Saturday, September 27, 2008
Thursday, September 18, 2008
JK Rowlings and the Inklings
http://www.george-macdonald.com/harry_potter_granger.htmGreat link for Potter fans. Here is his entire book, which is excellent:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1414300913/104-8862816-9099940?v=glance&n=283155Harry Potter is a modern morality play (Rowling loves Dickens and Austen). It is cleverly disguised as vastly entertaining mystery/fantasy, with Christian allegories hidden behind alchemical paradigms and not a little bit of antique Orthodoxy (the Orthodox doctrine of divinization with God's energies, which we so drily refer to as sanctification.
Walter Kunneth - Lutheran Champion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_K%C3%BCnneth
The man who saw through Bultmann, and was too Germanically Lutheran to be popular.
The man who saw through Bultmann, and was too Germanically Lutheran to be popular.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Mythopoeia
The Inklings never finished what they started; America needs them, Now More Than Ever (Ahora Mas Que Nunca).
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
A Review of Douglas Wilson's New Book : High Church Puritans
"Puritan Cavaliers"?
Douglas Wilson’s latest is a worthy offing : classic Moscovy satire and meditation, as keen and carefully forged as a blade. Wilson writes more for those who want to help the "Jabez crowd" than for those worthies who do their spiritual shopping at the Walmart island, but he has perennial appeal for his Reformed circle as well as for the generally "traditionalist" Protestant. He has done something, to be sure, with admirable acumen; he obviously knows his audience too well. One wonders what might happen if Joel Osteen were to get ahold of his little gem. This book aims to induce corporate, Protestant repentance, but the Protestants are fairly strung out.
While it is impossible to quarrel with any of Wilson’s stated aims, his book leaves several nagging questions in the mind of this wintery and discontented Protestant, mostly concerning his choice of vehicle, but a few regarding the subject itself.
What is his actual knowledge of late Catholic or Orthodox scholarship, and does he ever intend to interact with the likes of Vladimir Lossky or Ur von Balthasar? He manages to quote and critique Gordon Clark, so why not Karl Barth? At several points, he pushes toward a similar objective shared by the European "resourcement" theologians in the 20th century (e.g.., a broader definition of "Logos" or "the Word"). One can’t help wondering, is this desire to regain the fullness of the glory of the "Logos" just instinctual, plain calculated, or simply reflexive? His trench work on the reunion of piety and intellect, or re-examining NT "Love", has been directly addressed from several angles. For instance, Lossky famously remarked that it "was impossible to have mysticism without theology, and even more impossible to have theology without mysticism". One doesn’t have to be Orthodox, or "mystical", to profit from this aphorism.
It would be nice to see Wilson and the CRE move beyond knee-jerk reactions to theological formulations or terms from other, encamped traditions - the Roman Catholic Church, for instance, is usually understood as a virtual caricature, and the Orthodox worship old icons. If only we could recall the source of our objections! - Calvin’s refusal to distinguish between latria and dulia, but that (from our own camp) is also beyond us. We have our Reformed T-shirts. Part of addressing Protestant laziness and schlock would be to seriously begin to read, and absorb, seminal "High Church" theology : this, after all, is what Wilson says he wants.
Of course, one wouldn’t want to discuss abstruse theology in a primer such as Wilson has crafted, and yet one would like to see a footnote or too, or trace an invisible style between the lines that wasn’t purely allegorical. CS Lewis, the ultra-safe and by-now-mundane Lewis, gets an honorific mention, but even Chesterton is too radioactive. Would it hurt to limit the readership a little more, and focus the scholarship accordingly? Wilson wants to make sure that everyone has some paint spattered on them with his broad brush.
Who is he writing this to? If it is to the CRE readership, then why enforce our own lazy mental blocks by appealing to excesses and sin in Catholicism as if that were that? I realize that this volume parallels the rhetorical effort of Angels in the Architecture, and paints in broad strokes. But there was nary a single reference to the earlier volume. So is it medieval Protestantism, or High-Church Puritanism? Or both? Or is High-Church Puritanism a development of the former? And why hasn’t he cited any High Church Puritans? Which ones does he have in mind? Is there an exemplar here? Who is this for and who has embodied this trajectory? It would have been helpful to have oriented off of Angels in the Architecture : at least we could have gauged our rate of progress and estimated our residual laziness.
The most that Wilson offers here is an appeal to the need for collective repentance, rather than idealization of Piers Ploughman in terms of sola fide (as in Angels). But this just leads in circles, back to the question of whether this is primarily an internal appeal to the CRE or an attempt to widen the audience. If you shoot in a circle, you end up hitting a great many targets. As a minor matter here, perhaps he could at least have taken aim at some bigger fish, such as Barth, who shared his aim to combat liberalism without comforting the conservatives. Barth, unlike Wilson, chose to rally around the Christ-event to answer the charge that He was but a Myth; Wilson merely offers to explore deeper notions of the wordily defended "Word". This is true to classical Protestantism, but Wilson himself, in his deepest point of insight, defers to the Psalms in an effort to get us to "these things [that] are all in God’s songbook", which he implies is a Psalm-embodied ideal. It would seem that Wilson wants a "catholic Protestantism"; he might interact with the "protestant Catholics", at least in the matter of sacred music. Ur von Balthasar’s three volume magnum opus on Theological Aesthetics might have helped him here.
As a moralizing effort (in the best Austenian sense), all of this is exceedingly to the point. But his best passages are when he wanders into "the glory of the Logos" or "God’s songbook". Without vision, even the people perish. And even the people need to know a few hints of where "High Church Puritanism" is headed. After all, Wilson argues that this must be "tasted" rather than argued. As an ex-Methodist, I found myself wishing that he would quote Samuel Wesley’s great hymn "The Church’s One Foundation" : much of what he was saying is contained in those lines. Wilson is a great practical teacher, but he plodded and shredded his way through the book. Repentance-inducing it is, but the vision has to be Gnostically read between the lines. I have a feeling Wilson wouldn’t like that. This book should have been more "stand alone". Needed fiber, it is, but meat and drink, it is not. Perhaps it is the fault of the patient; our churches more and more resemble hospitals.
Perhaps the work IS focused, and on precisely who it needs to be, adapting appropriate terms and methods to reasonable ends. In that case, why hasn’t Wilson relied on someone like Walter Kunneth, a 20th century German Lutheran who, as far as I am aware, was the only one who gave a comprehensive answer to both Bultmann and Barth in his Die Theologie der Auferstehung (A Theology of the Resurrection)? I do not believe the American situation can be "abstracted" from the overall intellectual Western crisis we find ourselves in, as Wilson would probably be the first to concede. Kunneth’s focus on the Resurrection, like Oscar Cullman in his seminal treatise against the soul’s immortality, is perhaps the only way out of "Fundaresentalism", for a Protestant who wants to avoid Neo-Orthodoxy or reversion to the RCC. The drift of his rhetoric was decidedly more in favor of catholic Protestantism, a perennially problematic concept if there ever was one.
What makes Wilson believe that we can succeed where Baxter and Owens and Newton could not? High-Church Puritanism is desirable, but is it achievable? It sometimes seems as if Wilson was trying (forgive me, shades of Carl Jung!) to ride over a mountain on a tricycle. Granted, his determination and faith appear up to it, and granted (also) if God wills it so, in faith, then he’ll be stomping his kickstand on the summit. If anyone in contemporary Amerika can manage this (for rough and ready Protestants), it will be he and his band of merry men, acting under the blessing of God.
Wilson, without this larger focus, risks being taken as a disgruntled back-row heckler : "In the beginning was the logo, and the logo was with Mammon, and the logo was Mammon. And the people gathered and said they would obey all the words of the law." Veggie tales may be easy cannon fodder, but if the adults are nourishing themselves on Narnia, the children will have to content themselves with their Veggies. Wilson’s solid textual exegesis (the highpoint of which is his equation of the new Church with the original Eve and his allegorical analysis of the Fall) and Biblical immersive techniques are some of the best, undoubtedly, around, and possibly some of the most wise application, in the mind of Christ, that the Protestants have given in a hundred years. His pointing out the seemingly innocent observation that Genesis, Deuteronomy, the Psalms, and Isaiah were favorites of the NT authors is postively subversive. In his effort to steer clear from Origen’s allegories, while avoiding rationalism in exegesis, he makes clear progress in the example of a NT overlay on the OT, with "set" points given in open NT interpretation, which allow us to rotate the sheet accurately to attain new meaning (the Church = the new Eve). It is at this point that his effort to steer between Heraclitus’ "tumultous Verb" and Parmenides’ "frozen Noun", by appealing to John’s Logos, is simultaneously brilliant and self-undermining : the central event of the NT was the Resurrection, not the Incarnation - the Resurrection is what sets the lynchpin for the NT and the Incarnation, which then interprets the OT. Anything else risks getting caught in Judaizing, faithful or not. At least Karl Barth understood that, although he was wrong that the Revelation was one thing, and the record of the Revelation something else entirely. Wilson seems to virtually equate the two, at least by method. This is the perennial challenge of the "wordily"-constituted Word, which has given us Protestant rationalism and individualism in the first place. It is at this point in the high water mark of his mounting assault on modern unbelief that Wilson could benefit from "resourcement", regardless of an ultimate verdict on European Protestantism. At another point, he wishes to steer between transubstantiation and minimalism when it comes to the Lord’s Supper, but an appeal to a "historic Protestant view", as any Google search might reveal, is as problematic as the current problem. His call to repent of our virtues will sound like special pleading to anyone who has ever wrestled with the relationship of grace and freewill, even in the Reformed camp.
And this is both too bad, and also almost trifling to point out : there are so many gems for the finding : "Postmodernism says that metaphor is meaningless, and that everything is meaningless. Hence, everything is meaningless." Or, "a preacher must never behave as if he were an engineer trying to write a phonebook". He rightfully fingers Enlightenment "historico-grammatical" exegesis as a lion’s share of the problem. His underlying motives and method are so good-humoredly and pointedly put, that this may be a book that gets us up and walking again, singing the Psalms until we can leave hospital. A modern day Protestant could do much worse than read, and imbibe, and execute, the advice in this book. This reviewer may prefer Leithart’s Against Christianity, or the now defunct The New Pantagruel webzine, for his Calvinist fiber and medicine, but it is an honor and a privilege and a grave responsibility to be reading anything that Douglas Wilson fervently and prayerfully commits to paper. And since lazy Americans aren’t likely to make it through von Balthasar, Walter Kunneth, or even Leithart anytime soon, they ought to read this: it may get our heads screwed on straight and our hearts jump-started so that we manage Chesterton within the year. And who knows? Wilson’s own yearning embodiment of these teachings may overcome theoretical difficulties and give us "Puritan cavaliers" after all, despite King James having said that "it wasn’t a religion for gentlemen".
Douglas Wilson’s latest is a worthy offing : classic Moscovy satire and meditation, as keen and carefully forged as a blade. Wilson writes more for those who want to help the "Jabez crowd" than for those worthies who do their spiritual shopping at the Walmart island, but he has perennial appeal for his Reformed circle as well as for the generally "traditionalist" Protestant. He has done something, to be sure, with admirable acumen; he obviously knows his audience too well. One wonders what might happen if Joel Osteen were to get ahold of his little gem. This book aims to induce corporate, Protestant repentance, but the Protestants are fairly strung out.
While it is impossible to quarrel with any of Wilson’s stated aims, his book leaves several nagging questions in the mind of this wintery and discontented Protestant, mostly concerning his choice of vehicle, but a few regarding the subject itself.
What is his actual knowledge of late Catholic or Orthodox scholarship, and does he ever intend to interact with the likes of Vladimir Lossky or Ur von Balthasar? He manages to quote and critique Gordon Clark, so why not Karl Barth? At several points, he pushes toward a similar objective shared by the European "resourcement" theologians in the 20th century (e.g.., a broader definition of "Logos" or "the Word"). One can’t help wondering, is this desire to regain the fullness of the glory of the "Logos" just instinctual, plain calculated, or simply reflexive? His trench work on the reunion of piety and intellect, or re-examining NT "Love", has been directly addressed from several angles. For instance, Lossky famously remarked that it "was impossible to have mysticism without theology, and even more impossible to have theology without mysticism". One doesn’t have to be Orthodox, or "mystical", to profit from this aphorism.
It would be nice to see Wilson and the CRE move beyond knee-jerk reactions to theological formulations or terms from other, encamped traditions - the Roman Catholic Church, for instance, is usually understood as a virtual caricature, and the Orthodox worship old icons. If only we could recall the source of our objections! - Calvin’s refusal to distinguish between latria and dulia, but that (from our own camp) is also beyond us. We have our Reformed T-shirts. Part of addressing Protestant laziness and schlock would be to seriously begin to read, and absorb, seminal "High Church" theology : this, after all, is what Wilson says he wants.
Of course, one wouldn’t want to discuss abstruse theology in a primer such as Wilson has crafted, and yet one would like to see a footnote or too, or trace an invisible style between the lines that wasn’t purely allegorical. CS Lewis, the ultra-safe and by-now-mundane Lewis, gets an honorific mention, but even Chesterton is too radioactive. Would it hurt to limit the readership a little more, and focus the scholarship accordingly? Wilson wants to make sure that everyone has some paint spattered on them with his broad brush.
Who is he writing this to? If it is to the CRE readership, then why enforce our own lazy mental blocks by appealing to excesses and sin in Catholicism as if that were that? I realize that this volume parallels the rhetorical effort of Angels in the Architecture, and paints in broad strokes. But there was nary a single reference to the earlier volume. So is it medieval Protestantism, or High-Church Puritanism? Or both? Or is High-Church Puritanism a development of the former? And why hasn’t he cited any High Church Puritans? Which ones does he have in mind? Is there an exemplar here? Who is this for and who has embodied this trajectory? It would have been helpful to have oriented off of Angels in the Architecture : at least we could have gauged our rate of progress and estimated our residual laziness.
The most that Wilson offers here is an appeal to the need for collective repentance, rather than idealization of Piers Ploughman in terms of sola fide (as in Angels). But this just leads in circles, back to the question of whether this is primarily an internal appeal to the CRE or an attempt to widen the audience. If you shoot in a circle, you end up hitting a great many targets. As a minor matter here, perhaps he could at least have taken aim at some bigger fish, such as Barth, who shared his aim to combat liberalism without comforting the conservatives. Barth, unlike Wilson, chose to rally around the Christ-event to answer the charge that He was but a Myth; Wilson merely offers to explore deeper notions of the wordily defended "Word". This is true to classical Protestantism, but Wilson himself, in his deepest point of insight, defers to the Psalms in an effort to get us to "these things [that] are all in God’s songbook", which he implies is a Psalm-embodied ideal. It would seem that Wilson wants a "catholic Protestantism"; he might interact with the "protestant Catholics", at least in the matter of sacred music. Ur von Balthasar’s three volume magnum opus on Theological Aesthetics might have helped him here.
As a moralizing effort (in the best Austenian sense), all of this is exceedingly to the point. But his best passages are when he wanders into "the glory of the Logos" or "God’s songbook". Without vision, even the people perish. And even the people need to know a few hints of where "High Church Puritanism" is headed. After all, Wilson argues that this must be "tasted" rather than argued. As an ex-Methodist, I found myself wishing that he would quote Samuel Wesley’s great hymn "The Church’s One Foundation" : much of what he was saying is contained in those lines. Wilson is a great practical teacher, but he plodded and shredded his way through the book. Repentance-inducing it is, but the vision has to be Gnostically read between the lines. I have a feeling Wilson wouldn’t like that. This book should have been more "stand alone". Needed fiber, it is, but meat and drink, it is not. Perhaps it is the fault of the patient; our churches more and more resemble hospitals.
Perhaps the work IS focused, and on precisely who it needs to be, adapting appropriate terms and methods to reasonable ends. In that case, why hasn’t Wilson relied on someone like Walter Kunneth, a 20th century German Lutheran who, as far as I am aware, was the only one who gave a comprehensive answer to both Bultmann and Barth in his Die Theologie der Auferstehung (A Theology of the Resurrection)? I do not believe the American situation can be "abstracted" from the overall intellectual Western crisis we find ourselves in, as Wilson would probably be the first to concede. Kunneth’s focus on the Resurrection, like Oscar Cullman in his seminal treatise against the soul’s immortality, is perhaps the only way out of "Fundaresentalism", for a Protestant who wants to avoid Neo-Orthodoxy or reversion to the RCC. The drift of his rhetoric was decidedly more in favor of catholic Protestantism, a perennially problematic concept if there ever was one.
What makes Wilson believe that we can succeed where Baxter and Owens and Newton could not? High-Church Puritanism is desirable, but is it achievable? It sometimes seems as if Wilson was trying (forgive me, shades of Carl Jung!) to ride over a mountain on a tricycle. Granted, his determination and faith appear up to it, and granted (also) if God wills it so, in faith, then he’ll be stomping his kickstand on the summit. If anyone in contemporary Amerika can manage this (for rough and ready Protestants), it will be he and his band of merry men, acting under the blessing of God.
Wilson, without this larger focus, risks being taken as a disgruntled back-row heckler : "In the beginning was the logo, and the logo was with Mammon, and the logo was Mammon. And the people gathered and said they would obey all the words of the law." Veggie tales may be easy cannon fodder, but if the adults are nourishing themselves on Narnia, the children will have to content themselves with their Veggies. Wilson’s solid textual exegesis (the highpoint of which is his equation of the new Church with the original Eve and his allegorical analysis of the Fall) and Biblical immersive techniques are some of the best, undoubtedly, around, and possibly some of the most wise application, in the mind of Christ, that the Protestants have given in a hundred years. His pointing out the seemingly innocent observation that Genesis, Deuteronomy, the Psalms, and Isaiah were favorites of the NT authors is postively subversive. In his effort to steer clear from Origen’s allegories, while avoiding rationalism in exegesis, he makes clear progress in the example of a NT overlay on the OT, with "set" points given in open NT interpretation, which allow us to rotate the sheet accurately to attain new meaning (the Church = the new Eve). It is at this point that his effort to steer between Heraclitus’ "tumultous Verb" and Parmenides’ "frozen Noun", by appealing to John’s Logos, is simultaneously brilliant and self-undermining : the central event of the NT was the Resurrection, not the Incarnation - the Resurrection is what sets the lynchpin for the NT and the Incarnation, which then interprets the OT. Anything else risks getting caught in Judaizing, faithful or not. At least Karl Barth understood that, although he was wrong that the Revelation was one thing, and the record of the Revelation something else entirely. Wilson seems to virtually equate the two, at least by method. This is the perennial challenge of the "wordily"-constituted Word, which has given us Protestant rationalism and individualism in the first place. It is at this point in the high water mark of his mounting assault on modern unbelief that Wilson could benefit from "resourcement", regardless of an ultimate verdict on European Protestantism. At another point, he wishes to steer between transubstantiation and minimalism when it comes to the Lord’s Supper, but an appeal to a "historic Protestant view", as any Google search might reveal, is as problematic as the current problem. His call to repent of our virtues will sound like special pleading to anyone who has ever wrestled with the relationship of grace and freewill, even in the Reformed camp.
And this is both too bad, and also almost trifling to point out : there are so many gems for the finding : "Postmodernism says that metaphor is meaningless, and that everything is meaningless. Hence, everything is meaningless." Or, "a preacher must never behave as if he were an engineer trying to write a phonebook". He rightfully fingers Enlightenment "historico-grammatical" exegesis as a lion’s share of the problem. His underlying motives and method are so good-humoredly and pointedly put, that this may be a book that gets us up and walking again, singing the Psalms until we can leave hospital. A modern day Protestant could do much worse than read, and imbibe, and execute, the advice in this book. This reviewer may prefer Leithart’s Against Christianity, or the now defunct The New Pantagruel webzine, for his Calvinist fiber and medicine, but it is an honor and a privilege and a grave responsibility to be reading anything that Douglas Wilson fervently and prayerfully commits to paper. And since lazy Americans aren’t likely to make it through von Balthasar, Walter Kunneth, or even Leithart anytime soon, they ought to read this: it may get our heads screwed on straight and our hearts jump-started so that we manage Chesterton within the year. And who knows? Wilson’s own yearning embodiment of these teachings may overcome theoretical difficulties and give us "Puritan cavaliers" after all, despite King James having said that "it wasn’t a religion for gentlemen".
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Theodulphus
Saint Theodulphhttp://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14579b.htmIt took the new invaders of Europe very little time to go from being barbarians to endeavoring to live out the Gospel. We still sing this gentleman's song:http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/a/g/aglahonr.htm (I believe that names ending in-ulph were Gothic).Here is the Latin version:http://romaaeterna.web.infoseek.co.jp/liber1/lu0586.htmlRhyme was a medieval addition to poetry, brought over from the Celts and the Saxons and really created by the monks, who, I suppose, found it easy to rhyme in Latin. In any case, they kept metre. And the new style didn't suffer at all in this:http://www.franciscan-archive.org/de_celano/opera/diesirae.htmlThe Dies Irae is not only the credo of the Early Middle Ages, it is a beautiful piece of poetry, exemplifying the fact that rhyme, even an abundance of ryhme, is no bar nor detriment to the inner freedom of the idea. This hymn by Saint Theodulph is a processional hymn, part of the old, abandoned Church calendar. We either need a new one, or go back to the old, Ah reckon! Our calendar is that we have no calendar, much like our liturgy! One has to wait to the Reformation hymns of Rinckhart and Luther to read something like this.
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