off from other parts, as if we were machines rather than ensouled bodies.

Love is the highest expression of attention. To slight the geometry lesson, the potted flowers that need watering, the tasks of work, the dog that wags its tail at our feet upon returning home, the administration of medicine to a father after open-heart surgery, or the widow who sits by herself in church—all this is not only an attention deficit, but also a love deficit. Christian discipleship is apprenticeship in attention—loving attention to God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loving attention to our neighbor, as much as we attend to ourselves (Mark 12:30–31).

A consideration of the analogical imagination and dualistic holism from ancient monks might seem remote from the exigencies of life in the 21st century. Yet their insights can aid believers of any era. These monastic pioneers are not experts of focus; they are beginners like the rest of us, or perhaps (to use an oxymoron) expert beginners. “The Christian church is agreed on one thing,” posits Reformed theologian Karl Barth, “that it consists purely of beginners—and that this is truly a good thing: to become small again, to begin from the beginning, and thus at no point to stand still.”

Kreiner’s selections from The Conferences repeatedly show that Cassian and Germanus are enrolled in a school that has no graduation date, making their quest for concentration a lifelong endeavor. Their teachers are realistic about the mental limitations confronting us, and modest, too, about what can be achieved. Abba Moses of Scetis illustrates this with a very subtle analogy, likening the mind to a fortress and the monk to a vigilant gatekeeper who controls access: 

It’s truly impossible for the mind not to be interrupted by thoughts. But it is possible, for anyone who makes the effort, to welcome them in or kick them out. Their origin doesn’t have everything to do with us, but it’s up to us to reject or accept them. And yet, despite what we’ve said about the impossibility of the mind not being attacked by thoughts, we shouldn’t chalk everything up to assault and to the spirits who are trying to inflict these thoughts on us. That wouldn’t leave any room for the human will to be free, and we’d lose to the drive to improve ourselves.

Instead of succumbing to pessimistic fatalism about the practice of attention, Abba Moses admirably dignifies the exercise of our free will as an empowering gift from God. We are not victims of external stimuli, whether evil spirits or technology. Improvement can occur, even if the layman does not retreat to the desert, wear a sackcloth, and forgo baths.

Beyond the hermitage, is there an application of monastic wisdom to our maddening fight against distraction? All readers will benefit from inclining their ear to the desert dwellers, because their different approaches relieve us of searching for a silver bullet or 12-step program: Attentional athleticism requires perpetual vigilance and training. However, a person’s orientation to the sacred makes a significant difference, as the secular translator of How to Focus candidly admitted in an interview on The Medieval Podcast.

Following Abba Moses, a Christian is well-positioned to identify her immediate goal (“clarity and tranquility of the heart”) as a means to her ultimate goal (“the kingdom of the heavens”) because of biblical and ecclesial formation. By contrast, a non-Christian, absent such formation, may struggle to identify these goals. How does a secular person achieve “perfect roundness” as she builds a dome out of her mind without reference to the “fixed unchanging center” of the circle—the love of God? Training the attention will prove tricky if the center shifts.

How does a secular person choose a mantra to recite in “an unbroken cycle” for concentration when he experiences scattered thoughts while “sleeping and eating and going to the bathroom”? For the Christian, whether monk or not, “a lifesaving formula” is readily available, thanks to the Scriptures. Abba Isaac’s recommended mantra, which fulfills the apostle Paul’s exhortation to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17, ESV), comes from the distractible David: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me” (Psalm 69:2, Douay-Rheims version).

According to Abba Isaac, David’s cry for aid “encompasses every state of mind that can beset human beings, and it is neatly applicable to every situation and all onslaughts,” which he enumerates in detail, mentioning “demonic insomnia,” “physical arousal,” or “the pull of boredom, pretentiousness, and pride.”

What might be the equivalent text for a non-Christian? For Abba Isaac, his mantra

includes an invocation to God against every possible crisis. It includes the humility of a sincere confession. It includes the alertness that comes from care and constant anxiety. It includes a reflection on one’s own weakness, confidence in being heard, and trust that help is always close at hand—because whoever appeals to their bodyguard nonstop is certain that he’s always there. It includes the burning heat of love and compassion. It includes a cognizance of traps and a fear of enemies. And in perceiving that they are surrounded by them day and night, the speaker admits that they can’t be set free without the help of their protector. 

If there is a secret to attentional athleticism, Abba Isaac has named it: “trust that help is always close at hand.” Because I cannot “earn my liberation from this mental degradation,” I call out to God as my bodyguard—or, more apropos, my mindguard. It is no accident that compline—the bedtime office of prayer in the Anglican tradition—deploys a verse from the prophet Isaiah, which recognizes that the Lord alone soothes an agitated mind at the end of the day: “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you” (26:3, ESV).

Contemporary Christians often fare no better at focus than their secular neighbors, but we are without excuse for not making recourse to that “reliable compass of love” that refers the mind to God when it wanders from the center. For this reason, we should train with Cassian and company, not only to find mental stability for our own psychological upheaval but also to serve as an alluring witness for an age of distraction.

Christopher Benson is a humanities teacher and book reviewer. He blogs at Bensonian.

The post Becoming Athletes of Attention in an Age of Distraction appeared first on Christianity Today.

The War on the West

Douglas Murray (Author)

Broadside Books

320 pages

$17.29

Associated with the so-called “intellectual dark web,” which Jonah Goldberg describes as “a coalition of thinkers and journalists who happen to share a disdain for the keepers of the liberal orthodoxy” (e.g., Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Michael Shermer, Christina Hoff Sommers), Murray intrigues me as a sagacious conservative (à la public intellectual Roger Scruton), a nonconformist gay man (à la commentator Andrew Sullivan), and a Christian skeptic (à la Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy). The last two epithets need further elaboration: As a “nonconformist gay man,” Murray eschews the narcissism of sexual identity and the tribalism of identity politics; as a “Christian skeptic,” his questioning has a decidedly Christian coloration, owing to his upbringing and sympathies, even though he is not currently a practitioner. It seems God is so near to Murray that he does not yet feel him at his shoulder.

Watch the video of Justin Brierley, host of the podcast Unbelievable, moderate a conversation between New Testament scholar N. T. Wright and Murray on how we live in a post-Christian world. Murray confesses his discomfort as both an agnostic who recognizes “the values and the virtues” of Christianity in Western civilization and “a nonbeliever who is disappointed by the behavior of the believing church,” which, he reckons, has ceased preaching the gospel in favor of the latest social and political tropes.

Murray’s latest title, The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, strikes me as a coda to his previous books. He culls the dizzying number of stories from current events into a bricolage confirming our intuition that denizens of the West are practicing an extreme form of self-flagellation to atone for the sins of white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, and heterosexism. Worrisomely, this masochism appears to have no terminus of forgiveness, healing, or reconciliation because the inexhaustible will to power is at stake for the new masters. The juvenile chant of a marginal protest more than 30 years ago at Stanford University—“Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go”—has mushroomed into the pseudosophistication of today’s woke herd.

Any attempt to make Western civ optional or obsolete is a fool’s errand. We are inescapably bound up in its heritage. Instead of engendering the vanity of self-hatred, our geographic location should propel an earnest inquiry into the failings and glories of Western civilization and an appreciation for its gifts. Failure to do so results in ignorant enlightenment (not knowing the genealogy of ideas) and ungrateful achievement (not crediting our forebears who cleared the way to progress). Given the historical mistreatment of ethnic, sexual, and gender minorities in the West, Murray acknowledges the need for honest reckoning, but it is not as if the reckoning never occurred before. The pendulum has now “swung past the point of correction and into overcorrection,” he says, even igniting a thirst for revenge in formerly disenfranchised groups.

It is not my goal to recount dispatches from the war zone, which the author vividly narrates and whose cumulative force increases the plausibility of his thesis. If I were sharing a bottle of wine with Murray, I would focus on three aspects of his engrossing book: first, the appropriateness of invoking a metaphor of war to describe our contemporary upheaval; second, the centrality of antiwhite animus in his account; and third, the oddity of an exhortation to gratitude as a (partial) remedy to the pathology afflicting the secular West.

Wars old and new

At the start of the evening, I would question the framing of Murray’s book: Is there actually a war on the West? American poet Carl Sandburg delineates the evolution of war:

In the old wars clutches of short swords and jabs into faces with spears.

In the new wars long range guns and smashed walls, guns running a spit of metal and men falling in tens and twenties.

In the wars to come new silent deaths, new silent hurlers not yet dreamed out in the heads of men.

Obviously, the war Murray has in mind does not belong to “the old wars” or “the new wars.” Perhaps “the wars to come” have already arrived; their “new silent deaths” are the casualties of cancel culture, typically anyone (Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill) or anything (math, logic, classical music, opera) that is redolent of Western hegemony. Black, indigenous, and people of color are the new white; female is the new male; gay is the new straight; secular is the new Judeo-Christian. These “new silent hurlers” use violence that is less physical than ideological, cultural, and political.

As an unapologetic defender of the West—“the side of democracy, reason, rights, and universal principles”—Murray fights admirably. “To assess the natural quality of even the cleverest heads,” Friedrich Nietzsche says in Daybreak, “one should take note of how they interpret and reproduce the opinions of their opponents. … The perfect sage without knowing it elevates his opponent into the ideal and purifies his contradictory opinion of every blemish and adventitiousness: only when his opponent has by this means become a god with shining weapons does the sage fight against him.” Even by his own standard, Nietzsche failed to apotheosize his enemies, such as Plato and Paul. Murray approximates the status of sage by directly engaging with the words and actions of his opponents, whether critical race theorists, antiracist ideologues, education administrators, federal bureaucrats, Antifa-BLM rioters, the 1619 Project revisionists, statue topplers, anticolonialists, Enlightenment foes, and trendy clergy.

Some perspective is in order. War has been written into the cosmos ever since Lucifer, the bearer of light, esteemed himself equal to the Light, “and with ambitious aim / Against the throne and monarchy of God / Raised impious war in Heaven, and battle proud / With vain attempt,” as John Milton puts it in Paradise Lost. War moved from its cosmic battlefield to earth, but it will ultimately suffer the fate of the one who started it: defeat.

In the meantime, spiritual warfare animates every conflict—a reality not lost on previous generations of the church who recognized that “the sloth of disobedience,” or a failure to keep our zeal serving the Lord, is the ultimate cause behind war. In the opening of his sixth-century guide to monastic life, The Rule, Saint Benedict invoked martial imagery: “This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord.” As everyday monks, Christians belong not inside the walls of a cloister but to the church militant, which vigilantly campaigns against evil in the world and, more lamentably, in ourselves—not afraid, “for the Lord [our] God is the one who goes with [us] to fight for [us] against [our] enemies to give [us] victory” (Deut. 20:4).

The decisive battle in the Great War, which vanquished “the prince of this world” (John 12:31), was fought at the skull-shaped hill in ancient Jerusalem. Everything that follows Golgotha is a skirmish, including the cultural war against the Western tradition that Murray chronicles. Exaggerating the scale and severity of this war, Murray writes, “If we allow malicious critics to misrepresent and hijack our past, then the future they plan off the back of this will not be harmonious. It will be hell.”

No, hell occurs on the cross when “Christ’s body was given as the price of our redemption,” as John Calvin interprets the claim “He descended to hell” in the Apostles’ Creed. Besides the excruciating physical pain, “he paid a greater and more excellent price in suffering in his soul the terrible torments of a condemned and forsaken man.”

‘What do you like about being white?’

Midway through the bottle of wine, I would turn to a second aspect of interest in The War on the West: the antiwhite animus. What all of Murray’s enemies hold in common is a contempt for how the West underwrites the “parasitic-like condition” of whiteness, which does not yet have “a permanent cure,” according to psychoanalyst Donald Moss. “To delegitimize the West, it appears to be necessary first to demonize the people who still make up the racial majority in the West,” observes Murray. “It is necessary to demonize white people.” Murray correctly perceives internecine strife in the West, which makes Europe and North America weak as China vies to become the world’s unipolar superpower, but should we frame this strife primarily as a racialized conflict?

It is certainly worth asking how any white person today could answer Marc Lamont Hill’s gotcha question to a guest on the Black News Channel—“What do you like about being white?”—without setting off a tripwire. After all, society celebrates just about every species of identity pride except for white pride, which is judged inherently evil. Murray imagines two soft options for answering Lamont Hill’s question: either a colorblind outlook, which repudiates racial essentialism, or a reinterpretation of “white culture” as “a part of a universal culture,” open to all human beings, regardless of race. Though respectable, critics would still claim these answers betray white privilege.

At “the very edges of permissible sayability” is what Murray calls “the nuclear answer,” which takes stock of the good things that come from being white (read: Western). These include “almost every medical [and scientific] advancement”; “most of the world’s oldest and longest-established educational institutions”; “the invention and promotion of the written word”; “interest in other cultures beyond [one’s] own”; “the world’s most successful means of commerce, including the free flow of capital,” which has “lifted more than one billion people out of extreme poverty just in the twenty-first century thus far”; “the principle of representative government, of the people, by the people, for the people”; “the principles and practice of political liberty, of freedom of thought and conscience, of freedom of speech and expression”; “the principles of what we now call ‘civil rights,’ rights that do not exist in much of the world”; the music, philosophy, art, literature, poetry, and drama “that have reached such heights that the world wants to participate in them”; America as “the world’s number one destination for migrants worldwide”; and finally, “the only culture in the world that not only tolerates but encourages” self-criticism.

While this nuclear answer carries some truth, it also returns us to modern tribal lines of racial identity that are deeply problematic from a Christian point of view, which holds that there are only two “races” of human beings: the old creation of the first Adam and the new creation of the second Adam (2 Cor. 5:16–17). In an article for First Things, Anglican theologian Gerald McDermott, editor of Race and Covenant, claims the apostles taught that “the work of Jesus does not destroy the old creation unity of the one human race but redeems it and brings it to its God-given destiny by the power of the Spirit.” In another article for Public Discourse, McDermott disabuses evangelicals of racial essentialism because “there is a broad consensus among biologists and anthropologists that race as a clear distinction separating groups and individuals is a notion of modern origins without solid grounding in biology or genetics.” Moreover, biblical authors “grouped people by nations and cultures,” not by skin color. If skin color is only skin deep, then accident is not essence, lest Christians make a categorical mistake and sacralize the secular.

Gratitude and resentment

Near the end of our bottle of wine, I would address a third aspect of The War on the West. Of all strategies to fight this war, it is peculiar that Murray, as a lapsed Christian, exhorts his readers to wield the weapon of gratitude, which belongs to the arsenal of theists more than nontheists. Murray takes “an unauthorized loan from the theistic capital that he officially repudiates,” to borrow the words of philosopher John Cottingham. “True thankfulness has no really secure place in a worldview where ‘gift’ is nothing but a specious metaphor.”

To understand why gratitude plays a role in Murray’s account, we must first consider its opposite: resentment. Drawing on Nietzsche’s psychological insight that people “sanctify revenge with the term justice,” Murray avers that a disconcerting number of today’s social-justice warriors are motivated by resentment; they aim “to turn happy people into unhappy people like themselves—to shove their misery into the faces of the happy so that in due course the happy ‘start to be ashamed of their happiness and perhaps say to one another: “It’s a disgrace to be happy! There is too much misery!”’”

How can we be happy while watching a theatrical production of William Shakespeare’s Othello if we know his works are “full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and misogynoir,” according to a touchy librarian? How can we be happy while listening to George Frideric Handel’s Messiah if we know he “invested in a company that owned slaves”? How can we be happy strolling the world-famous Kew Gardens in London if we know its “plants were central to the running of the British empire,” as one botanist bemoaned? Behind calls to diversify and decolonize, the author detects “a pathological desire for destruction.”

People of resentment forbid “the best emotions,” and in Murray’s estimation, “the most important, without doubt, is gratitude.” He writes:

Without an ability to feel gratitude, all of human life and human experience is a marketplace of blame, where people tear up the landscape of the past and present hoping to find other people to blame and upon whom they can transfer their frustrations. Without gratitude, the prevailing attitudes of life are blame and resentment. Because if you do not feel any gratitude for anything that has been passed on to you, then all you can feel is bitterness over what you have not got. Bitterness that everything did not turn out better or more exactly to your liking—whatever that “liking” might be. Without some sense of gratitude, it is impossible to get anything into any proper order.

To be sure, resentment crowds out gratitude, which explains why the implacable critics of the West make woebegone society. But Murray’s notion of gratitude as an emotion is thin compared to the thick conceptualization in Christian ethics, which regards gratitude as a virtue that involves affection between a poor recipient and a prodigal giver, namely humankind and their Maker. Since God owes us nothing, everything he does give us—including himself—is gratuitous, consistent with his nature of gratuitous love.

In Learning the Virtues, Catholic priest Romano Guardini lamented how the virtue of gratitude has receded in the modern world, where democratic rights and economic transactions suppress the relational dynamic that is essential to gratitude. Guardini sets forth three conditions to gratitude:

Gratitude can exist only between an “I” and a “thou.” As soon as the consciousness of the personal quality disappears and the idea of the apparatus prevails, gratitude dies. Gratitude can exist only in the realm of freedom. As soon as there is a “must” or a claim, gratitude loses its meaning. Gratitude can exist only with reverence. If there is no mutual respect, gratitude perishes and turns to resentment. Anyone who gives assistance to others should think about that. Only the assistance which makes gratitude possible really deserves the name.

All three of these conditions have a theological character that Murray overlooks.

Is Murray guilty of what Nietzsche derisively calls “English logic,” as typified by Victorian novelist George Eliot: “They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality”? In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche castigates this kind of sophistry with reasoning that is strikingly orthodox for a putative atheist:

When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates. Christianity is a system, a consistently thought out and complete view of things. If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one has nothing of any consequence left in one’s hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know what is good for him and what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows. Christian morality is a command: its origin is transcendental; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticize; it possesses truth only if God is truth—it stands or falls with the belief in God.

More than just “a fundamental idea,” gratitude is a vital practice of Christian living because of the gift economy that God set into motion with the creation of the universe and humanity, where “every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights” (James 1:17). “Giving and thanking, which lift man above the functioning of a machine or the instinct of animals, are really the echo of something divine,” writes Guardini. “For the very fact that the world exists and embraces such inexhaustible profusion is not something self-evident; it is because it was willed; it is a deed and a work.”

Divine logic, contrary to unsound “English logic,” holds that gratitude is not possible without recognition, even adoration, of the ultimate Giver. If there is no Giver, to whom do we express gratitude? It is rather silly to thank the Earth, as if a plausibility structure in the secular West makes room for Gaea. It is silly to thank dead geniuses because the secularist, unlike the Christian, is not surrounded by “a great cloud of witnesses” (Heb. 12:1).

So, I heartily agree with Murray that the weapon of gratitude is needful in these sour times, but we cannot rely on the vagaries of an emotion. The virtue of gratitude swims against “the corrupted currents of this world,” which is how Hamlet describes the rotten state of Denmark. Strength for exercising this virtue does not reside within us, as if we could retard the flow of water, but comes to us as another gift for which we give thanks to God.

Our gratitude, then, must go well beyond the blessings of the Western tradition to the inexpressible joy of salvation made available by the Man of Sorrows. Jesus has given us an identity and mission far nobler than custodians or saviors of Western civilization. We are his “chosen race”—notice the premodern and biblical sense of the word race—“a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that [we] may proclaim the excellencies of him who called [us] out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet. 2:9, ESV).

Christopher Benson is the director of culture and instruction at Augustine Classical Academy in Lakewood, Colorado. He worships at Wellspring Anglican Church in Englewood and blogs at Bensonian.

The post Can Westerners Atone for Their Sins Without Breeding Resentment and Ingratitude? appeared first on Christianity Today.

Andrew Pressley, who has spent the past 15 years transforming the children’s music ministry at his East Texas church, thinks it’s time for the grownups to put the devices away.

“We encourage parents not to take pictures and videos of their children when they are up front,” he said. “That was an adjustment. But when kids look out and see a sea of people singing with them, that’s a different message than the one they get when they look out and see their parents behind their phones.” 

When Pressley joined the staff of First Baptist Church Lindale in 2010, about 750 people attended weekly, but the dwindling children’s choir maxed out at 6 singers. He made an intentional shift in the vision, “moving from performance to participation.” 

Rather than cultivating a children’s choir that puts on a brief show on holidays before exiting the stage, Pressley wanted to give kids a more robust experience as worshipers and worship leaders—one that would help them grow up to better understand how and why they sing.

Pressley founded KidsCore, a small organization that produces resources for churches that want to cultivate a stronger singing culture, starting with children. 

“Lifeway and Brentwood Benson have pared down their music for children’s ministry,” Pressley recalled. “I couldn’t find a curriculum that accomplished what we wanted to do.” 

Lifeway discontinued some of its children’s choir products in 2002. The company still produces arrangements of worship songs for kids, as does Brentwood Benson (an old guard Christian publisher based in Franklin, Tennessee), but Pressley was looking for something more than musicals and performance pieces.

Pressley was looking for something specific—a resource that would help children become musicians and worshipers. He wanted a combination of musical and spiritual formation that harnessed the power and fun of music-making to help children participate in the life of the body of Christ.

Kids Can Sing and Shout. How Do We Teach Them to Worship?

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Starting in 2010, Pressley and a music educator at his church began designing their own program. Over the next decade, Pressley saw the singing culture of his church change completely, beyond what used to be a six-kid children’s choir in a congregation of 750.

“In the past 15 years, kids have learned and grown, and now we have a culture of family singing, where so many more people are interested in making music together.”

KidsCore now has a small team of volunteer musicians and educators who have created arrangements and accompanying curriculum for around 40 songs, new and old. Each song  comes with a packet that includes song arrangements, multiple devotional lessons, music lessons covering principles like phrasing and rhythm, and optional activities like coloring pages and word searches.

Songs like “Be Thou My Vision,” “By Faith,” and “Joy to the World” come with pages of material that schools and churches can use to teach the song over the course of days or weeks, using each as a central theme to teach kids about music fundamentals and the Bible. 

KidsCore is one of several emerging initiatives across traditions focused on children in worship. In September, the Lilly Endowment announced that it had approved over $104 million in grant funds to 91 organizations and institutions through its Nurturing Children Through Worship and Prayer Initiative.

“Congregational worship and prayer play a critical role in the spiritual growth of children and offer important settings for children to acquire the language of faith, learn their faith traditions and experience the love of God as part of a supportive community,” said Christopher L. Coble, the endowment’s vice president for religion. 

Dordt University in Sioux Center, Iowa, received $1.25 million to fund its “All Kids are Worship Leaders” Initiative. 

“We have all of these faith formation programs for kids,” said Jeremy Perigo, one of the initiative’s directors. “But we don’t invite kids to be part of the leading and the planning and the reflection. The Spirit is poured out on all flesh, sons and daughters, children and adults.” 

Perigo, a professor of theology and worship arts, said the project team hopes to work with congregations to imagine new ways of letting children lead in their church communities. 

“We want to attend to and respect how children experience God,” said Perigo, who added that for some churches, this may require significant and permanent changes. 

“Some churches have services that are highly produced and pulpit- or platform-led. They have extremely high expectations of performance. One challenge will be helping those churches create hospitable spaces.” 

New Resource Helps Kids ‘Grow Into’ Hymns

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

In many churches, kids spend Sunday morning services in classrooms while adults participate in corporate worship. The logistics of switching to family worship can be daunting, especially when they involve reconfiguring child check-in or dismissal processes. But in the end, those changes can be worth it.

“Over time, we started bringing children into the worship services, and they would help lead and teach the congregational songs,” Pressley said.

The changes around worship practices require some teaching and guidance for the rest of the congregation. When a church is used to children serving only as occasional, cute performers, it can be hard for adults to see them as leaders. 

“Children are people. They are not sentimental objects,” said Robin McLaughlin Conine, a K–12 music teacher and composer in Greensboro, North Carolina, who arranges music for KidsCore. “Kids’ music doesn’t have to be fast; it doesn’t have to be synthy and frenetic. Kids love singing slow songs and songs in minor keys.” 

Conine and the other musicians who work for KidsCore are selective about the songs they choose, but they try not to focus exclusively on either classic hymns or new praise songs. 

“We’re trying to pick songs that seem like they will have staying power,” Conine said. 

Pressley said he’s been inspired by Keith and Kristyn Getty’s slogan: “songs to carry for life.” The KidsCore team has arranged several of the Gettys’ modern hymns, including “In Christ Alone” and “Christ Our Hope in Life and Death.” 

Kirsten Shive, a worship leader and early childhood educator in Nashville who writes music lessons to accompany KidsCore arrangements, said that kids can and should sing songs with challenging words and melodies, provided the music is beautiful enough to draw them in.

“Kids know the difference between low-quality and high-quality music,” Shive said. “They love hearing and making beautiful music.” 

Acknowledging the musical and spiritual capabilities of children is central to KidsCore and Dordt’s “All Kids are Worship Leaders” initiative. Both projects aim to reorient music programming for kids around worship and collaboration, rather than performance. Leaders involved in both recognize that this shift will require some teaching and discipleship around the treatment of children in the church. 

“Children are capable of way more than we give them credit for,” Pressley said. 

Shive insisted that those capabilities include leadership and spiritual friendship and that children are called to be more than just receivers of information or entertainment. 

“There’s an opportunity here for intergenerational discipleship. We can learn from these kids. All of us, children and adults, are called to speak truth to each other.” 

Pressley and Perigo both spoke of the positive changes children bring to the dynamic of a worship service by helping adults to take themselves less seriously and focus on the dynamic, relational work of God in the body of Christ. Whether children lead by singing from a platform or by standing side by side with adults, they bring playfulness, wonder, and joy. 

“There’s something about an awkward family gathering that children can fix. There’s something children bring that unites us and gives us perspective,” Pressley said. “When kids are around, parents do silly stuff that they wouldn’t do otherwise.” 

“There might be some noise, or a microphone drop, or a silly comment during a quiet moment,” Perigo said. “But changing some of our norms will help welcome everyone in the community of faith. It may mean going back and rethinking how we do church.” 

The post Enough With Cutesy Kids Choirs. Let the Little Ones Lead Worship. appeared first on Christianity Today.

The Future of Orthodox Anglicanism

Gerald R. McDermott (Editor), Gerald Bray (Contributor), Timothy George (Contributor), Mouneer Hanna Anis (Contributor)

Crossway

288 pages

$16.96

Against tradition without tradition (nondenominationalism), Lewis encouraged Christians to find themselves in a room because “the hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in.” He adds, “I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do get into your room you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise.”

Lewis’s analogy has organized the shape of my Christ-life with remarkable clarity. My childhood and adolescence were spent in the hall, oblivious that it was a hall and unsuitable for the long haul. Only when I studied abroad and worshiped in the Church of England did I find a room—or it found me, satisfying questions that Lewis advises in our search: “Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this?”

The journey I made from generic evangelical to Anglican fits a recent pattern narrated by American theologian Robert Webber in his 1985 book, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail. The Anglican room welcomed Webber and other evangelicals, including myself, with six areas of orthodoxy that were “not adequately fulfilled” in our Christian experience: mystery and awe, liturgical worship, sacramental vision, historical consciousness, catholic sensibility, and holistic spirituality.

The analogy of Christianity to a house originates with Paul, who reminds Gentiles that they are no longer “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise,” but now “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone” (Eph. 2:12, 19–20, ESV unless specified, emphasis added). If we reside in a house, then logic holds we must also be members of a family—and no family, east of Eden, is free from dysfunction and discord.

Brother keeping

As I read The Future of Orthodox Anglicanism, an engaging collection of essays edited by Anglican priest and theologian Gerald McDermott, I realized that my Anglican family—the third-largest Christian communion in the world (85 million) behind Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy—bears resemblance to the Karamazov family in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov.

For Dostoevsky, the family was an emblem of the promises and perils of 19th-century Russia. Just as that family was in a full-blown crisis, so too Anglicans face their own turning point five centuries after their inception in the 16th-century English Reformation. Who are we, and where are we going? The question of identity and destiny hangs not on which brother is the greatest but on whether the members of our family will practice the kind of fraternal love that Jesus exemplified when he washed the stinky and dirty feet of his disciples before they supped together for the last time.

Let me tease out the parallel between the fictional and ecclesial families. With absentee parents—mothers who desert or die and a father who is murdered—the Karamazov brothers have only each other. They must either learn to be each other’s keeper or refuse their appointed role, like Cain, through prideful disobedience or careless dereliction.

Each son in the Karamazov family represents an aspect of the human personality: Dmitri the body, Ivan the intellect, and Alyosha the spirit. Patricide exacerbates the fragmentation of the integrated personality: Together, the brothers will survive and perhaps even thrive; apart, they will dissolve. As tendencies, Dmitri’s passionate sensuality yields to bestial debauchery, Ivan’s cold intelligence succumbs to nihilistic despair, and Alyosha’s zealous spirituality detaches from worldly troubles, particularly his familial drama.

Zosima, the elder at the monastery, exhorts Alyosha to leave the security of the monastic enclosure and participate in God’s “ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18). Once equipped, Aloysha follows his mentor’s direction, “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3), starting with his own flesh and blood. Although the novel does not tidy up the messiness in the Karamazov family, it ends hopefully, as Alyosha demonstrates that he is his brother’s keeper not only inside the family but also outside with the neighborhood boys that he befriends.

Contemporary Anglicanism, like the Karamazovs, shows all the signs of a fractured fraternity: the Global North is an amalgam of the death-dealing brothers Dmitri and Ivan, whereas the Global South is a profile of the life-giving Alyosha, which makes it (in the words Dostoevsky uses to describe his protagonist) “a humble and indefinite hero” in the Anglican family.

If healing and harmony are in its future, the Anglican Communion, whose power and privilege reside in its birthplace of England, must give way to the new center of gravity in Africa, which boasts “more Christians than any other continent” as of 2018, according to McDermott. “Significantly, Nigeria has more Anglicans than any other country on the globe, and Nigeria is poised to become the third most populous nation on the planet by 2050, surpassing the United States.” Thus, McDermott reasonably claims Nigeria is “a harbinger of the future of orthodox Anglicanism. By itself, it tells us that future Anglicanism will be largely nonwhite, vibrant in mission, and a suffering church.”

Former Archbishop of Nigeria Peter Akinola puts it well: “We don’t need to go through Canterbury to get to Jesus,” which indicates that “the long season of British hegemony is over,” as his African brother Henry Luke Orombi, former Archbishop of Uganda, says. Of course, the stakeholders in the Global North are reluctant if not resistant to cede any ground, even though this appears to be a providential correction to the waywardness of the Anglo-American provinces, who have failed to “guard the good deposit [of faith] entrusted” to them (2 Tim. 1:14).

Somber notes

The volume, organized by regional, vocational, and ecclesiastical perspectives, ensures that readers hear the polyphonic voices of the worldwide Anglican Communion. Predictably, voices culled from the Global North carry a lower register of somber notes. They belong to “a remnant, chosen by grace” (Rom. 11:5); a majority of their brethren have bowed the knee to what Foley Beach, Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America, provocatively but convincingly calls “neo-pagan Anglicanism”—Anglican in style but not substance.

Speaking with a prophetic mantle, Beach observes that “liberal innovations in theology and sexual ethics” are hidden within an orthodox façade, comparable, I would say, to the Trojan horse: This so-called gift to Anglicans in North America and Great Britain signals ruin. He bemoans:

Neo-pagan Anglicanism is beautifully packaged in some of the most elegant liturgy, music, and tradition in Christianity. But it has become liturgy for the sake of liturgy, music for the sake of music, and tradition for the sake of tradition. As the apostle Paul wrote, they are “having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power” (2 Tim. 3:5). And as Athanasius argued against Arius’s heresy, the Jesus whom they promote is not the Jesus of which the Bible speaks.

As a result of this tragic accommodation to culture, Beach eschews the flaccid slogans of Canterbury and New York City about “communion across difference,” “mutual flourishing,” and “walking together” because there can be no truce with heretics and schismatics who advance a counterfeit gospel (Rom. 16:17–18). Estranged Anglicans in the Global North, he argues, can address their “ecclesial deficit” by joining forces with Anglican leaders from the Global South, who, beginning in 2008, formed the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), which has continued to serve as a vital reform movement: “As colonial and aging wineskins continue to promote neo-pagan beliefs and practices, the new wine of Christ’s continuing redemptive work will burst out to transform lives and renew our churches among the nations.”

Other voices from the Global North are comparably grave, as if singing a requiem for Anglicanism. For example, theologians Ephraim Radner and Gerald Bray, the former an Episcopalian and the latter an evangelical Anglican, share a view that Anglicanism, as a “genetic linkage” of churches, may not survive the social upheaval of late modernity.

Radner posits that “God has, until the present, been using Anglicans as a figural outworking of Christian reconciliation in a fragmented, post-Babel world.” Reconciliation of the divided church has been achieved through Anglican habits encapsulated in three Latin phrases: ecclesia semper reformanda est (ongoing reform of the church), ad fontes (retrieval of the apostolic tradition), and lex orandi, lex credendi (reciprocation of prayer and belief). Another contributor to the book, Anglican journalist and theologian Barbara Gauthier, maintains that Anglicans have wrought reconciliation through the three streams of Scripture, sacrament, and Spirit, “representing Anglicanism’s evangelical, sacramental, and charismatic traditions.”

Because Anglicanism seems to be dying, Radner suggests letting it go as “a discrete ecclesial vocation and allowing its historic and contemporary forms to be remade for some further divine purpose.” This echoes the late Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey’s vision about the built-in obsolescence of Anglicanism, as summarized in the book by Stephen Bayne: “The vocation of Anglicanism is to disappear because Anglicanism does not believe in itself but believes only in the Catholic Church of Christ; therefore it is forever restless until it finds its place in that one Body.” Bray makes a similar point: “If Anglicanism is anything, it is a servant church in which every member has a ministry and in which all who believe in Christ are equally welcome.”

Indeed, a servant church may ultimately become invisible if the schisms in the worldwide church are healed, but ecclesial unity may not be possible without “Anglican essentials,” which have faded from the Global North. What other room off the hall summons the entire Christian family to the belief and practice of the undivided church during the first five centuries, as outlined by 16th-century Anglican Divine Lancelot Andrewes: “One canon reduced to writing by God himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries and the Fathers in that period (the three centuries before Constantine and the two after) which determines the boundaries of our faith”?

The shorthand for Anglicanism is “reformed catholicism.” That seems as relevant today as ever because Geneva, Rome, and Constantinople have not come together in the ministry of Word and sacrament. And yet, as Bray recognizes, Anglicans in the Global North have either ignored or revised the formularies of the tradition—the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, the Homilies, the Ordinal, and the Book of Common Prayer—which are critical to its work of reconciliation: “Can a theological tradition exist without theology? That often seems where we are heading, but if we ever get there, Anglicanism will be as good as dead. Theological renewal is essential if we are to survive.” The via media of the Anglican tradition (interpreted in various ways as a mediator between Catholicism and Protestantism, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, popery and Puritanism) constitutes “the best of Anglicanism and its template for the future of Christianity after Christendom,” but also “evokes the worst aspects of Anglicanism: the spineless, muddling middle way that encourages a managerial mentality and gives rise to a false peace without principles,” avers ex-Episcopalian, Catholic theologian R. R. Reno.

Exultant notes

When the ear inclines to voices from the Global South, the reader experiences a jarring register break: Southern brethren hew to orthodox Christianity and therefore sing with a higher register of exultant notes. Listening to Eliud Wabukala from Kenya and Mouneer Anis from Egypt, one hears, against the rigor mortis that paralyzes the Global North, churchmen who are “resurrected by love,” to borrow Dostoevsky’s memorable phrase in his epilogue to Crime and Punishment. Their missional vigor, rooted in the formularies of the Anglican tradition, inspires hope.

“The ‘Anglican experiment’ is not ending in failure,” says Wabukala, “but is on the verge of a new and truly global future in which the original vision of the Reformers can be realized as never before.” When Archbishop of Canterbury Lord George Carey said in 1990, “You don’t have to be English to be Anglican,” he probably could not have foreseen that today, “Anglicans in the Global South represent more than 80 percent of the members of the Anglican Communion,” according to Anis.

All of which makes British colonial rule in a postcolonial world not only an anachronism but an anathema, insofar as pride of place must yield to the new reality with humility instead of reluctance and resentment. The mission field is reversed, where the once-evangelized are now the evangelizers. Fraternal love involves correction, which can be heard in Wabukala’s gentle rebuke: “Leaders from the Global North have led us down unhelpful paths. The so-called instruments of unity—the archbishop of Canterbury, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates’ Meetings—have failed to provide unity and focus for effective mission.”

Africa not only shaped the Christian mind in the past but will shape its mind—and, just as importantly, its heart—in the future. The way forward is backward through a recovery of apostolic faith that took shape with first-century African theologians like Augustine of Hippo, Tertullian and Cyprian of Carthage, and Clement, Origin, Cyril, and Athanasius of Alexandria. In short, the Global South, like Alyosha, serves as a brother’s keeper to the Global North, loving the family to a healthier and holier future.

Fruitful death

The epigraph to The Brothers Karamazov, which quotes from the Gospel of John, fits the overall impression that The Future of Orthodox Anglicanism left with me: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (12:24, KJV).

For the Christian, death is never the final word. What follows is greater: walking in “newness of life” (Rom. 6:4). It’s worth remembering that Anglicanism has died twice before: once in the 16th century during Queen Mary’s bloody reign, where she tried, in vain, to reverse the English Reformation, and again in the 17th century during the puritanical reign of Oliver Cromwell, whose commonwealth tried to banish, in vain, the Anglican Church.

In light of this history, what reason is there for fear? As Ray Sutton, presiding bishop of the Reformed Episcopal Church, observes, “Each resurgence of life after death left Anglicanism with a greater capacity to become a more unifying church. To cite the great Roman Catholic writer Henri Nouwen, out of the wounds came an ability to heal: a wounded healer. Anglicanism emerged with greater comprehensiveness, bringing in more branches of God’s vine.”

As Radner perceptively claims, the “giftedness of death is true for human persons; but it is equally true, as the Scriptures point out, for our communities of faith—Israel and the church both.” From the context of the Global North, where I worship, the Anglican family seems on the cusp of imprisonment like Dmitri or madness like Ivan. But I share Alyosha’s indefatigable hope in the Resurrection. Paul reminds us that we are “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies” (2 Cor. 4:8–10).

In a final scene from The Brothers Karamazov, Kolya, the neighborhood scoffer turned seeker, asks Alyosha, “Can it really be true as religion says, that we all rise from the dead, and come to life”? When Alyosha replies, “half laughing, half in ecstasy,” he offers a word that inspires confidence in the fruitfulness of Anglican witness bearing in the future: “Certainly, we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been.”

Christopher Benson serves as the curriculum director and humanities instructor at Augustine Classical Academy in Lakewood, Colorado, and worships at Wellspring Anglican Church in Englewood. He blogs at Bensonian.

The post The Contentious Literary Family That Explains Global Anglicanism appeared first on Christianity Today.

Adam, Eve, and the Riders of the Apocalypse: 39 Contemporary Poets on the Characters of the Bible (Poiema Poetry)

D. S. Martin (Author)

Cascade Books

176 pages

$22.50

As I watch the procession for the Gospel reading, I am gently chastened. For a lifelong creature of the church, there is always a danger of rising above the Bible through familiarity and study instead of responding under the Bible through awe and obedience. Nodding to a line of verse from the poet George Herbert, let me ask: With “Bibles laid open,” how can God’s people encounter its “millions of surprises?” Devotional poetry is a vital way to become surprised by the Word again because it awakens the mind’s attention from what Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge calls “the lethargy of custom,” directing it “to the loveliness and the wonders” of God’s self-revelation. All poetry has the potential to freshen the eyes, alert the ears, and prick the heart, but devotional poetry is set apart for its ability to inspire reverence toward the miracle of divine speech that confronts us in the biblical text.

For anthologies of classical devotional poetry, take up The Soul in Paraphrase, edited by Leland Ryken, and Before the Door of God, edited by Jay Hopler and Kimberly Johnson. Although it is difficult to improve upon the likes of George Herbert, John Milton, Christina Rossetti, and T. S. Eliot, I am grateful that the Canadian poet D. S. Martin has put together a fine anthology of contemporary poetry in Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse, which focuses on characters of the Bible, who Martin describes as “saints and stumblers.”

Just as the “the word of God is alive and active” (Heb. 4:12), so too are its readers. Therefore, we need to hear from those poets who speak in the idiom of our time. I will only treat three of the 122 poems in this collection, which can be viewed as a triptych (a picture in three panels) on the characters featured in Genesis 19, surely one of the most bizarre chapters in the Bible.

Sympathetic Imagination

Matt Malyon is the founding director of Underground Writing and a prison chaplain in Washington State. In his poem “Lot,” told from a first-person point of view, you might guess that Abraham’s nephew comes off more sympathetically, but even this literary technique does not wrest Lot from ethical ambiguity. His legacy is dubious, at best, despite Peter calling him a “righteous man” who was “greatly distressed by the depraved conduct of the lawless” in Sodom and Gomorrah (2 Pet. 2:7–8).

My gaze so fixed on the holy,

I had all but forgotten

the feel and look of her face.

My daughters, too, beautiful

and innocent, were strangers—

the easier to offer them.

Who can judge? The two angels,

heralds of the rumored doom,

were under my protection.

The first half of the poem implies that Lot was so heavenly minded that he was no earthly good to his daughters, who he volunteers to the rapacious crowd of men outside the house, or to his wife, who trails behind him as he escapes the burning cities of the plain. Does the pursuit of holiness exonerate Lot from familial neglect? Anticipating the reader’s judgment on his failure of solicitude, he asks, like any good relativist today: “Who can judge?” He justifies the inexcusable offer of his daughters by highlighting his practice of hospitality to the angelic visitors.

In the second half of the poem, the urbanite has become a troglodyte. Evacuation from Sodom returns Lot to primal reality, where anguished thoughts about his salinized wife come to him inside a cave: “Even the feel / of my arms around her brave turn / a memory now, the taste of her / hardened lips less salt than fire.” Those lips taste “less salt than fire” because, despite the merciful rescue operation, God’s fiery judgment rests upon Lot as much as those who were reduced to ashes.

James E. Cherry, a poet and novelist from Tennessee, authors the second panel in our triptych, “Lot’s Wife.” Here, the third-person point of view editorializes on the story in Genesis 19, taking its cue from Jesus’ exhortation to the disciples, “Remember Lot’s wife!” (Luke 17:32). Addressing the woman directly, the speaker exercises a sympathetic imagination by trying to delineate some of the humanity that was absorbed into a pillar of salt:

History has deemed you unworthy of a name,

the mere property of Abraham’s nephew,

a case study on the perils of possessing the past.

But maybe, in your haste for the hills, the photos

of you and Lot at the beach flashed

across your mind or maybe a pot of coffee

on the fire came to your remembrance or the dog barking

to be walked or fed woke you from the daydream.

Was Lot’s wife “unworthy of a name” because she disobeyed the angel’s command, “Flee for your lives! Don’t look back, and don’t stop anywhere in the plain!” (Gen. 19:17)? On this reading, all sin erases our identity as God’s beloved, whether gradually or suddenly. Or, was she “unworthy of a name” because, in the patriarchal society of the ancient Hebrews, a woman could not occupy a role higher than “the mere property” of her husband? Either way, history—personified as an impersonal force—seems cruel to this wife whose “glance over the shoulder” was fatal. But why? In the rush to leave Sodom, can she be faulted for sentimental ties to hearth and home?

Before we take her side entirely, the speaker concedes, “These are the things of speculation. What we know / for sure is that your life has become a moral to an Old Testament story”—a moral revived by Jesus in his lesson about the coming kingdom. The rabbi unveils the secret about why she is “a footnote upon the history / of fire and brimstone”: “Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it” (Luke 17:33). Instead of living forward into God’s promises, Lot’s wife looked backward to her security and thereby lost her life. We recoil at the harsh sentence, but this story jolts us into an undeniable truth: Where your home is, there your heart will be also.

Beginning to Hear Again

The final panel of the triptych, “Lot’s Daughters,” is by Marjorie Maddox, a professor of English at Lock Haven University and author of poetry, short stories, essays, and children’s books. As if a spectator to the events of Genesis 19, this speaker’s voice is more intimate than distant. Divided into four parts, the first concerns Lot’s “almost-sacrifice” of his daughters to the “leering mob circling / the house, jeering, dancing naked, / taunting the guests with their sex.” What kind of father would barter his daughters’ sexual integrity? It seems impossible to regard Lot as Peter did, which accounts for why his appellation of “righteous man” appears in scare quotes. The reader feels the terror of his daughters in the stanzas below:

Then their eyes were like Isaac’s

below the knife,

the ram not yet in the bush,

the blade gleaming.

What dread dug in the daughters’

betrayed hearts before the rioters—

struck blind—stumbled and fell,

unable to find the door,

Lot tugged back safely to the house?

By comparing the near-rape of Lot’s daughters to the near-sacrifice of Isaac at Moriah, the speaker emphasizes the traumatic experience of the would-be victims. How could they trust their fathers again, even if their fathers are rightly lauded for acting with firm trust in God’s inscrutable plan? Enter Søren Kierkegaard, who argued that Abraham suspended his ethical qualms when he chose to kill Isaac because he believed that God ordained a righteous end (or telos). Similarly, Lot performed with a “teleological suspension of the ethical” when he chose to hand over his daughters to lascivious men. While this brings some philosophical coherence to otherwise inexplicable situations, it gives little psychological relief to the children of these patriarchs.

The second and third parts of the poem concern a silence in the biblical text about how, if at all, the daughters responded to the transmogrification of their mother. What follows in the fourth part of the poem raises the question: Would it have been better for Lot’s daughters to have perished in the “ashen cities” than to violate the holiness code against incest (Lev. 18:7)?

This time, they sacrificed themselves,

holding out wine, lifting their dresses

to lure their father.

He twirled a drunken dance,

love or revenge spinning,

blurring vision.

“Rewarded” with sons,

they named them From Father

and Son of My People,

sang lullabies of fear and fire,

of what it means to wander,

to exile yourself,

to dream of salt and sand.

The speaker does not piously edit the heinous deeds of Lot’s daughters, but conjectures about why, as fugitives in a cave with “no hope for heirs,” they engaged in drunken sex with their father: “love or revenge spinning, / blurring vision.” If love, then the desire was disordered. If revenge, the anger was uncontrolled. Whatever the motive, Lot’s daughters share their “mother’s unbelief.” Their self-sacrifice was ignoble—a far cry from our Savior’s work on the Cross.

Too easily we forget, as the Bible-besotted theologian Karl Barth said, “The Word of God is the Word that God spoke, speaks, and will speak in the midst of all men. Regardless of whether it is heard or not, it is, in itself, directed to all men. It is the Word of God’s work upon men, for men, and with men. His work is not mute; rather, it speaks with a loud voice.”Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse helps to amplify that voice for Christians who are no longer riveted by the recorded breaths of God. With the decibels of a rock concert, we may begin to hear again. These poetic glosses on Scripture break open its millions of surprises.

Christopher Benson teaches literature and theology at The Cambridge School of Dallas, worships at St. Bartholomew’s Anglican Church in Dallas, and blogs at Bensonian.

The post How Devotional Poetry Unlocks the Bible’s Surprises appeared first on Christianity Today.

Being Human: Bodies, Minds, Persons

Rowan Williams (Author)

Eerdmans

127 pages

$12.55

Metaphors efficiently transport meaning when literal language fails us. The poet Emily Dickinson compares hope to “the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.” The economist Adam Smith compares the free market to “an invisible hand” that promotes social welfare despite the natural selfishness of individuals. As C. S. Lewis claims in Miracles, “The truth is that if we are going to talk at all about things which are not perceived by the senses, we are forced to use language metaphorically.”

For much of Western civilization, there was a consensus among Christian and non-Christian thinkers about the material and spiritual nature of human beings. The Genesis creation story memorably captures this dynamic harmony when “the Lord form[s] a man from the dust of the ground and breathe[s] into his nostrils the breath of life” (2:7). But the materialism of our time diverges from this consensus, insisting that we are only brains and bodies—nothing more.

When I recently taught Mere Christianity, I was surprised that Lewis frequently deploys a mechanical metaphor for human beings. He is typically alert to imperfect illustrations. And nothing, in my estimation, is more imperfect than transfiguring a living organism into a manufactured object. Lewis says, “God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on.”

Notice how Lewis, who seems uneasy with his own mechanical metaphor, adds an organic metaphor. But he presses on with the mechanical one, as if the Garden of Eden were a pristine garage for Aston Martins until a malevolent mechanic interfered: “In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down. They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us humans.” Elsewhere in the book, Lewis imagines humans as “a fleet of ships sailing in formation”; moral failure occurs when we collide into each other and when our “steering gears” malfunction.

Despite using these mechanical metaphors for human beings, Lewis readily admits that God did not invent mere machines, as the gift of free will makes clear: “A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designed for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water.”

Why, then, does Lewis employ mechanical metaphors for the human being? As much as he was a medievalist by training and imagination, he still lived in the modern world. Ever since the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes described humans as “microclocks” belonging to an interconnected “macroclock” of the universe, the metaphorical mechanization of life has been hard to escape. Materialism has come like a thief in the night, robbing us of organic metaphors for the human being. Cars and ships are meager in comparison to rich pictures of sheep rescued by a watchful shepherd (Ezek. 34:11–16), fruit-bearing branches that abide in the nourishing vine (John 15:4–5), or, most affectingly, adopted sons and heirs of the kingdom (Gal. 4:4–7; James 2:5).

A Network of Relations

In Being Human, the Anglican theologian Rowan Williams awakens us to the dead metaphor of the human machine, which has become so familiar that we seldom recognize it as a metaphor, let alone one that truncates the mystery and complexity of our existence. His book is the latest contribution in “a sort of unintended trilogy” that includes Being Christian (2014) and Being Disciples (2016). Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, speaks clearly and calmly into the “contemporary confusion” about our humanity because he follows the perfect model of being fully human: Jesus Christ. Consisting of addresses given between 2009 and 2015, the first three chapters concern human nature as it relates to consciousness, personhood, and mind-body relations, while the last two chapters concern human flourishing as it relates to faith and silence.

Like C. S. Lewis before him, Williams understands that human beings are set apart from animals because of personhood—a nature shared with our three-personal God. Machines, however sophisticated, lack this nature; therefore, we should resist comparing humans to them. If personhood depended upon “a set of facts,” we might tick various boxes to judge whether a human being deserves respect, thus endangering “those not yet born, those severely disabled, those dying, those in various ways marginal and forgotten.” Williams persuasively argues that we ascribe dignity to humans—regardless of “how many boxes are ticked”—because every person stands “in the middle of a network of relations” that confers meaning and worth. God himself belongs to a network of relations that Christians name the Trinity.

Not only does the community of the Godhead precede the community of humans, but the latter is coupled to the former, making atomized existence a delusion. As the metaphysical poet John Donne famously penned, “No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” What else could this continent be other than God? God, we could say, reclaims the oceans that man invents to separate himself from his Creator and neighbor. “Before anything or anyone is in relation with anything or anyone else,” Williams writes, “it’s in relation to God … the deeper I go into the attempt to understand myself, who and what I am, the more I find that I am already grasped, addressed, engaged with. I can’t dig deep enough in myself to find an abstract self that’s completely divorced from relationship. So, for St. Augustine and the Christian tradition, before anything else happens I am in relation to a non-worldly, non-historical everlasting attention and love, which is God.”

Man is “neither a machine nor a self-contained soul,” as materialist and spiritualist views of human life erroneously claim. We are instead hybrid creatures—body and soul—living in “the material world, subject to the passage of time, and yet mysteriously able to go beyond the agenda that is set, to reshape what is around; above all, committed to receiving and giving, to being dependent as well as independent, because that’s what relation is.” A theologically informed language of personhood corrects the mechanical language that reduces us to a checklist of attributes and the individualist language that alienates us from the destiny of others.

Faith and Silence

Once we have developed a proper notion of being human, we should ask how to become more human in a world that conspires to make us less human. Here, Williams offers wise reflections on the roles of faith and silence in human flourishing. Faith helps us mature in four ways: (1) Against the modern ideal of autonomy, faith empowers us to acknowledge a “non-disabling dependence” on divine liberty as we become who we were meant to be—the adopted sons of God (Rom. 8:15). (2) Against a neurological determinism that makes us victims of unchosen instincts, faith educates the passions to serve the good. (3) Against the undifferentiated and commodified time of secularism, faith reckons with time as “a complex and rich gift … the medium in which we not only grow and move forward but also constructively return and resource—literally re-source—ourselves.” (4) Against the kind of anxiety expressed by Claudio in William Shakespeare’s drama Measure for Measure(“Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; to lie in cold obstruction and to rot”), faith teaches us to accept our mortality, living purposely because our days are numbered.

Known for his mystical practice of Christianity, Williams considers how silence aids our “growing humanity.” We are tempted by a fantasy of domesticating whatever is wild and managing whatever is unwieldy. Silence humbles this will to power, which explains why we fear prayer that relinquishes words, theology that eschews systems, and worship that invites mystery. Silence helps us to let God be God, Williams believes, “and in the process we’re letting ourselves become more fully human, because, in the extraordinary economy of heaven, God is God by being God for us, and we are human by being human for God; and all joy and fulfillment opens up once we recognize this.”

The epilogue of Being Human is an insightful sermon that Williams delivered on Ascension Day at Westminster Abbey. Had I been a disciple who followed Jesus through it all—the life-changing ministry, the heart-wrenching death, and the mind-boggling resurrection—I might have sunk into depression when he “was taken up before [my] very eyes, and a cloud hid him from [my] sight” (Acts 1:9). Where is the good news for humanity in the bodily absence of our Lord and Savior? The Ascension, according to Williams, celebrates “the extraordinary fact that our humanity in all of its variety and vulnerability has been taken by Jesus into the heart of the divine life. ‘Man with God is on the throne,’ the hymn goes.” We are not left alone, sorting through our own mess.

Jesus, Williams preaches, hears all the words we speak and takes them before the Father, saying: “This is the humanity I have brought home. It’s not a pretty sight; it’s not edifying and impressive and heroic, it’s just real: real and needy and confused, and here it is (this complicated humanity) brought home to heaven, dropped into the burning heart of God—for healing and transformation.” Amen.

Christopher Benson teaches literature and theology at The Cambridge School of Dallas. He blogs at Bensonian.

The post What Humans Have That Machines Don’t appeared first on Christianity Today.

33 Under 33

“33 Under 33” is breathtaking, to say the least. There has been too much gloom and doom from too many pulpits and books. After all, there is no set way to do church in the New Testament except for meeting together in Jesus’ name and with the gifts of the Spirit to lead.

Of those featured, Wesley Hill stands out. Many of us gay Christians have had a hard road to walk. We desired to be able to speak freely of our struggles and to have prayer with others. We desired to be Christ’s servants in many areas but were denied because of fear that even having thoughts and desires was evil.

Hill’s openness should have been a part of church life from the days of Paul.

Ted Adams Gresham, Oregon

I was greatly inspired by “33 Under 33.” Now how about a sequel featuring the Abrahams of this world, who, instead of resigning themselves to puttering in the garden and taking cruises, use their golden years creatively to “do exploits” for the kingdom of God?

I recently visited Mount Rushmore and learned that its sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, began the work at age 58. Abraham heard God’s call at 65, and the work that began in him continues to this day. Our churches are loaded with senior citizens. Many know they have some purpose yet in life. Can we encourage them?

Greg Moore Rainier, Oregon

Gleanings

I don’t know when I have felt as stunned as when I read “Immoral Minority,” on how many evangelical and born-again churchgoers would do heinous acts for money. Are we sitting next to a fellow churchgoer who would kick a dog hard in the head, cheat, demean, and flip off others for the right amount of money?

Corinne Golden Carlsbad, California

Editor’s Note: In “Learning Who Latino Evangelicals Are” under News, we should have pictured the flag of the Dominican Republic. We apologize for this error, and thank Yanira Molina for her correction.

Staying Alive in a Suicidal World

To add to CT’s Where We Stand, one way to help further reduce depression and suicide in the world, especially in our Christian communities, is by republishing an old idea: practicing intrinsic religion.

Gordon Allport described intrinsic religion as, in part, “practicing what one . . . deep down believes is true, characterized by the ability to not be overwhelmed by inconsistencies, staying open-minded.” Staying open-minded does not mean rejecting the Bible. Rather, it means that since God does not change, we must. It also means that, if we want to avoid depression and suicide, we have to be entirely honest with ourselves and what we truly believe. Every mistaken belief we have is an opportunity for God to show his power by changing us for the better.

My work is so much easier when I depend on God to do the internal work. We cannot find God without God revealing himself to us, and when he does, we will know intrinsic religion.

I encourage everyone to keep trying different approaches to treating their depression, and to never give up.

Robert D. Neve Executive Director, The Clearview Center Omaha

Her.meneutics

“The Hidden Blessing of Infertility” was thoughtful, but I was disappointed that author Karen Swallow Prior did not mention adoption as way to become a parent. Adoption is not for everyone, and I am glad that Prior has found fulfillment through other blessings provided by the Lord. But for many, adoption is a way to parenthood, a way mentioned many times in the Bible: Our Savior Jesus Christ was adopted by his earthly father; Moses by Pharaoh’s daughter; Esther by her uncle, etc. And of course, we as believers are adopted into God’s family.

Nancy Dubois Grand Rapids, Michigan

Open Question

I really enjoy the Open Question section. This past issue’s question, “Would Jesus hang out in a strip club?” was particularly thought-provoking.

What all three respondents would agree on—and every Christian should agree on—is that no person is off-limits from the pursuit of God. He graciously comes for every one of us. The differences in the answers weren’t so much about the people of the mission, but the location of the mission. And this is where I struggled.

I appreciated how Mike Foster said “no place is off-limits to the gospel.” But then he says, “There is no context, environment, or event that Jesus would choose not to be in.” I wonder if it is significant that when Jesus “ate with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners,” it was in their own homes or the homes of friends, away from their place of business. Jesus goes after the people, but not always into the locations of their sin. Yes, the darkest places need the light, but strippers are still as lost when they leave the club as when they are in the middle of the stage.

Jake Chitouras Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada

Water Works

In the Global Gospel Project, it is a bit harsh to say that the Salvation Army “rejects baptism entirely.” It is mostly our fault because we have not explained often or well enough our position, taken when William Booth discontinued the ceremony with water. This was mainly because of conflictive beliefs among his coworkers on the subject, which drove him to his Bible, where he found justification for his decision.

Basically, the Army sees baptism as a public and unambiguous testimony of one’s new faith in Christ. We have always urged such witnessing, though not using any of the traditional ceremonies with water.

A Baptist theology professor gave me the best (short) statement of our position when he asked me, “Do you all still spiritualize baptism?” I like that. Understood thus, the repentant thief on the cross did get baptized: In front of others he expressed his admission of sinfulness and showed his faith in Christ, and Christ confirmed his faith.

Larry Repass Newnan, Georgia

The Most Troubling Parable

Like author Alec Hill, I too have been troubled and puzzled by the “slave” parable in Luke. However, the example of Takashi Nagai—a godly man who survived the bombing of Nagasaki and went on to serve others, offering spiritual wisdom to millions—has helped me understand the spirit of being a slave to Christ. On Nagai’s tombstone, it says, “We are unworthy servants, we have only done what was our duty” (Luke 17:10). His life is a testimony to the meaning of that parable.

Cheryl Touryan Indian Hills, Colorado

A Grief Transformed

This is a beautiful testimony by Tara Edelschick. I find it interesting, though, that when faced with an open Communion table, Edelschick still realized the defining distinction of what it means to take Communion and follow Christ (you are either with him or against him), which seems to be one of the main defenses for a closed Communion table as well.

Andrea Ruffner Cavanaugh Facebook

Net Gain

Responses from the Web.

“All work has dignity because it belongs to our God-given cultural mandate (Gen. 1:28). Some people are suited for the trades, others for higher education. One is not better than another. The mistake is to turn higher education into vocational training, whether that’s for white-collar or blue-collar jobs.” Christopher Benson, JeffHaanen.com. “The Work of Their Hands,” by Jeff Haanen and Chris Horst.

“This keeps on happening over and over, dimming the light in more ways than one. This is not a comment on what and if Driscoll did, but a comment on our Christian love affair with celebrity Christians and big ministries.” Chip M Anderson, Facebook. Gleanings: “Acts 29 Removes Mars Hill, Asks Mark Driscoll To Step Down and Seek Help,” by Ruth Moon.

“I’m preaching on it this Sunday. Thanks for the exhortation.” Matt Orth @lesswithoutyou Her.meneutics: “Why Pastors Should Preach About Body Image,” by Sharon Hodde Miller.

“As always, John Perkins nails it. It is long past time our churches pretend that racism no longer exists.” Robert J Mayer, CT online comment. Thin Places: “John Perkins: The Sin of Racism Made Ferguson Escalate So Quickly,” interview by Amy Julia Becker.

“The funny thing about Scripture is a woman would do everything Ed exhorts men to do and come out perfectly feminine. It’s not about replicating a certain portrait of your gender. It’s about doing what God asks you to do.” Christopher T Casberg, CT online comment. The Exchange: “Act Like Men: What It Means to Fight Like a Man,” by Ed Stetzer.

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At some libraries, alas, there's more going on. Space devoted to books is shrinking. I've seen no sign of that at our library (so far, at least). Nevertheless, the current round of weeding out is unusually severe. Among the books on the sale shelf yesterday were volumes by Elizabeth Bowen, Vance Bourjaily, Malcolm Bradbury, Gillian Bradshaw, Dorothy Bryant, John Buchan, Christopher Buckley, William F. Buckley, Frederick Buechner, and Mikhail Bulgakov, along with other Bs too numerous to mention. I've read titles—in some cases, many titles—by all those named except Bradshaw and Bryant. I hate to think of these books no longer being available except via interlibrary loan—but again, what's the alternative?

Please don't suppose that ALL of the fiction by the writers named has been discarded. There are still a number of Buechner titles on the shelf. You'll still be able to check out Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita at the Wheaton Public Library. (If you want to read Bourjaily, you'll have to resort to interlibrary loan or pick up a cheap used copy.) I'm sure the discarded titles hadn't been checked out in a while—in some instances, not for MANY years.

Even so, I felt a crazy desire to "save" these books (at $1 apiece). I settled for acquiring several historical novels by Bryher (the pen-name of Winifred Ellerman). She turns up in many books by and about "modernist" American writers, ranging from H. D. to Hemingway. Marianne Moore admired her fiction, but I haven't read her. Now seems like a good occasion to do so.

Question: In what very interesting book of American poetry, published in the year 2012, do the following lines appear?

What is Christianity, anyway? Is it a
theological tractate? Or merely
Whatever answers the needs of people
standing at gravesites—?

The first reader to submit the correct answer (not counting close friends of the poet—we'll use the honor system) will receive a book of poems. (The answer to the poem's question, of course, is "neither.")

"Even the most gifted scholars were so immersed in the scriptures that they often saw the Bible everywhere they looked. There was a serious theory that the Great Sphinx at Giza was a monument to Noah. It was decided that the pharaoh Akhenaten wrote the original version of Psalm 104. Petrie visited an orphanage and his trained eye could not fail to notice that two of the children were Hittites … .

"Moreover, the meshing of biblical and Egyptological enthusiasms defied any neat boundaries. Religious skeptics of long standing would suddenly be overcome with fascination that a particular scriptural text was being confirmed by archaeology. Conversely, orthodox clergymen would plunge into occult Egyptian rituals. The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor was actually led by an Anglican vicar. The archbishop of Canterbury, E. W. Benson, was so enamored with ancient Egypt that the family cat was named after the god Ra. Primed with such zeal, his daughter, Margaret Benson, had Egyptology and Anglicanism so thoroughly blended together in her head that when she arrived in situ she found herself, in the fullness of her heart, confessing her sins to the Sphinx. But as ever in this story, the zany lies side by side with the substantial: Benson went on to become the first woman to lead an Egyptian excavation."

For the rest of the story, turn to p. 38 of this issue, where Timothy Larsen reviews Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822-1922, by David Gange. And speaking of Tim Larsen, his latest book is just out—The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith (Oxford Univ. Press).

Have you heard that we've launched a biweekly digital edition of B&C that you can read on your tablet? (See the ad on p. 6 for more information.) Our art director, Jennifer McGuire, has created a very handsome and user-friendly design, as I think you'll agree. The digital biweekly will also feature some extras. If you subscribe to our free weekly e-newsletter, you already know that we regularly publish web exclusives, pieces that appear only on the B&C website, not in print. In July, for example, we posted Wesley Hill's tribute to his friend Chris Mitchell, whose sudden death left many of us feeling bereft.

But over the years I've discovered that many faithful readers of the magazine are not aware of these web exclusives. To introduce such readers (you, for instance?) to what they're missing, one installment of the digital biweekly gathers five web exclusives posted on the B&C website between June and December of last year. I hope you'll enjoy them—and that you will start looking for such pieces routinely.

Since the start of the year, we have been receiving donations fulfilling pledges made last fall to support B&C in 2014. Thanks to all of you who have already done so. We continue working toward our goal of securing funding for 2015-18. When I look at the contents of the September/October issue—encompassing Dale VanKley on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Matthew Milliner on Thomas Pfau's Minding the Modern, Rachel Marie Stone on Slow Church, D. L. Mayfield on trafficking into forced labor, and Sarah Ruden on the survival of writers in the digital age—I'm thankful all over again for your support.

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