Spring break

Posted on | March 9, 2010 | No Comments

Posting will be erratic this week. But in the meantime, if there were ever a discussion panel I’d kill to attend, this might be it:

“Red Toryism” Roundtable: A Response to Phillip Blond

12:30 – 2:00 PM Panel 1

Ross Douthat, Op-ed Columnist for the New York Times
Rod Dreher, Director of Publications, Templeton Foundation
Daniel McCarthy, Senior Editor of The American Conservative

2:15-4:00 PM Panel 2

Andrew Abela, Associate Professor of Marketing and Chair of Business and Economics, The Catholic University of America
Charles Mathewes, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia
John Milbank, Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics at the University of Nottingham

Respondent: Phillip Blond, ResPublica
Moderator: Patrick Deneen, Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Chair Associate Professor of Government, Director, Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy, Georgetown University

Stout’s alternative democracy

Posted on | March 3, 2010 | No Comments

The second part of Democracy and Tradition continues to develop an expressivist definition of democratic tradition that stands apart as a tertium quid from both neo-traditionalism and contractarian liberalism. For Stout, the contractarian view of democracy is undermined by its quest for a “socially cooperative” definition of reasonability. According to Rawls, reasonable people must begin by identifying “a principle from which they and others can reason in common.” This rationality is problematic, however, in that it imputes irrationality to those who fail to accept it. Since it is a “free-standing” conception of justice, Rawls assumes that it is commonly foundational. But here, Stout argues, Rawls is guilty of a fundamental epistemological error in underestimating the role of an individual’s “collateral commitments.”

Stout disavows this Rawlsian construction of liberalism. Rather, he attempts “to explore the possibility that a person can be a reasonable (socially cooperative) citizen without believing in or appealing to a free-standing conception of justice.” In Stout’s model, each individual begins with a historical-cultural inheritance, even while his or her personhood is not assimilated into group thinking.

This alternate democratic vision crucially stands outside the increasingly polarized conflict between contractual liberals and traditionalists. For Stout, the danger in the present milieu is that the rigorous “definitional component” of contractual liberalism is accepted by traditionalists as an accurate reflection of the practice of the democratic tradition. But Stout suggests that this is not the case. The irony of the situation is that both traditionalists and contractarian liberals agree on a particularly rigorous definition of liberalism even while – Stout suggests – that definition fails to reflect the actual practice of the democratic tradition.

[Read more...]

New blog

Posted on | March 3, 2010 | 1 Comment

Make sure to add the excellent new blog The Christian Humanist to your rss feed.

Evangelicalism and Quietist spirituality

Posted on | March 1, 2010 | 1 Comment

[Update (3/3): See Mark Noll's brief review at Books & Culture.]

The influence of Anglo-American pietistic movements on evangelicalism is familiar to most readers, but the continental Quietist lineage of evangelical spirituality receives much less recognition. Following in many ways on the work of W.R. Ward, Patricia Ward presents this other side of the family tree in Experimental Theology in America: Madame Guyon, Fenelon, and Their Readers.

The historical narrative of American spirituality would be incomplete if it concerned only the more traditional and confessional denominations, which generally trace their theological heritage to the Puritans. The alternate strand of religion which Ward describes originated not in the colonies, but in the Old World – in the Quietism of seventeenth-century French Catholicism. Ward’s central figures are Madame Guyon, a charismatic laywoman, and her defender Francois Fenelon. Guyon’s Quietism would have a lasting impact after her death, as her ideas continued to attract a readership from within even the more traditional Protestant denominations. Ward describes Guyon as “a laywoman with a sense of vocation, an aristocrat with financial resources, a mother who had abandoned her sons and her home, a mystic with an exuberant personality and charismatic presence.” Her dynamic writings and personality were seen as threats by the religious establishment of the time; perhaps attracted for this reason, later American Protestants adapted aspects of her Catholic Quietism as an unlikely but welcome component of democratic spirituality. Ward even suggests that Guyon’s primary “drive” was reformational, effectually clearing the path of theological obstructions for her evangelical followers.

The adaptation of Guyon’s theology into American Protestantism proceeded through stages: the initial readership of Protestant immigrants, the 19^th century revivalists, and the later incorporation into the broadly Protestant movement toward “inner” spirituality and a “deeper life” of holiness. The uniquely American interpretation of Guyon’s experientialism manifests itself in what Ward calls a kind of “Baconian” fusion, that is, a combination of the Quietist theme of certain knowledge through inner experience with the Commonsense emphasis on “reasonable truth gained through evidence.” Elements of this sort of fusion could be seen as early as Jonathan Edwards, who, while approaching the issue as an intellectual, emphasized the “sense of the heart” so embedded in his idea of conversion. The Quietist influence in Phoebe Palmer and Thomas Upham, and their contemporary, Charles Finney, were crucial in mediating the work of Madame Guyon and Fenelon more directly to Protestant spirituality. The Quietism of French Catholicism had been thoroughly reframed within the Protestant – and American – context.

The influence of Guyon and experimental theology continues in the particularly democratic spirituality of American religion. After World War II, Protestant religion was energized by the intensely experiential evangelical and charismatic renewal movements. The renewal was centered on “personal piety, new forms of community and of worship, and an emphasis on the laity.” Broad evangelicalism stressed the need for “intimacy” with Jesus, an ever-deepening experience of God through the Holy Spirit. The theology of Guyon, filtered through American Protestantism, had effectively become the new means of spiritual formation in modern evangelicalism. An anti-establishment, anti-liturgical community acquired its own standard pedagogy of spiritual growth, one that proved paradigmatic and cohesive even as it was profoundly intimate and individualized.

Secularization and intellectual life

Posted on | February 23, 2010 | 10 Comments

David Koyzis has a good piece up at Cardus on evangelicalism and intellectual life. There’s been a fair amount of interest lately in an evangelical recovery of intellectualism. Matt Anderson questions whether too much is being surrendered in this pursuit. John Mark Reynolds suggests that many younger evangelicals are, basically, intellectual posers in search of respectability; a return to an intellectual Christendom is needed.

Koyzis’ piece doesn’t raise any shockingly new points, but does cover the ground very nicely from a Kuyperian perspective. One of his concluding statements did give me pause:

This means that cultivating the evangelical mind cannot simply mould us into Christian versions of, say, Rawlsians, Marxists or Derrideans. If we become such, not only will we have nothing distinctive to contribute, but we will merely be parroting the reductionist errors we ought instead to be exposing. Worse, we will inevitably follow the secularizing paths travelled by so many academic institutions and individual scholars in the past. We should rather be faithful scholars, exploring God’s world in all its complexity, affirming the partial truths in the many pagan and secular schools of thought, while definitively recognizing that the all-encompassing claims of Christ in the academy call for a distinctive approach fundamentally at variance with these.

His overall point is well taken: it’d be a mistake for evangelicals to fail to make their own distinctive contribution to intellectual discourse. Our own populist history notwithstanding, we do have the resources that any established tradition would have, at least in raw form. It remains for evangelicals to make something of that material, and not be afraid to argue boldly. That said, I’m not entirely convinced that the best way to approach such a project is to begin by assuming that anything we contribute will be “fundamentally at variance” with the “pagan and secular schools of thought.” This seems to grant a sort of ultimacy to “the secular school” that I think we would want to withhold. I wonder whether we’ll really get very far if we begin — again — with a basic suspicion of the wisdom and intellectual gifts of those outside our community. The Reformed tradition has not always assumed such a stance, and I’ve questioned whether the stagnancy of evangelicalism (outside its Americanist context) may be a result of its closed system; in MacIntyrean terms, evangelicalism lacks an empathetic imagination. Underneath all this, I wonder whether evangelicals and Calvinists alike sometimes conflate secularity and secularism in an unhealthy manner that often puts the brakes on any theological-anthropic motivations. If our vision is one that assumes the “all-encompassing” dominion of Christ, then is it possible that evidence of God’s grace may be even more pervasive than we first anticipated? If the evangelical-Calvinist project assumes the necessity of the Spirit for the very order of the cosmos, then how will we approach the “partial truths” of those outside our tradition?

The evangelical God

Posted on | February 22, 2010 | No Comments

After Mark Noll describes his work America’s God as “a social history of theology,” the reader might expect the narrative to subsume theological developments within a broader history of class conflict or political debates. The striking feature of Noll’s work, however, is how theological and cultural trends are seen as integrated forces, perhaps with one as the dominant influence at one moment, and in a receptive mode at another.

In the aftermath of the War for Independence, Noll argues that there was a unique synthesis of evangelical religion, political republicanism, and common sense philosophy which together framed the American identity. This symbiotic relationship worked, in part, by appealing to the emerging democratic impulse. The appearance of evangelical religion in this synthesis is perhaps the most surprising, since, as Noll points out, colonial evangelicals were marginalized at the time of the Revolution. What is remarkable is how the post-Revolution evangelicals were able to appropriate the late Puritan theology of the church and covenant for use of political republicanism. This unprecedented alliance had the effect of Americanizing evangelical religion, and thus welding the national and religious identities closely together. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, effectually, a distinctively American civil religion emerged, replacing the older “Puritan canopy.” Although it varied between north and south, formalists and anti-formalists, men and women – the American element remained constant.

The American synthesis had far-reaching effects. The “exchange” of theological and cultural language was so thorough that it became difficult to distinguish between a formerly theological concept like “virtue” and the political ideal of “liberty.” Further, as the new American religion embraced the democratic novus ordo, the hierarchical denominations, encumbered by tradition and inherent suspicion of the masses, were unable to keep pace with the Baptists, Methodists, and a host of upstart sects. Theologically and philosophically, “simplicity” was highly valued, in the reading of both Scripture and commonsense rationality – perhaps suggestive of evangelicalism’s burgeoning anthropocentrism. The consequence was a certain confidence in ethical and theological reasoning that led eventually to violent conclusions – most poignantly in the debate over slavery. Opposing sides, each assured of its own self-evident convictions, each with finger poised over biblical proof-texts, eventually collided in what amounted to a regional-theological-political Civil War.

It is perhaps this last link between Reformed hermeneutics and the violence over slavery that is most striking. The denouement leaves the reader feeling a certain sense of (qualified) tragedy, as the dynamism of evangelical religion is eventually and unwittingly submerged beneath the weight of its political aspirations. Noll quotes the criticism of Bonhoeffer: American secularization derives from the church’s excessive confidence that it could join itself to the world and not become subordinate to the world. While the confusion of ecclesial and national identity is unmistakable, was this muddled alliance the only reason for the evangelical dynamism? Was the Faustian bargain the only way for American religion to claim its cultural inheritance? And could it be possible that a fuller explanation for the emphasis on human moral responsibility (across all social classes) extends beyond republicanism, to some deeper, reformational trend?

Basil Hall and the Protestant humanists

Posted on | February 22, 2010 | No Comments

I’ve recently started reading Basil Hall’s classic Humanists and Protestants (T&T Clark, 1990). I stumbled on it by accident while doing other research, but I’ve been amazed by the depth of scholarship in Hall’s work. He comes out strongly in favor of the early humanistic impulse in Bucer and Calvin, in particular, which he views as necessarily distinct from the later scholasticism of Calvin’s heirs. While I’m not convinced that the humanism and scholasticism of the Protestant tradition can be so easily disintegrated (historically or practically), Hall does present some fascinating case-studies to bolster his point. Particularly fascinating (so far) are his chapters on “The Reformation City” and Bucer’s theology of diakonia. A future chapter promises to delve into the troubles inherent in defining “Puritanism,” which should be a fun ride.

I’d be interested if anyone else has read Basil Hall, or has any thoughts about how his work fares in respect to the historical arguments of Muller, Grabill, etc.

Side note: for a more recent take on the humanist vs. scholastic debate (perhaps more commonly tagged as Calvin vs. the Calvinists), there’s a fascinating section in Charles Partee’s recent The Theology of John Calvin — “Three Introductory Conclusions.” Partee dissents from Muller, R. Scott Clark, and other modern scholastics who view Calvin more as a “starter” than a “closer,” requiring the more systematic formulations of his followers.

The next president of Wheaton College

Posted on | February 20, 2010 | 2 Comments

Phil Ryken. My knowledge of Dr. Ryken is mostly limited to his involvement with the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals and the old Tenth Presbyterian pulpit he filled after James Montgomery Boice passed on. Is Wheaton moving toward traditional Calvinism?

Stout’s democratic ancestors

Posted on | February 17, 2010 | No Comments

The polarization of American culture along religious lines is nothing new. Heightened rhetoric has been part and parcel of our pious democracy since Jefferson’s Federalist critics cast him as an atheist Francophile in a concerned plea to preserve the nation from revolutionary immorality and chaos. Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition begins with the recognition of this continuing societal dualism, in which secular liberals and religious traditionalists “thrive mainly by inflating the other’s importance” (10). Neo-traditionalists, such as Hauerwas and MacIntyre, argue that liberal democracy is “empty” of any “moral or spiritual core” (1). Many secular liberals, such as Richard Rorty, on the other hand, view religion as “a conversation-stopper” (10), as it presumes some level of rationality or transcendence that is not fully available to any reasonable citizen.

Stout places himself in the midst of this crossfire, as his project levels fundamental critiques of both the polarized parties. He acknowledges the neo-traditionalist argument that ethical and political reasoning are “creatures” of tradition. However, Stout maintains, the neo-traditionalists err in their assumption that democracy itself in not such a tradition of rationality (11). Further, the heightened rhetoric often employed against democracy underestimates “the capacity of democratic practices to sustain themselves over time” (12). After all, it is this democratic society which provides the forum for these debates to exist (cf. 55).

Stout’s defense of democracy stands apart from the mainstream of liberalism, which has inadvertently bolstered the neo-traditionalist critique in two ways: first, by endorsing a definition of the nation-state which assumes neutrality toward any comprehensive good; second, by assuming an entirely non-contextual, a-historical means of practical reasoning. However, democracy cannot avoid tradition. It is a tradition – a certain way of life, embedded in history, with a particular understanding of piety and virtue. Here Stout makes a critical turn to recover and make explicit the democratic conception of character, piety, and identity in a way that may often go unarticulated in liberalism. Rather than follow the dominant Lockean-Rawlsian strand of liberal thought, Stout highlights three strands, or dialects, within the American discourse: Emersonian pragmatists (from Emerson to Whitman to Dewey), orthodox Augustinians, and – strikingly – a kind of “blues spirituality” rooted in the African-American experience. These three strands provide a more “concrete” account of our own societal debates, perils, and potentialities (21).

The Emersonians pursue a “self-cultivated” ethic “that is always in the process of projecting a higher conception of self to be achieved,” abandoning any notion of a “fixed telos of perfection” (29). This “perfectionism” is never static, nor does it undercut cultural achievement through democratic “leveling,” as some neo-traditionalists have argued. Rather, the democratic impulse reorients the direction of “piety” away from deference toward hierarchical, and potentially tyrannical, powers. Contrary to the neo-traditionalists, this reorientation is only impiety if one accepts the notion that deference toward hierarchy is an inherent good; the democratic tradition does not. While traditionalism emphasizes an individual’s “place” in society, the democratic tradition gives the individual a dynamic responsibility for his or her own piety, which is pursued through stages of “ascension.” There is no fixed way through this ascent, none of the “stationariness of religion” (32).

Stout acknowledges in his account both of Emersonian tradition and blues spirituality that Augustinian democrats have a tenuous relationship with their unorthodox counterparts. The stark realities of an imperfect world (Eliot and West’s “twilight civilization”) bring this continually to the forefront. Stout rightly points out that our response to this imperfection is a crucial test of a tradition’s hopeful orientation. Perhaps here the Emersonian mode of “ascent” requires the capacity for humility and patience afforded by either Augustianian-Niebuhrian ambivalence or the tragicomic blues sensibility of Ellison and Baldwin. This modified, hopeful democratic impulse is one that Stout believes can accommodate both naturalists and supernaturalists, despite their profound differences (33, 59). In part one of Democracy and Tradition, at least, this acknowledgement will have to suffice. Stout’s appeal is persuasive because it is an invitation to dialogue. Still, Augustinians may approach Whitman and Emerson with justifiable caution. For all Augustine’s appreciation of neo-Platonism, the final line was eventually drawn at an epistemic point.

And yet, the dynamism of the Emersonian democrats may appeal to Augustinians. The democratic emphasis on active citizenship offers a corrective to some of the more ambivalent strands of political Augustianism; it also allows for a sort of anthropological realism that would appeal to orthodox Protestants. These similarities are even more striking in light of Stout’s choice to follow a tradition of ex-Puritan discontents rather than the dominant Lockean branch. One can’t help being curious about the humanistic genealogy of Emersonian democracy.

More on humanism

Posted on | February 17, 2010 | No Comments

While we’re at it, Steven Wedgeworth has an excellent new article on recovering the surprisingly high anthropology of the early Protestants: “The Goodness of Stuff.”

Thoughts on a Calvinist humanism

Posted on | February 16, 2010 | 11 Comments

Trying to pin down the humanist elements in Calvinism is something like theological archeology. That’s not to say that the tradition has given up its humanism altogether, but that its sacralizing tendencies are almost always bound up with either an Aristotelian scholasticism or evangelical pietism. The humanist elements often seem at odds with both, but I doubt that a pure humanism can be extracted and isolated entirely. That said, I do wonder whether the presence of humanism in the Reformed tradition acts as a sort of vitalizing preservative in more scholastic or pietistic circles.

I’m sure that there are many other, more profitable, definitions of theological humanism. But I’d like to take a preliminary shot, in the hope that others will offer critiques and alternatives.

Theological humanism gives full weight to the worthy “end” of humanity and creation, while recognizing creation’s complete dependence on the animation of grace to achieve its end. The Reformed perspective adds the element of alien grace — in which the Spirit drives creation toward exaltation. So the end of humanity is its ascension to full union with, and enjoyment of, Christ. Because the locus of this ascension is in the heavens (a function of the extra calvinisticum), some have argued that, once grace has ascended, the world is left without, in some significant way (e.g. Simon Oliver targets Calvin’s “spiritually rarified” eucharist). But this runs contrary to a Calvinist humanism, because all of life, and not just the ascetic elements, possess the privilege to glorify God. While Calvinism affirms that the saeculum cannot on its own achieve its proper end (namely: to honor the worship of God), it is dignified by such “ornamentations” of divine grace that it can achieve a true beauty animated by the Spirit. The rejection of the privilege and duty to honor God is the tragic aspect of humanity, precisely because it has been given so much. This is why “natural law” functions differently for the early Reformed, who used it to vindicate divine judgment, than it does for many modern natural law theorists, who often use it to provide common ground in a pluralistic society.

Hacker trouble

Posted on | February 12, 2010 | 1 Comment

Apologies for the messed up RSS feeds. A couple Russian hackers broke through yesterday, and I’m still working to clean everything up.

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Theopolitical is the weblog of Davey Henreckson, a graduate student in theology at the University of Notre Dame. Topics of conversation are political and historical theology, with semi-frequent forays into literature, economics, localism, and the divine American sport -- baseball.

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