Advent 2018

The Divine Initiative: An Advent Reflection

            For forty years, since its publication in 1978, Richard Foster’s book Celebration of Discipline has spurred millions of Christians to renewed interest in and practice of spiritual disciplines such as fasting, meditation, study, and so on.  Foster also warns against something I will call “magic.”  That is my word, not Richard’s, but I have heard him give the warning in public talks frequently.

            “Magic,” as I am using the word, expresses an attitude toward spiritual practices, an attitude that expects God to perform if a believer or group of believers “does it right” (whether “it” is prayer, or solitude, or fasting, etc.).  The magical attitude arises from our desire for spiritual power.  We want control over things and events: we want to heal sick people, convince unbelievers, influence elections, stop wars, prevent droughts . . . The list is long of things and events that we wish we could control.  And Christianity, it seems, offers what we want!  Peter told the paralytic to rise and walk.  James wrote that the prayer of a righteous person avails much.

            We want spiritual power.  And Jesus told his disciples they would have power after the Holy Spirit came on them . . . And so we are tempted to think if we just fast enough or pray in the right way or do something else, then God must act.

            And we will be in control.

            Foster, as I say, warns against “magic” over and over.  Spiritual disciplines do not make God do things.  Solitude and study are not spiritual tokens with which we can purchase God’s favor.  Instead, Foster says, the disciplines change us.  They make us ready to receive good things from God.  God is always good, and he is always in control.

            Consider Simeon, in Luke’s gospel.  He was an old man who lived in Jerusalem, waiting for the messiah.  Simeon had a wonderful hope, because the Spirit had told him he would not die until he “consolation of Israel.”  After the birth of Jesus, when Mary and Joseph brought the baby to the temple, Simeon praised God for keeping his promise.

            It’s easy to imagine that Simeon prayed passionately for messiah to come.  Faithful Jews for generations had been hoping for messiah.  Simeon stands out from the others not because he (or his prayers) deserved God’s answer; Simeon’s was simply the voice God chose to use to speak a word which Mary would remember her whole life.

            Advent season should teach us that we are not in control.  Yes, we pray for the kingdom to come.  We preach the good news.  We work for peace.  We practice doing good in many ways.  But none of our actions control God.  God is good, and he is always in control.

            In some seasons of life, we affirm our trust in God as it were in the dark.  We pray, we fast, we wait, and nothing seems to happen.  Notice I say “seems.”  Perhaps we know enough of human psychology to believe that our souls have unconscious depths.  God may well be using our spiritual disciplines to change us in “places” we don’t see.

            In other seasons of life, without warning the grace of God explodes into our conscious experience.  It could be as simple as hearing, for the ten-thousandth time, that “in the town of David a Savior has been born, who is Christ the Lord.”

            The daily news convinces me, beyond all caveat, that we need a savior.  Our technology has discovered not one but lots of way to destroy humanity.  Brilliant minds devote themselves to hacking hospital records so they can extort money.  Armed terrorist groups (of many sorts, not just Islamic) use bombs, trucks, airplanes and any other bit of ready-to-hand technology to kill innocents.  We drive animals to extinction by destroying their habitat.  Chemical and nuclear wastes pollute the land and sea, and in recent decades we have learned that our pollution of the atmosphere is even more dangerous.

            Of course, it’s easy to imagine someone writing this essay in the 1950s, when the specter of nuclear war first forced its way into our collective consciousness.  In America, someone could have written similar words in 1862, when it began to be clear how stupendously bloody the Civil War would be.  There are times when history presses us to acknowledge our need.

            Advent 2018 is one of those times.  We need a savior.  A savior has been born.

            It’s not magic.  It’s better than magic.  God is with us.

           

Election Eve, 2018

Dual Citizenship

I am a Christian and an American.  As a Christian I pray for the Kingdom of God to come and I owe allegiance to Jesus, the King.  At the same time, as a citizen of the United States I desire good things for my country and I am obligated to fulfill certain duties to the state (obeying laws, paying taxes, etc.).  As Augustine wrote long ago, a Christian lives simultaneously in two “cities”: the City of God and the City of Man.

Election season in America compels me to think about my dual citizenship.  Clearly, the allegiance I owe to Jesus is more basic and overrides the claims placed on me by the state.  If my country demanded that I deny my faith or act in ways contrary to conscience, I would have to disobey.  Civil disobedience must be part of the Christian’s public repertoire when duties conflict.  In this essay, though, I want to focus on another aspect of dual citizenship.

I’ve been discouraged by the 2018 election.  I don’t mean the outcome of the election.  I’m typing these words on November 5, before election day, so I don’t know which candidates won or lost, nor whether any of the ballot measures were approved.  My discouragement arises from the way we Americans have conducted the campaign.  Campaign spending is way up, but the quality of the campaign is way down.  Over and over I see attack ads, telling me how wrongheaded, deceptive, self-interested, foolish or just plain evil some candidate or measure is.  There is very little attempt to persuade undecided voters by recounting the virtues of a candidate or policy.  Instead, we are pushed to vote our fears.  The pundits describe this as “appealing to the base”—that is, the campaign seeks to increase turnout among voters who already agree with the campaign.

Such campaigning is also “base” in another sense.  Rather than appeal to reason, or hope, or compassion—the “better angels” of our nature invoked by Abraham Lincoln—campaigns of fear and resentment try to win votes by demonizing the opposition.  Such campaigning demoralizes us—literally; it moves us from virtue toward vice.

I’m also discouraged by the extent to which Christians join in the fray.  I understand how it happens.  You think, as a Christian, that you ought to side with righteousness.  You decide that righteousness requires that you favor some public policy (to restrict abortions, or reform immigration laws, reduce mass incarceration, fight poverty, protect property, and so on—the list can be extended indefinitely).  You let yourself forget there are Christian brothers and sisters who, precisely because they want to side with righteousness, oppose the very policy you think is necessary.  Having forgotten the brothers and sisters on the other side, you then neglect the humanity of the other side.  The political opponent becomes the enemy, an enemy who must be defeated at all costs.  And so—in order to win lower taxes or more just immigration laws or whatever—you say and do whatever it takes to win.

Listen: your political opponent is a human being beloved by Jesus.  It is always more important that we love people than that we win.

Followers of Jesus must treat their political opponents well.  This is a requirement of discipleship.  You may think the other side is wrong.  You are convinced that their policies will lead to disaster.  You suspect they are campaigning in bad faith, that they actually intend to replace free government with some kind of religious or secular empire.  Even if you are right, even if your opponents are as misguided or evil, that does not free you from your duty to follow Jesus.

Jesus commands us, no mere suggestion, that we love our enemies.  This is not fantasy talk or advice for saintly hermits; it is his straightforward requirement for disciples.

Notice I am not defending pacifism, at least not now.  I’m talking about the way we conduct political campaigns, the way we treat our fellow citizens.  Even Christians who believe in just wars must agree that Jesus calls us to civility in politics.

In The Virtue of Civility in the Practice of Politics (2002) I predicted that our increasingly post-modern age would move away from civility.  Sadly, my prediction seems to be coming true.  As our culture discovers that the god of the modern age (rational autonomy) is an empty idol, people discover they have no reason to treasure political opponents.  More and more, the political opponent is seen purely as impediment, something to be defeated.

Christians should not think like that.  No matter how benighted or selfish “they” seem to be, we know that Jesus loves them.  Further, they know things we don’t know.  We can learn from them.  We ought to see political opponents as God’s gift, a resource for better government.

Gospels and Criticism

Meaning and the Great Story

            According to Hollywood, Jesus’ story is “the greatest story ever told.”  (1965 movie, produced and directed by George Stevens, starring Max von Sydow as Jesus.)  Whether the film lived up to its billing or not, Hollywood got the title right.

            The story comes to us almost exclusively from the canonical gospels.  One of Jesus’ famous sayings, “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” comes from Acts, and the Revelation reports various messages from the resurrected Jesus; e.g. “I am the alpha and omega,” and “I am coming soon.”  But if we want to know about the earthly life of Jesus, we go to the gospels. 

            Of course, there have been retellings of Jesus’ story.  From the second century to the twentieth, authors have “spun” Jesus in a variety of ways.  The second century gnostics reworked the story to make Jesus more “spiritual”; their version of Jesus is hardly likely to persuade modern readers unless we are predisposed to reject orthodoxy and/or are tempted to attribute the canonical gospels to an orthodox conspiracy.  But orthodoxy, as expressed in the creeds, arose in the third and fourth centuries.  It is far more likely that the gospels created orthodoxy than the other way around.

            Modern retellings of the Jesus story are often just as tendentious as gnostic gospels.  Enlightenment rationalists, such as Thomas Jefferson, erase miracle stories.  Marxists make Jesus into a revolutionary; social reformers make him a reformer.  Pluralists avoid Jesus’ demands for obedience and faith.  Theological liberals misunderstand or reject Jesus’ “Son of Man” sayings.

            I do not deny there is a difference between story (the gospels) and the meanings (creeds or theological systems or sermons) that interpret them.  There is nothing illegitimate about the work of a critic or interpreter.  Whenever the church proclaims good news about Jesus, it does so by interpreting the gospels.  In literature, we call that “criticism”; the attempt to understand at a deep level.  We always run the risk of bad criticism, of misinterpreting the text.

            Notice that I assume that good criticism implies an attempt (and some degree of success) to read a text fairly and on its own terms.  I have no interest in theories of meaning, sometimes labeled “deconstructionist” or “reader-centric,” which liberate readers from their duty of faithfulness to texts.

            So we have story and meaning.  Both are needed.  No matter how wonderful our sermon, interpretation, or creed, it cannot replace the gospels.  No matter how restricted our criticisms are—even if they amount to a public reading of the text—we cannot avoid interpretation.  All readings are interpretive.  All interpretations are tentative, waiting (in a sense) for better criticism.

            Gospel is a unique kind of story.  It isn’t tragedy, though without faith people may read it that way.  It is the deepest comedy, a comedy of joy, of a shockingly happy ending.  It is not a quest like the search for the grail or Frodo’s mission to Mordor; at the same time it is a quest unlike all others.  Jesus’ mission exposes him to misunderstanding from his friends, unbelief, enmity, conspiracy, and social injustices of many kinds, including Roman oppression, ethnic hatreds, religious sectarianism, poverty, violence, and sexism.  In the end, the forces of our world kill Jesus.

            (Whatever his faults, Mel Gibson, when making The Passion of the Christ, got that part right.  Who killed Jesus?  Answer: We all did.)

            But it was not the end.  In this story, Jesus wins.  When we, his enemies, kill him, he triumphs over us.  He invites us to submit and be remade.

            Notice the recursive element to this essay.  I’ve been writing about story and meaning while engaging in criticism.  There’s nothing wrong with this.  If my essay is badly written or if my thesis is thoroughly mistaken, the remedy is to reread the story and restate its meaning.

A Philosopher Asks a Certain Question

                                                 Tractatus Amores-Nuptias

(Apologies to L. Wittgenstein.  He died in 1951, so he won’t object.)

Dear Sarah,

1.         I want to marry you.  I believe you want to marry me.

1.1       People always say, when asked, that they want to marry because they are in love. 

1.11    I have told you I love you.  You have said the same to me.

1.2       Unless we are deceiving ourselves (unfortunately, people are good at that), we are in love.

1.21    I don’t think we are deceiving ourselves.

2          Being in love is rarely a sufficient reason for getting married.

2.1       Suppose Jesus asked us, “Why should I give you permission to marry?”

2.2       Our answer should be: Our marriage would advance Kingdom purposes (maybe only in small ways, but we are ordinary people).

2.21    Our marriage would give my grandchildren a grandmother, which will help them grow up as they should.  It would give your grandchildren a grandfather, which could also be a good thing.

2.22    If we were married, I could encourage and support your ministry in GRM and Thrive. 

2.221  Quite likely, you will discover further ministry opportunities at Newberg Friends Church.

2.3       If we were married, you could encourage and support my ministry as professor, writer, preacher, and church official.

3          My love for you is not purely spiritual or intellectual.

3.1       You are pretty, and I like your smile.

3.11    I greatly enjoy your kisses.

3.2       You have really nice legs.

3.3       Some things can be left unsaid at this point. 

4          Companionship is a great good in marriage.

4.1       We know that we enjoy doing things together.

4.11    Driving to Crater Lake, watching Kaleb’s soccer match, running & biking together, going for walks, watching baseball (on tv) and attending worship together are all good activities we have enjoyed.

4.2       We know ourselves well enough to predict we could enjoy many other activities in the future.

4.21    Driving to the coast, watching GFU sports (in person), attending concerts, visiting our children and grandchildren, reading aloud, spending silent time together, hiking at Champoeg (or other parks), going to Europe with students, attending lectures, and many other such opportunities lie before us.

5          Partnership is also a great good in marriage.

5.1       We will not have more children, but we will be partners together in advising our children and grandchildren.

5.11    We will rejoice together in the successes of our children and grandchildren.

5.2       We will probably buy a house together.

5.21    We will decorate together.  (Mostly I will put things where you tell me.)

5.22    We will care for our lawn, flowers, hot tub, trees, vehicles, and many other things together.

5.3       I can be a “junior partner” in your projects by encouraging you.  You can do the same for me and my projects (e.g. reading and criticizing things I write).

5.4       We will weep together when losses come.  We both know that losses inevitably come.

5.41    I will be there for you when you go to hospital.  You can do the same for me.

6          Friendship is perhaps the greatest good in marriage.

6.1       Friends share common interests. 

6.2       Friends delight in showing each other new good things or new aspects of things.  Friends often say to each other: Look at that!  Isn’t it fine?

6.21    We both like the natural beauty of Oregon.  We like visiting foreign countries.  We like reading, and you will like some of the books I like. 

6.22    We like music of many sorts (but not rap).  We like food from many cultures (but not liver).

6.23    We will delight in discovering new good things.

6.3       We have already learned, independently, that Jesus is the bedrock foundation of a good marriage.  Jesus is the most important of our common interests.

6.31    We have, and we will, in many ways, point to Christ and say: Isn’t He fine?

7          I anticipate a good marriage, founded on Christ, and open to joy.

Will you marry me?

Much love,

Phil

I read this letter to Sarah in June.  She said yes!

Fear and Hope

Radical Fear and Christian Hope

            In Radical Hope, Jonathan Lear argues that people can hope for a good future even in the worst circumstances, in times of “cultural devastation.”  Lear builds his case by describing the hope of Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow nation, who hoped for a good future for his people though he knew that the coming of white people would destroy the traditional Crow way of life.  Lear emphasizes the depth of loss experienced by the Crow people; their most important thick concepts of the good life were turn upside down.  What does it mean to be brace when traditional expressions of courage have been turned into felonies punishable in a white man’s court?  Part of the excellence of Lear’s book is that it helps one see how natural it would have been for Plenty Coups and his people to despair.  Plenty Coups did not despair; he hoped for a good future, even when he couldn’t say what that good future would be like. 

            Lear says you too can hope.  You don’t have to be Crow, or Native American, or even religious.  Completely secular people can hope, even in the worst of times.  His argument is simple.  The world is big and people are small.  The world contains much more goodness (and more possibilities for goodness) than any person could ever experience.  No matter how bad life is for my people at this time, it remains possible that goodness will come.  We can hope for a better future.

            This is “radical” hope.  It reaches beyond the thick images of a good life we have inherited or invented to look forward to a future that will be good in ways we cannot now comprehend.

            The analytic philosopher in me wants to say: Yes, but…  Notice that Lear’s argument builds on certain truths.  The world is big and people are small.  The goodness of the world is greater than we can experience.

            I want to agree with Lear that these things are true.  But will they always be true? 

Suppose some small cultural group was targeted for extermination by a powerful neighbor.  Suppose the powerful nation carried out its plan, leaving the weak group no survivors.  To complete the story, suppose all memory of the weak group was lost in the passage of generations.  (Given hundreds of thousands of years of human prehistory, our suppositions almost certainly describe actual facts.)  What hope would there be for a member of the weak group when she realized that she and all her people were going to be destroyed?

“Radical” hope is transcendent in the sense that it rests on something much bigger than a single person or people group, the goodness of the world.  Unfortunately, we might also say that the evil of the world transcends a single person or people group.  Who knows what terrors there might be?

In the 1940s, Enrico Fermi proposed what has come to be known as Fermi’s paradox, when he asked the simple question: Where is everybody?  Given what we know about the age of the universe (very old), the nature of our galaxy (billions of stars, so billions of planets), the possibility of evolution (low probability in a particular case but near certainty in millions of cases), and the facts of radiation (in particular, radio waves), we should be hearing radio programs from other planets.  But we aren’t.  Where are all those radio signals?

People have proposed lots of possible solutions to Fermi’s paradox.  For instance, maybe intelligent life (any life capable of making powerful radio transmitters) is much more rare than we expect.  Or maybe ours is the first species in the galaxy to reach such technological heights.  (Most scientists would laugh.)  And so on: speculation abounds.

Consider this solution.  Perhaps in every case—millions of cases—in which life evolved to master radio technology, that species also invented nuclear weapons, much as humanity did in the 1940s.  And in every case—millions of cases—the intelligent species totally destroyed itself.  Picture our galaxy as a collection of millions of suicide planets, sprinkled among the far more numerous uninhabitable planets.

I’m not trying to provide a probable, or even plausible, answer to the Fermi paradox.  My point is just this: The horrors of the universe could transcend human experience in counterpoint to Lear’s doctrine of the goodness of the world.  Lear is correct; there are grounds for radical hope.  There are also grounds for radical despair.

            Christian hope is grounded in the resurrection of Jesus.  This is a central point in N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope, and in one sense it merely reports a historical fact: this is what the 1^st century Christians believed.  Jesus was crucified, but three days later his tomb was empty because he rose from the dead.  Wright spends time on the empty tomb part because it guards against morphing the resurrection into something “spiritual.”  The New Testament repeatedly insists that Jesus’ resurrection included his body.  Further, Jesus is going to return to earth as king.  We pray: “May your kingdom come,” which is close in meaning to the prayer in Revelation: “Come, Lord Jesus.”

            Though grounded in a particular event, Christian hope transcends the world in a greater way than radical hope.  Lear’s concept is tied to the truth that the world is bigger than me and my people.  Christian hope is tied to the truth that Jesus, the maker of the world, triumphed over sinners when he let us kill him and rose from the dead.

Christians in Politics (!)

A Quaker Reflects on the Fourth of July

            On Independence Day, one’s mind is naturally drawn to political questions.  In a recent post (June, 2018) I argued that Christians ought to welcome “deep difference” in a society with many religious and cultural groups.  We should not be surprised to discover we live as moral minorities; we will find that many other people disagree with our beliefs on important matters.  There is no “moral majority” in our country; rather, there are many different groups whose beliefs differ.  Matthew Kaemignk says we ought to acknowledge these facts and think as pluralists.  We ought to support every group’s freedom to join in public debate.  Since Jesus is king, we are not.  Even if we think our policy positions are right; it is not our job to compel others to agree with us.  We may vigorously try to persuade others in open dialogue.

            I worry that in recent public discourse civil debate has greatly declined.  I wrote a book about this, The Virtue of Civility in the Practice of Politics, published in 2002.  For reasons rooted in philosophical history, I predicted dark days for civility in the United States.  Sadly, it seems my prediction is coming true.  Political campaigns in this country focus more and more on energizing “base” voters rather than trying to persuade the undecided.  Once in office, legislators rarely compromise on hot-button issues, fearing an attack from extremists within their own party.

            And it’s not just the politicians.  Many studies have demonstrated that Americans tend to listen to the voices—on TV, internet sites, newspapers, and radio stations—they already agree with.  They rehearse the slogans and arguments of their favorite talking heads, perhaps picking up choice points to deconstruct the arguments of the other side.  Increasingly, Americans simply do not listen to the other side.

            It’s not just them; it’s us.  I’m speaking as a Christian to other Christians.  I don’t listen very often to political views I disagree with.  And when I do listen, too often I am mentally formulating replies rather than trying to truly hear another person.

            I am not arguing that all views are equal.  I firmly oppose some political positions, and I am glad to give my reasons for those positions.  Nevertheless, I must practice civility toward everyone in the political sphere.  Let me give a personal example.

            In 2016, I quit the Republican Party, though I had been a member my whole adult life.  I thought Donald Trump was clearly unfit to be president, and my conscience revolted against membership in a party that would accept Trump as its standard-bearer.  I don’t need to rehearse all my reasons now; you can find my essay “Why I Quit the Republican Party” on this blog (storymeaning.blogspot.com) in the 2016 archives.  In the 18 months since he took office, Trump has been almost as bad a president as I expected.  Now: how should I treat Donald Trump?

            At first glance, this might seems a strange question, since I never meet Trump, don’t talk to him, and don’t even read his Twitter feed.  But I do talk about him, perhaps in a class or in everyday conversation.  Do I treat him civilly in the way I speak?  Someone might point out that on various occasions Mr. Trump has not spoken civilly or truthfully about other people.  I don’t think that justifies repaying him in kind.

            In his first letter to Timothy, the apostle Paul wrote: “I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone—for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.”  When we read these words, we need to remember historical context.  The authorities for whom Paul urged Christians to pray served the Roman Empire.  We’re not talking democracy or human rights here.  This is the empire that backed Herod the Great and employed Pontius Pilate to rule Judea.  When it comes to outright wickedness, our current political leaders don’t really measure up.  And yet Paul wanted Christians to pray for these people.

            So: do I pray for Donald Trump?  If I say I don’t understand how Christians could vote for him, I should also say I don’t understand how Christians can fail to pray for him.

            The truth is I don’t pray for the president as much as I should.  I don’t have to like his trade policies to ask God to draw him toward justice and righteousness.  I don’t have to endorse his statements (treating women as sex objects, for example) to ask God to bless his family.  I can pray that his foreign policies lead to peace (for example, in relation to North Korea) even if I worry that his words could lead to war.

            What I saying is not about President Trump.  I could illustrate my point with some other leader, e.g. Governor Brown.  Christians should practice civility toward all their political opponents.  The Bible plainly says we should pray for those in authority.

            On this July 4, in a season of much political discord, I resolve to do better.  I won’t be a perfect citizen, that’s sure.  But I can acknowledge the fact that I am a moral minority.  I can participate vigorously in public debates with the hope of inviting others to join me, but without compelling anyone to agree.  And I can pray for God to help persons in political authority.

           

Christians in Politics (?)

A Moral Minority

            I hold lots of unpopular opinions on important topics.  I think we ought to abolish capital punishment.  I think abortion is morally wrong in almost every case.  I think we ought to pursue peace by peaceful means, not by killing enemies.  I think women should marry only men, and only one at a time.  I think it’s always wrong to break a marriage, but sometimes after a marriage has died the best option is legal divorce.

            These opinions vary in their degree of unpopularity.  The very earliest Christians were pacifists, but for a long time now the vast majority of Christians have adhered to the “just war” theory.  (Most non-Christians, in this country and worldwide, also approve of war.)  On the matter of peace and war, I’m in a small minority. 

On the question of abortion, my position isn’t quite so unpopular, but only because all the opinions are minority views.  Public opinion about abortion is deeply divided between multiple positions.  Some say abortion is always wrong and should be prohibited, some say abortion may be wrong but only the mother involved should have any say in the matter, others say abortion is sometimes wrong because it is the killing of an innocent person so society as a whole (the state) should prevent those abortions, others say abortion is never wrong unless it is forced upon a woman who doesn’t want it—and there are many variations on these positions. 

Public opinion about capital punishment varies from time to time and country to country.  In some places and times my abolitionist view would actually be a very popular one, but in other times or in other places my view would be excoriated.  I could make similar observations regarding gay marriage, plural marriage, and divorce.  Public opinion shifts over time and varies between cultures; my views are guaranteed to be unpopular somewhere sometime.

There is nothing surprising or wrong about this.  I live in a moral minority.  Most likely, you do too.  The moral beliefs of people in the United States are influenced by culture, religion, education, personal experience, family migrant experience (except for pure-blood native Americans, the immigration experience shaped every family tree in this country), relative wealth, and other factors.  On this or that important moral question, you may find yourself in the minority.

When I say there is nothing wrong about this situation, I do not imply any kind of moral relativism; that all views are equally true, right, or “valid.”  (As a teacher of logic, this last locution is especially irritating.  No opinions whatsoever are “valid.”  Validity is a feature of arguments, not propositions.)  If my unpopular views about abortion or war are right, then contradictory views are wrong.  But in a country whose people’s thinking is influenced by differing religious doctrines (including anti-religious doctrines), multiple cultural backgrounds, and a myriad other differing factors, we should not be surprised by deep difference.

How should we think about and live with deep difference?  One option is to ignore its existence.  Those of us who have inherited privilege (for example, by being white, male, and Protestant in my case) may be tempted to think that most people are really like us.  That is, we may believe that behind all the headlines, we are the “moral majority.”  Demographical changes have exploded that self-deception.  There is no majority ethnic, cultural, or religious group in America (unless by “Christian” we adopt a very inclusive definition, lumping all Christian sects together whether or not the individuals participate much).

More realistically, we could seek to think and live as pluralists.  Here I am drawing on the excellent work of Matthew Kaemingk, Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear.  Christian pluralism should not be taken as a belief that all religions are equally true, Kaemingk argues.  Sometimes in philosophy of religion we do use “pluralism” that way, but Kaemingk is a theologian, using the word to describe a position rooted in Dutch Calvinism.

Abraham Kuyper and other pluralists started with a basic Christian belief: Jesus is King.  But they drew an interesting and important implication from that belief: If Jesus is King, we are not, not even if we are doing our best to follow Jesus.  It is clear that Jesus, as Sovereign King, has allowed many human cultures to flourish.  No human culture (not even Dutch culture!) is the “right” culture; rather, God wishes to bless all cultures. 

Jesus is King and Messiah, so Christianity really is the right religion.  But in 19^th century Holland, did that mean Calvinists or Catholics or agnostic liberals?  Kuyper was a convinced Calvinist, but he said that every religious persuasion must be encourage to participate in the larger society.  If Calvinists wanted their freedom to worship as they thought right, Kuyper said, they must support the freedom of Catholics to worship in their way and liberals to neglect worship in whatever way they thought they could.  (In truth, Kuyper thought, everyone worships something, and the agnostic deceives himself if he thinks he doesn’t.)

The pluralism of 21^st century America is much greater than 19^th century Holland.  We have Catholics, many kinds of Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, a great many “nones,” and lots of smaller religious groups.  Kaemingk argues that Christians, because we are Christians, ought to support and welcome the arguments of all groups.  If we don’t want “them” to impose their will on us, neither must we impose our will on them.

Because Jesus is King (and we aren’t), we should not be afraid to live as moral minorities.  We should vigorously participate in public debates on important moral topics, but we should not presume to think we are “claiming America for Christ.”  Even if on some particular issue my opinion should carry the day (e.g. if capital punishment were abolished in this country), that day will only last for a time.  Jesus is King, and when he returns his reign will be made evident.  Until then, his followers should speak up and encourage others to do so as well.

What can writers do?

Limits to Imagination

            Several weeks ago, while discussing a philosophy text with some really good students, I said, “MacIntyre’s point is that we can’t imagine a good life for human beings without practices.  And since practices require virtues, we actually need virtues for the good life.”  Or something to that effect.  Claire, being a really good philosophy student, challenged the claim.  “Let’s imagine someone stranded on a desert island,” she said.  “Why couldn’t this person live a good human life?”  And so the classroom discussion/debate continued. 

            (Side comment: I get paid to do this!  How cool is that?  Yes, being a professor means reading and marking lots of mediocre essays by half-hearted or sleep-deprived students.  But it also means doing philosophy with smart, enthusiastic young people like Claire.)

            At the end of the hour—at the end of the semester, for that matter—I still agree with Alasdair MacIntyre.  Human beings are social creatures, and I can’t imagine a good life for human beings that did not include “practices” (a semi-technical term in MacIntyre’s theory of the virtues).  But my point is not to resume a classroom discussion, but to think about the limits of imagination.

            What does it mean to imagine or conceive of something?  In philosophy we sometimes speak of “broadly logical” possibilities.  The only limitation here is logical consistency.  The sun has risen in the east for ten million mornings in a row; can we imagine that it will not rise in the east tomorrow?  Yes.  The sun “rises” because the earth turns on its axis.  If there were no earth, there would be no sunrise.  So if the Vogons put in a hyperspace bypass (see Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), there won’t be an earth and there won’t be a sunrise.  There is no logical contradiction between the fact that the sun rose ten million mornings in a row and the possibility that it will not rise tomorrow.  In contrast, “a stone so heavy that an omnipotent God could not lift it” is a logical contradiction, naming nothing.  We may think we can imagine such a stone, but we can’t, no more than we can imagine round squares.

            But logical limits are not the only limits to our imagination.  We can conceive of beings somewhat like human beings who could live happy, productive and fulfilling lives in total solitude.  They might be some sort of angel or extraterrestrial.  Of course, these imagined beings would only be “somewhat” like human beings.  They would not have language, since we are imagining them to live wonderful lives without any interactions with others.  An intelligent being with no language and no interaction with other intelligent beings…  Hm.  Aristotle remarked that a solitary life might be fit for a god or a beast, but not for a man.  The limitation here rises from human nature, not pure logic.

            Some people object to arguments that appeal to “human nature.”  For good reason!  In times past, people have argued that human nature requires or allows superior people to enslave inferior ones, or that women are designed naturally to be mothers and wives and not much else, or that human beings are naturally warlike.  Objecting to such arguments, some have come to think that “human nature” is a fiction.  They believe that people can be literally anything they want.

            But that’s not true.  Each one of us has a certain physical form, organs of particular kinds, and mental capacities peculiar to us as individuals.  And in spite of the differences between us, we are far more like each other than we are like the ET or the angel who could delight in lifelong solitude.  We cannot be “simply anything” and still be human beings.  Who would want such an undefined life?  We are human beings, and what we want is a good life for human beings.

            There is yet a further limitation on our imagination, a limitation especially important for writers.  George MacDonald, nineteenth century writer of fantasy stories, pointed out that the fantasy writer has enormous but not unlimited freedom.  In a fantasy, the author can make fairies small or tall, princesses serious or light (MacDonald’s “The Light Princess” is so light she defies gravity, which is a problem for her parents), dragons of all sorts, and intelligent parrots (as in my story, The Heart of the Sea).  But what the fantasy writer cannot do is change good into evil or vice versa.  The moral world extends to the land of fairie, MacDonald said.  There cannot be a world where cruelty is the ultimate good or kindness the worst of evils.  Of course, there may be imaginary worlds with lots of cruel characters and those characters may pour scorn on kindness (think Game of Thrones), but even in those stories vice has not been turned into virtue.  The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called for a revaluation of all values, but even he pleaded with his readers: “Let us be honest with ourselves!”  It turns out Nietzsche wanted to revalue some values, not all of them.

            Despite the truth in MacDonald’s teaching, imagination does have the power to shape our understanding of morality.  It’s not so much the explicit teaching of stories that matters, though that is important.  Stories help us see what is possible.  For example, if a person reads or sees story after story built on the myth of redemptive violence, he may come to see the world that way.  He may come to think, perhaps only unconsciously, that evil can be defeated only by destroying the source of evil—that is, by killing the enemy.  Marduk kills Tiamat, Luke Skywalker destroys the Death Star, the good guys imprison the bad guys (even better, execute them); this is how good defeats evil.  An imagination shaped by the myth of redemptive violence may be offended by a gospel of redemption through suffering.  It is important to attend to stories shaped by Jesus’ story.

Jesus and Hercules

What Kind of Hero?

            On Saturday afternoon between Good Friday and Easter, after the Mariners game I resorted to channel surfing.  I chanced to watch a few minutes of The Legend of Hercules.  Other than those minutes, I knew nothing about this movie until I looked it up.

            Wikipedia facts: released in 2014, The Legend of Hercules was panned by critics and quickly ignored by the movie going public.  Its box office take did not cover its costs of production.  The film was nominated for several “Gold Raspberry” awards, including worst picture, worst leading actor, worst director, and worst leading actress.  The convoluted story line starts with Hercules’s birth as son of Zeus and a human mother, Alcmene, the wife of King Amphitryon (Hera, Zeus’s queen, approved and abetted the sexual liaison between Zeus and Alcmene). Since Alcmene never publicly revealed her liaison with Zeus, Hercules grew up as son of Amphitryon and brother of Iphicles.  The story then jumps twenty years to Hercules’s adulthood, when he fights in battles, against gladiators, against his half-brother, Iphicles, and eventually against King Amphitryon himself (who meanwhile had murdered Alcmene).

            In short, it’s a soap opera—sex, secrets, betrayals, alliances, surprises, reversals, and so on—with swords and sorcery thrown on top.  I’m not condemning The Legend of Hercules on that ground; there have been fantasy stores made into fine movies.  But by all accounts this wasn’t one of them.  (It holds a 3% rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website, which gives a consensus judgment: “Cheap-looking, poorly acted, and dull.”)  My reaction matched those of the critics; I quit watching after about ten minutes. 

So why am I writing about it? 

The only scene I watched comes late in the story.  In this scene Hercules has been captured by King Amphitryon’s men.  They chain Hercules, spread-eagle fashion, between two stone pillars.  Amphitryon commands Hercules flogged and executed.  While Hercules still lives, Amphitryon brings out Chiron, the long-time faithful servant of Alcmene and orders Iphicles to kill him while Hercules watches.  (Chiron knew Hercules’s true parentage from the beginning and helped Alcmene raise the boy-god.)  Thus physically and spiritually tormented, Hercules cries out to his true father, Zeus, who answers by giving Hercules super-strength.  Hercules pulls the chains binding him, and the stone pillars break into pieces.  The chains still intact, Hercules swings massive stone blocks like gigantic scythes, mowing down his enemies. 

At this point I could stomach no more and surfed to another channel.

It cannot be an accident that this horrible movie played on Holy Saturday.  Consider the scene I described.  In it, the “son of god” is tortured in a crucifix position, having fallen under the power of an evil king.  He appeals to Zeus, calling him “father.”  The god answers his prayer, giving him power to slaughter his enemies.  According to Wikipedia (since I watched no further), Hercules goes on to kill Amphitryon and Iphicles, save his true love from a forced marriage to Iphicles, and rule the kingdom in peace and harmony.

Walter Wink, a Bible scholar, coined the phrase “the myth of redemptive violence.”  It’s an archetype, showing up in story after story, beginning with the Babylonian creation story Enuma Elish.  In the myth of redemptive violence a great hero (the god Marduk in Emuma Elish) saves the world from chaos (represented by Tiamat and her servants) by killing his enemies in inventive and gory detail.

Our stories—on television, in films, in novels and graphic novels—repeat the archetype so often that we don’t notice it.  Star Wars, Batman Begins, Taken, the list goes on and on.  It’s the American way, right?  No matter what your problem, the answer is to find your enemy and kill her, even if she is not yet born. 

But of course that’s too simplistic.  The myth of redemptive violence is far older than American popular culture, and it is found all around the world.  Wink argues that the biblical creation narrative may have arisen in opposition to the violent mythology of Enuma Elish.  In the Hebrew Bible, God creates by speaking; he does not have to destroy prior gods.  Of course, Wink cannot deny that the Bible also contains many episodes that seem modeled on the myth of redemptive violence: Pharaoh and his chariots are drowned in the sea.  But as a Christian Wink points to the New Testament for the definitive story of God’s action in the world.  Real redemption came via redemptive suffering, not redemptive violence.

And that’s what made my viewing experience on Holy Saturday so jarring.  Salvation came to my world not when the son of god called for super power to destroy his enemies and make everything good, but when the Son of God bore the sins of the world and endured the violence of men, dying with words of forgiveness for his oppressors.

What kind of hero do I want?  The Legend of Hercules is a lousy movie, but its hero is a very familiar type.  We like heroes who put things right by killing our enemies.  But it seems to me that followers of Jesus would want something better.

Do we live tragedy?

The Shape of Stories

            Much of what I know about literary criticism (and it isn’t very much) comes from having read Anatomy of Criticism, by Northrup Frye—well more than forty years ago.  Frye invented (or borrowed from others) an easily remembered scheme for categorizing stories: the mythos of spring—comedy; the mythos of summer—romance; the mythos of autumn—tragedy; and the mythos of winter—irony and satire.  Comedy/spring celebrates new beginnings, new life, and new possibilities.  Romance/summer gives us an adventure, a contest between the hero and all that opposes him, a contest that ends happily.  In tragedy/autumn, the forces that oppose the hero triumph, things end badly.  Irony and satire, the voices of winter, protest the injustices of the world, the things that produces bad ends.

            Within the four mythoi, differences in detail abound.  Comedy can be farcical; new hopes emerging from silly coincidences; this is comedy on the border of satire.  In other comedies, the protagonist triumphs at least in part by virtue; comedy on the border of romance.  In romance proper, the hero is more completely heroic, overcoming multiple or great antagonists in a great contest.  Sometimes the hero dies in battle and his triumph is to be celebrated by his comrades.  And so on: there is infinite room for authors to innovate.

             Popular storytelling in my lifetime has come to be dominated by movies.  Since movies are expensive to produce, they cater to mass audiences, usually with happy endings.  Love stories, musicals, adventures—we get lots of spring and summer stories, from Forrest Gump to Sleepless in Seattle to Star Wars.  Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List show how deadly serious a movie romance can be; their heroes’ triumphs are not fully complete and bought at high price.

Hollywood occasionally gives us popular winter tales of irony or satire; think of M.A.S.H. or Catch 22.

Tragedies?  Well, we have horror films, with suitably bad outcomes for the protagonists, but too often we feel cheated; the story is just an excuse for mayhem.  We don’t really care about the—often very young and vulnerable—protagonists, since we know from the start they will die.  The television series Breaking Bad probably counts as a tragedy, so it’s not impossible for tragedy to gain a mass audience.

Nevertheless, I want to consider the mythos of tragedy.  What should we think of stories that end badly for the hero?  For serious tragedy we sometimes turn to Shakespeare or to ancient Greek writers like Aeschylus or Sophocles.  Here the main characters are in many ways admirable and sympathetic.  We want them to do well and be well.  Yet disaster befalls them.

Aristotle wrote that we are attracted to tragedies—he was thinking of plays performed before an audience—because we experience through them deep emotions we would otherwise avoid.  We admire the tragic hero, or at least we see he has good qualities.  He has a flaw of some sort, a flaw which in some ways is admirable.  Oedipus is determined to discover the truth—a good thing, surely!  But his determination to find the truth at all costs destroys him.  Creon wants to steer the ship of state through perilous waters, and to that end decrees what seems to him a sensible law.  By ordering his law be obeyed, he loses his son and his wife and finds his life ruined.

Modern interpreters, such as Martha Nussbaum, give other readings of tragedy.  Rather than a flaw in the hero, maybe a tragedy shows us the chanciness of the world.  We want to live lives of meaningful activity (Aristotle would agree with that) in which we enjoy good relationships with others and experience good outcomes.  In the typical word of modern philosophy, we want to “flourish.”  But many things may undermine us, Nussbaum says.  Perhaps, through no fault of hers, a woman’s business partner betrays her; she ends in poverty.  Disease, war, or bad government may destroy one’s hopes.  At a deeper level, the hero may be frustrated by contradictory impulses arising in her own heart.  It is impossible to this good and that good in the same life.   In Nussbaum’s phrase, tragic drama shows us the “fragility of goodness.”  It is possible, with luck and skill, to reach old age and look back with satisfaction on one’s life.  But no amount of skill can erase the danger of bad luck.  Your life may turn out to be a tragedy no matter what you do.

I suspect J.R.R. Tolkien would reject Nussbaum’s philosophy.  The Christian gospels are, in Northrup Frye’s terms, romances.  Tolkien invented the word eucatastrophe to express what he saw as central to the Christian story.  Jesus is presented as a cosmic figure—the eternal logos, the Son of Man, the lamb of God—in battle with the evil powers of the world.  The stakes of his quest are the highest possible, the Kingdom of God and the redemption of humanity.  At the climax of the story, demonic forces working through religion and the state crucify him.  In a stunning about-face, the resurrection of Jesus transforms defeat into victory.

(Compare Frodo, in The Lord of the Ring.  Lacking the necessary spiritual strength, Frodo failed in his quest to save Middle Earth.  At the crucial moment, when all was lost, help came to Frodo in a way he would never have expected: eucatastrophe.)

Tolkien would aver, I think, that Jesus’ story is the fundamental story.  All our stories and our personal histories are bits and pieces of the great story.  Whether we see it or not, our stories weave into a romance, the triumph of the Christ.  For Christians, hope is always appropriate.