Nonplussed, they said they thought that is what parents do with newborns. Not doing so was, however, still considered an acceptable choice for parents who might prefer to institutionalize or put up for adoption children thought to have necessarily bleak futures.

“In 1972,” Will writes further, “people with Down syndrome were still commonly called Mongoloids.

“Now they are called American citizens, about 400,000 of them, and their life expectancy is 60. Much has improved.”

Not very much that’s controversial, there.

And if Will had contented himself with relating how his son has lived a life full beyond expectation and enriched the lives of others who have crossed his path, we could all enjoy a moment of quiet reflection on parental dedication and go on about our day.

But Will uses the occasion of his son’s birthday to draw a larger point: that though much has improved for such children, in the larger society there has also been, “moral regression, as well.”

And of course that point doesn’t sit so well with many.

It may cause us to react with varying degrees of cynicism, even offense, at the conclusions he draws when considering how we choose to either give birth to, or destroy, unborns whom we perceive to have “necessarily bleak” (read: ‘expensive’) futures.

In arguing that we have experienced a moral regression, Will relates that Jonathan was born as prenatal testing was becoming common and just eight months before Roe v. Wade inaugurated an era of “casual destruction of pre-born babies.”

This era, he continues:

has coincided, not just coincidentally, with the full, garish flowering of the baby boomers’ vast sense of entitlement, which encompasses an entitlement to exemption from nature’s mishaps, and to a perfect baby. So today science enables what the ethos ratifies, the choice of killing children with Down syndrome before birth.

Expectedly, reactions to Will’s observations vary depending on a variety of factors, including religious belief and political leanings.

Most traditional Catholics and Evangelicals would find abhorrent the notion that it’s acceptable to end a life just because one is uncertain as to one’s ability to cope with such a bleak (expensive) future. (I can’t speak to how Muslims would react, but welcome informed comments. Interestingly enough, Will has described himself as “agnostic.”)

Others, whether conservative or liberal, would take Will to task.

Some liberals would point out that “capital ‘C’” Conservatives who decry abortion often appear to be against providing taxpayer resources to help children like Jonathan.

And indeed some conservatives, especially more Libertarian ones, say it’s wonderful if someone like Will is able to provide for children like Jonathan, but, “don’t expect us to pay for it.” They may even go further to say that in the face of an inability to pay, the decision to abort is a responsible one.

Both seem to agree that as a Conservative who champions smaller government at almost every turn, Will is in danger of gross inconsistency — if not downright hypocrisy — if he’s suggesting it’s society’s responsibility to shoulder the burden of parents who give birth to children they don’t have the ability to properly care for.

I’ll leave it to Will to answer those charges. A task I’m certain he is eminently qualified to undertake.

But to my mind, Will’s description of my generation as having a sense of entitlement to exemption from nature’s mishaps is accurate.

And it seems that contained within that entitlement ethos is the notion that “sacrifice,” “burden,” and “inconvenience” are all synonymous, unmixed evils.

So in the case of a problematic or even merely unplanned pregnancy, among the primary, if not the very first of considerations is, “can we afford this?” which often means nothing other than, “will we have to change our lifestyle to accommodate this child?”

Now, if you are pro-choice, you may not find this particularly vexing, especially if you view the unborn as a fetus, or a mass of cells, or part of the women’s body.

And, except to ask that you honestly consider how much that view is predicated on an entitlement ethos, it’s not my purpose here to talk you out of your belief.

Instead, I’d like to address those of us who consider abortion of such unborns to be extremely troublesome, if not an unmitigated societal evil.

And I’d like to do it in the context of something that happens in almost every church — baby dedications.

It being Mother’s Day, there’s a chance that like me, you witnessed a baby dedication today.

If you did, you probably witnessed the child’s parents stand up in front of the congregation and promise to the Lord to raise their child in a godly way.

At the churches I’ve been active in, the pastor also asks the congregation to affirm they will support the parents in this endeavor.

Today, as I joined my church in making just such an affirmation, I wondered how many of us (including me) really understood what it was we were agreeing to.

Were we willing to come together as a community around those parents? Were we willing to do so in the knowledge we may very well have bound ourselves to inconveniences, burdens, even sacrifices we could not have anticipated as we made our pledge? or that our inability to foresee those burdens did not release us from our obligation?

Do we understand that we are not put here on earth to be free of nature’s mishaps, and that our lot as Christians is to love our neighbor, whom C.S. Lewis has described as, “next to the Blessed Sacrament itself,… the holiest object presented to your senses,” in whom, Christ, “the glorifier and the glorified,” is hidden?

If we haven’t understood and displayed the above truth through our actions, then any arguments we make to the world will be seen as nothing more than easily carried opinions, with little ability to answer the charges of “hypocrite,” that we undoubtedly, perhaps rightfully, will endure.

God’s politics is not liberal or conservative. Instead, it is a politics based on life in God’s Kingdom. Yes, there is a future kingdom in which we will realize our truest selves. But I believe he also expects us, with the Spirit’s help, to diligently move toward that realization here and now. That, I believe, is what Paul meant when he charged us in Philippians to work out our salvation in fear and trembling.

Doing so will require us to bear burdens we would not have asked for. Let us pray when we are called, as we know we will be, that we fulfill our obligations to our neighbor in the knowledge that no matter what is asked of us, Christ has already done immeasurably more than we ever could.

Happy Mothers’ Day.

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That footwashing (as opposed to Baptism and celebration of the Eucharist) appears only once in the Gospels; that footwashing is not practiced in Acts; and that there is no detailed instruction regarding when it is to be practiced.

As mentioned in my previous post, it’s not my intent to argue the status of footwashing as an ordinance.

However, neither do I believe Christ’s instructions on this matter are to be taken lightly, and it seems those who argue against footwashing as an ordinance are invariably reduced to exercising in some pretty intricate exegetical gymnastics in order to dilute the force of Christ’s command, “that you also should do just as I have done to you.” (John 13:14-16)

To explore how footwashing may contribute to our capacity to participate in the goods internal to, and extend our conception of the ends resulting from, the practice of discipleship will require an imaginative act.

Most commentaries that commend footwashing as an example to be followed do so in the context of the “servant leader.” And given Jesus words in Mark 10:44, it seems unproblematic that in washing the disciples’ feet, Jesus was intentionally modeling an  example of humble service to be emulated by Christians in leadership positions.

But as Jerome H. Neyrey and others have noted, the Johannine text is a complicated one, and without close attention, our historical and cultural distance from it can cause us to miss much of what’s happening.

Here, instead of focusing on Christ’s apparently self-humbling action, I’d like to look at what’s going on with Peter.

Peter is aghast at what Jesus is about to do. “Lord, do you wash my feet?” he asks incredulously. Jesus responds not with a “yes” or “no” but simply requires Peter to allow his feet to be washed in the faith that Peter will later understand what Jesus has done.

But Peter cannot accept this. If Christ is to wash his feet, then surely Jesus must also wash Peter’s hands and head.

And here I think is where many commentators who wish to relegate footwashing to mere “example” status may be missing something.

Because while Jesus’ act certainly carries with it a valuable lesson in servant leadership, it also carries an equally valuable lesson in receiving grace.

As Neyrey has pointed out, Jesus is training his disciples in the art of the “Good Shepherd.” And part of that training requires the disciples learn how to serve their flock. But if that’s all Jesus intended, he could simply have had the disciples wash each others’ feet. Or, better yet, he could have brought in the household servants and had the disciples wash their feet.

However, perhaps Jesus wanted to ensure the disciples not only knew that “whoever would become great must become a servant.” Perhaps Jesus also wanted them to understand at an experiential level what it means to be tenderly served by one’s master.

This single act, it seems serves multiple purposes, not the least of which may be to completely break through the most fundamental of status relationships.

It’s one thing for Jesus to command his disciples to serve his flock.

It’s quite another to require a servant to allow his master to bow before him and perform such a seemingly menial and intimate service.

To get an idea of what this must have felt like to Peter, imagine if a slave in Herod’s court had suddenly found his king performing such a task. It would have been almost horrifying–a violation of all conceptions of the order of things with no reference point for understanding such an act.

Yet this is what Jesus required of his disciples. And in so doing, we might not be wrong in thinking, he modeled both the love his Father had for him, as well as heart with which Jesus received that love.

Now we can see that not only is it important that leaders serve their flock. It’s also important that all of us, in whatever position we occupy, understand what it means to be so served.

To allow oneself to be served by one’s master may indeed be even more uncomfortable than to humble oneself before those one leads. How many leaders do we know who would not let themselves be so served?

To do so would be to acknowledge that one is in need of such care. We can brush off those whose status is inferior to our own when they attempt to help us. But it may be more difficult to allow our superiors to serve us in such a way as to appear to humble themselves.

To be a human is to find oneself at times in a position of relative independence and at other times in a position of utter dependence.

Most of us count the virtues of independence as being highly desirable.

But is it possible that there are also virtues of dependence?

One might object that a state of dependence is not something to be prized.

To that I offer two counter-objections.

The first is that all of us have been dependent when we began life. And all of us will be dependent as our lives come to an end. And many, if not all, of us will also have periods during which, due to circumstance or illness, we find ourselves in a position of dependence.

If dependence is an inescapable condition of being human, then certainly we should ask if it should always be treated as something to be despised both of others and ourselves.

The second objection is in the example of Christ himself, who not only acquiesced to, but cherished his utter dependence on his Father.

Here we have the model of one who made himself nothing, in the form of a servant (Philippians 2:7), and yet was given all authority in heaven and on earth by his Father (Matthew 28:18).

Given the above, it might be reasonable to ask if Jesus didn’t intend for us to actually wash the feet of those we serve.

And if he did, we might then ask if his intention was not only to model the Good Shepherd’s servant leadership. Perhaps he intended us to understand both that we are utterly and ultimately dependent upon God, and to help us learn what it means to be dependent on each other.

Now it may be there are other ways to “wash each others’ feet.” But it’s also true that as a culture we have a long history of looking with disdain at being dependent.

By instituting footwashing as a regular exercise, even if only on Maundy Thursday, for instance, we discipline ourselves both in the practice of servant leadership and in the virtues of dependence.

And in understanding there may indeed be such a thing as “virtues of dependence” it may be that we are able to more fully participate in the goods internal to, and extend our conception of, the ends resulting from the practice of discipleship as we serve both our Lord and each other.

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The church’s telos, imposed by God is to bear witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is neither a set of ideas or a system of belief, but the grace (both judgment and redemption) of God made known in human lives. ~ From: Why Church Matters, by Jonathan R. Wilson

*Behest: an urgent prompting <called at the behest of my friends>
Middle English, promise, command, from Old English behǣs promise, from behātan to promise, from be- + hātan to command, promise (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary)

Does your church practice footwashing? And if so, how and how often?

I’ve recently taken part in one or two animated discussions on this subject. (Really, the animation was exclusively on my side.) Reading the account of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, I was struck by the force of Jesus’ charge:

If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you. (John 13: 1-5, 12-17)

Contrast that with Jesus’ words at the Lord’s Supper:

(H)e took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. (Luke 22: 17-20)

It seems to me the imperative force of these statements is semantically equivalent.

Why then is communion considered an ordinance, but footwashing is not?

The answer is that in some churches it is indeed considered an ordinance. However, it seems that in the majority of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox denominations, footwashing is hardly ever observed, if it’s even mentioned at all.

But my purpose today isn’t to debate the status of footwashing in the church, however interesting I think that may be. Instead, I’d like to look at footwashing as worthy of being incorporated within the larger practice of discipleship.

First, though, we need to get clearer on what we mean by “practice.”

It turns out this is a bit more complicated than a first glance might indicate. There are several senses in which we use the term “practice.”

Most commonly in our sports-saturated culture, “practice” is used in the sense of a repetitious rehearsal. A football player rehearses blocking and tackling. A ballet dancer practices the pas de chat.

The point being to so train the mind and body during practice, that when the performance happens, virtually no conscious thought has to be exerted over the muscles in order to execute the correct movement.

Practice is also commonly used to mean the exercise or pursuit of a profession, such as a legal or medical practice.

But that’s not quite what we’re aiming for here.

Instead we’re searching for a more comprehensive definition, which while incorporating some of the features of the more common definitions, situates the term “practice” within the telos of the church.

And of course, for that, we will turn to Alasdair MacIntyre. (Those of you familiar with MacIntyre may know where this is headed, for the rest, I ask your forgiveness and at least a few moment’s indulgence.)

For MacIntyre, a practice is:

any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. ~ From After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre (pg 187)

We’ll try to unpack that rather infolded definition using examples outside the church.

For brevity’s sake, let’s take it as given that discipleship is a “coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity.”

But what do we mean by “goods internal to that form of activity”?

This is not an easy concept, and MacIntyre himself has spent considerable time expanding and extending it. But again turning to sports, a quick approximation of “internal goods” would be the goods one may realize in the course of attempting to “play the game the way it’s meant to be played.”

In the case of American football, that would include the joy experienced in a well completed pass, the camaraderie of great line-play, devising and properly executing a new defensive strategy, etc.

Or if one is a craftsman, the excellence of a beautifully turned out piece of furniture. It is in the doing itself that one realizes these goods. Notice also that one cannot realize these goods in isolation.

Playing great football presumes the contemporaneous presence of others. It also presumes the previous activities of those who have gone before and made their own contributions to how the game is played. In other words, it presumes a tradition, and institutions (clubs, schools, universities, etc.) which preserve and transmit the tradition.

MacIntyre opposes these internal goods to external goods, or goods that are realized as a by-product of the activity, the most obvious ones being financial reward and accolades.

As Jesus’ disciples we are commanded to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20 ESV)

From the above, I hope it has become clear that discipleship does involve the realization of internal goods.

I also take it as a given that the practice of discipleship involves standards of excellence.

We may evaluate our discipleship practices by various criteria, and those criteria may differ from church to church. Nonetheless, the standards are there, and much like standards in any art, they are given their fullest formulation not by external critics but by those who are most passionately involved in upholding and extending them. (It may be that worship is the paradigmatic case of art, but let’s leave that aside, for now.)

It would take quite a bit more effort to fully unpack MacIntyre’s notion of a practice. But here I also want to briefly draw attention to a key distinction MacIntyre does not make, but that must be inserted if we are to make full use of the concept of practice.

It’s a distinction made by Jonathan R. Wilson in Why Church Matters.

Wilson makes the point that MacIntyre’s formulation (at least as quoted above) depends solely on human ability to achieve. So Wilson modifies the concept by saying, “practices enable us to participate in the good,” instead of “achieve the good.”

But Wilson takes the notion of practice every bit as seriously as MacIntyre intends.

“Practices,” Wilson says, “constitute a community.” He goes even further, though:

The church does not exist apart from the practices that embody its good and constitute it as a community. There is no identity for the church other than its practices—the first of which is discipleship.

And it’s in this context, that I’d like to consider footwashing as a discipline that has the potential to more greatly enable our capacity to participate in the goods internal to, and extend our conception of the ends resulting from, the practice of discipleship.

We’ll be exploring that potential in our next post.

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The food thing hasn’t been as difficult for me as it has Shawn. (That may have to do with the fact she’s carrying less body fat than am I.) The reverse is true of the television.

In any case, I’ve picked up a few books from the library. My reading list includes Renovare’s Devotional Classics, Practice Resurrection, by Eugene Peterson, and Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. I also picked up a book on fasting, which I’ll be discussing in a future post.

While reading Ethics, I came upon a brief prayer (or poem, if you like) called “Stations on the Way to Freedom.”

In my earlier days before coming to know the Lord, I consumed quite a few “self-help” books, some worthwhile, some not. While reading Bonhoeffer’s words, it struck me that I could have saved myself quite a bit of time by simply committing them to memory.

I can almost see him staring straightforwardly at me. And the thought that these words were penned by someone who likely knew his death was not far off imbues them with added force.

I’m usually not one to make resolutions, but this year I’ve made a few. And at the top of the list is to progress along the stations on the way to freedom…

Self-discipline

If you set out to seek freedom, you must learn before all things mastery over sense and soul, lest your wayward desirings, lest your undisciplined members lead you now this way, now that way. Chaste be your mind and your body, and subject to you and obedient, serving solely to seek their appointed goal and objective.

Action

Do and dare what is right, not swayed by the whim of the moment. Bravely take hold of the real, not dallying now with what might be. Not in the flight of ideas but only in action is freedom. Make up your mind and come out into the tempest of living. God’s command is enough and your faith in him to sustain you. Then at last freedom will welcome your spirit amid great rejoicing.

Suffering

See what a transformation! These hands so active and powerful now are tied, and alone and fainting, you see where your work ends. Yet you are confident still, and gladly commit what is rightful into a stronger hand, and say that you are contented. You were from from a moment of bliss, then you yielded your freedom into the hand of God, that he might perfect it in glory.

Death

Come now, highest of feasts on the way to freedom eternal, death, strike off the fetters, break down the walls that oppress us, our bedazzled soul and our ephemeral body, that we may see at last the sight which here was not vouchsafed us. Freedom, we sought you long in discipline, action, suffering. Now as we die we see you and know you at last, face to face.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer – “Stations on the Way to Freedom”

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It’s been almost 2 years since the publication of James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, and if the initial tide of commentary/debate/criticism has ebbed, still, it seems this book will continue to exert a commanding influence over the ways in which Christians consider their place in an increasingly fragmented American culture.

At the risk of being exposed as an inattentive reader, I’m going to admit I’ve gone through TCTW more than once and have found myself reacting to Hunter’s argument at times with affirmation, at other times with indignation (occasionally with both emotions simultaneously), but never with indifference.

Most often, though, my engagement has taken the form of vexation at how thoroughly Hunter argues his case. As I read and reread TCTW, it seemed that any objections I had to perceived inconsistency or bad argument were dismissed within one or two pages of being raised.

And judging from an informal survey of reviews, my reactions were pretty typical.

Predictably, those who identify with factions Hunter criticizes have reacted with varying degrees of recognition, rejection, graciousness, and churlishness. I suspect I’m not alone in giving my hearty assent when Hunter reproaches those with whom I disagree and objecting just as vigorously when he dismantles a favored shibboleth.

To that point: I’ve already tipped my hand I’m not neutral in this debate, and I promise to lay my cards out more completely in a moment.

But first I’d like to look at two rhetorically contrasting reviews in order to consider Hunter’s more important points, and in so doing, offer a few (probably futile) criticisms of TCTW along the way.

The first review I want to look at was poison-penned (in good fun, though) by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch for the “Slaughterhouse” section of American Spectator.

Malloch wastes little time in betraying his agenda, most noticeably by questioning Hunter’s.

For the most part Malloch’s time is spent playfully misrepresenting TCTW’s argument and launching ad hominem attacks against Hunter (“the zeal of a smoker who quits”), as well as against the predictably approving blurbs (or “hype,” as Malloch calls them) on TCTW’s dust jacket.

Malloch’s pique seems to have been stirred by what he takes to be Hunter’s suggestion that it is only as “exiles” that we may live authentically Christian lives in latter-day America. “I take issue,” writes Malloch (with subtle undertones of Colonel Nathan R. Jessup), “with the idea that we should flee from the very civilization that we made — and I include Christians in the ‘we’ — and the civilization that we are called to renew.”

Clearly, Malloch is no fan of Hunter’s. Yet despite the gratuitous ad hominems, the misrepresentations, and the intentionally overheated rhetoric, he does make at least three points – one stylistic, two substantive – worth mulling.

The stylistic point is in reference to what Malloch calls Hunter’s “Cartesian logic,” that, so Malloch complains, “often takes away on one page what he offered up the page before.”

Here Malloch gets at the source of my aforementioned vexation. Hunter does indeed appear to sometimes be engaged in taking away on one page what he offered the page before. And one could ungraciously interpret that seeming tendency as an agenda-driven refusal to present a stationary target – by so over-qualifying his arguments that Hunter appears sometimes to walk an extremely fine line between academic expansiveness and intellectual sleight of hand.

And I must admit, upon my first reading, that was the view of Hunter’s presentational style I frequently entertained.

But upon rereading TCTW, it seemed to me that Hunter was not engaging intellectual legerdemain so much as doing everything in his power to give the most generous possible account of what he identifies as the three main streams of Christian Political Engagement (CPE) in America. So generous, that the inattentive reader might easily take Hunter’s statement of what a particular group believes to in fact be Hunter’s own view – something Malloch repeatedly does in his brief review (as was pointed out by Heather Templeton Dill in her rebuttal of Malloch’s review).

I’ll leave to the reader of TCTW to determine whether or not this style counts among Hunter’s virtues. But it does provide an easy stance from which one so inclined may take umbrage when Hunter criticizes whichever particular strain of CPE one tends to sympathize with.

For instance, as someone sympathetic to a more or less neo-Anabaptist program, I found myself frequently engaging in heated internal argument with what I took to be particularly harsh criticisms of the neo-Anabaptist stance.

(Of course, I thought Hunter was dead-on and more than even-handed in his criticism of the Constantinianism of both the Left and Right.)

But enough on style.

The first of Malloch’s substantive points I’d like to consider is his concern that Hunter’s attempt to decouple the notions of “public” and “political” may be “too cute and suffers from a lack of correspondence to reality.”

Hunter expends a good deal of effort explicating the perils of engaging in modern-day politics.

Christian political engagement, he states, unwittingly tends to “embrace some of the most corrosive aspects of the cultural disintegration they (Christians) decry. By nurturing its resentments, sustaining them through a discourse of negation toward outsiders, and in cases, pursuing their will to power, they become functional Nietzscheans, participating in the very cultural breakdown they so ardently strive to resist.”

But as is suggested by Malloch’s objection, other than in graduate studies colloquia, it seems problematic that we can succeed in decoupling the “public” from the “political” in any meaningful sense.

That isn’t to say we can’t benefit from Hunter’s and similar analyses of what’s gone wrong with our politics. In large part, what Hunter describes has been asserted by a wide range of sociologists, political scientists, and philosophers – most notably and most cogently by Alasdair MacIntyre. And though Hunter doesn’t agree with the label, an argument can be made for Christians to engage in political “quietism”, or what Hunter advocates as the salutary discipline of “the church and its leadership to remain silent for a season until it learns how to engage politics and even talk politics in ways that are non-Nietzschean.”

What Hunter doesn’t appear to do in TCTW is make a serious attempt to at least sketch out how the church might go about engaging and talking politics in non-Nietzschean ways. And if he has failed to make such an attempt, then he has in no small measure failed to recognize that he is ceding to MacIntyre’s “barbarians” an essential sphere of human activity.

It’s not a hard argument to make that our politics is so fallen that it threatens to drag any Christian who engages in it into the service of the powers and principalities, but that is equally true for every other human endeavor given under the creation mandate.

Hunter does briefly consider the possibility of a redeemed politics, when he writes:

Some argue that what we need is a redefinition of politics, one that is more capacious and capable of absorbing actions, ideas, and initiatives that are independent of the State. The idea here is to reclaim or restore a “proper” understanding of the political. Such efforts would, in principle, accomplish the same end as I am describing here. This position is certainly worthy of serious debate, but as a sociologist who is attentive to the power of institutions, I am inclined to think that all such efforts will be swallowed up by the current ways in which politics is thought of and used. It is why I continue to think that it is important to separate the public from the political and to think of new ways of thinking and speaking and acting in public that are not merely political.

One has to wonder, though, if the same sort of criticism mightn’t be applied to Hunter’s notion of “public” that Hunter himself applies to “politics”.

It seems it might be legitimate to turn the tables and ask of Hunter:

“Isn’t your notion of ‘public’ subject to being swallowed up by the current ways in which ‘public’ is thought of and used, and chiefly in the notion of ‘public’ as opposed to ‘private’ (where ‘private’ is the sphere relegated by the modern liberal state for speaking of and openly acting from religious conviction)?”

It further seems at least plausible the answer to such a question by one supporting Hunter’s views might well be that we should “separate the private from the public and think of new ways of thinking and speaking and acting in private that are not merely public.”

But such a state of affairs would not be quietism; it would be near-total effacement.

The second substantive point made by Malloch is one that has been made by both Hunter’s supporters and critics, and it is an opinion shared by the other reviewer I want to consider, James K. A. Smith in a review he wrote for The Other Journal.

Where Malloch is “scathing”, Smith is for the most part quite approving. But what they do have in common (along with others) is in identifying Hunter’s notion of “faithful presence from within” – whether read as a “constructive proposal for a different paradigm” (Smith), or a “loudly anti-modern, anti-American, and anti-globalization, post-political, narrow, negative view of power” (Malloch) – as being highly indebted to the neo-Anabaptist tradition Hunter takes such great pains to criticize.

And in so identifying Hunter’s project, Malloch and Smith help us to situate Hunter (properly, I think) in a particular tradition of the church’s history, when that history is understood as an argument for the Christian faith (or what MacIntyre refers to as a “tradition”). More specifically it is a tradition which stresses the church’s mission as “to bear witness to and to be the embodiment of the coming Kingdom of God.”

Seen in this light, one can read Hunter’s criticism of what he identifies as the “purity from” strain of neo-Anabaptist teaching to be an attempt to heal the tradition of ressentiment and thus restore the tradition back to good order.

But in pursuing this desirable end, Hunter, the “sociologist attentive to the power of institutions,” may suffer from a blind spot that renders him unable to fully appreciate the value of “reclaim(ing) a ‘proper’ understanding of the political.”

Where Hunter finds in the neo-Anabaptist project a strong element of “world-hating”, James K. A. Smith wonders if Hunter’s criticism isn’t (at least in some respects) “a critique of a caricature.”

In my view, to the extent Smith’s point is valid, it is due to the blind spot inherent in Hunter’s critique. A blind spot which I’ve suggested may be leading Hunter to call for abandonment of an essential part of our nature as given in the creation mandate.

If this view is correct, then we have no choice but to reach toward a politics “that is more capacious and capable of absorbing actions, ideas, and initiatives that are independent” of a State which increasingly asserts its hegemony over all areas of human life, including, in Malloch’s phrasing, “the complete social architecture… which ranges from committed persons to families to civic associations to schools to the state itself.”

But if To Change The World doesn’t provide guidance for this task, where might we find it?

One might be tempted to run straight back to the neo-Anabaptists—esp. Yoder and Hauerwas—and it may be that would be the best course to take. (Here I must make an admission. I have at best an arm’s length familiarity with Hauerwas, and even less direct contact with Yoder.)

However, I am passably conversant with the writings of two descendants of the Hauerwas/Yoder intellectual lineage – Jonathan R. Wilson and Scott H. Moore – and for the purposes of my argument, I think they’ll do quite nicely.

What Moore and Wilson bring to this debate is a deep sense of the church as a “counter polis,” thereby serving as a corrective to Hunter’s critique of neo-Anabaptist overreaction to the sin of Constantinianism.

Moore, in his book, The Limits of Liberal Democracy, has spent considerable effort teasing out a notion of the church which offers a robust challenge to the idea that “a democracy which is principally committed to the autonomy of the individual and the expansion of personal liberty (i.e. Liberal Democracy) (is) capable of forming the souls of Christians who believe that ‘he who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life will keep it in the life eternal.’”

Moore warns:

(T)he tendency of the culture of Enlightenment Liberalism, which has steadily exported its principles, vocabularies and methodologies from the necessarily public sphere of statecraft (where it works more or less pretty well) into almost every sphere of our daily lives (where it is far less successful) must be checked and can only be checked by communities that have both constituting narratives and sustaining practices strong enough to challenge the linguistic and imaginative hegemony of Liberal Democracy.

If Moore (in quoting Father Michael Baxter, also mentored by Hauerwas) is correct in stating that when politics is redescribed in traditional theological terms…

As the art of achieving the common good through participation in the divine life of God – then substantive religious convictions are central to legitimate political authority, and “interest politics” is not really politics at all, but a cacophonous conflict of wills.

…then when Hunter says, “Politics is always a crude simplification of public life and the common good is always more than its political expression,” one may reasonably ask if Hunter is uncritically accepting the deformed view of “politics as statecraft.”

And when Hunter further states, “the expectations that people place on politics are unrealistic, for most of the problems we face today are not resolvable through politics,” we might well take that as an indication not that politics itself is unredeemable, but that the problems we face are not resolvable through the political levers of statecraft as it is understood by modern liberal market-states.

A further implication being that the public sphere in which Hunter wishes to operate is no less under the sway of functional Nietzscheanism than is the politics from which he wishes to withdraw.

Wilson’s contribution – chiefly in the two works, Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World, and Why Church Matters – is to have effectively translated and then deployed MacIntyre’s philosophy of virtue ethics into the service of the local church. It is Wilson’s reading of MacIntyre, (a skill he learned under Hauerwas), that most effectively brings to light the necessary piece of the neo-Anabaptist tradition that Hunter’s critique misses.

For what Hunter and the outside world see as an over-emphasis on the “purity from” ethos may more properly be seen as the necessary work of carving out from the larger culture a space whereby we may set about the task of inculcating the disciplines and virtues necessary to best order our lives toward our proper telos.

Hunter and Wilson both share the sense that the church’s function is that of “faithful presence” or “witness.” In many respects, their language (and, arguably, what is intended by their language) is nearly identical.

Where Wilson speaks of why “practices cannot be isolated from the whole life of a community and the relationships internal and external to it,” Hunter speaks with great discernment on the role of formation in the task of making disciples.

Hunter, though, believes neo-Anabaptists and new monastics take a too-narrow view of incarnational living as something that “happens in the disciplines of the Christian life—especially in the corporate disciplines of Eucharist, the liturgy, the observance of holy days, and the like.” Where he finds fault is in the view that devalues or at least “ignores the implications of the incarnation in the vocations of ordinary Christians in the workaday world.”

And to the extent that the neo-Anabaptists do not provide, or think it unnecessary to provide, a robust and affirmative account of vocation and a sense of life together with the polis outside the church, Hunter makes a critically important point.

However, in this fallen world, currently subject to the overwhelming influence of fragmentation, dissolution and the ceaseless to and fro movement of the will to power, it would seem the best hope we have for acting in concert with God’s will for the world – including in our homes, our politics, and our vocational callings – is that we do not forget (again, in Baxter’s words as recounted by Moore) that:

Understood theologically, politics entails the ordering of human relationships according to their ultimate end: God. The primary political setting in which this ordering occurs is the church. If the true polis is constituted by the practices of assembled Christians called “the Church,” the “pilgrim City of God,” then “faith” is intrinsically political.

And it is only by making the church our first and primary polis – with all that entails for the practices and disciplines which rightfully order that polis to its proper telos – that we can expect to live faithfully in the world and among our fellow human beings who have yet to recognize what one day every tongue will confess.

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It’s possible you’ve recently acquired a copy of Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller.

Much has been made of the favor in which the doctrine of “Animal Spirits” is held by the current administration.

Michael Scherer recently wrote a piece on Obama and the Animal Spirits for TIME

In that article he at one point gently chides the Administration for its faith in the Spirits. But Scherer ultimately concludes that these same Spirits are likely our only salvation.

William Safire provides a serviceable if somewhat truncated genealogy of the phrase in his recent “On Language” column.

If you’re not familiar with the term and haven’t the leisure time to dive into Akerlof and Shiller’s book, don’t despair – because Mr. Shiller offers some insight into his thinking in a column he recently penned for the Wall Street Journal. (More on that coming up.) But first, I’m going to shamelessly claim-jump Mr. Safire and reconstruct the fossilized underbelly of the “Animal Spirits” meme.

What I found should give at least momentary pause to those now enthusiastically touting the Animal Spirits as our path to redemption.

But only insofar as they’re able to recognize the source of their misplaced hope.

We’ll get to that source in a moment.

Right now, let’s go back to Mr. Safire’s dig site and examine what he’s unearthed…

As Safire notes, the term has a long history dating back to at least 16th century medical texts in which the “animal spirites” were employed to explain then-current notions of the elan vital, or vital animating force.

But it is in the term’s Economic usage, and particularly its deployment in Keynesian Economic theory, that Akerlof, Shiller – and the Obama brain trust – have resurrected their hope in the Animal Spirits.

Here are the relevant passages, quoted by Safire, from Keynes 1936 treatise, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

Most, probably… our decisions to do something positive . . . can only be taken as the result of animal spirits — a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

“In that passage,” writes Safire, Keynes “was warning about overconfidence; in another, he (Keynes) encouraged risk-taking: ‘If the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die.’”

“I like that one more,” Safire opines.

What’s interesting to note – at least in the columns mentioned – is the unconscious and reflexively deferential attitude Safire and Shiller (and by extension, Obama, Summers and Geithner) show toward the unexamined premises of Keynes’ argument.

And the reason of course is because they are the shared premises of what Dallas Willard describes as the “life-form called modernity.”

Or to use Alasdair MacIntyre’s phrasing, they are the premises of emotivism – the moral underpinning of Keynes’ economic theory.

On Keynes view, success at moral suasion rests not on the power of rational appeal, but with those who “speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction,” and can “best use the accents of infallibility.”

To the modern (by definition, emotivist) mind, what matters is not that our convictions have solid foundations.

In fact, there’s no need for our convictions to have any foundations, or even any need for us to have convictions at all.

All we need is the ability to speak in clear “accents of infallibility” with the “appearance of undoubting conviction” (emphasis added).

But in these uncertain times and while wholly in the grip of the life form called (post-)modernity, we can’t keep ourselves from asking our political, corporate and bureaucratic leaders if there isn’t at least a token gesture toward something of substance beneath their histrionics.

Even if just a knowing wink that they could produce it if we were to ask.

We instinctively know not to inquire too closely, “but still,” we think, “it would be nice to see a marker on the table indicating something real supports all those casino chips.”

“We want to trust you,” we tell our leaders.

But when trust is no longer confidence grounded in reality, but is simply a subjective psychological state allowing us to suspend disbelief, does it really matter if we can trust our leaders or not?

And if it’s no longer necessary to restore confidence based in reality – but simply to restore trust in Keynes’ “appearance of conviction” – then there’s not much need to inquire as to what the Emperor is wearing.

The only thing necessary is that he appear undoubtingly convinced his robes are as magnificent as he says they are.

It’s been said that in the last decade or so, we’ve lost our capacity for irony.

But given recent events, the quote at the beginning of this post from Paul Mazer – the now long-departed employee of the recently departed Lehman Brothers – ought to induce smiles from even terminal post-modern life forms such as we.

Because Mr. Mazer is correct – just not in the way he intended.

We indeed must be “trained to desire.”

And whether our training was haphazard, or left to currently fashionable management theories, or intentionally guided by the most profound grace, our desires must of necessity always overshadow our needs.

Given this state of affairs, the questions we must continually and humbly ask are, “Who or what am I allowing to train my desires?” And, “If what’s now training my desires leaves me a slave to my animal spirits, what can allow me to retrain them before they consume me?”

Substituting “animal spirits” for “flesh” in the ESV translation of Romans 8:13 we get:

For if you live according to the animal spirits, you will die, but if by the Holy Spirit you put to death the deeds of the animal spirits, you will live.

If a significant number of us begins to do that, perhaps we can once again demonstrate real trust in each other, instead of an impoverished counterfeit of trust.

The alternative – as our intellectual, corporate and political leaders see it – is to concede that “managing these animal spirits requires the steady hand of government.”

Of course there is a huge bootstrapping problem here. Exactly who is it that’s managing the animal spirits of those who would manage us?

Because if MacIntyre is right when he says in After Virtue that “the barbarians are no longer waiting beyond the frontiers, but have already been governing us for some time” – then it’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of prayerfully considering exactly who it is we can trust to train our desires.

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I’m constantly fascinated with the “fine line.”

On a grand scale, cosmologists hypothesize that had certain physical constants varied – by seemingly infinitesimal amounts – no mind would be here to ask, “Why is there not nothing?”

On the moral front, Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke compellingly of the fine line separating good and evil that “passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.”

It seems that God has woven this fine line into the very heart of being – even down to already-but-not-yet determinations of “particleness” and “waveness” in quantum mechanics.

“The fine line” appears to be an integral part of the world…

… So much so, that it can allow the most devout believer and the most convinced non-believer to look at the same reality and affirm with equally thoroughgoing certainty, “Thus it must be and cannot be otherwise!”

Now self-described “recovering pharisee” Kary Oberbrunner’s newest book, The Fine Line: Re-envisioning the Gap between Christ and Culture, attempts to limn anew what it means to “live in the world, but not of the world.”

While I haven’t had a chance to read the entire book, Oberbrunner has offered a limited number of free audio editions in exchange for posting an Amazon review of the excerpt on his Zondervan press page.

(So my response to anyone who questions the fairness of “reviewing” a complex argument such as Oberbrunner’s without having read the entire book is, “I’ve been given permission by both author and publisher.”)

With that in mind, here are a few thoughts on the material available at the Zondervan site, as well what I’ve gleaned from other online sources about Oberbrunner’s book and work…

Oberbrunner takes as one starting point the work of Yale Christian theological-ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr (brother of theologian Reinhold).

But where Niebuhr speaks of “conversionists” – those who are more concerned with God’s divine activity of “present renewal than with conservation of what has been given in creation or preparing for what will be given in a final redemption” – Oberbrunner’s chief category is that of “Transformist”.

Transformists are those who inhabit the fine line of “Relevance” between Separatist rejection and Conformist embrace of culture.

All well and good – and as mentioned above, I’ve not yet read the book in it’s entirety, so in large part I’m shooting from the hip here – but I always have a concern when “Relevance” wants to be elevated to the status Oberbrunner seems to give it.

This is the “fine line within the fine line” we disciples of Jesus must walk.

Because when relevance is invested with inherent value, it runs a high risk of tipping the balance toward cultural conformism.

It creates in the disciple a bias toward “marketing to” what the culture wants, instead of ministering to what it needs.

Yes, there are times we are called toward relevance.

This indeed may be one of those times.

But there are also times when as children of God we may be called to be disdainful of relevance as well. (Luke 4:24-27)

It may be that an ill-advised hunger for relevance is what led to the excesses of the Christian political practices over the past few decades. It may be that at bottom, the need to be relevant always positions us more “of the world” than just “in the world.”

This isn’t to say we should avoid relevance, no more than we should seek irrelevance.

Indeed, Paul seems to endorse some form of relevance when he writes:

To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law.

To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law.

To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. 1 Corinthians 9:19-23 NIV)

But as Paul concludes his argument, we see that it wasn’t his intention to be relevant for the sake of relevance, or even for the sake of transforming culture as his final goal; it was instead to “share in the blessings of the Gospel.”

Those blessings do not find their ultimate home at the level of culture, but in the individual life that is transformed – here, now and for eternity – as one is brought into conformity with Christ – whether or not culture is transformed.

No doubt there will be huge, beneficial changes in any culture when a critical mass of individuals undergoes such inner transformation. And the spillover from those blessings to the culture at large will be profound. But it is not for the sake of cultural change that we are called to discipleship, as appealing as that change may be.

And I also agree with Oberbrunner that it’s generally along the “fine line” that God would have us walk.

The same fine line that’s illuminated by terms such as “missional churches” and “new monasticism”. At their best, both these movements seem to walk side-by-side as they address culture on the razor thin division of the fine line Oberbrunner seeks to describe.

I look forward to hearing more from Pastor Kary on these issues – including reading his newest effort in it’s entirety. I hope you’ll do the same!

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