Category Archive: Theology
PJL on ERH
Recently, I’ve been reading Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s I Am an Impure Thinker, though when I read it in a coffeeshop, as I have been, I wonder if people who see it think it’s a book about having impure thoughts. In the opening essay, “Farewell to Descartes,” Rosenstock-Huessy takes on Rene Descartes and the philosophers who strived for “pure thought,” unaffected by emotion or circumstances or the fact that humans don’t always behave strictly rationally. He writes:
Our attack on Cartesianism is inevitable since “pure” thought encroaches everywhere on the field of social studies. Historians and economists and psychologists cannot stand the idea of not being “pure” thinkers, real scientists. What a frustration!
I am an impure thinker. I am hurt, swayed, shaken, elated, disillusioned, shocked, comforted, and I have to transmit my mental experiences lest I die. And although I may die. To write a book is no luxury. It is a means of survival. By writing a book, a man frees his mind from an overwhelming impression. The test for a book is its lack of arbitrariness, the fact that it had to be done in order to clear the road for further life and work (p. 2).
In the course of this essay, Rosenstock-Huessy proposes a new grammar, which doesn’t start with the first person indicative (“I do this or that”) but rather with the second person imperative (“Do this!”):
King Ptolemaeus’ grammarians in Alexandria first invented the table which all of us had to learn in school: “I love, he loves, we love, you love, they love.” Probably that table of tenses set the keystone into the arch of the wrong psychology. For in this scheme all persons and forms of action seem to be interchangeable. This scheme, used as the logic of philosophy from Descartes to Spencer and as the principle of politics from Machiavelli to Marx, is a grammar of human caricatures.
How far, in fact, does the “I” apply to man? For an answer to this question let us look into the imperative. A man is commanded from outside for a longer time in his life than he can dispose of the “I.” Before we can speak or think, the imperative is aiming at us all the time, by mother, nurse, sisters and neighbors: “Eat, come, drink, be quiet!” The first form and the permanent form under which a man can recognize himself and the unity of his existence is the imperative. We are called a Man and we are summoned by our name long before we are aware of ourselves as an Ego. And in all weak and childlike situations later we find ourselves in need of somebody to talk to us, call us by our name and tell us what to do. We talk to ourselves in hours of dispair, and ask ourselves: How could you? Where are you? What will you do next? There we have the real man, waiting and hoping for his name and his imperative. There we have the man on whom we build society…. A man who can listen to his imperative is governable, educatable, answerable. And when we leave the age of childhood behind us we receive our personality once more by love: “It is my soul that calls upon my name,” says Romeo (p. 7).
Baffled yet? Perhaps. Rosenstock-Huessy isn’t the easiest writer to read.
But his point is that we aren’t the kind of person that Descartes and his followers claim we are. We aren’t primarily minds.  We are not the initiators of our own thoughts, as if our minds are isolated from society and the world and thinking independently. Nor is it the case that we are because we think.
On the contrary, others come before we do. Before we can think our own thoughts, we have other people addressing us. Before we say “I,” they are saying “You” to us. And above all, God addresses us:
We do not exist because we think. Man is the son of God and not brought into being by thinking. We are called into society by a mighty entreaty, “Who art thou, man, that I should care for thee?” And long before our intelligence can help us, the new-born individual survives this tremendous question by his naive faith in his elders. We grow into society on faith, listening to all kinds of human imperatives. Later, we stammer and stutter, nations and individuals alike, in the effort to justify our existence by responding to the call (pp. 10-11).
And so, instead of Descartes’ slogan Cogito ergo sum (“I think; therefore I am”), Rosenstock-Huessy proposes this one: Respondeo etsi mutabor (“I respond although I will be changed”). We are never “pure thinkers,” independent of the world around us, churning out our own ideas. Rather, we live in the world and in society and are always responding, and called to respond, even though that means that we also are always being changed, moving into new situations, becoming new people.
Again, Rosenstock-Huessy isn’t the easiest writer to read, nor is it always clear (to me, at least) exactly what he’s getting at or what the significance of what he’s saying might be. I’ve heard that he’s worth reading, and so I’m wrestling my way through him, which is actually a lot more fun than it sounds, even when he baffles me. (I also am an impure thinker. I am baffled. But bafflement is part of how God grows us toward wisdom.)
All of which leads up to this, my thankfulness that there are others who have wrestled with Rosenstock-Huessy and who can point out what I may fail to grasp. So enough of my few quotations from one essay I probably don’t even understand. On, if you’re interested, to Peter Leithart’s essay on “The Relevance of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy,” which may whet your appetite more than my comments.
Nothing
Screwtape predicts internet surfing?
As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forego (for this is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention.
You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room.
All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”
The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong.” And Nothing is very strong, strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off (C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters 63-64, paragraph breaks added.)
And now … back to work!
Disappointment
More wisdom from Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters in the form of advice from a senior devil writing to a junior tempter whose “patient” has just become a Christian:
Work hard … on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman. The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavour. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing.
The Enemy takes this risk because He has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human vermin into what He calls His “free” lovers and servants — “sons” is the word He uses, with His inveterate love of degrading the whole spiritual world by unnatural liasons with the two-legged animals. Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves them to “do it on their own.”
And there lies our opportunity. But also, remember, there lies our danger. If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt (pp. 17-18; I’ve added paragraph breaks).
Let me first quibble with a couple things in this quotation. While I understand what Lewis is saying about getting past dependence on emotion, I’m a little leary about Lewis’s love of reason, which shows up strongly in the first letter here, and his perhaps related distrust of emotion. Even when we persevere in the face of dryness, it seems to me that emotion is still involved, not least the emotion we associate with a longing for joy and a memory of past joy.
I’ll quibble also with Lewis’s emphasis on freedom. It’s not just freedom God is after, it seems to me. It’s maturity. God allows the disappointment and dryness at the outset of our endeavours because he wants us to grow to maturity. Children have decisions made for them. They are carried from place to place. When the chair they’re trying to climb into is too high for them, someone picks them up and puts them into it. Grown-ups generally have to get into their own chairs, make their own decisions, and so forth. And God’s goal for us is that we be mature, that we be grown-up.
To that end, He makes life puzzling, so puzzling we just have to give up trying to figure it all out and go and eat and drink and be merry because God has already accepted our works, as Ecclesiastes says. And to that end, God also allows life to be a vapor so that the great art works of the past decay, so that we lose many of Bach’s great compositions, so that great architecture crumbles and buildings fall down, and things we love change. That would likely have been the case even apart from the Fall.
Quibbles aside, what struck me as so important about the phenomenon Screwtape mentions here is that it often goes unnoticed. Well, we all notice it. We all notice that the job we thought we’d love rapidly becomes drudgery. As Alexander Schmemann has said, “Every job which has had three Mondays in its history already becomes meaningless, or at least to some extent oppressive.”
We notice that, but we don’t notice it as a general phenomenon. We feel the disappointment, the dryness, when we buckle down to doing our new job, the job we thought we’d love. We feel it, as Lewis says, when we get married and start learning to love each other in that new situation. We feel it sometimes even when we finally start reading a book we’d been hoping to get to for some time. And we feel it, as Screwtape points out, when we become Christians and start attending church.
We feel it, but we don’t say to ourselves, “Hey, that’s how it is with everything in life. The initial excitement wears off and we go through a dry period or a series of dry periods.” Instead, we act as if this disappointment and dryness are surprising (“Oh, no! What’s happening? This isn’t what I expected”) and that gives the devil a foothold.
Now if only I could remember all of this the next time it happens.
Theologies of Kissing
I came across this the other day: a list of various theologians and their theologies of kissing. The authors have done a great job of capturing the style and tone of the various theologians. Scroll through the comments and you’ll find more.
Now these “theologies” are, of course, all made up by the various writers. I suspect, though, that Augustine (whose theology, as Peter Leithart has said, is as large as life and sometimes larger) might have had an actual theology of kissing.
And why not? The Bible actually talks a fair bit about kissing. Think of “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” in the Song of Songs, and Paul’s frequent encouragement to greet one another with a holy kiss. So it would certainly be possible to write a theology of kissing.
It might go something like this: Eating, in the Bible, has to do with communion. That’s why sacrifices in the Bible are called “food for God”: God “eats” them and in so doing “eats” the worshipers who presented them, drawing them into His fiery presence. Similarly, when we eat the Lord’s supper, we have communion with Christ and with each other.
We eat with our mouths and with our mouths we kiss. The kiss is a symbolic eating. “I could eat you up!” lovers sometimes say, and parents say that to their babies as they pretend to gobble up their tummies. And because it’s a symbolic eating, it’s also a form of close communion.
That’s not all that could be said, but now the ball is in your court. What is the biblical theology of kissing?
Surfing the Web
I came across a few interesting items while surfing the web in the last couple of days, so I thought I’d pass them on to you:
The universe is stranger than we thought: Here are thirteen things that don’t make sense. [HT: Alastair]
77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, Better. [HT: Alastair]
Ros Clarke on the Song of Songs.
Peter Leithart, “Humanism and Health Care” (you’ll have to scroll down to March 6 to find it), with a follow-up here.
Toby Sumpter, “Classical Education is Christian Education” and “You are the Curriculum”
“When the Scriptures Fell Open” is a snippet from a book by C. Veenhof, translated by Theodore Plantinga, about the 1940s in the Netherlands. It strikes me that there are some similarities to certain debates taking place in the Reformed world today.
Also by Veenhof: “The Word of God and Preaching” (translated by Nelson Kloosterman). Kloosterman assigned this to us when I was in seminary, and I’m glad to see it online now.
N. T. Wright, “Simply Lewis,” a very helpful review of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.
Henry Law: Gnostic?
Henry Law was one of the leading evangelicals in the Anglican Church in the 19th century, according to the blurb on the back of the Banner of Truth edition of his The Gospel in Genesis. I was surprised, though, by what he says about the creation of Adam from the dust (Gen. 2:7):
When we go back to the birth of him, who is this common birth [i.e., who is the father of the whole human race], we naturally ask, of what material is the work? Pride would conclude, that no mean quarry could produce such frame. But pride must lie low before the unerring word: “Dust thou art.”
Ponder this first truth. The mightiest monarch, — the Lazarus at his gate, — are one in base original. The common parentage is that of worms. The flesh of each is but the filth, which our feet scorn. Who, then, will boast of beauty or of strength? There is a voice in dust which mocks such pitiable folly.
But man is more than a shell of clay. The mean case holds a matchless jewel. God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” The flesh is of the earth and earthy. The spirit is from on high and heavenly. One is the clog of matter. The other is a ray from God. One soon crumbles back to vileness. The other is a deathless principle. One sinks as to the level of the beasts. The other gives the wings of immortality.
Reader, you cannot think too highly of the soul. It cannot cease to be. Age after age imprints no wrinkle on it. It neither withers nor decays. Its time is timeless. Its death is never (pp. 18-19).
Isn’t this the heresy of gnosticism? While he doesn’t quite say that the body is bad, he does describe it as made out of “filth” and “vileness” and as “the clog of matter” as opposed to spirit. Quite clearly, to Law “spirit” is good and the body not so good.
If he’s thinking of human nature after the Fall, then he’s forgetting that the whole man fell, not just his body, that the whole man, including the spirit, experiences death because of sin, and that the sins that Paul characterizes as “fleshly” include what we often think of as sins of the “spirit.”  But if he’s thinking of human nature before the Fall (which I assume he is, given that he’s meditating on Genesis 2:7), there’s an even greater problem, because he’s saying that even apart from sin, our bodies as God made them were mere clay shells and filthy, the kind of thing we scorn. Of course, he’s also forgetting that the term “living soul” here is the same term that’s used for the animals and fish back in Genesis 1.
Weird stuff. I’ll have to see if the book gets better later on.
The Bible and Human History
We today are so used to reading the Bible only for individual inspiration and personal guidance that we overlook the fact that the Bible is also concerned with the development of human history. The Bible teaches us that humanity is God’s Daughter. We are called Daughter Zion and Daughter Jerusalem (often mistranslated “Daughter of Zion”; in fact, Zion/Jerusalem is the Daughter). We are the “only-created” Daughter of God, whose destiny it is to grow up to become the Bride of the “only-begotten” Son of God. The Spirit, the Divine Matchmaker, has been sent to prepare the Bride for the Son. That course of preparation is what human history is all about. — James Jordan, Crisis, Opportunity, and the Christian Future, pp. 4-5.
Your Temper & Welcome
Something for fathers by Doug Wilson: “Your Temper is a Doctrine of God.”
And, though Paul Buckley has been blogging since September, I only just discovered his blog. Paul’s a journalist who used to work for the Dallas Morning News and is now a student at Westminster in Philly. I met him at a conference a few years back.  So welcome to the world of blogging, Paul!
DeGraaf on the Pre-Fall Covenant
Remember when it was okay for Reformed writers to speak like this?
We are accustomed to speaking of this covenant as the covenant of works. However, we should not take this name to mean that man was expected to earn eternal life as a reward for doing good works, as though eternal life was man’s payment for services rendered. Because man owes everything he is and has to God, we may never speak of man earning wages paid out by God. Therefore it might be wiser to speak of the covenant of God’s favor. — S. G. DeGraaf, Promise and Deliverance 1.37.
Today, people seem to get all worked up if you suggest that God’s covenant with Adam wasn’t a meritorious “covenant of works,” in which Adam was required to earn God’s blessing. Well, some may have been upset by DeGraaf, too. I don’t know. But there was a time when Promise and Deliverance was widely read by Reformed people and they didn’t freak out at statements like this one.
It’s good to remember, in the midst of today’s polemics, that things weren’t always this way in the Reformed church. And by God’s grace, they won’t be this way in the future.
The Presbyteer
Two good blog entries by The Presbyteer: “I’d Say It Differently Now” and “This Is All I Remember of College Math” (which makes me even more pleased that I didn’t take any math after high school!).
Fuzziness
The Bible is a complex book. Consisting of sixty-six books written over several millennia, it describes a bewildering array of characters and events. The Bible seems especially complex and difficult to modern Christians, because, however hard we try to think biblically, we have been subtly but deeply influenced by modern philosophy and science. Often, even when we have rejected the explicit conclusions of science, we unconsciously adopt a scientistic mind-set. One example of this is our tendency to operate on the modern assumption that all ideas can be defined with infinite, scientific precision, and that concepts can and should be distinguished very sharply.
The more you study the Bible, the more you will find that it cannot be forced into this mold. Ideas and symbols in the Bible meld together, overlap, and stretch out in a thousand different directions. This is not to say that the Bible is irrational or unscientific, or that we cannot make any meaningful distinctions. But a modern reader cannot escape the sense that the Bible speaks a very different language than he learned in “Chem. Lab” or Philosophy 101. As theologian Vern S. Poythress has noted, the biblical world view acknowledges the reality of “fuzzy boundaries.”
Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck drew a distinction between pagan and biblical thought that may help to clarify this idea. Bavinck said that modern (and ancient Greek) thinkers attempted to find the “essence” of a thing, that which makes a thing uniquely what it is, by subtraction. To discover the “essence” of a pencil, we subtract its color, its size, its shape — all of which may vary without changing the nature of the thing and all of which may describe something other than a pencil. (There might be a red apple as well as a red pencil, a six-inch slug as well as a six-inch pencil, etc.) When we have subtracted all the variables, what we have left is the “essence” of the pencil, what might be called “pure pencilness.” (Of course, what we really have left is nothing at all.)
Scripture, by contrast, describes the essence of a thing by addition. Only when we know the fullness of a thing, all of its attributes, do we really know its uniqueness and “essence.” God’s “essence” is not some “bare minimum” of deity, or some “basic attribute” from which all the other attributes can be derived. Instead, the “essence” of God is the fullness of all his attributes — Peter Leithart, The Kingdom and the Power, pp. 93-94.
Lest that sound too abstract, Leithart relates it to his main theme, the kingdom of God: we can’t know what the kingdom of God is by subtracting everything it has in common with something else to determine what makes it unique, nor can we really know what the kingdom is by reducing it to some basic elements. Rather, we need to hear all the various ways in which the kingdom is described, all the images that the Bible uses to depict it, and so forth. The more we hear, the more we say, “Yes! The kingdom is like that, too.” These various images don’t contradict. Rather, they offer different perspectives on the kingdom. And just as you know a diamond better the more facets of it you see, so we know the kingdom better by looking at its facets, turning it, as it were, so that we can see it from all angles.
That’s an important point. But what Leithart says earlier, drawing on Poythress, should not be overlooked. Why do we assume that the Bible defines everything precisely? Probably because we’re used to a sort of scientific description of things.
But the Bible often presents “fuzzy boundaries.” It’s not always easy to fit the Bible’s various images of the kingdom together. Various perspectives may seem to us to conflict: How can it be both this way and that way? How can the Bible teach this and that? The conflict, of course, isn’t in Scripture but in us. We don’t understand how both things can be true. So our calling is to teach both, to live with the fuzziness.
Nor may that fuzziness necessarily be resolved by more study. It’s not necessarily the case that God has given us all the data we’d need to resolve these apparant conflicts, to figure out how this relates to that or how this and that can both be true. In other words, God may not have given us everything we need to produce a fully systematic theology. That shouldn’t scare us, though, because we can trust that God has given us everything we need for life and godliness.
In fact, men in other fields have to live with a certain amount of mystery, too. Even in science, I’m told, people work with the concept of the “black box.” The scientist puts in a certain input and the same thing happens every time, even though the scientist has no idea how it works. It’s a “black box” to him.
And so with theology. Think of the Lord’s Supper. How is is exactly that we can be nourished by Christ’s body and blood and receive His life as we eat bread and drink wine together? I don’t know. I do know that God says that’s what happens. I don’t know how it happens. I can’t explain it. It’s fuzzy to me. Calvin’s answer? By the power of the Holy Spirit. And that’s as good an answer as any. But notice how that answer is pretty much a black box answer, leaving all the mystery while glorifying God.
Living with the fuzzies may be hard sometimes, especially because we want all the answers and we want them to fit nicely in our minds. That’s part of how God made us: we want to see how things work and make them fit. But living with the fuzzies is another way of saying living by faith. It’s trusting God and echoing what He tells us, even if we don’t understand it all.
What’s More Important?
It strikes many modern Christians as surpassingly odd that, with the Roman Empire collapsing about their ears and the barbarians invading from the north and east, Christian leaders of the first centuries were preoccupied with debates about whether the Son’s eternal relation to the Father should be described as homoousion (“same substance”), homoiousion (“like substance”), or homoion (“like”). Unless we are Lutherans, we might think Luther a fanatic for his ferocious defense of his formulation of the real presence of Christ in the sacrament at the Marburg Colloquy. (In Luther’s Small Catechism, the body and blood are said to be “in, with, and under” the bread and wine.)
While the church fathers and Reformers are hardly above criticism, the contention of this book is that we are the oddities, not they; we are the ones obsessed with trivialities. The church fathers and Reformers had a more biblical sense of priorities than we have. We have permitted the idolaters of power and mammon to set our priorities for us; we have let them convince us that the really big issues confronting the world are political, and that they can be solved through political means….
Our forefathers knew better. They would tell us that the debates over homoousion are of vastly greater significance — ultimately, of vastly greater political significance — than the debates over Saddam Hussein. They would warn us that Arius remains a greater threat to our social well-being than acid rain. Reforming the welfare state is important, but our forefathers would have insisted that reforming worship is a more pressing need. Liturgy is closer to the heart of the church’s concern than a hundred pieces of legislation. The next assembly for communion will have a more profound effect on the world than the next assembly of Congress. Baptism is a more crucial reality than the size of the federal budget. — Peter Leithart, The Kingdom and the Power, pp. 21-22.