XX. Kent Laboratory, December 20th, 2016:
Recollections and Changes.
I have at long last begun the work of re-merging my two blogs together. Back when I first started blogging in 2012, I started both a "Christian life" blog (which in its second iteration was called "Apolytrosis: Meditations on the God Who Redeems") and a "Christian mythologist" blog (this one). The purpose of the separation was primarily academic. In the first blog I would write about matters that were on my heart, discuss art and good things, and listen to really really incredible music. In the second, on the other hand, I would try my hand at literary analysis, using the small bits of tools I had received from my two Honors courses in college.
What I did not expect was how these two sets of ideas would intersect over the course of the past four years. I began to blog about political topics, mainly fighting against the cultural hegemony of Christian conservatism in my circles, and I began applying academic methods of philosophical engagement - like Claude Levi-Strauss' The Savage Mind - to contemporary political situations. Slowly I found my "personal, redemption blog" and my "academic, mythology blog" to begin overlapping, communicating to one another, and making sense of the other.
This is not altogether unexpected. After all, I am a Christian, and my theology impacts my political thought and my intellectual thought, and what I am reading and what I am hearing about become, often, the set of topics I engage on.
Over the past several months, especially as I've been able to blog more, I have begun writing more and more on my mythology blog on the topics of political and intellectual engagement. I've used Althusserian Ideology to critique the orthodoxies of the Left and the Right, made a defense for the sake of anti-Trump Christians who find the current political-spiritual situation unstomachable, and made a thorough rejection of Randian epistemology. I've actually really enjoyed engaging these topics in this way, so I think my "Confessions" are going to shift in their central goals.
Increasingly, I am finding the political problems of our current state to be the result of certain strains of heterodox theologies and ideologies operating "under the surface," so to speak, of our beloved evangelicalism. Increasingly, I am finding the desire to target these theologies and ideologies, "bring them to the light" (as they say), and expose their true natures.
My central goal, however, is not Political Theology, although I discuss it often. In truth, it is my greatest desire to shuck off the husk of politics that enfolds our country and simply live the Christian life, unfettered by the obnoxious demands of political-powers-that-be. Yet, it seems that even our theologies have become tainted by political demands. After all, there's this strange reality - something I touched on in my blog against the hegemony of Christian conservatism - that evangelicalism implies a commitment to a particular brand of political beliefs. And, as I have been largely targeting this particular problem amidst conservatives, the recent upsurge - likely thanks to the Trump administration - of Christian liberals has within itself the recipe for the same disastrous ideology.
In a recent conversation with several liberal-leaning Christian colleagues, I made the point that I felt like our faith is not political. Of course - and I made this clear - Jesus is political, He says things that are political, He challenges political powers, etc. The prophetic books of the OT are all hemmed within their particular political environments, and they cannot be read without attention to that. But my point was to say that as a Christian I strive for a life outside of politics. I was accused of having a "white perspective" on the matter. Everything is political, this colleague said, when you're black.
In some sense I don't disagree with him. I think there's many ways that the political realm infests our local lives and affects specific groups of people in specific ways. That, after all, is the power and the legacy of racism and slavery (and other abuses to other groups of people). But there is an eschatological problem with saying that "everything is political." There's an acceptance: This is the way things are, this is the way things will be, we have to deal with it as it is.
I entirely disagree. I write about politics often because I find it to be a real pain in my behind. The political thought would very much like us to think that it is the central determinant of values and purpose. The Right leverages it and says to Churches (and literally, given the vice president-elect's recent video message): "These are your values." The Left leverages it differently, but with the same result, "If you believe this, then these are your values." Neither seems to recognize that these forces have no moral authority to describe values. In fact, they have no source for values in the first place, other than obscure political traditions that have disappeared through our inattentiveness to history.
The Christian person, thus, is not a person who is determined from outside by political powers-that-be, nor a person who is called to submit or accept political definitions-that-be - as Foucault might say, these are indeed "power plays" - but, instead, ought to be a person defined, not from within (as some erroneously say), but from above from the God who defines us.
So, in a sense, my goal is not too dissimilar from that of the Libertarian, but whereas the Libertarian aims at the removal of the bondage (so they say) of the State over its subjects, I aim at the remove of the bondage of Ideology over Christian minds. That work includes difficult conversations regarding politics, and it requires an openness to diversity in certain answers, something I find most political pundits to deeply lack. One has to hold in tension the various beliefs and commitments of the global Church whilst navigating the claims that various political powers or intellectual forces make and compare these to the Bible. I don't think it's easy work to do.
Here, as I have done in the past, I find myself at a new inflection point with my writing and my work. Pretty much everything I wrote between 2012 and 2015 strikes me as banal or unhelpful, or at least poorly written. I leave them here for now as a testament to the journey the Lord's been taking me on, but soon enough I am going to separate the tares and the wheat, leaving only the older posts that I most value and most refer back to on the site. Between 2015 and 2016, I began writing better - thanks to the MA program - and thinking stronger, and most of these posts do justice to the sort of broader project I aim at.
As I move into 2017, I think I will begin writing more philosophy essays, like I did with Ayn Rand and with the problem of knowledge. I have an essay regarding Jean-Paul Sartre and the Book of Romans that I might write soon, or, at the very least, do some sort of comparative work of the claim "A is A" as made by Aristotle, Rand, and Sartre, and explain how these three function very differently from each other (and how Rand is utterly nonsensical in her description of the law of identity).
I think I will also begin writing more just on the topic of theology. We've been doing a Bible study in Romans here at Church of the Shepherd, I have been just in awe about how beautiful and complex and incredible the Scriptures are, all over again. I think I might have more reflections on that topic.
And I think I will continue to wrestle with politics and current affairs, because they are important, and we need to wrestle through them better. I find Al Mohler's claim on his podcast "we'll discuss these things from a Christian worldview" a little problematic; and, in some sense, I intend to offer a different view on "the Christian worldview," and reject certain propositional claims made by the conservative powers-that-be (and the liberal too). In order for us to really write "the Christian worldview," we need to really back up our claims with the way that Jesus deals with politics in the Bible. (Tim Keller does this pretty well in his talk here.)
And, beyond all this, I do intend to continue my mythopoetic work. I think about literature differently now than I did back in 2012 and 2013 when all of my posts about mythopoesis revolved primarily around Robert Bly, Joseph Campbell, and John Eldredge. I find these Jungians less helpful for the work of literary analysis. Instead, these days I find myself more inspired by Francesco Petrarch and Giambattista Vico, by Renaissance humanism, and by that spark of Renaissance humanism that undergirds the great Christian humanists - C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. That is more of the lineage that my mythopoetic analysis shall follow.
Looking over these past four years of blogging, I can see that I have changed in many ways. But, then again, I haven't changed too much. I still find politics more of a stumbling block than the work of the Lord, I still find the implicit claims of Christian conservatism stifling and un-godly, I still think that Love & War & the Sea In-Between is one of the greatest albums of the century, and I still really really really love the music of Olivier Messiaen. And, even from the beginning of this blog, I still have a huge theological opposition to Rationalism. You know, "the more things change..."
I have at long last begun the work of re-merging my two blogs together. Back when I first started blogging in 2012, I started both a "Christian life" blog (which in its second iteration was called "Apolytrosis: Meditations on the God Who Redeems") and a "Christian mythologist" blog (this one). The purpose of the separation was primarily academic. In the first blog I would write about matters that were on my heart, discuss art and good things, and listen to really really incredible music. In the second, on the other hand, I would try my hand at literary analysis, using the small bits of tools I had received from my two Honors courses in college.
What I did not expect was how these two sets of ideas would intersect over the course of the past four years. I began to blog about political topics, mainly fighting against the cultural hegemony of Christian conservatism in my circles, and I began applying academic methods of philosophical engagement - like Claude Levi-Strauss' The Savage Mind - to contemporary political situations. Slowly I found my "personal, redemption blog" and my "academic, mythology blog" to begin overlapping, communicating to one another, and making sense of the other.
This is not altogether unexpected. After all, I am a Christian, and my theology impacts my political thought and my intellectual thought, and what I am reading and what I am hearing about become, often, the set of topics I engage on.
Over the past several months, especially as I've been able to blog more, I have begun writing more and more on my mythology blog on the topics of political and intellectual engagement. I've used Althusserian Ideology to critique the orthodoxies of the Left and the Right, made a defense for the sake of anti-Trump Christians who find the current political-spiritual situation unstomachable, and made a thorough rejection of Randian epistemology. I've actually really enjoyed engaging these topics in this way, so I think my "Confessions" are going to shift in their central goals.
Increasingly, I am finding the political problems of our current state to be the result of certain strains of heterodox theologies and ideologies operating "under the surface," so to speak, of our beloved evangelicalism. Increasingly, I am finding the desire to target these theologies and ideologies, "bring them to the light" (as they say), and expose their true natures.
My central goal, however, is not Political Theology, although I discuss it often. In truth, it is my greatest desire to shuck off the husk of politics that enfolds our country and simply live the Christian life, unfettered by the obnoxious demands of political-powers-that-be. Yet, it seems that even our theologies have become tainted by political demands. After all, there's this strange reality - something I touched on in my blog against the hegemony of Christian conservatism - that evangelicalism implies a commitment to a particular brand of political beliefs. And, as I have been largely targeting this particular problem amidst conservatives, the recent upsurge - likely thanks to the Trump administration - of Christian liberals has within itself the recipe for the same disastrous ideology.
In a recent conversation with several liberal-leaning Christian colleagues, I made the point that I felt like our faith is not political. Of course - and I made this clear - Jesus is political, He says things that are political, He challenges political powers, etc. The prophetic books of the OT are all hemmed within their particular political environments, and they cannot be read without attention to that. But my point was to say that as a Christian I strive for a life outside of politics. I was accused of having a "white perspective" on the matter. Everything is political, this colleague said, when you're black.
In some sense I don't disagree with him. I think there's many ways that the political realm infests our local lives and affects specific groups of people in specific ways. That, after all, is the power and the legacy of racism and slavery (and other abuses to other groups of people). But there is an eschatological problem with saying that "everything is political." There's an acceptance: This is the way things are, this is the way things will be, we have to deal with it as it is.
I entirely disagree. I write about politics often because I find it to be a real pain in my behind. The political thought would very much like us to think that it is the central determinant of values and purpose. The Right leverages it and says to Churches (and literally, given the vice president-elect's recent video message): "These are your values." The Left leverages it differently, but with the same result, "If you believe this, then these are your values." Neither seems to recognize that these forces have no moral authority to describe values. In fact, they have no source for values in the first place, other than obscure political traditions that have disappeared through our inattentiveness to history.
The Christian person, thus, is not a person who is determined from outside by political powers-that-be, nor a person who is called to submit or accept political definitions-that-be - as Foucault might say, these are indeed "power plays" - but, instead, ought to be a person defined, not from within (as some erroneously say), but from above from the God who defines us.
So, in a sense, my goal is not too dissimilar from that of the Libertarian, but whereas the Libertarian aims at the removal of the bondage (so they say) of the State over its subjects, I aim at the remove of the bondage of Ideology over Christian minds. That work includes difficult conversations regarding politics, and it requires an openness to diversity in certain answers, something I find most political pundits to deeply lack. One has to hold in tension the various beliefs and commitments of the global Church whilst navigating the claims that various political powers or intellectual forces make and compare these to the Bible. I don't think it's easy work to do.
Here, as I have done in the past, I find myself at a new inflection point with my writing and my work. Pretty much everything I wrote between 2012 and 2015 strikes me as banal or unhelpful, or at least poorly written. I leave them here for now as a testament to the journey the Lord's been taking me on, but soon enough I am going to separate the tares and the wheat, leaving only the older posts that I most value and most refer back to on the site. Between 2015 and 2016, I began writing better - thanks to the MA program - and thinking stronger, and most of these posts do justice to the sort of broader project I aim at.
As I move into 2017, I think I will begin writing more philosophy essays, like I did with Ayn Rand and with the problem of knowledge. I have an essay regarding Jean-Paul Sartre and the Book of Romans that I might write soon, or, at the very least, do some sort of comparative work of the claim "A is A" as made by Aristotle, Rand, and Sartre, and explain how these three function very differently from each other (and how Rand is utterly nonsensical in her description of the law of identity).
I think I will also begin writing more just on the topic of theology. We've been doing a Bible study in Romans here at Church of the Shepherd, I have been just in awe about how beautiful and complex and incredible the Scriptures are, all over again. I think I might have more reflections on that topic.
And I think I will continue to wrestle with politics and current affairs, because they are important, and we need to wrestle through them better. I find Al Mohler's claim on his podcast "we'll discuss these things from a Christian worldview" a little problematic; and, in some sense, I intend to offer a different view on "the Christian worldview," and reject certain propositional claims made by the conservative powers-that-be (and the liberal too). In order for us to really write "the Christian worldview," we need to really back up our claims with the way that Jesus deals with politics in the Bible. (Tim Keller does this pretty well in his talk here.)
And, beyond all this, I do intend to continue my mythopoetic work. I think about literature differently now than I did back in 2012 and 2013 when all of my posts about mythopoesis revolved primarily around Robert Bly, Joseph Campbell, and John Eldredge. I find these Jungians less helpful for the work of literary analysis. Instead, these days I find myself more inspired by Francesco Petrarch and Giambattista Vico, by Renaissance humanism, and by that spark of Renaissance humanism that undergirds the great Christian humanists - C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. That is more of the lineage that my mythopoetic analysis shall follow.
Looking over these past four years of blogging, I can see that I have changed in many ways. But, then again, I haven't changed too much. I still find politics more of a stumbling block than the work of the Lord, I still find the implicit claims of Christian conservatism stifling and un-godly, I still think that Love & War & the Sea In-Between is one of the greatest albums of the century, and I still really really really love the music of Olivier Messiaen. And, even from the beginning of this blog, I still have a huge theological opposition to Rationalism. You know, "the more things change..."
No comments:
Post a Comment