Less than the Least

Every year, it staggers me. Mostly, I think it’s the improbability of the enterprise that knocks the wind out of me, leaves me utterly shattered. The notion that the God of the universe would submit Himself to all the ugliness and indignity and pain that this world can muster, and much worse besides – that He would, in doing so, turn death itself against itself. Add to that the breathtaking, terrible yet wonderful truth that He did all this for the likes of me, and countless more like me. How can it be so?

An article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday described a celebration of the work of the late rabbi and scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel, who wrote a famous book (“The Prophets”) about Biblical prophesy and was intensely involved in the Civil Rights Movement. According to the article, several of the speakers suggested that Barack Obama has prophetic qualities. I’m no expert on prophetic discourse, but it seems to me that the terms “prophet” and “prophetic” are almost always misused, often but not always by the evangelical left.

Oversimplifying radically, the Biblical prophets seem to me to have had three qualities. First, they called for a return to Godly behavior in their culture. “The prophet was an individual who said no to his society,” as Heschel put it, “condemning its habits and assumptions, its complacency, waywardness, and syncretism.” Second, they put themselves at great risk in proclaiming this message. Third, they predicted (often with specific prophesies) the consequences of a failure to correct the sinful patterns of the present.

If you ever read the verses on bribes and gifts in the book of Proverbs, as I did for a Sunday school lesson last week, you will quickly run into apparent contradictions. “Whoever is greedy for unjust gain troubles his own household, but he who hates bribes will live,” instructs one verse (Prov. 15:27). But another that says “A gift in secret averts anger, and a concealed bribe, strong wrath.” (Prov. 21:14). How can good bribes– or gifts, if you prefer– be distinguished from bad ones?

The easiest case is gifts simply to show respect or humility, as when the Magi brought gifts to the baby Jesus (Matthew 2:11-12). These, the Bible makes clear, are good and often admirable.

But with gifts that expect or hope for something in return, distinguishing the good from the bad seems much harder.

Are secular university faculties prejudiced against evangelical Christians?

The folks at Volokh [link here] are having an interesting discussion about that question. The conversation was kicked off by a study that, I gather, shows that 53% of university faculty members view evangelicals negatively. Todd Zywicki says that figure suggests a measure of bigotry among those who teach in secular universities.

Having been a part of the secular university world for almost thirty years (counting my student days)—and having belonged to evangelical churches for more than twenty years—I’m quite sure that anti-Christian bigotry exists, and that its targets extend beyond evangelicals. But bigotry is not an on-off category; differences of degree matter. And while I have only my own experience to go on, my impression is that the amount and depth of hostility have declined sharply in the last couple of decades, and especially in the last several years.

Over 55 years since it was first published, C.S. Lewis's wonderful book Mere Christianity still seems to me the best introduction to, and most winsome account of, orthodox Christianity. I've found it surprising that after all these years, there still isn't a real replacement for it. I wrote a little op-ed about this that appeared this morning: here. I'd be interested to hear whether readers agree, and whether there's a book any of you thinks measures up to the Lewis classic.

Two comments on David’s interesting and wise column on the absence of contemporary C.S. Lewis equivalents:

I think the absence of Lewis-like figures in the university world is part of a larger change in academic culture. Used to be, the best professors at the best universities were expected to engage with the world outside universities. Lewis was hardly alone in this. His rough contemporary, British historian A.J.P. Taylor, was a major public figure even as he wrote first-rate historical scholarship. In mid-twentieth-century America, sociologist Daniel Bell, historian Arthur Schlesinger, and economist John Kenneth Galbraith are all famous examples of the same type. Today, economists still play this “public citizen” role, but few academics in other disciplines do. And most academic writing is now so technical and jargon-filled that no one outside the relevant discipline could bear reading it.

Thanks to everyone who has chimed in on the question of whether there's a true successor to Mere Christianity. The discussion has prompted many thoughts, but I'll mention three for now:

1) Several people (both in the comments and in emails) asked whether we really need a new Mere Christianity. In a sense, I think the answer is no. Like Augustine's Confessions, Mere Christianity is unique; perhaps we should simply be grateful for the gift. But I also like to think that each generation has a classic that has permanent value yet also speaks to that particular generation. I don't feel as though our generation's classic has emerged yet.

2) I especially appreciated all the suggested readings. A few I've read, but others I haven't and now plan to: Michael Green, Rav Zacharias, even D'Souza. Several are on my desk waiting to be read (Francis Collins, Phillip Yancy). I have read Pascal (with a friend) and loved a number of his pensees, but they struck me more as brilliant isolated insights than as a complete apologetics.

Some of our earlier discussion on this blog about evangelicals and the environment prompted a email from my colleague Stephanos Bibas that may be of interest to those who are following this issue. The email argues that there is a connection between evangelicals' "uneasy relationship with environmentalism" and their relationship with the Republican party, and is informed throughout by Stephanos's Orthodox faith.

Rather than trying to restate his comments, no doubt much more poorly, I'll simply quote from his email:

"Christianity should naturally (excuse the pun) embrace environmentalism. The first few chapters of Genesis make it clear that while man is the crown of creation, he is also to be a steward of it, because all of creation bears God's imprint as His handiwork; as God created each thing, he saw that it was good. Francis of Assisi, St. Seraphim of Sarov, and many other holy men and women have been so attuned to creation that they befriended wild animals, reflecting their love for His creatures.

            A few weeks ago, I was struck by a line in Abraham Kuyper's "Lectures on Calvinism" (1898), one of the great (and accessible!) modern Protestant works on politics and law.   In a world without sin, Kuyper wrote, "every rule and ordinance and law would drop away, even as all control and assertion of the power of the magistrate would disappear."  Heaven, he suggests, is no place for law or lawyers.

            We lawyers come in for a lot of abuse, much of it justified, but I'm not so sure our work will disappear in heaven.  The conclusion that law and thus lawyers will be unnecessary seems to assume that in heaven we will be all seeing and all knowing, and all complexity will simply disappear.  I'm not sure where that assumption comes from; it doesn't seem especially consistent with the hints of heaven, with all its richness and diversity, that we get in the Bible.  The absence of sin doesn't necessarily mean the absence of complexity, and where there is complexity law and lawyers seem to have a role to play.

            I don't think it's entirely coincidental that the Holy Spirit is described in the Bible as an advocate and a counselor, both distinctively lawyerly roles.  The lawyers in heaven will be much better lawyers, but I suspect they will still be dispensing legal advice.

            I'd be curious as to whether others agree.

The New York Times noted in a small article this morning that President-elect Obama has invited Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration, and called this an "olive branch" to evangelicals. Two thoughts on the choice.

First, as the article suggests, the pick confirms that Rick Warren is the new Billy Graham- the obvious choice for this kind of honor. The contrast between the Warren and Graham as leading public evangelicals is striking. With a couple of exceptions, Graham resolutely avoided social issues, whereas Warren has made them a centerpiece of his ministry. This is dramatic testimony, it seems to me, of the extent to which some of the emphases of evangelicalism are changing. In some respects, Warren has less in common with Graham than with the early twentieth century evangelicals (such as John R. Mott of the YMCA and Student Volunteer Movement) who treated social issues and evangelism as inextricably intertwined.

Warren's prominence does not necessarily mean, however- and this is the second point- that evangelicals will be an important part of the Obama era. Evangelical political influence may well have peaked. Evangelicals played surprisingly little role in the election- and not because Obama made significant inroads; although he won a higher percentage of young evangelical votes than John Kerry in 2004, the overall percentages were nearly the same, with McCain winning well over 70%.

I suspect the most noteworthy development in Protestant Christianity in an Obama era may be at least a temporary reversal of the decades of decline in mainline Protestantism in America. Although Obama hobnobs with a few prominent evangelicals, and his first memoir prominently featured a conversion story, his instincts seem much more in line with mainline Protestantism than with evangelicalism. The frequent comparisons to Lincoln and Roosevelt are fully consistent with this- and Obama also seems to me to have some similarities to the young Woodrow Wilson. In historical terms, Obama is a Progressive, not a Populist, and this may bode well for the mainline Protestant denominations that are the Progressives' principal religious heirs.

It is hard to imagine a world without Father Richard John Neuhaus– his dazzling intellect; the wide-ranging "The Public Square" columns he wrote each month in First Things; his love of ideas and of his Creator. But with his passing away this morning, we now must.

I only saw him once. Almost exactly a year ago, he came to the annual Christian law professors’ conference to participate in a debate with Bill on the legacy of the religious right. I was well aware that his bold defense of Christian participation in the public square in the 1980s was an important part of the inspiration that eventually led to gatherings and groups like ours. But I also had the impression that he did not always suffer fools gladly. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.

I needn’t have wondered. The "debate" with Bill turned out to be a brilliant conversation about some of the positive and negative legacies of the religious right. He was unfailingly gracious, and the panel was the highlight of a remarkable conference.

I’m grateful to have seen him in action.  He was one of a kind.

David is right:  Father Neuhaus was indeed one of a kind, and also a deeply admirable man.  He was the happy warrior of the culture wars:  eager to mix it up with those with whom he disagreed, but always with respect.  There seems to have been no anger or spite in him—a rare thing among those engaged in hot-button cultural debates.

Neuhaus embodied one of the most important developments of our time, and also one of the most surprising:  the hold conservative Catholics have on the political and legal views of conservative Protestants.  Though he converted in middle age (he was a Lutheran minister when he became a public figure), Neuhaus was every inch a Catholic.  Yet his work—both in his books and in First Things, the magazine he ran—attracted a wide and attentive audience among Protestants.  I feel confident saying that Neuhaus was far more influential in evangelical Protestant circles than figures like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, or James Dobson.

Great as his influence was, the trend was the work of more than this one man.  The most admired legal intellectual in evangelical circles is Antonin Scalia, a conservative Catholic.  Catholic academics have spawned large and sophisticated bodies of work on the role Christian faith does and should play in law, politics, and culture.  Of course, Protestant academics work in these areas too, and some of them—Mark Noll, Alvin Plantinga, and Nicholas Wolterstorff come to mind—are every bit as smart and knowledgeable as their Catholic counterparts.  Just as Michael McConnell, longtime law professor and judge on the 10^th Circuit, can match wits with anyone in wide world of legal thought.  But the Nolls and McConnells are few; their Catholic equivalents are many.  Much as Father Neuhaus will be missed, his death does not alter that state of affairs.

At one level, the Catholic influence in Protestant circles has been a source of great good:  there is more unity across denominational lines than perhaps at any time in American history.  But there is a downside.  Today’s American Protestants are optimistic about the potential for politics and law to move the culture in positive directions.  That has led to the too-casual embrace of Republican party orthodoxy by many believers.  (I say this as a registered Republican: I’m part of the problem, not part of the solution.)  Likewise, American Protestants of my generation have placed more weight on cultural symbols—crosses and crèches in public spaces, prayers at public school graduations and sporting events, the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance—than our predecessors in generations past.  Battles over those symbols have absorbed too much of Christians’ political attention, and a host of other problems too little.

Father Neuhaus was a large part of the reason for those intellectual tilts—his thought was shaped by a religious tradition that found the exercise of government power more comfortable and Christian symbols more important than most Protestant traditions would suggest.  Maybe Neuhaus and the tradition that shaped his legal and political views got these issues right.  If so, the increasingly blurred line between Catholicism and Protestantism we see today is an unmitigated blessing.  If not—well, suffice it say that some of us often find ourselves wishing that a more distinctively Protestant voice might emerge in the ongoing conversation about the role of Christian faith in American life.

My first impulse when I saw a picture of Richard Dawkins standing in front of a London bus emblazoned with an atheist ad--“ There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”—was to chuckle. My second was to skim through the article to see if he really had endorsed these words, which are an atheist response to the ads run by a Christian group.

 My spouse and I are in the process of joining a Boston church; the church requires that would-be members give their testimony. Because my memory is lousy these days, I wrote mine out; it’s pasted below with a few minor edits. Some of this material, though not all of it, will be familiar to anyone who read this blog last spring. Here it is:

A student emailed me this marvelous commentary by Stanley Fish, which I hadn’t seen. I’ll only add two brief thoughts, since Fish speaks for himself as always: 1) the two Christian discourses Fish discusses don’t strike me as necessarily at odds with one another—any more than faith and works are; and 2) the forgiveness offered by Christ, and the economic imagery so often used to describe it, was of course vividly foreshadowed in the Old Testament by the Jubilee (Leviticus 25), which had both practical and spiritual significance. 

Few experiences remind me of the common bond that unites all Christians as vividly as attending a worship service in a different city or country when I’m traveling. When I’m in Rome—as I am for the next two and a half weeks—this usually means worshipping at Rome Baptist Church.

Rome is full of reminders both of the layers of history and of the temptation to marry Christianity with pagan religions. Sitting by the fountain with Bernini’s Four River Gods fountain in Piazza Navona—a revelation both because of the light gleaming in the sheets of water and because it has so often been blocked by scaffolding in recent years—it was easy to understand the temptation to take the best from nonChristian traditions and combine them with our own.   A few blocks away, Michaelanglo’s Sistine Chapel paintings (which we saw with a few thousand of our closest friends on Friday) include both Biblical prophets and pagan ones. 

This article made me sad. The subject is the coming depopulation of much of the world. Here’s the key graph:

With the possible exception of several Caravaggios, my favorite painting in Rome on my most recent visit was this painting (the reproduction here isn't great) of Saint John the Baptist by Veronese, in the Borghese Gallery. The planes of the painting—John’s body and arms, the trees in the background—are at slightly rakish angles, and the colors—reds, oranges, olives—seem pleasingly unexpected.